It's so stupendous, living in this tube

The Moma Dance opens Phish’s 7/19/98 concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre (Mountain View, CA), and the groove is immediately very thick and heavy, and on the audience recording that I have, you can make out someone, probably the taper himself, saying to his neighbor, “big bass… if I’m not careful… I’m worried about the bass.”

But the taper gets the levels right, and the bass is deep and full without distorting and rattling the speakers; it seems to define an aquatic world in which the bass guitar and the bass drum are currents, waves that toss the body floating on the sea, and the strut of the beat is Bonhamesque—you are not sure where in Fish’s drumset the pulse of 16th notes is coming from, what permutating mix of unaccented snare taps and hi-hat snips—and the tempo is andante, corresponding to the movement of a body walking on a rolling globe, or a body floating backwards “at a walking pace”, with 2 and 4 ringing out as the “steady slap” of the lap of the waves in the song’s narrative of maritime adventure; sailing, surfing, and floating are all very Phish.

Yet the true cresting wave comes later in the set, in Sample in a Jar, where the taper gets the recording right in a quite different way, namely, by getting things wrong: the two microphones are aimed just clumsily enough that one communicates the sound to the tape a millisecond before the other, introducing a faint, flanging wave of phase cancellation, a sort of rolling blackout through the frequencies of the music that causes in listeners a sensation like swirling down the drain or having one’s consciousness sucked out of one’s head through a very thin straw.

This song, a sing-along rocker and a permanent staple in Phish setlists after its minor FM success in 1994, a mile-marker at the beginning of Phish’s arena rock/sellout years, has a sort of twisting Bold as Love guitar solo at the end, played over the four-bar progression from the verse:

| A / C / | G / D / | A / E / | G / D / |

Though these chords continually promise transcendence (just voicelead the triads in a four-bar descent down the guitar neck, starting with A, 1st inversion, with C# at the 11th fret of the D string), Trey usually burns through them automatically and earlessly, and one feels that although the shaman may have set himself ablaze, he is not seeing anything special. On this night, however, he is suddenly possessed by music, as though he has grabbed a lyre from a rack on the wall of the mead-hall of the gods and channeled a forgotten spirit in his song, and for one and a half passes through the chords he plucks out a melody so strong and natural and spontaneous that it seems to be a living thing, a sort of visiting being that has come down to speak to us—hello, for this moment we exist together, in music.

The vivacity of this particular moment of recognition of everything’s being one thing is no doubt heightened by the subtle stereo flanging of the left and right channels of the recording, where the the overlapping double image unites dimensions like the connecting twist of a Möbius strip or the peak of a flash of deja vu in which we perfectly occupy two times, so it is a sort of accident of the universe that Sample is finally allowed to be itself, floating free from Phish, uncomposed, freely given, and sustained by grace.