Big Shots

12/28/98, New York, NY, Madison Square Garden

SET 1: Axilla > Stash, Farmhouse, Taste, Sleep, Albuquerque, Driver, Tube > Golgi Apparatus > Good Times Bad Times

SET 2: Carini > Wolfman's Brother, Birds of a Feather, When the Circus Comes, Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn) -> David Bowie

ENCORE: Been Caught Stealing

Listen on phish.in or watch on YouTube

Tonight, in the year 2023, Phish embarks upon their eleventh four-night New Year’s Eve residency at Madison Square Garden. And twenty-five years ago, they kicked off their first such run, yet another milestone in their late 90s ascendancy. Take a step back and appreciate just how quickly Phish leveled up, with just four years separating the audacious big swing of booking the most famous American arena for the first time and, now, kicking off the tradition of taking it over for the final half-week of any year they desired. For Phish’s first decade, MSG represented the horizon of rock and roll success; 48 months later, it’s Phish’s late-December routine, the equivalent of taking down the Christmas lights. 

That status pushes past the point of career peaks and milestones to pure cockiness. It’s a completely justified arrogance, earned through selling out the famous room anytime from weeknights in October to the year’s biggest party night, on the back of not much more than word of mouth and their fans’ enthusiasm for attending multiple shows. But it’s hubris all the same, building off last year’s curfew-flaunting, dominance-asserting trilogy, and flipping once and for all what used to be an annual year-end Northeast victory tour into a destination event where everyone had to come to them to celebrate.

The swagger is realized in rolling out a full production, complete with stage decorations and costumed dancers, on the very first night of the run instead of saving it for the grand finale. And it’s further enlarged by the decision to scrap those special features after tonight; stripping back the rumored seasonal theme to just the occasional dance troupe stage invasion*. Instead, they wisely chose to let the music provide the spectacle, successfully bringing all the highlights and innovations of the preceding year’s touring to their Garden party.

On 12/28, that’s represented by some particularly fine entropy jamming. I spent a lot of the first half of fall tour talking about this style, where the band let its improvisations patiently unravel in search of the fertile trance achieved during the Lemonwheel Ring of Fire set. But it proved to be a challenging mode, producing friction when not everyone was on board and running at odds with the party-time energy of most arena environments. The playing on the back half of the tour bent towards the latter expectations, with jams going big and brash instead of small and subtle.

That is, until the final set of the fall, when an excellent Simple reminded them of their earlier persuasions. And happily, 12/28 picks right up where they left off a month prior, with the centerpiece Carini > Wolfman’s exploring entropy with exquisite control. Carini, making its triumphant return to the MSG stage, could be little more than a metal-stomp appetizer, but it starts to degrade nine minutes in and, importantly, doesn’t rush to morph into another song. Instead, it whips up a storm of harsh drones and synths over an ominous Mike bassline while a person or persons in a worm costume starts wriggling around the back of the stage. That’s one way to get your holiday party off to an unsettling start.  

Do you know where you are? You’re in a worm costume at the back of the stage!

Wolfman’s feels like a return to safety, at first. But after a stretch of rich cowfunk – with a dab of No Quarter in Trey’s turnaround riff – it steers back into the same territory the song explored with controversial results on Halloween. This time around, the vote is unanimous, and the differences are obvious. Instead of Trey making weird noises while the rest of the band flounders for footing, here he picks a theme and picks it apart, providing a runway for the band to stay on when he eventually switches to mimicking power drills and missile screeches. When Trey’s ideas fade out, the other three have his back; Mike and Fish playing hell jazz while Page takes over the industrial soundscapes on his synth. It’s terrifying and shapeless but still purposeful, a fruitful revision of the Vegas Wolfman’s slow-mo collapse.

That level of experimentation brings to mind another milestone of four years prior, one that just missed MSG: the Providence Bowie. Carini > Wolfman’s isn’t anywhere near the horror show of that performance, instead showing how Phish has refined that boundary-pushing sound to deploy in more responsible dosages. But it’s also another cocky strut to bring that level of weirdness out of rundown New England civic centers and into midtown Manhattan, a sign of their comfort in making a big city crowd on a high-expectations date feel uncomfortable. It’s the first strike in a decadent New York extended-stay, one where they’ve earned the right to get away with anything.

* - Perhaps because, from what we can see on the very static fancam of this show, it looks awfully derivative of the aquarium stage set of 1993.

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Like a lot of you, I’m disgusted by Substack’s pitiful response to the no-brainer question of “should we host and profit from white supremacists?” I’m 100% okay with anyone who unsubscribed or feels like they should, and appreciate everyone who contacted me and explained why you dropped off the mailing list. I’m still going to post this run’s essays here, but if there aren’t significant walkbacks and policy changes from Substack soon, I’ll be moving shop somewhere else for the 1999 posts. Stay tuned.