The funk is strong with this one.
Night four of the quickie Island Tour saw Phish messing with everyone's expectations right from the start. "The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony" opened the show for the first time in three years and then, when everyone was likely expecting the usual "Suzy Greenberg" or even "AC/DC Bag" to follow, a hard left was taken and the band launched into "You Enjoy Myself" (first and only "Oh Kee > YEM" ever). Naturally, this "YEM" was funkier than usual, keeping the groove nice and slippery for the audience's dancing pleasure. Even the vocal jam was funky.
Phish knows how to play with contrast, so the strongly executed but decidedly un-funky "Theme From the Bottom" between "YEM" and "Bathtub Gin" was an impressive move in set-list construction, leading the way for a fantastic "Gin" and its entertaining (though a bit rocky) segue into a funkified "Cities". I suppose "Sparkle" was thrown in for the sake of more contrast, to break things up a bit one more time before the set-closing "Split Open and Melt", which was good enough but neither rip-roaring like the early-'90s versions nor Island-Tour-funky.
In fact, it may have seemed that the funk was done for the week with excellent, but definitely non-funky, performances of "Down With Disease" (totally rocking), "Ya Mar" (fun and breezy) and "Prince Caspian" (big and bombastic). However, the second half of the set brought it back as songs continued to segue, with a jarring crash from "Maze" to "Shafty" and with an effortless slide from "Shafty" to "Possum" to "Cavern". Save for the latter, every song in the set (save for the "Cavern" closer) was left unfinished.
As if the point had not been completely made by the music, Trey Anastasio even mentioned during the intro of the funkiest "Cavern" ever, that they were going to jam on the funk groove for the rest of the night because, "That's sort of been the thing."
It is almost surprising then, especially since Trey also instructed the audience that they can take off if they want to, implying that the funk groove would be all that was left of the show, that they came back for an encore with a blazing "Bold as Love" (or even at all - they probably could have continued the "Cavern" funk jam until their curfew with no encore and no one would have been upset about it).
But there is still no doubt that the funk certainly had been "the thing" in that small but glorious moment in time known as the Island Tour.
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