2009-08-16 SPAC

Well, here we are. The end of summer tour '09. As I was at the end of Leg One, I'm a little surprised that I've made it this far. When I started this project, it was to try to get a sense of Phish's evolution throughout 3.0 as a whole, to try to reconcile the amazing shows I've seen live and the few I've heard on tape with the general internet-whining that frames 3.0 as a total embarrassment and waste of time for "real" Phish fans.

I don't really want to spend an entire blog post at this point arguing for the relevance of 3.0 or even '09 in particular, but I'll just quickly say that I've had as much fun listening to this tour as I've ever had listening to any other Phish tour, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the only metric that really counts. This shit is great, and as I've never listened to any of fall or winter '09 before, I'm absolutely stoked to follow the band later into the year. '09 so far has been much more weird and experimental than I expected, and when the experiments flop, in general the band's playing on non-jammed songs has actually been more solid than it typically was anywhere between, say, '95 and '04.

With all that in mind, I'll say that SPAC is a fitting tour closer for a tour that, as far as I'm concerned, was much better than any of us likely expected in early June '09. It doesn't feature a lot in the way of improv, but it's got some fun antics, a good mix of old and new songs, and an energy that makes it clear that this is a victory lap for the band that we last saw at Coventry before this all got (re)started.

We get a surprise "Llama" opener, but it seems like it's as much a surprise for the band as it is for the crowd; Troy falls off a cliff early and things never really recover. It's like a bust out that shouldn't have been busted out. "Moma" is a great redeemer, though: it's a song that the band pretty much always seems to nail, and Trey especially attacks this version with great relish. The energy carries over into a surprisingly early "Guyute," which melts into a lovely ballad bust-out in the form of "Anything But Me." Page gets a great legit piano solo here, and infuses a bit of lately-rare jazz into the night. "Cars Trucks "Buses" has a bit of stop/start fun in it, but the remainder of the middle of the first set is pretty pedestrian up until a "Possum" that's unexpectedly Page-led.

The guys continue stringing together another marathon first set with an "Ocelot" that features a bit more shredding than Trey usually includes in the usually loping jam section, and things end on a high note with a well-played "Antelope" (which still isn't anywhere near the upper echelon of excellent "Antelope"s already played this year).

"Number Line" is the night's go-to second-set monster jam. It jumps off the rails at about 10:00, heading immediately into a tail-chasing guitar jam of the type that was such a big part of some of the wilder jams in the Red Rocks run. Page takes the lead with some spacey organ madness at 12:00 while Trey recedes to the background, chopping out some nearly atonal, sinister-sounding chords. The bottom falls out in a good way around 16:00, paving the way for a few minutes of abstract madness of the best kind, and setting up a slow, patient segue into "20 Years," which features a whale-y Trey jam that falls flat and goes for way too long.

"Halley's" > "Rock and Roll" is another great pairing, with the ">" between the songs being less of a transition and more of a stop-on-a-dime direction change executed by all four band members at once. It's a great moment, and the "Rock and Roll" itself ain't bad, either. It stays pretty standard type 1 until the final minute (9:00) or so, though, and then enters a similar space as the end of the "Number Line" jam just long enough for a dissolve into "Harpua."

The "Harpua" kicks off the "victory lap" part of the show in earnest: there's a fun narration, Fish singing the shit out of "I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry, "HYHU" heading into some more "Harpua," and then a fluid "YEM" (because what else do you play as the last song of your comeback tour?).

The fun continues through the encore, which features "Grind," the only Joy tune to not be played live yet, "I Been Around," and a surprise "Highway To Hell."

The "Number Line" hangs with some of the better jams of Leg Two, but there's not a whole lot else in this show that stands out when compared to the earlier shows in the leg. It's by no means a bust, like, say, Shoreline or Toyota Park. It's a nice wrap-up, and the effortlessness with which the band bounces from song-based playing, to improvising, to pulling 90s-Phish-like hijinks one last time strengthens the case for the relevance of 3.0 while leaving some room for more growth later in the year.