SET 1: Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Ya Mar, Down with Disease > Guelah Papyrus, Poor Heart > Foam, Theme From the Bottom, Golgi Apparatus > Tweezer, Hello My Baby, Possum
SET 2: Runaway Jim > Simple > Taste > Free > Fluffhead > Prince Caspian > The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Run Like an Antelope
ENCORE: Punch You in the Eye
Tour openers are typically triumphant, if somewhat tentative, returns to the road. This one is more like a sigh of relief. “The world is a beautiful place, but it’s good to be playing in the States, I’ve gotta say,” Trey announces mid-first set, and while it might just be cliche “band returns from foreign country” stage banter, you can hear the tension of a difficult month abroad evaporating. It’s all over the first set, from a very emphatic “Play It Leoooo!” in Ya Mar and an equally enthusiastic “Cactus!” in Poor Heart, in Fishman’s frequent interjections throughout the show, and the dedication to his LASIK surgery (“flap and zap”) before Hello My Baby.
The band’s “return” to Wolf Mountain — it was the venue they were supposed to play on 6/8/95 before weather forced a move inside to the Delta Center — is back in a safe space. And while Phish don’t immediately revert back to the kind of risk-taking and world-conquering they left off with the last time they toured in 1995, they start to shrug off the over-polite behavior of their opening act gigs.
They finally seem excited and comfortable enough to play a slew of songs from Billy Breathes, even showcasing the new arrangements of Taste and Free back-to-back in the meat of the second set. They restore Disease and Simple, two of the year-to-come’s MVPs, to places of honor in the setlist and dust off Fluffhead for the first time in 22 shows. They debut Page’s newest toy, the Theremin, about which I will have much more to say anon.
The best sign that Phish is back in their comfort zone is a somewhat intangible end-of-jam feeling that grows from Disease to Tweezer to Possum before fully reemerging in Antelope. The Phish community, which loves to label otherwise nebulous improvisational concepts, has never quite found the right term for this one. But it’s that feeling you get that a jam must be coming to an end, that they couldn’t possibly go any harder or find any further melodic territory to explore, and yet, they send it around one more time, or several more times, inspiring general hysteria.
Possum, which is absolutely packed with ideas, flirts with this phenomenon at the 9:24 mark, but it’s the Antelope which does it best, as it so often does (it even did so again just before press time, on 8/1/21). After Trey stumbles into the “The Force Theme” — absolute catnip to the Gen X-ers on tour in the late 90s — the band builds and builds and builds some more. Somewhere around 7:30, it sounds like it’s starting to wrap up, but Trey’s got an extra minute and a few more frets up the neck he hasn’t used yet, and though he starts signaling the drop-off at 8:30, there’s one final screaming run to obliterate the audience.
Suffice it to say, that’s not a gear (sorry) Phish ever reached in Europe, even in their headlining shows. Sesto Calende was loose and playful, and the candles of inspiration started flickering in Germany, but never did they recapture the reckless abandon of Fall ‘95. It’s almost as if Phish now needs a large, adoring audience to provide the necessary fuel, charging up off crowd-band feedback loops to find their extra levels.
Fortunately, they’re about to play for their largest audiences yet, but that comes with some extra baggage. If Wolf Mountain still has a coat of that tour-opener rust despite playing 20 shows in 1996 (for example, they forget to reprise the Tweezer for the fourth out of four times this year), it could be jet lag, or it could be the new stress of the massive party Phish Inc. is getting ready to throw in two weeks, at the end of this unusually brief cross-country trek. It’s very good to be home, but also a classic frying pan/fire sitch; after a month with profoundly lower expectations, Phish is in for some serious whiplash.
Two quick points (and apologies that I’m just discovering this post now):
1) The opening Somewhere Over The Rainbow was prompted by a glorious double-rainbow that appeared surrounding the stage right before the show, after a fierce rainstorm had blown through earlier. (“Look! The storm’s gone!”) It was a stupendous, magnificent moment, entirely unexpected, and filled with grace. What a way to kick off my first tour.
2) I very much doubt that they ever “forgot” to reprise Tweezer. There have been multiple shows where I believe they *chose* not to reprise Tweezer. Ascribing intention to isolated events is always suspect, but I’m not aware of any information which would justify the statement that they “forgot” Tweeprise.
Looking forward to reading the rest of tour! Thanks for doing this!