Jeremy--always a treat to read you here. All these anniversaries have me thinking about nostalgia and what it means for Phish. This is a band that is special (at least in part) because of the insistent promise of surprise, what you describe as "we can do anything." I think/hope all of our (band and fans) musical tastes have evolved quite a bit over the last decade or two, but one of the things that keeps us coming back is the promise that we'll hear/see/feel something new. In a sense, then, what we seek out in Phish is somehow the opposite of what draws us to a Billy Joel or Pink Floyd or Justin Bieber concert. We want to hear Piano Man sound just as we always remember it and we want Gilmour's solo to ring out just so and we want whatever it is that Bieber does done precisely right--but we want to hear Antelope differently--preferably very differently--each time.

It's too easy to say that this is what makes some people uneasy about latter-day Phish, even if that problem seems to be diminishing a bit in the last year or so. More interesting is the question of why so many people point to 1998 as the beginning of The Long Decline (even if, as Chris notes, '98 might get better with age). Perhaps the issue is that the surprise of the surprise jam had worn off as the last real funk jam ended that night in Providence. It seems that after all the unexpectedness of the '97 fall (an hourlong Jim! a jam in Character Zero! something-or-other at Hampton!). After all, we remember Summer '98 at least as much as the jukebox tour as anything else. When you finally become the band that can do anything--when America has been destroyed--what's left? Doesn't the empire slayer just become the empire, and mustn't it decline and fall? Perhaps the nostalgia we feel is nostalgia for the possibility of surprise, a possibility that we lost because there just weren't any real surprises left, just top-ten lists to be made, updated, and compared. The horizons needn't be reconsidered--they've collapsed.

For me, the question that the Island Tour poses now--fifteen years later, when we re-listen to it full of loving nostalgia and warm memories, too full of the knowledge of everything that comes next--the question is necessarily about that moment's relative future, those post-perfect antediluvian moments of the very late 1990s. What did you do after the orgy?