High Tide
The 1995 Summer Tour may not have the Hall of Fame status of its fall counterpart, but it was pretty dang consistent. Putting some extremely basic data science on the phish.net ratings, the topography of the 22-show, 27-day run is fairly typical stuff for Phish: a slow start reaching a mid-tour peak, and then a steady plateau to the end, bent by a few late-tour disappointments. Still, only eight of the 22 shows fall below the 4 star rating that is roughly the default score for most fans, the quantitative standard for “average-great.”
If you can make sense of my rudimentary ggplot skills, you’ll notice that tonight’s show in Hotlanta is a major contributor (along with the night before on Mud Island) to that early-tour peak. In fact, the first of Phish’s 11 shows to date at the Lakewood Amphitheatre is the 2nd-highest rated show of the entire summer, according to the extremely biased pool of people with enough free time to rate shows on phish.net. Only 6/26 from Saratoga tops it, and that’s a show with the thumb on the scale of an official LivePhish release.
On paper, it’s surprising that this show would rank so highly in a summer with many legendary, lengthy jams and beloved venues such as Red Rocks, The Mann, and Sugarbush. Lakewood has a pretty fantastic batting average, possibly the best among regular Phish stops in the South. But in this debut, there’s not really a standout jam in the band’s maiden voyage that earns named status in Phish lore — 26 minutes and jam-charted it may be, tonight’s Bowie suffers from being just one of many notable Bowies this summer — and no unique sequence of segues or rarities or debuts.
Instead, it’s something that’s a lot harder to write about: just a thoroughly Very Solid Show. While you can’t point to a single legendary performance, almost everything gets played extremely well. In addition to the Bowie — which, as you’ve likely gathered, I’m not as fond of as the version two nights prior, but it’s still pretty great — there are superb takes on Antelope, Fluffhead, Theme, and Slave, an intriguing drone-and-trombone version of I Didn’t Know that spawns from the depths of a Stash jam, and maybe the first successful blending-in of the new songs with the older material.
But the consensus excellence of this show is broader than the specific songs. This show might be the first of the year — maybe the first of my 1993-to-present listening project — where Phish feels truly confident in their ability to play a 20,000-person venue. Sure, they’ve played great shows in big venues before this point, but there usually tends to be a nervous charm to those earlier moments in Madison Square Garden or Great Woods, a giddy “we made it, ma!” energy that creates a slight layer of irony — had they really ridden an inside joke to the country’s largest stages?
There’s very little of that bar-band-in-an-amphitheater cheekiness at Lakewood: no Fishman song, no Big Ball Jam or Secret Language, no ludicrous attempt to belt a barbershop tune out to the lawn without microphones. But it’s still a typically eclectic and quirky set of music: nightmarish prog, original and covered bluegrass, a dispatch from Gamehendge, two of their poppiest songs, their most complicated epic, two different tunes featuring evil laughter, a song where they all sit on stools and play acoustic guitars, and an Edgar Winter Group cover.
That this buffet of material doesn’t collapse is testament to Trey’s progress in setlist construction. There’s a great flow in this show despite the lack of segues, and the recent trend towards the jamband cliche of songy first set/jammy second set is tweaked just enough to keep the audience both guessing and happy. Halfway through the first set, it diverges into deeper listening with Stash > I Didn’t Know, Fluffhead, and Antelope, while for the second consecutive night the centerpiece of the late set is a thick slab of improv, surrounded by more accessible options. Whether your top priority was dancing or chin-stroking, the show didn’t disappoint.
True, that flow comes at the cost of some predictability. Antelope and Slave are about the easiest set closer calls in the Phish songbook, but you can’t argue with results — both are tremendous exclamation points in very different flavors. And slotting the new songs into their proper place freshen things up as well; Strange Design works great as a comedown from nearly a half hour of intense Bowie-ing, and both Taste and Theme are growing into their roles as reliable mid-set songs that provide a blend of composition, improvisation, and singalongability (if anyone there knew the words — or even the songs — yet).
It all just works and sounds effortless, in a way where this show would likely not earn the same level of crowdsourced acclaim if played in 1999 or 2019. But it stands out as a developmental step in the context of 1995, when Phish was no longer yo-yoing between different venue sizes and types and needed to establish a baseline approach that succeeds in a shed. What comes close to the high water mark for Summer 95 will just be the standard in the future, but you have to first construct a standard before you can deconstruct it.
[Ticket stub from Golgi Project.]