Early Risers
SET 1: Cars Trucks Buses > Mike's Song > A Day in the Life > Poor Heart > Weekapaug Groove, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Ya Mar, Stash, Amazing Grace, Fee > Chalk Dust Torture
SET 2: Also Sprach Zarathustra > David Bowie, Suzy Greenberg > Uncle Pen, Fluffhead, Sleeping Monkey > Frankenstein -> Suspicious Minds > Hold Your Head Up, Run Like an Antelope
ENCORE: Acoustic Army, Good Times Bad Times
One of the pleasures of a multi-night run is that the individual dates tend to melt into one long show. It’s mostly the same audience every night, the band is looking at the same backdrop from the stage (in the Fox’s case, quite the view), and the energy built up each night carries over to the following, with only slight diminishment from the 20 hours each day Phish is not performing. In the best case scenario, the nightly two-set structure itself breaks down; it’s more useful to frame the run in terms of third, fourth, fifth, or sixth sets instead.
That’s my explanation, anyway, for why this show gets going remarkably early. After a routine Cars Trucks Buses opener, Phish dives right into Mike’s Song, which has been exclusively a resident of the second set since late 1992. And while it’s not a landmark version, it’s no wimp either, with a torrid first jam and a second half that scoots Trey over to his percussion kit barely ten minutes into the night’s proceedings. They follow it up with A Day In The Life, which the band to this point has only used as a nightcap, a crescendo fit for a second set closer or encore. After a lightning-quick Poor Heart, they close out the sequence with an equally respectable Weekapaug, capping a half-hour plus chunk of music that would typically be the show’s main course, served as an appetizer.
From there the show’s structure cools its jets and looks bog-standard on paper: first-set Stash, 2001 > Bowie to open the second, a late Fishman song, Chalk Dust and Antelope closers. But that unexpected early blast of improv and unusual song placement throws off the gravity of the rest of the night just enough to give everything an extra layer of danger and possibility. Take the Chalk Dust, which clocks in at an unassuming 6 minutes and doesn’t drift too far away from its usual course, but features a sustained note so long and loud from Trey that he finds time to move over to his mini-kit underneath it and rattle away for several seconds.
Reader Greg Bloom chimes in with a first-person account (and the stub below):
There's one aspect of 11/11 that is thankfully locked in my memory bank: the amazing Chalk Dust Torture closer of Set 1. What a spectacular close to the set! I can almost close my eyes and see it. I've never experienced a crowd more locked in than that night. Walking into the lobby at intermission, everyone had the same look on their face. Everybody was saying the same word to their friends: "Wow". I think this might be my all-time favorite concert experience.
It’s a tangled web of causality: the locked-in crowd inspires Phish to make unusual choices, which further electrifies the audience, which stimulates even more torrid performances, and so on, in a positive feedback loop which never finds an asymptote. The last quarter of the show, post-Fluffhead, is almost absurdly delirious, Phish morphing into a possessed classic rock station, cramming The Beatles (by way of Sleeping Monkey), Edgar Winter, Elvis, Argent, and Zeppelin into the home stretch around a combustible Antelope and an Acoustic Army breather. The Good Times Bad Times closer is so delirious it manages to put another Zeppelin song inside the Zeppelin; cue the Xzibit jokes. When you can hear the crowd, they’re eating it up like it’s Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square club.
The rave reviews from attendees of this Fox run don’t quite match up with my take from 25 years of temporal distance — I think they are three very strong and very fun shows overall, yet lacking in any of the individual highlights we’re about to encounter over the next month. But I definitely sense that the tapes are only delivering a fraction of the in-person experience, just a peek at a version of Phish that has weaponized itself for rooms of 20 thousand crammed into a theatre holding only 5k. Listening back, you catch whiffs of an almost painfully visceral experience, the musical equivalent of looking at a too-bright light, uncomfortably close. Phish used the Fox as an inner sanctum for conjuring the spell that would carry them through November and December; I’m sure it was both thrilling and just a little bit scary to watch.
[Poster by Les Seifer. Thanks to Greg Bloom for the stub and the memories…firsthand accounts always welcome!]