Birds of a Feather 12/17/99

12/17/99 is typical night of 1999 Phish: there are glints of light and color and consciousness in a vast black ocean of unknowing. At times they are playing to you as if from a hospital bed (your sick host recites vapid truths while his mind is nowhere (there are moments of clarity and flight, brilliant gasps, but you can hear that Phish is dying. There's the sustained, spacey, loopy, heavy, slow stuff, which can be vertiginous and exhilarating, a romantic evocation of death, and then there's the modal jamming, which is a performance of death. Trey's solos seem to be issued from his autonomic nervous system (lizard brain guitar), while his musical mind is in a sort of coma (the melody never remembers what happened the measure before (the purpose of a drone is to externalize musical memory

Birds of a Feather is a sort of double-time Doors jam, and Trey gets stuck stuttering in broken staccato phrases; he sounds like Walter Becker soloing over new Steely Dan. You are desperate for a melody, for sustained notes, for rhythms that cross the bar line, and you curse Phish. But then there's this glistening part where Trey is playing more or less the same sort of phrases but everything synchs into a more organic geometry, the flow and counterflow of living things. The basic rhythmic and harmonic frame is the same, but it undergoes a sort of aspect shift; Trey is bending the notes subtly, the guitar becomes a little voice speaking, the music becomes three-dimensional; they figure out the right gravity and distance and spin to get all the planets moving in orbit around the sun (consider the prevalence of the trope of the gears that turn the universe (this moment or place exists only because Trey fought through shit to get there. There's no way for Phish to skip straight to such musical plateaus (except maybe by playing the first 2 seconds of YEM, or during so much of 1998, when they seem to be always floating, and the music starts free and stays free) It's like a little dream before you fall asleep, where the exact contours of the rush are directly influenced by whatever story you were just telling yourself, but the effect is a qualitative break from all narrativity (you are just delivered to friendly light (the band seems to be illuminated through a crack in the universe (this is the meaning of "The Divided Sky," and, I think, a reason they played that song less in later years: it represented something spiritual they couldn't reliably achieve (this is why the 2004 Keyspan Park "Live in Brooklyn" Divided Sky is so disappointing; it's not that it's bad, it's that they don't respect the song; they trot it out as a gratuitous greatest hit, and Trey blows over it selfishly (maybe he is trying to kill it (Trey's incredible independence from Page and Mike is also one of the good aspects of 2004; you get to hear the pure idea of Phish: just Trey and Fishman (the Zappa thing over the Bonham thing (my feelings about the Keyspan Divided Sky may be influenced by the fact that I was listening to it at top volume at the moment I realized my car had lost its brakes and was flying independently down 495 (I did coast to safety