Halley's Comet 12/7/99

This night at the Cumberland County Civic Center, the strawberry goo is thick and black and starry; the jam on Halley's instantly descends into night and sleep; as soon as the composed singing part ends, they sink into the darkest, most unconscious groove of the jam, it strobes out in the concentric outlines of an expanding echoing shape in a PBS animation, the dull orbit of stars around the head of a man sleeping on the sidewalk on Free Street, the froth of some bagged 40 circulated in a bank vestibule on Congress, the upside-down concrete terrace of the Civic Center flying through space, an ark, the concert within sort of literally taking place in another dimension, unimaginable from the concrete hallway surrounding it (tonight we looked through the windows at the empty hallways (counters, kiosks, bathrooms (it has the brute functionality of a traffic island or parking garage. Part of Phish 99's sound is blankness, openness, and emptiness (a sound suited to the modernism of of 70s civic architecture). They explore impersonal spaces, and you sort of find yourself in this dreamy, personality-medicated but intoxicatingly deeply depressed nowhere. The ambient landscapes are darker and spookier, less friendly than 98, less exploratory than 97, less jazzy than 96, less classically perfect than 95, less adventure-sportsy than 94, etc. Phish has quaffed from Lethe and lies sprawling on the shore, dreaming of nothing, and Trey's backwards guitar lights out into the night space of late Hendrix, the color specks in the darkness on the Band of Gypsies gatefold, the gatefolding double-wide of cinematic space vision, the frame of silence and slow-moving destruction, and this Halley's goes deep into the brain damage and forgetting of millennial Phish, rave Phish. The loop siren (the ghost/drip sound) echoes through, by now an old friend in the world of Phish sounds (thank you for saving me again and again!) The jam turns major at the end, stiffly Ionian, like columns of snare drummers, and the chill-out feels rule-based and forced. Trey does this repeating pull-off thing, a sort of idiotic Allman Brothers riff, an obvious accident of memorized finger positions on the fretboard. He is caught in a trap, and it is a relief when he stops playing and the notes slither backwards in watery reverse delay and finally sink into a drone. This music tends toward death. You can hear what they were trying to rescue themselves from by going on hiatus (there is a void at the center of this music (when they start The Squirming Coil, for a second you hear the kind, breezy summer song you knew from some hippie girl's hatchback, but a wave of blackness quickly descends (in 1999 Phish is almost intentionally sinister (though the next night they bring the kindness (is a comet a flying ice-ball?