So I guess this is now the final show review thread... I\'m really tired but I want to get something down before I go to bed.
First of all, thanks to my heroes, Phish. The band and the people around the scene have been an absurdly huge impact on my life. I caught on and bought Junta in 1992 at the highly impressionable age of 11, and since then everything I listen to and most of the friends that I have are at least partly attributable to Phish pulling me out from the musical quagmires. It\'s been great!
Tonight\'s was a tale of two shows. I thought first and second set were top-notch. There were some throwback-style jams that smoothly went all over the place. First set kept picking up. Mikes>H2>Weekapaug was standard but good, Reba was a little bit better, Carini>Chalkdust was very good and then after a quick Possum came one of the best Wolfman\'s ever. (In my humble Wolfman opinion.) The jam went into several of those Phish-only jam areas, followed by a sweet and rare Page vs. Fishman jam. Trey and Mike were up to the challenge after this and performed an equally creative duet that could only have been played by people who have spent 21 years practicing together. Second set didn\'t let off at all. DWD had to be played and it was every bit as powerful as some of the \'94-\'96 DWD\'s that helped make the band famous. Tough to watch Page in Velvet Sea, but I had already briefly lost it way back during Weekapaug, so I was good for the rest of the night. Trey\'s guitar playing in Glide was an unfortunate foreshadowing of things to come, however. The loooong SOAM>Ghost was the highlight of the show, possibly the greatest post-hiatus Phish jam. It went up and down and in and out and was generally on point. Boy was I psyched to see what 3rd set had to bring...
... ... ... sigh ... ... I hate to do this right now so I\'m going to keep it brief. This was probably the worst set I\'ve ever seen or heard out of Phish. It started out decently, FEFY was fine and Seven Below had a very nice jam to make up for the early miscues. Then the train fell off the track an hour too early. I don\'t need to explain to anyone here how bad this was, when you hear it you\'ll know pretty quickly. I thought The Curtain was a fantastic and unexpected song to close with, but Trey obliterated it. Forget the hard parts, he couldn\'t even remember the chords to the jam so he went into some awful Rift jam and then did the unthinkable by stopping the band mid-jam and telling them, through the mic, to change keys. My god, just fade it out. I think Page, Mike, and Fish might wake up in a cold sweat from time to time for the rest of their lives thinking about this set. Oh well, I think I can be satisfied to remember only the first two sets from tonight and the 3,000 other great sets that came before. Thanks Phish!
