Sugar High

8/14/96, Hersheypark Stadium, Hershey, PA

SET 1: Wilson -> Jam > Down with Disease, Fee -> Poor Heart, Reba, The Mango Song > Gumbo, Stash, Hello My Baby

SET 2: Runaway Jim > You Enjoy Myself, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Cars Trucks Buses > Tweezer, Theme From the Bottom > Hold Your Head Up > Cracklin' Rosie > Hold Your Head Up, Sample in a Jar > Tweezer Reprise

ENCORE: Julius

Listen or Watch [Set 1, Set 2]

It is an especially confusing time to be working on this project. Last year, I had 1995 Phish all to itself, allowing me to take refuge from the horrors of 2020 in simpler times of Phish absolutely killing it night after night. This year, I’m virtually on two simultaneous tours, slogging my way through 1996 while keeping tabs on the shockingly strong 2021 summer. I was mostly keeping this temporal juggle up in the air until this week, when 2021 Phish played Hersheypark Stadium just as I started work on 1996 Phish playing...Hersheypark Stadium. But it’s totally different, right? 25 years ago was the final show before a big Northeast festival, while this year’s Hershey run was the final stop before...a big Northeast festival*. Damn it!

Those similarities aside, these two visits to the Land of Chocolate come at very different points in a summer tour. In 2021, the two-night Hershey run feels like a hinge of the band’s 22-show summer swing: mid-tour, mid-week shows that find the band assessing the progress so far and where their next steps lie. That usually means mixed results, and Hershey 2021 provided the first real clunker of the tour (8/10), followed by a show with major sleeper show energy, full of weird setlist choices, tease wackiness, and big, inventive jams in unusual places. The rest of the month will fill out the story and reveal whether these shows were transitional or outliers (and tours don’t typically start as hot as 2021, so all bets are off), but in the moment, it sounded like the band was taking a well-deserved breath.

Hersheypark in 1996 is a different story. Here, the tour-timing dynamic is closer to what I wrote about way back in Fall 94 — the tendency for shows before and/or after big events to go hard, sometimes even harder than the special event itself. It’s completely understandable if Phish was nervous heading into the Clifford Ball. Like that Spartanburg show before the first Halloween album cover, they were about to try an experiment for the very first time, though the stakes were much higher in 1996, logistically and financially. As Phish Inc. spruced up the Plattsburgh Air Force Base for the biggest party they had ever thrown, Phish The Band had to put it out of their minds and play some normal shows on the road eastward.

But that anxiety creeping in could explain the unique features of 8/14/96, which wastes no time getting weird. The opening Wilson careens straight into a bizarre, noisy jam with no hesitation, as though they were possessed by the nearby presence of the Hersheypark Arena, where they kicked off the historic month of December 95 with a similarly rule-breaking performance. It sets up yet another masterful Disease — practically clinching the MVP for the summer — and then the 2nd song out of 3 with an atypical outro: Fee, which somehow finds a frolicking pathway to Poor Heart. Reminder: this is the first set, on a tour where even the second sets can be first-setty.

Those hijinks set up the most improv-heavy set of the summer, with three significant jams in Jim, YEM, and Tweezer. But even more promising than the depth of these jams is their placement, which doesn’t follow the usual set structure Phish had fallen back on this summer: an opening Jim is nothing unusual, but heading straight into YEM after is, and after a brief breather, there’s a nearly 20-minute Tweezer tucked into the middle of the set. Like the Mike’s > Weekapaug in Hershey 8 months prior, or the You Sexy Wombat and now-rare extended versions of Halley’s and BOAF 25 years later, all these unorthodox moves are a sign that the tour is about to steer into thrillingly unpredictable waters.

But while December 1995 had a whole month left to explore that territory, the summer of 1996 only has two more shows to go, and they are...not your typical gigs. In an alternate universe where the tour had extended past the Clifford Ball, one wonders if the relief of throwing a successful festival and the breakthroughs starting to happen in Hershey might have combined to produce a more memorable era in Phish history. Instead, they took two months off before fall, resetting their warm-up status to zero. That leaves 8/14 as a tease of what Summer 1996 had been in a more traditional touring year. It’s the hinge for a tour that was about to be snuffed out too early, if triumphantly.