Excerpt Review - 1998-10-29 Berkeley, CA

 My 1998 listening is severely lacking for no good reason whatsoever.

So right now im hitting up the Greek for 10/29/98's Possum>Moma>Reba>Walk Away>Simple>Albuquerque

Ripping Possum to start, though it is surprisingly chill for its first few minutes of jamming. Eventually Trey says screw it and we get our usual machine gun assault that doesn't disappoint.

Possum roars to a close, with everyone strumming and hitting their instruments as hard as possible. Right when you think its a dead-stop, the SLAM into Moma on the downbeat in as a perfect a segue as has ever been played by humans. Several minutes of excellent jamming before the first lyrics are spoken - this almost tricks you into thinking its the return of Black Eyed Katy!

Dang, Gordo is just tearing it up on this Moma. With Fish's whispers, and Trey's turn at the mic to follow, dare I say this MD is down right sexy! Never thought I'd say that about a Phish song . A wonderful little nugget to seek out if you care to do some 1998 metal detecting!

And then BAM into Reba so quickly you didn't even notice the segue! Absolutely friggin' planned!

how do they do that?!?!?

11 minutes in and Reba is her usual self. Wonderfully patient and mellow, beautiful and relaxed, building to its normal peak. But then WAIT! Around 11 minutes in the mood changes and things - out of nowhere - get dark and weird. I can honestly say I've never heard a Reba like this! Instead of the usual "grind to a halt" peak of the guitar solo, we get a jam that morphs into the soon-to-be familiar ambient landscapes of 99 and 2000.

Wowzers, this is surely interesting stuff, eh? Delays and loop sequences with some ambiant piano tossed in for good measure. Awesomely weird. Now, this is nothing near the craziest jam of all time or anything, but its certainly the most far out REBA you will hear, no? (if there's a weirder one, please enlighten me!).

We go on to spend a few minutes in "bleep-bloop land", before a murky swampiness slowly descends upon the music. This is some late-night southern-style darkness right here. Very funky and very...well, swampy is the only way to put it. This Reba has surely covered a lot of ground!!!!

And finally down the black hole drain we go! Ever so slowly Trey starts hitting us with those 70s classic rock-type riffs and Page busts out the organ. And into the first Walk Away since 1994 we go!!!!!

Walk Away is sludgy and heavy as hell, fireball licks flying across the airwaves. After a couple intense minutes we segue into Simple - coulda seen it coming a mile away
The jam out of WA begins to speed up, but then we get the Simple riff and the guys pull the reigns back on the tempo. Interesting. So, into Simple we go.

A very nice and short version. The "bliss" jam is just beautiful as hell tonight. Really working those dynamics, the guys bring things down to a whisper again, almost sounding like they are gonna go ambient on us (that'd be cool - has that ever happenned with a Simple?)

And what do ya know!!! They actually end the song there, having brought the collective volume down to zero - mighty, mighty impressive and cool that was!

Out of the ashes of Simple is a very nice Albuquerque.

Wow, this was an outstanding hour of A+ Phish if I do say so myself