2009-07-30 Red Rocks I

There must be something in the water out west. I admit that after eight years of living in Washington state and loving it, I'm a little biased, but every time Phish 3.0 comes out and plays in Colorado or anywhere west of the Rockies, they blow anything they've done on the east coast away. '09 is no different: I'm two shows into the Red Rocks run, and the first show features a jam that blows away literally anything played during the first leg and the second show makes the first show look like a pile of shit. And apparently the third show is the highlight of the run, according to the internet. I can't wait. But first, here are my thoughts on night one.

While I don't really enjoy "Divided Sky" as an early-first-set block of composed music, I do quite like it as a show opener, especially to kick off a four-night run. This version is extra fiery, and hints at the energy that will run through the rest of the night. Trey absolutely shreds..."The Wedge" afterward; an odd choice for a fret-melting guitar workout, but subject-appropriate, considering the show's location. The next thing in my notes is the phrase "hot moma," so I'm going to guess this version of "Moma Dance" is first-set exceptional. "Horn" comes next, and while I can occasionally get sick of some of the band's oft-played shorter songs (like "Sample" and "Character Zero"), I never seem to get sick of "The Wedge" or "Horn." Go figure. In the following "Stash," the first real jam of the run, Trey starts working out some of the tension-y, circular riffs that have characterized a lot of the (very good) jamming at least throughout the first two shows. The jam starts a little subdued, with nice subtle interplay between Trey and Page, then there's a few minutes of what sounds like a major key switch-up before the song explodes into full-on bliss mode at 13:00. It's a decent warmup, but is pretty much nonessential when you consider what comes later. The set ends with a "Possum" that sees Trey launching himself into the jam with almost hilarious abandon, to great effect.

The second set starts off with an energetic Mike's Groove, but that doesn't matter because the "Ghost" that follows completely invalidates pretty much everything that's happened since March, including Alpine's transformative "Piper," and introduces a completely new improvisational direction (at least for 3.0) for the band. Admittedly expecting more the same when I kicked off this run, my jaw was on the floor at how fast things changed. First, I don't know if it's because I've been listening to the last few shows at home with the subwoofer turned up or what, but suddenly I can hear Mike and Fish a lot better than I could for most of early summer, and their work on the first few minutes of this "Ghost," even before the jam, hints at something exceptional coming. There's a space jam here, highlighted by Page's playing, a machine-gun Trey section, and then a bliss section that finally fades gently back into the funk that started the song. The switches between movements are a lot less turn-on-a-dime than earlier in the summer, which makes the entire jam seem a lot more organic, and gone is the ambient washout trick that they relied on a lot to transition between songs/jam sections regularly a month before. Near the end of the song, Page latches onto a riff that slowly morphs into a long "Windy City" tease. At the tail-end of a particularly amazing "Ghost" jam (one of my favorite songs), to get a "Windy City" tease (one of my favorite never-played-live songs) was just mind-blowing. Or, as I said in my notes: "i'm not sure what page started playing at 15:40, but it's fucking awesome. fucking windy city tease! this shit is just absolutely nuts. PERFECT page-only piano ending -> wolfman's. good christ."

"Wolfman's" is an above-average version that features some plinko-funk and later some Trey shredding, and while it's not on par with the "Ghost," it's a nice "outro."

Then, straight from my song-choice heaven comes "Billy Breathes." It's not exactly a perfect version, but I absolutely love the song, so it's nice to hear it played live.

The closing "Coil" > "Bowie" sandwich is also above-average: Page's outro on "Coil" gives him a chance to show off in a show that already has a lot of big Page moments, and the "Bowie" jam is a bit more patient and subtle than usual before building to the usual conclusion in an unexpected way. I'm often torn on "Bowie" jams (half the time they do nothing for me and half the time they're incredible), but this one is a keeper.

The highlight of this show (and likely one of the highlights of the year) is this "Ghost," but there's a lot of other good show here. If you like the song choice in the first set, it's a solid run, helped a lot by the guys' first-night energy. Pretty much everything in the second set except a pedestrian "Limb By Limb" is worth a listen...but for god's sake, at least listen to the "Ghost."

Oh, and someone has nicely uploaded the whole damn show to YouTube, so we're back to videos!

Hampton and Early Summer '09 Wrap-up

Whoop here it is. A few final and very brief thoughts on each show from this leg. I'm already two shows into Late Summer Tour '09, and if it continues in the vein it's in now, none of Early Summer Tour will ever matter again because Red Rocks is blowing away any of the shows I've heard in 3.0 so far. But, for posterity, here's a brief series of thoughts on stuff and things.

3/6: Good for the historic opening "Fluffhead," a spacey, whale-y "Stash," and a seriously top-shelf "Tweezer."

3/7: Great song choice and flow for this one. Highlights are "Rock and Roll" > "Limb by Limb" and "Ghost."

3/8: Best show of the run, combining the strengths of the first two nights. "Disease" > "Seven Below," "Twist" > "Piper."

5/31: Workmanlike. Nothing to see here but a suddenly stellar "Tweezer."

6/2: Wrote in my notes: "really bad." "If I Could" and and ambient "Hood" are the only highlights.

6/4: Great first set, but not much else. "Ghost" and "Drowned" > "Meatstick."

6/5: Meh. "Twist" > "Piper" is the only highlight.

6/6: Just a nice rock and roll show. No songs worth mentioning.

6/7: Best show of the run, almost for sure. "Fee" and "The Wedge" have outro jams, "Sand" is a monster, "Suzy," "Tweezer" are also highlights.

6/9: Consistent but not amazing. "Number Line" > "Ghost."

6/10: Workmanlike. Nothin'.

6/12: 'Roo 1-set show. "Disease," "Kill Devil Falls," and "YEM" > "Wilson" > "YEM" sandwich are highlights.

6/14: Long, energetic show with no real jams. "Tweezer" > "Horse" > "Silent" and "Rock and Roll" > "Light" are highlights.

6/16: Great, song-based playing. "Halley's" jam!

6/18: Same, but "Tube" jam, and a good "Piper."

6/19: Second best, only bested by Camden. "ASIHTOS" > "Drowned", "Tweezer" > "2001" are highlights.

6/20: Meh. "Ghost" > "The Lizards" and a truncated "YEM" > "NICU" are neat.

6/21: Equal to 6/19 in quality. Great tour closer. "Crosseyed" > "Disease" and "Piper" are awesome (especially "Piper"!). "Frankenstein" ends the tour on a great note.

2009-06-21 Alpine II

Well, here we are at the end of Summer Tour '09 Leg One. Honestly, I'd figured when I started listening at Hampton that I'd get bored and give up within a few shows, but this has been legitimately interesting, both from a musical perspective and an historical one, and I'm hoping to make it through the rest of '09 at least before this year's summer tour kicks off and I get inundated by listening to Phish music that hasn't actually happened yet. If anything, this listening project has made it clear to me for the first time exactly how fucking much Phish there is out there to listen to, and it's fun to imagine going through the '10 tours next, and then '11 and '12, and then maybe going through all of 2.0, and a bunch of the archival LivePhish releases that I haven't heard yet. Then, once I've exhausted all of the soundboards I have, I could dive into The Spreadsheet and start listening to some of the more well-known runs of Phish (summer '94, fall '97, etc.) in their entirety for the first time...

Even listening at the rate I've been listening lately (and I think I'm going to have to back off a bit from that as I am getting a bit burnt out and wanting to listen to other music more often), we're talking years and years of entirely new music, and that's not even counting the times I could skim back over my show notes and say "Aha! I really would like to hear that Hampton "Tweezer" again!" This shit is huge, guys. And it appears I'm just getting started.

Speaking of beginnings, here's where the boys' first leg of their reunion tour ends. Alpine II, judged by many to be one of the best if not the best of the leg, though to me it's probably on par with Deer Creek and a few notches below Camden. Here's why!

I love "Brother," and having here as the opener is excellent. It's not a particularly unique or noteworthy reading, but it's "Brother," and it's awesome. The "Wolfman's" that follows is straightforward and surprisingly unfunky. Trey unloads a lot of typical guitar-god shredding, and we move on. Thankfully, someone apparently requested "Funky Bitch," because Page and Mike really jump on the funk here. Page makes this version, and I love it. There's a nice segue into "Divided Sky," but it's another of those momentum-killing early-first-set "Divided Sky"s that I love to bitch about. Bitch bitch (funky) bitch. This version does include a rather extended "jam" section at the end, featuring a brief bit of Treynnihilation that sounds almost like '93 or '94 instead of '09. "Joy" is a terrible follow-up to "Divided Sky," but it's a good song as long as its not overplayed...so I guess I'm ambivalent about its appearance here. You can pretty much guess at the content of the middle section of this song-stuffed first set by looking at the setlist, but things start to get interesting again with a brief but gorgeous "TMWSIY" > "Avenu Malkenu" > "TMWSIY" sandwich...aaaand then there's "TTE" to close out the set. Almost like a "really old song/really new song" thing going on there at the end. Overall, the first set is one of those "Let's see how many songs we can fit into 80 minutes" sets, and as a result, the flow suffers quite a bit. Nothing really careens around outside of its usual structure, and so the result is a set that's hardly nothing to be ashamed of from a technical standpoint but hardly anything to be excited about from a listener's standpoint.

The second set, on the other hand, makes up quite a bit for the shortcomings of the first. We open with "Crosseyed and Painless," another of my favorite Phish covers and one that often leads to deep space. This particular "Crosseyed" follows the now-blueprint of some of the better jams of this leg: Type I soloing from Trey all the way until the final 3-4 minutes of the song, when there's a sudden left turn into a spacey-ambienty sort of place, followed by a brilliant segue. The requisite spaciness at the end of the "Crosseyed" jam is extra abstract, featuring a lot of droning and arrhythmic chording, but, like many of these jams so far in 3.0, not featuring any overall theme or momentum or coherent structure. To me, this is the difference between these early 3.0 space jams and ones like the '11 Gorge "Rock and Roll": whereas that jam lasts nearly 20 minutes and moves through a number of clearly stated ideas while still succeeding in being abstract and at times ambient, these earlier jams don't have that trajectory, so while they're fun to listen to, they're fun for about 2-3 minutes. Then the novelty wears off and you're waiting for the next song to begin. Fortunately, the band seems to realize this (unlike in some of the worse 2.0 jams), and right when these jams are starting to fizzle, they often transition into a new song. That happens here, with a beautiful segue into "Disease."

"Disease" follows the same pattern as "Crosseyed": it rides on Trey's powerful soloing for 11 minutes of its 13 minute length, then turns a sudden corner and spends a few minutes almost reprising the space jam at the end of "Crosseyed." It's neat to see Phish doing such abstract improvisation this early in their return, but at this point I'm also feeling a bit like "Yeah, we get it. Can you do something else now, please?". Though I imagine if I weren't listening to all of these shows back-to-back-to-back over the course of a few weeks I might feel differently. Anyway, Mike and Page finish off "Disease," Mike with that extra-sticky swamp bass and Page with some organ that recalls Zep's "No Quarter." Then we slam into a standard reading of "Bug," which turns into a "Piper" which, for my money, is the best jam of the second half of this leg (if not of the leg in its entirety).

The "Piper" jam is really what elevates this show from good to great. Everything else that comes out of this show we've already heard before, and often in more inspired incarnations. But this is new, and awesome. The jam almost immediately moves into space-funk territory, with Trey's Story of a Ghost-style strumming overlaying a driving beat from Fish. After a bit, Page starts putting some very low organ notes underneath this template, raising the Sinister Level from 0 to about 75. Things get more and more dissonant, tonally and otherwise, until the wheels come off completely in the most beautiful way possible. This "Piper" sounds like the breakthrough that the band repeatedly wasn't reaching in all those previous space jams that sputtered out at the 3-4 minute mark for the last few weeks. This is a great note to end the tour on because it feels like a sonic breakthrough...plus, it's just a damn great jam that's worth a few relistens.

The rest of the show, honestly, is just filler, albeit strong filler. There's a patient, building "Slave" in the vein of many of the "Hood"s we've heard lately, a proto-plinko "Boogie On," and the tour closing "Frankenstein," with a lot of extra Wall of Noise, which actually makes this one of my favorite versions. But it's that "Piper" that really matters, that really makes me excited for what's going to happen in leg two.

But not so excited that I'm going to listen right now. There's other music in the world, folks!

2009-06-20 Alpine I

After the awesome-but-not-totally-awesome near-best of early summer tour that was Deer Creek, Alpine I fell a little flat for me. It's a neat show, with high energy that permeates the playing all the way through, but where song selection and good-though-not-great improv elevated a similar show a night before, neither of those things really come into play here, so the result is yet another solid summer 2009 show that really isn't worth a backward glance in 2013 unless "Ghost" > "The Lizards" puts a smile on your face (and it should).

We kick off the first set with an oddly fiery and well-played "PYITE" (I love this song to death, but how often is it played live nowadays minus a lot of stops and starts?). There's a "Jim" that's equally high-energy, but then a loooooong "Stash" that just features a lot of aimless Trey wanking (I mean that negatively, in case that isn't obvious) and sort of stunts the momentum the first two songs built up. I love "Ya Mar" next, and Mike serious works this version over, but then "Gin" falls victim to the same problem as "Stash": too much Trey, not enough exploration. Between these two songs, the first half of this set is burdened with 25 minutes of "jamming" that's more or less a lot of Type I noodling that never coalesces around anything. I like "Train Song," and finally we get a version of "Farmhouse" where everyone remembers the chords, but that's about all worth mentioning in the rest of this set.

The second set opens with a well-played, if uninteresting, "Waves" > "Sample" pair and then a "Maze" that features some interesting work from Page (but then again, what "Maze" doesn't?). The centerpiece of this show is, arguably, the mid-set "Ghost" > "The Lizards" pairing. I had high hopes for the "Ghost," considering the "Ghost"s of early summer 2009 past, and while this one doesn't necessarily reach the heights of the others, it's a decently engaging long jam, which is something we haven't seem from the band at this point in the run for quite some time. Sadly, we don't get another multi-movement improvisational masterpiece from this "Ghost," but it's well-played and not just a simple Trey-shred-fest...and it features a hell of a segue into "The Lizards."

I also appreciate the novelty of the brief "YEM," which suddenly and smoothly moves into "NICU" at the 12:00 mark (shortly after the trampolines). This works well not just as a gimmick, and it's nice to see something interesting done with the usually monolithic (though admittedly always-enjoyable) "YEM," much like the "YEM" > "Wilson" > "YEM" sandwich we saw a few shows ago. I wish the band would still mess with these compositional sacred cows nowadays, honestly.

"NICU" has a bass solo instead of the usual "Leo" solo, and Mike rips it in his typical fashion. That in and of itself makes this a version worth mentioning. The follow-up "Caspian" is oddly euphoric and energetic, with Trey going straight into the blissed-out high-fretboard stuff and not letting up. To me, this is sort of against the spirit of the song, so it rubbed me a bit the wrong way (I like darker, murkier "Caspian" jams), but hey, it's their song, not mine...

"Fire" and "Character Zero" pair up to close the show with some guitar pyrotechnics, but this late in the run, neither is anything we haven't already heard (though, technically speaking, I suppose this is the first "Fire" of 2009).

Overall, I was a bit underwhelmed by this show, but word on the street is the Alpine II tour closer is way better, so, I suppose I should go find out...

2009-06-19 Deer Creek

So, reading through others' reviews of this initial 3.0 run, the final three shows (starting with Deer Creek) were often touted as a breakthrough of sorts for the band, the point at which the quality of their playing skyrocketed and set the tone for the rest of the year. Well, I've listened to the Deer Creek show and while it certainly isn't a wall-to-wall powerhouse like Camden and it's missing a singular "deep" jam worth mentioned like Hampton III and a few of the other, earlier shows featured, it's still one of the better shows of the run thanks to its Camden-lite overall appeal.

To start, the first set just crackles with energy. It's one of those sets that just sounds like the band is having fun, and while there's no space-funk hook to hang your jam hat on, I sat through the whole thing with a huge smile on my face. "Number Line" is a great opener when played with energy, and it's a scorcher here. In fact, everything up until "Melt" pretty much crackles. Even "Water in the Sky" is a fast-tempo version that rides Page's arpeggios into foot-tapping territory. I've talked about "Melt" before, but I'll say it again: I've never heard a "Melt" jam that I like. I'm pretty sure this is on me, that it's really a good song, and the type of jamming the band goes in for on "Melt" is just a type I don't get, but on any given night I'd rather hear almost any Phish song than "Melt." The jam on this version is murky as all hell, with Trey distorting the shit out of his guitar and stretching his notes like strands of half-dried glue...it's probably badass, I'd just never know because I'm racist against "Melt" innately.

There's a little extra shredding on "The Wedge," we get a bouncy version of "The Connection" (I love me some Undermind), and the set closes with "Fluffhead," which in my mind is one of the better first set closers in the band's catalog. In a run packed with surprisingly decent first sets, this one's still a keeper, for the song choice and for the energy. I wrote this in my notes near the end of the set: "this is even a good ocelot, which is when you should start worrying that you might be losing objectivity."

The second set kicks off with "ASIHTOS," which is likely one of my top five Phish songs, so I had high hopes for the jam potential. Trey completely botches the lyrics right off the bat and never seems to satisfactorily rememeber them; however, the jam is pretty satisfying. There's some basic guitar-solo-led action up until the 8:00 mark, when suddenly  Pink Floyd makes an appearance and things get much spacier. The band only stays in this space for a minute or so before Trey moves back into some high-register noodling, but the rest of the band stays in a sinister-sounding space beneath him, which makes for an interesting effect. Eventually there's a perfect Page-led segue into "Drowned," which is one of my favorite Phish covers and a perfect thematic complement to "ASIHTOS." For those reasons alone, this pair-up would be one of my favorite of the run; however, the jam out of "Drowned" is satisfyingly weird. The band starts with a little of the typical space-funk they've been playing with all summer, but then Page bridges the gap between the funk and a section that features Trey soloing over the keys with an extremely fat, oddball guitar tone while Mike brings up the back end with some sticky-sounding syrup-bass. The whole thing is just really weird and maybe doesn't "work" in a cohesive sense, but I really enjoyed it.

Right when things seems about to go off the deep end (either in a good or bad way), Trey launches into "Twist" out of nowhere (I wrote in my notes "proto-ripcord?!"). It's a decent "Twist," (ha!) with the jam leading basically right back to where the "Drowned" jam took off from. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as interesting the second time around: Trey hooks on to an interesting riff early on but doesn't stick with it, and then everyone seems to flounder for a few minutes before Trey suddenly pulls the train back into the station. It's as if things didn't quite cohere in "Drowned," so they wanted to try again, but they had less luck getting their footing on the second attempt.

It's neat to hear "Let Me Lie," in an early, Phish-y arrangement here, but it's nothing exciting.

Then there's a late-set "Tweezer"! Whoo! Page hits on a catchy piano riff right away here and everyone else adds some flourishes to it for a bit, then the final few minutes fades out into a semi-ambient space anchored by Mike's bass...then there's a great segue into "2001." The "2001" is standard for 2009 (read: it doesn't go off the deep end, but it's still way fuller and funkier than most 2011 and 2012 versions).

The second set keeps on going with an energetic segue into a "Suzy" that's like the minecart chase in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and then a "Possum" that features another one of those "quiet" jam sections. I love me some "Possum" (yes, even after all of 3.0 thus far), but I hate it in the second-set-closing spot. Whose idea was this?! Shoot them!

The show's "Sleeping Monkey" > "Tweeprise" finish is just as awesome as it looks.

I wrote a shit of a lot about this show, it appears. But that's because it's pretty damn good. Solid, energetic first set, second set with a lot of good song choices, smooth segues, and interesting little jam bits...if you're into that sort of Phish (which I am), then you'll like it a lot, I think, compared to most of this run. If you need 20 minute orbital jams to get off, this show's gonna leave you with blue balls. It actually reminds me quite a bit of an inferior version of Tahoe II from 2011, a show I loved but was apparently a huge disappointment to most "serious" Phish fans. Eh, on to Alpine!

2009-06-18 Star Lake

So, word on the street is that the last three shows of this first leg of 2009 summer tour are a pretty dramatic transition for the band in terms of improvisational quality. If that's the case, then the fourth-to-last show is by no means a sign of things to come.

As I feel like I've been saying a lot lately, it's by no means a bad show, but it doesn't really offer up anything (save a surprisingly fun, goof-off encore, maybe) that makes it worth coming back to over three years after the fact.

We start off, as seems par for the course lately, a few high-energy song-y songs: fun, but nothing special. The "Wolfman's" has a little extra mustard on it thanks to a serious keys workout from Page in the first half and some follow-up shredding from Trey in the second half.

I don't know what's up with the early first-set "Divided Sky"s, but I wish they would stop. I love this song, but playing it at this point in the show is a killer...in a bad way.

"Sky" is followed by a weird "Heavy Things," where it sort of sounds like Trey is trying to solo his way off the beaten path, but fails at it and reins things in for a standard jam for the last few minutes of the song. Fortunately, next we get the rare, non-segued "Walk Away." This is one of my favorite Phish covers, and this is an excellent version.

Here's what I wrote about the "Tube" in my notes: "this tube is the real deal, super-funk madness good. seriously. holy shit mike and page...holy shit everybody." I'm a happy guy when there's a good "Halley's" or "Tube" jam, and now there've been both two nights in a row. This "Tube" is another one of those great examples of why you don't need a 20 minute version of a song to build a good jam. We're under 10 minutes here, and there's more to dig into than there often is in much longer jams. Unfortunately, "Tube" is followed by a "Bowie" that is just absolutely butchered. Like, the band just leaves out an entire chunk of the song because they get so out of sync. I've never heard this happen before in years of listening to Phish. They recover okay, with a little ambient washout that leads into the song's main jam passage, but this "Bowie" is pretty much disqualified from being anything anyone might ever care about.

The second-set-opening "DwD" is a weird one. It makes a lot of the same stylistic moves as some of the better jams of this early run of 3.0 (blissed-out Trey shredding, spacey, proto-plinko action, and ambient washout) but nothing in it really grabbed me. I've already heard a few versions of Phish's jam vehicles ("Disease," "Tweezer," and a few others) that have used these styles to captivating effect throughout June '09, but this just fell flat for me. There's probably someone out there who thinks this is the best jam of the first leg of the '09 tour, and they're probably not wrong for them. For me, it was all dressed up and nowhere to go. There's a nice segue into "Free," but "Free" is just "Free," so who cares?

Even though I just slammed this "Disease," I'm going to post a video, because there's a decent video of it, and there's been a serious dearth of videos in these posts lately.

"Guyute" starts out with some extra precision and fire at the beginning, but falls apart a bit at the end, with everyone contributing a few gaffes.

There's a long "Piper," but much like the "Disease," it feels like the steps are there, but nobody's  having any fun connecting the dots.

There are late-set highlights with yet another patient, ethereal June '09 "Hood" and a "YEM" that features some manic Mike action near the very end, but this is generally one of the flatter second sets of the year so far for me.

The encore, with its botched a capella song that leads to a Fish "HYHU" > "Bike" > "HYHU" sandwich, is just so much fun to listen to. Fish, at one point, jokes "Welcome to the trainwreck portion of the show," which is funny to me because this is probably the best part of the show for me. "Loving Cup" is an unremarkable but fitting closer.

On to what's apparently going to be a magical, transformative experience as I round out Summer Tour '09 Leg One!

2009-06-16 The Fox

Well, this was a fun one.

As you've probably come to realize by now, when I say "fun" I generally mean "lots of good, song-based playing, some neat setlist choices, but no serious improvisation or jamming." That pretty much sums up the Fox show.

Things kick off with a great "KDF" (I have to keep reminding myself that this is really only the second or third play for a lot of these Joy songs). "Ocelot" is "Ocelot" (or is it "Alaska"?), but in the three slot is "Brian and Robert," the first of this show's interesting setlist choices. I love this song, so I was happy to hear it. The great first set song choices continue through "Sample," "Rift," and then a "Ya Mar" that's exceptional for its Page and Mike interplay, plus a rare Fishman mini-solo. The "Reba" is well-played but is nothing really noteworthy, and the mellowness continues with a welcome "Train Song" and "Horn." Really with the exception of "Sample," "Rift," and "Possum," this first set is surprisingly laid-back, but somehow it really works. By the time the "Slave" closer hits, you've got a pretty cohesive if not terribly energetic first frame of music.

The second set never ventures into bizarro-world territory, but it opens with a 13-minute HALLEY'S JAM. And it's pretty good. There's a lot of fluid Type I shredding from Trey and the last few minutes is the sort of ambient washout that the band is starting to get so good at. Definitely the highlight of the show, and more evidence (if we needed more beyond 1997) that "Halley's" needs more chances to stretch its legs. What phish.net calls a "->" into "Runaway Jim" is sort of less-than-spectacular, and "Jim" stays within its normal boundaries, though there's a little extra fire on this version. You can read the setlist for most of the rest of the set and know pretty much how it goes down. I loved hearing "Frankie Says," though pairing it with "TTE" and "Sleep" made for maybe the weirdest 3-song run I've ever heard from a Phish show. "Mike's" is a top-notch version, though the rest of the Groove is nothing special. The encore is a bit of a surprise in terms of song choices ("Star Spangled Banner," "McGrupp," and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"),  but again it's more notable for its novelty than any of the actual playing (sans some epic Trey shredding at the end of "WMGGW").

Overall, a fun show for the oddball setlist construction and a few rarities, but nothing really worth a relisten minus maybe the "Halley's."

2009-06-14 Bonnaroo

So, the band's real two-setter at 'Roo 2009 is just a big, long, fun show. There aren't really any marquee moments (except maybe one), though, so if you're looking for something really unique, this won't be your bag. Rather, it's just a well-played show almost front-to-back, and one that actually seems to gain energy as it goes instead of losing it, as is often the case with 3.0 shows.

The opening run of songs up to "Gin" has excellent flow and features a few neat moments: "Bag" features another one of those "quiet" full-band mini-jams that have been prominent lately, Fishman has a lot of fun in "NICU," and the "Jibboo" jam is a bit different than usual (I'm lacking the musical vocabulary to explain how, exactly, but if you're a fan of the song, check this version out).

"Gin" clocks in at 12 minutes, and features a lot of Trey-shredding, but never really goes anywhere interesting enough to make it worth the time. That said, it's still a solid rocker in the first set.

The always-welcome first set "Tweezer" starts off with some absolutely chunky funk before fuzzing out into some more abstract spaces and ending (too soon!) with a surprisingly nice segue into "Horse." The first set proper ends with a ripping "Antelope" (early 3.0 Phish seems to love shredding this song...what happened?), and then, of course, Springsteen comes out for three songs, which is a nice moment, but not really anything musically memorable (except for Bruce calling Page "Mr. Keyboard Man," which made me kind of sad).

The second set is a bit more consistent and seems to just gain momentum as it goes. "Rock and Roll" is a great start, as its jam (labeled "Manchester Jam" on my recording) moves through a few different types of musical space in its brief existence. Things start off with some Trey-led Type I fire, then a bit of dissonance as Trey starts pulling at the edges of the song's structure while everyone else plays it straight still, then a total collapse into all-out spacey weirdness for the last few minutes. It is, as I wrote in my notes, "worth a goddamn listen."

As if that wasn't enough, there's a great segue into "Light," which features a lot of Treypeggios and a great Mike and Page section that starts around 9:30. There's a neat segue into "46 Days" from here, but the song stays in the arena-rock ballpark. Fishman's on fire here, as well as during the ensuing "Limb by Limb," which I marked in my notes as "very good": high praise for a song whose live versions normally don't do much for me.

The guys sort of remember how to play "Farmhouse" this time, but it's not much better than the Hampton version. Fortunately, the ending triplet of "Number Line," "Caspian," and "First Tube" is a constant, driving thing that propels you right into the Page-gasm of the "Suzy" encore.

Like I said above, minus the "Rock and Roll" > "Light," there's nothing here to really sink your teeth into, but for a consistent show with some great setlist choices, there aren't many better than 'Roo so far in 3.0.

Note: There's not much good video footage on YouTube for the 'Roo run, but this Pro-Shot compilation features a few of the better songs from the first night and the "Manchester Jam" > "Light" > "46 Days" run from 6/14: