oh kee pah

Set 1: Guyute, Back on the Train, Bathtub Gin, Limb By Limb, The Moma Dance, Lawn Boy, Fluffhead, The Curtain With > Chalk Dust Torture

Set 2: Rock and Roll > Theme From the Bottom -> Dog Log > The Mango Song -> Jam > Free

Encore: Contact > Rocky Top

This show was part of the "2000 Fall Tour."

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Incredibly, last Wednesday night's three-hour-plus Phish extravaganza at Madison Square Garden—the first of their three-night run there, and my first Phish show, period—is not, in fact, the most indulgent, meandering, patience-obliterating concert I have ever experienced. The Mars Volta spring somewhat unhappily to mind. As do, unhappier still, the Allman Brothers. Ween, maybe. But that's it, in terms of competition. Which is not to say the show was terrible—exhausting, certainly, and nigh-insufferable, occasionally, but, for long stretches, surprisingly vibrant and rousing, too. This is something everyone should probably do once, seeing these boys in action. You might even talk me into doing it again someday. But only after an appreciable recovery period. Say, three to five years. Read on

Forget about Phish 3.0. For a long time I reckoned there were only two Phish eras: the Clinton years and the Bush years.

Having seen the band all three nights at Madison Square Garden last week, however, I’m forced to update that notion. Phish has now fully entered their – and our – Obama phase.

Of course the band actually gestated during the first Bush administration. Phish released their first album the same year Bush entered office, and they established the rudiments of their groove while the “pragmatic caretaker” president floundered in the wake of Reagan administration’s huge deficit. The country entered a recession as Phish began making headway as a touring band. These simmering upstarts were then a creative alternative to another widely inspiring, yet ultimately bloated and frail, California institution: the Grateful Dead. Read on

by Jesse Jarnow

Finally listened, after many years, to the three tracks recorded by Richard Wright (the Phish buddy, not the Pink Floyd keyboardist) in the late ’80s under the name Nancy Taube (the lesbian-trapped-in-an-acidhead’s-body, not the board member at Vermonters For A Sustainable Population). Phish have covered two of his songs, “I Didn’t Know” and “Halley’s Comet,” since the mid-‘80s. For some reason, it’d just never occurred to me to check out the originals, even though the Mockingbird Foundation blessedly (as it turns out) coaxed them out of Wright a few years ago, ‘cause they’re really cool. Based on this music alone, one could make a fair case for Richard Wright to be the true genius of the Phish scene, a psych-pop outsider from some DIY sub-scene in deepest Vermont. Read on

Legendary rock band Phish came to John Paul Jones Arena on Saturday, December 5, for the final sold-out show of their fall tour.  It was an appropriate setting, not least because Charlottesville has become a new center of sorts ever since locally based Red Light Management began repping them after their reunion shows in Hampton, this past March. Read on

With the holidays just around the corner, and four shows left in Miami, Phish is on the brink of completing their first year back on the road. And what a year it has been! With an action-packed fall tour that gained serious momentum in Albany, the band brought hints of deeper musical exploration. Taking the first half of tour to acclimate to indoor arenas once again, when the band hit Albany after Thanksgiving, they were ready to take off – and that they did. Throughout the second half of tour, Phish showed an increased willingness to take risks, something that will be integral in the long-term musical success of the band. Trampolining off fifty-minutes of a deeper magic from the dawn of time, Albany’s “Seven Below > Ghost” pushed the band deeper into the creative fabric of their music over tour’s final week. Creating some of fall’s most indelible explorations at Madison Square Garden, with “Light,” Disease > Piper,” and “Seven Below,” and at Charlottesville with “Tweezer > Light,” Phish began to incorporate more open jamming into their shows. Read on