RIDESHARE - Phish 07.26.98

RIDESHARE: Phish 07.26.98

i spun this one on tuesday, so i need to do it quick, lest i forget.

i've really been feeling the 97-98 phish lately; something about the wide open spaces of a drive through the southeastern washington desert lends itself to spacey, 30-minute
versions of “also sprach zarathustra”.  or the other way around.  or something.

anyway, setlist here.

on a five-star scale where zero is a pepperoni pizza and five is a five-cheese pizza, this show would be a three-and-a-half cheese pizza.

the highs were high and the lows weren't low...let's just say there were a few times throughout the show where i caught myself realizing that i hadn't been listening for twenty minutes because i was subconsciously finding the scrub brush more engaging than the music.

"birds of a feather" is a great song and a great opener, and this version was no different...though maybe it was a sign of the show's overall "too little of a good thing" feel in that this "birds" clocked in at about six minutes, about ten minutes shorter than usual.  then comes "better believe it baby", which i've heard a number of times already in various TAB shows and, no matter who plays it, i never like it.  same thing here.  rarely will i just not like a phish song (rather than just a particular night's interpretation of it), but that's the case with this clunker.  and it came on while i was puttering through colfax, no less.

there's something that draws me to "bowie".  i love the speed and precision of the intro section, especially in earlier years' shows, but then everything always just goes to shit for me in the middle.  i don't know why.  compared to other phish jams, i always find "bowie" jams to be loud, screechy, hard to follow and generally unpleasant...but the wait up to that last second pay-off somehow always makes me forget the middle section and want to bounce out of my seat (or car) at the end.  this one was no different.  the "frankie" > "reba" mashup is nicely mellow and hypnotic, while i was a bit let down by the first set closer of "funky bitch" (another one of those few phish songs i just don't like) and "good times bad times", which followed the zeppelin version a little too closely to be interesting.

the second set was marked by some pretty incredibly covers.  it opens with "la grange", which i didn't even know that phish ever played, and their version was wonderfully faithful to the zz top original, albeit with a hectic blues-rock jam in the middle.  this version of "you enjoy myself" takes a few extra minutes to get started, which i actually really liked...it was interesting to hear them jam out the beginning of the song a bit longer.  "albuquerque" was another song that i didn't know phish had ever covered, and as the song started i immediately thought to myself "hmm, this sounds like a neil young song".  and then it was and i was all "yeah!" and the guitar was all "skeedly deedly deedly!" and my car was all "vrooooom!"

so there's that.

I LOVE "SIMPLE".  that's probably pretty clear by now.

after "simple" was a great version of hendrix's "bold as love" and the show closes with four solid (there's that word again) but not really outstanding songs.

i'm going to go out on a limb and say that most phish shows i listen to or attend fall into one of two categories:
1) band starts out strong, falters near the end of the first set, tries too hard at the beginning of the second set, ends on a great note after recovering
2) band starts slow, slaughters everything for the end of the first set and the beginning of the second, and then ends the show on a decent, but not impressive note.

the first gorge show from last year was definitely a Type 1 show for me, while the second gorge show and this year's blossom show were both Type 2.  this tape definitely epitomizes the Type 2.