Well, the boys' second night at MSG starts off with the fire that the first night's opening duo lacked. It's always a good thing when "PYITE" opens a show, and it's even better when it's a particularly on-point, fiery version that's immediately followed by a "Number Line" that's noodled to perfection. After the band's mostly in-the-box performance on 12/2, I took this as a sign that things would be different on 12/3. I was both right and wrong.
The high-energy opening to set one continues through "Axila I" > "Taste," the latter featuring some great action from Mike and a better-than-average solo from Page. Mike's enthusiasm seems to get him the call next as the band goes into "Boogie On" and slays a short version, and then we move on to "Stash," which seems like a great, somewhat exploratory vehicle to keep this train moving...right? Right?
Well, something happens in this "Stash." There are some Phish jams that are bad because I'm just not "getting it." These jams might be someone else's Best Of All Time, but to me they sound like the mindless noodling parodies of the band always reference. There are some Phish jams that are bad because they're just executed poorly; the ideas are their but the hands aren't. And then there are the Phish jams that are bad because everyone's trying to do something potentially interesting at once, but nobody is jelling. I don't profess to frequently know what the band is thinking, obviously, but there are some times when they're synced up so poorly that it's just obvious. This "Stash" is one of those times. At the very least, Trey and Fish try to do interesting but opposing things during the jam at roughly the same time and the result is just flat. We wrap up shortly after, with this version weighing in well below the many excellent "Stash"s of '09.
Set one never really recovers. "Lawn Boy" is "Lawn Boy," then there's "Time Turns Elastic" (no comment), followed by slightly-above-average takes on "BOTT" and "Julius." This is one of those rare shows where I like the first half of the first set better than the second half.
The second set is more of what's becoming the standard Phish 3.0 template at this point: one long jam, one nice segue, and then a bunch of standards to end the show. We start with "Disease," which is 100% Grade A Trey Shredz up through the 9:30 mark before slowly creeping its way into a typical space-funk breakdown. It's creepy to me how frequently these long '09 jams depart for Weird Space between the 9:00 and 9:30 mark. Do they have a clock up on stage or something that tells the band when to stop functioning as a foundation for a Trey solo and start actually jamming? Because you can almost set your watch to it.
Anyway, the jam itself gets interesting at around the 12:30 mark, when Trey, Trey's looped guitar, and Page and start crashing together in a wonderful wall of sound. Things splinter into ambient space a few minutes later, but it's not the typical minimalist ambient dissolve of summer '09: instead, it's something more purposeful and haltingly melodic. Near the end of the jam, it gets more drone-like (think 12/2's "Slave" build) before melting into "Piper." The segue is great, though "Piper" itself is a pretty standard, Type 1 affair. There's a small "Birds"-esque funk space near the end that culminates in a bass outro that, in retrospect, sort of prefigures the rest of the show.
"Fluffhead" is your average version, but it leads into an energetic reading of "Cities" featuring some vocal vamping from Trey and a goddamn bass explosion from Mike. Again.
From "Cities" on, this is basically the Mike Show, in both good and bad ways. Good, in the sense that Mike ripping every song to shreds is awesome to hear, but bad, in the sense that he stands out partially because the rest of the band can't seem to get their shit together. "Free" is totally empty except for the bass, "Halley's" is a mess, and the rest of the show (including "Bowie") is just rolling up to a stop sign.
So, in the context of fall tour, this is honestly one of the better shows, if only for the high-energy run of songs in set one and the "Disease" > "Piper" in set two. In the context of '09 in general, it's another of those "listen to these two songs and skip the rest" shows, which seem to be becoming more and more prevalent as the year goes on. Aside from a solid jam here and there (like this "Disease" or last night's "Light"), I can still only really point to two or three half-shows as worth a listen in their entirety (11/20's and 11/28's second sets). Well, there's always MSG III! Fingers crossed.
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