Holiday Residency

10/30/98, Las Vegas, NV, Thomas & Mack Center

SET 1: Wilson > Meat > Scent of a Mule > Back at the Chicken Shack > Scent of a Mule, Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress, Run Like an Antelope, Guelah Papyrus, The Lizards, Cavern

SET 2: Stash -> Manteca -> Tweezer -> NICU > Jam > Prince Caspian > Golgi Apparatus

ENCORE: Driver, Free Bird

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1998 reflected a major shift in the Halloween tradition. The last three times Phish did their musical costume show on the holiday, it was just a date in the middle of the broader tour, with the location dictated by what part of the country they found themselves in as October ended. Glens Falls, Rosemont, Atlanta – none of these were particularly special cities or venues before they became the site of a legendary holiday show, they were just not too far away from the date before and the date after. 

But placing the ‘98 Halloween stop amid two nights in Vegas was clearly meant to heighten the occasion. Phish pulled out all the stops in their 1996 tour closer on the Strip, and while the 1997 Vegas stop came too early in the tour to share in the full fireworks of that fateful fall, it auditioned the near-Strip Thomas & Mack Center as a suitable venue for the traveling Phish circus. Dionysian Productions doubled-down there the next year, marking the first time that Phish wouldn’t have a night off to prepare for their Halloween hijinks. From this point on, whether it was part of a festival or in Las Vegas or its East Coast equivalent, Halloween would be a multi-night affair. 

I wrote four years ago (sheesh!) about the highly variable pre-holiday jitters of the show preceding Halloween; sometimes, as in 1994, it produces slap-happy magic, sometimes it’s a warm-up session with a guest performer, sometimes it’s somewhere in-between*. But those shows all took place on October 29th, and it wasn’t clear what scratching the off-day would do to Phish’s Halloween preparations. Add in that the fall tour practically starts with the Halloween run, if you don’t count the unorthodox appearances sprinkled around October, and it only deepens the uncertainty.

But it’s easy to see that Phish delivered on its first Devil’s Night show in six years, just judging by how Live Phish Vol. 16 added a whole extra disc to make sure its highlights were included. Any early discomfort is resolved by the band celebrating a more personal occasion, reprising The Hollies’ CCR knock-off “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” for the first time in the precisely 15 years since their very first show. Only problem: despite common Phish lore, codified in the freshly released The Phish Book, that they made their inauspicious debut at a Halloween dance, subsequent research determined that their first show wasn’t even on October 30th, but December 2nd (the tinsel should’ve been a clue). 

Historical inaccuracies aside, the dopiness of “Long Cool Woman” loosens them up to resume flirting with entropy after the Greek’s portentous Reba. The subsequent Antelope – the only first set selection included on the bonus disc – is a masterpiece of taking their time, peaking with a three-minute segment of spooky drone fit between “Rye Rye Rocco” and “Been you to have any spike, man.” The second-set is a segue chain built on songs that either never reach their ending (Stash) or refuse to end (NICU), marked by several places where chaos threatens to run rampant, only to be dispelled by a Dizzy Gillespie riff or a throwback Tweezer peak/slowdown or the life preserver chords of Caspian. 

All in all, it’s a very good and surprisingly normal Phish show, given the high stakes looming 24 hours later. There aren’t any clues to the costume and the playing isn’t distracted by trying to remember the chords to “Cool It Down” – maybe because they already had Loaded down pat before fall tour finally started, or maybe because it wasn’t that hard of an album to learn and rehearse. It fully detaches from any album-promo responsibility, only playing Meat, doesn’t let the pseudo-anniversary nostalgia distract from the band’s current musical development, and deftly walks the balance beam between deconstruction and total musical disintegration, a trick that will be put to the test on night 2 of the run.

Because Phish also edges along another important cliff in this show: the siren song of Las Vegas. Sin City will eventually become the seemingly permanent home for the Halloween run, with Phish plotting ever more extravagant pranks in the MGM Grand Arena and settling in for four-show residencies. But in the interim, it will become a Phish city of no little infamy, where they shared the stage with their most unfortunate guest and where they played the disastrous 2004 run that led to the review that led to the breakup. 

As anyone who has been there knows, Vegas can be great for a while until the non-stop smorgasbord of capitalism starts to poison your blood. 10/30 captures that first-night-in-Vegas euphoria without the slimy excesses, but staying for an extra night is like hitting on 16 (that’s a gambling metaphor). Fortunately, they had picked out a musical costume that was all sunshine and rainbows…

* - My primitive data science in that post also found that the show after Halloween is a guaranteed banger…hmm, wonder if that will hold up in 1998?