Full Sprint

10/21/95, Lincoln, NE, Pershing Auditorium

SET 1: Tweezer Reprise, Chalk Dust Torture, Guelah Papyrus, Reba, Wilson > Cars Trucks Buses, Kung > The Lizards, Strange Design, Acoustic Army, Good Times Bad Times -> Tweezer Reprise

SET 2: Also Sprach Zarathustra > David Bowie, Lifeboy, Sparkle > You Enjoy Myself > Purple Rain > Hold Your Head Up, Harry Hood, Suzy Greenberg

ENCORE: Highway to Hell

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Up is down, the Earth is rotating clockwise, dogs and cats living together...Phish opens a show with Tweezer Reprise. This is not Nam, there are rules, but rules are meant to be broken. Opening a show with the band’s most powerful closer — ”The best 4 minutes in live rock music,” to quote Steven Hyden for the second time in three posts — is powerful voodoo, not to be used lightly. Opening and closing a set with it? Well, I’m not sure it’s illegal in every state, but it seems likely to be on the books in Nebraska.

Tonight in Lincoln is the earliest Fall 95 show to have the official LivePhish seal of approval. And if you were doing a swing through this legendary tour entirely inside the app — there are 8 SBDs available as of press time, so it’s a hefty mini-tour all its own — you’d think that Phish hit the ground at an absolute sprint in the final quarter of 1995. If you’ve been following this newsletter, you know...that’s not true. But aside from the hidden treasure of Compton Terrace, this is indeed the first show that resembles the Phish that would end the year with Madison Square Garden in the palm of their hand.

That first-ever Tweeprise opener is perfectly symbolic in two important ways. On one hand, you have the expectations-violation we talked about in Austin, an opener that nobody could have predicted. Particularly, since it’s not even closing out an earlier un-reprised Tweezer like some later Reprise openers...it’s just a Tweeprise, out of absolutely fucking nowhere. On the other hand, it’s Phish rejecting the entire premise of a warm-up, beyond even the level of the safe Set 1/adventurous Set 2 dichotomy, to the scale of the very first song. There’s no easing into the water tonight, it’s a running tackle into the deep end, from an energy sense at least.

These twin objectives repeat themselves throughout the show. Kung also spontaneously appears in the first set, coughing in after a pretty standard Cars Trucks Buses and getting into some giallo-score territory beneath Trey and Fish’s incantation. The second set is stacked with three heavy hitters — Bowie, YEM, and Hood — each of which are given deep attention and unusual features, including fake-out endings in the Bowie jam, a YEM that unleashes wave upon wave of funk themes, and a Hood where Trey inserts seemingly random names into the final “you can feel good about” lines. 

Phish is also in maximum prankster mode vis a vis the upcoming Halloween set, responding to either online or offline rumor mills about a Thriller costume by threading Michael Jackson teases throughout the show. There’s “Black or White” — previously heard way back in early 93 on Jimmy’s turntable — and “Beat It” (RIP EVH) worming into both Hood and Suzy. The latter song also gets a blast of the “Stairway to Heaven” solo, for good measure, deliciously adding new tinder to the Halloween speculation. 

But beyond the setlist notes, the important thing is the incredibly manic energy Phish sustains throughout this show. There are lulls, to be sure; the first set settles down after Tweeprise/Chalk Dust with Guelah and again later with a Strange Design/Acoustic Army pairing, while the second set drops a Lifeboy in amongst the titans. But Phish could have strummed Acoustic Army for 2 hours and the GTBT > Tweezer Reprise (technically Tweezer Reprise Reprise, or Tweepriseprise) would have still felt like being shot out of a cannon. Set 2 uses Sparkle like interval training after Lifeboy’s cooldown, and even the Fishman song can’t trip up the bullet-train momentum, as they revive Purple Rain for its only 1995 appearance.

All the classic Phish months — August 93, December 95, December 97 — occur at the end of a lengthy lead-in, weeks and weeks of shows that contain sparks of what’s to come but mostly feel more “standard.” There’s always a tipping point where the band throws out the rulebook and suddenly finds themselves in new, fertile space as a result. 10/21/95 comes a little too early to throw that switch, and I’m sure there are quite a few more mediocre shows to come before we get to the hallowed ground of December. But in the abridged LivePhish version of this tour, it’s a perfect prologue.