Home from work today for extended holiday weekend, its time to take my
dialy walk before everything melts (was 96 here yesterday!), and its
been 3 months since I put my 1997 see-how-far-I-make-it marathon on
hold.
Next show is 7/2/97 Amsterdam - aka 30 minute Stash show
Im feeling the renewed vibes so lets strike while the iron is hot! Lets go! 
7/2/97 Amsterdam, HOL
Set 1
Mikes Song - Only 10 mins but absolutely crushing. The song
itself is a tad slow and ordinary, but the INSTANT they move into the
jam portion, you know ITS ON. Very dark and growly and
funky playing on this one. No all timer, but its a gnarly little beast
that will light a fire under your tail. Sick! Complete face melter!!!
>Simple - and just like that Trey leads us perfectly out of
raging guitar ripping into the Simple riff. "Standard" version of Simple
without much unique about it, except that it just has that feel about
it. You know, where everyone is LOCKED IN with each other, playing
exactly the right stuff at exactly the right moments. As perfect a type 1
version as has ever existed. Excellent! The chill outro jam is extra
long and has all kinds of extra mustard about it, fading the song into
strangeness for the final minute or so.
Just at the point of "jam liftoff", they slowly wind down Simple and do one of the finest ever segues into....
>Maze - GOOD LORD THATS YOU DO A SEGUE!!!!! And its 14 minutes at that!!!! The
song proceeds as usual until the initial round of solos, Page jumping
on the church organ. Trey does his excellent jazz chord thing underneath
while they SLOWLY build Page's solo from a tiny rumble up to a massive
explosion over the course of 4 or 5 incredible, tension filled
minutes!!! This is one the best slow burn Maze's EVER!!! This is NUTS!!!!!! Then
Pages solo peaks and Trey takes over, doing the same thing, going back
to square one. Relying on patience and choosing his spots, he darts in
and out, slowly working and kneading his solo like a baker. Of course it
jist gets hotter and hotter and hotter until the whole thing EXPLODES
like you expect .
Its 1997. Its Maze. Its incredible. What do you expect?!
Holy moly that Maze was SERIOUSLY next level, even by Maze
standards. Now THAT is how you annihilate worlds. Holy mother of
crap....1998 Prague Ghost move the F over!
Strange Design - Unexpected but excellent set placement. Great cool
down after the previous 35 minutes of destruction. Terrific version
played flawlessly. Cant see how one could be much finer than this!
Ginseng Sullivan - is Ginseng, but as with the rest of the set, its got
that extra "something" about it and just sounds downright terrific
anyways.
Vultures - Feels a little short and never goes next level but is
otherwise as excellent as anything else. Very tight, strongly played,
hot Trey. Good stuff!
Water In the Sky - Great stuff. See above.
Weekapaug Groove - The set ends with a SPECTACULAR 13 minute Paug!!! This version is a damn masterpiece, a friggin FUNK TORNADO SUPREME!!!! It
proceeds at lightspeed through a myriad of vamps and solos, all led by
that X Factor Magic. A true 10/10 version. Think Talking Heads meets
Weekapaug. Or something. Nuts....
All in all, this was a nearly flawless set. There wasn't a single
weak spot, though Id say Maze and Weekapaug are the true "must hear"
takeaways. Everything was played tightly, energetically, and with
seemingly extra pizazz, if you will. No inconsistency here! A stellar
set from top to bottom - and supposedly the best is yet to come!!!
Had to wait a few hours for set 2 of 7/2/97 - had some early afternoon errands to run....
On with the show!
7/2/97 Amsterdam
Set 2
Stash - The one, the only, the 31-friggin-minute long Stash
Odyssey!!!! This sucker opens the set with a lengthy and extended spiral
of ambience. Screaming seagulls and loopers while Trey slowly toys with
the Stash theme. Finally at the 3 minute mark they LAUNCH into the song
at once. Let's go! They rage the standard Stash jam excellently until
somewhere around 15:45. Trey begins this circular kind of riff motif and
the jam turns into a more rock and roll vibe for several excellent
minutes.
----After a few minutes of rocking the hell out, things turn towards a
more blissful and lowkey feel around the 18 minute mark, eventually
sounding like the kind of jam early 3.0 Phish might stumble into. This
slowly continues to evolve for the next several minutes, getting ever
more elegant and grand!
---Around the 21:30 mark Trey has yet another new "motif" happenning and
this whole other level of blissful happiness takes over the jam - this
is kind of like some crazy hardcore-yet-lowkey bliss peak. Or something
like that. Whatever it is, this jam is damn incredible. It has
this almost "nostalgic" feel about it, like something that might play
during the farewell scene at the end of a movie or during a scene of two
friends waving goodbye....Spectacular!!!!
---This section lasts a LONG time, until somewhere around 24:45 or so,
Trey begins a loop, Mike's bass comes to a fore, and we begin to slowly
move into the next zone of this jam, very, VERY slowly quieting down to a
whisper by the 27 minute mark! Eventually, at said 27 minute mark,
everyone drops out aside from Trey's continuing loop which very slowly
fades away.
---From here, we descend into the depths of pure, unadulterated, Type 2,
blackhole, wormhole, outerspace ambience insanity! Droning guitars,
what sounds like power tools (did Mike have a drill yet?!), random
rhythms on the drums. In other words....DARKNESS.
HOLY MOTHER OF HOLD ON TO YOUR BIBLE AND YOUR CRUCIFIX. WE HAVE ENTERED THE HELLSCAPE!
And just like that, this insane, magical journey through both Heaven AND Hell takes a twist and moves into...
>Llama - Yes! All my friggin yes!!! Coming out of that damn sonic
vortex was an INCREDIBLE call!!!! This Llama is insane. It's fast and
upbeat, but at the same it's also incredibly FUNKY!!!!!! WAH PEDAL ABUSE! "YEA!!" If
you can picture the PERFECT go-between between what we call "fast" and
"slow" Llama these days, this would be it. This is freaking incredible. SHRED THAT SYNTH, PAGE!!!! POP THAT BASS, CACTUS!!! DANCE ON THAT WAH, TREY!!! LET'S GO!!!! Then Trey unleashes one of the gnarliest, sickest, most perfectly face melting guitar solos this side of that Maze in set 1. Absolute
annihilation! IS THIS THE GOAT LLAMA?!?!??!?!?! (A goat-llama, picture
that, lol). BANG YOUR HEAD AND PICK YOUR MELTED FACES OFF THE FLOOR!
>'Wormtown Jam' - So Llama makes it all the way to the 6
minute mark and instead of coming to a close, Fishman keeps the beat
going, and they IMMEDIATELY drop into some kind of strange, bass and
drum-driven semi-ambient darkness. Spooky droning guitar abound. And
then they start Singing Swingtown, except instead of Swingtown its, you
guessed it, WORMTOWN. "You're on the back of the worm!!!" So
basically, we have Phish playing an utterly demented cover Steve
Miller's "Swingtown" with "worm" replacing "swing" and all kinds of
ridiculous synthesizer and black hole guitar droning. How the hell
would you even begin to describe what the F this jam sounds like?! It's
damn incredible, but I don't know what to say! It's just ridiculous in
the most demented and screwed up kind of way. Pure ridiculousness. Drug
fuelled? Most certainly. Don't get sucked into the porta johns when you
leave the show!!!!
"Wooooooorrrrrmmmmmttttooooowwwwnnnnnn.....". Eventually, around
the 5 minute mark, everyone drops out except for Trey on droning
guitar, and we enter spooky, scary ambient space once more. "I think you
know where you are....". "You're on the back of the wooooorrrrmmmmmm!" .
Holy moly once more. What the crap were they smokin' in Amsterdam......
>Wading In the Velvet Sea - And out of the insanity we slowly
fade into the most delicate Velvet Sea intro of all time. Good lord this
is like a lullaby....The boys take the song at about half the regular
speed. And it is so ridiculously glorious. Yet another true all-timer
rendition. Trey's patient guitar soloing over this sad melody.....ugh,
this is spectacular.
And just like that, set 2 proper comes to a conclusion....
Free - A MASSIVE 13 minute version is our first encore of the
night! Immediately, the jam descends into the funkiest, gnarliest,
grooviest, SICKEST groovefest mother effer of all time. Bass and wah FX
all over the friggin place. I have heard some funky versions of
Free. I have never heard one that was THIS funky!!!!! This is the
DIRTIEST, GRIMIEST, FILTHIEST Free of all time!!! Holy crap, everyone is
sinking in the MUD! Slow and murky and SLUDGY! This is another
legitmate, X Factor Magic, ALL TIMER version. Jesus..... Incredible....
David Bowie - And this all-timer, epic cluster-F of a show/set comes
to a proper conclusion with a second encore of a whopping 16 minute
Bowie! Excellent Type 1 Bowie until the final few minutes when they lay
into the strange just a little bit. But really, this is just a terrific
"classic" Bowie all day long. The final shred-fest from Trey needs to be
heard to be believed - absolute guitar annihilation!!!!
All in all....the hell ya want me to say?! This show is
incredible!!!! Set 2 was just one jaw dropping moment after another! I
didn't think a show could surpass night 1, but I think they might have
done it!!!! An obvious class in EVERY sense of the word. What the corn
took me 6 years to finally hear this?!?!?!
No comments:
Post a Comment