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.
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.
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!
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