It took nearly 15 years, but 5:45 of Phish's 7-hour marathon set has leaked in pro-shot video form. One of the most magical nights of music the world has ever seen, and now everyone can see it for themselves.
Meatstick - Auld Lang Syne - Down with Disease 2 - Llama, Bathtub Gin, Heavy Things, Twist - Prince Caspian - Rock and Roll, You Enjoy Myself 4 , Crosseyed and Painless, The Inlaw Josie Wales 5, Sand - Quadrophonic Toppling[6], Slave to the Traffic Light, Albuquerque 7 , Reba, Axilla 7, Uncle Pen, David Bowie, My Soul, Drowned - After Midnight Reprise, The Horse - Silent in the Morning - Bittersweet Motel, Piper (cut) does not include rest of show. (yet?)
There’s a reason Phish’s Summer trek only takes the band as far west as Commerce City, CO (where Phish will wrap things up with a trio of Labor Day weekend shows). The band will kick off a 12-date Fall tour that will take them to seven cities in the west beginning October 17 with its first-ever show at Matthew Knight Arena in Eugene, OR. Phish will play two consecutive nights at Santa Barbara Bowl (October 21 & 22), a venue Phish first played as openers for Santana in 1992, and its first show at Los Angeles’ Forum since Valentine’s Day 2003. The tour will conclude with Phish’s first shows at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The three-night stand begins on Halloween night.
An online ticket request period for the Fall Tour is currently underway at http://tickets.phish.com/ and will end Sunday, August 3 at midnight ET. Tickets will go on sale to the general public beginning August 7. For complete ticketing details, please visit phish.com/tours
PHISH 2014 FALL TOUR
10/17 Matthew Knight Arena, Eugene, OR
10/18 Key Arena, Seattle, WA
10/21 Santa Barbara Bowl, Santa Barbara, CA
10/22 Santa Barbara Bowl, Santa Barbara, CA
10/24 The Forum, Los Angeles, CA
10/25 Sleep Train Amphitheatre, San Diego, CA
10/27 Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, CA
10/28 Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, CA
10/29 Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, CA
While listening to Phish, the music writer Mike Hamad developed a way to sketch a road map through a song. He’s hoping his technique will help him “see” the magic in music.
I love being able to sing, ‘inside your Fuego, we keep it rolling’ because it’s the Phish community that’s the heart and soul of what we do. We, Phish, keep it rolling, but what we do is inside of your Fuego. I like being able to think of that as we sing that line.
On August 2, 2003, at 2:30 a.m., Phish performed an hour-long, ambient group improvisation at Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, Maine, from the top of an abandoned air traffic control tower.
"White rolls of fabric were dropped, covering the tower," Elayne Best wrote on fan site Phish.net. “Three dancers from the Bay Area’s Project Bandaloop began performing acrobatics at the top, and then they began to gradually descend in front of projected patterns. The band was able to match the jam to the rhythmic motions of the dancers. This was accomplished via ground-based video cameras and tiny television monitors on top of the tower. Amorphously improvising amidst their own sonic art installation, Phish had once again outdone themselves; leaving behind them a trail of smoke and light in the night sky.”
I was living in Connecticut at the time, and I had no idea this was going on. Nobody I knew even listened to Phish anymore. I can’t remember what was going on in the world, but it was less than two years after 9/11, my son was two and a half and my wife was working as a teacher while I was home with him, trying to finish my dissertation when he napped.
But later I heard about the Tower Jam, and I finally listened to it for the first time a couple of nights ago. I sketched this out on an 18 in. x 24 in. piece of paper as I did, juggling six different colored markers. The width of the sketch, from left to right, represents the length of the improvisation (or 60 minutes; the midpoint of the diagram is roughly halfway through the piece, or 30 minutes). Each color is an interpretation of what one of the players is doing at any given moment. Large letter names (“E,” “A,” etc.) represent tonal centers, usually (but not always) established by the bass voice (Mike, in blue).
There’s a third dimension to this schematic that’s not in many of my other ones: a third, outward-leaning dimension, which occurs around where the first dramatic descending lines occur. At these points, where that vertical dimension is so prominent, the sound gets “stacked” on top of itself. There’s a build-up of density; see if you hear that too.
This is only an interpretation of the music, representing the first and only time I’ve ever listened to it. I’m not sure I’ll ever listen again, but probably.
—Michael Hamad
For more of these, visit setlistschematics.tumblr.com.
These photos, the mp3s, the webcast rips… none of it quite does Phish’s NYE run justice, though Chris Kuroda’s lighting did have a variety about that seemed to fit the context of each set quite well. It almost felt as though CK5 tried to deliver 30 years of lights over the course of the MSG run through his various schemes and patterns. On New Year’s Eve the stripped down bar-like lighting perfectly captured the spirit of the truck set. Vintage equipment, a 1991 setlist that never was, and the imagination of the idea itself… it felt more like Christmas than New Year’s. Behind the whole weekend was a genuineness, a candidness, a display of all the bare essentials that make up the Phish experiences.
And even when it felt like the band was holding back a bit musically, it was overcome by the sentiment and love present in this year’s NYE. It wasn’t just another NYE run, this was a celebration of all that the band and we have put into making this community what it is today. They cared about these shows so much, and there was indeed a message: Love. Love it all. This thing we have is so incredibly special and you can’t take it for granted.
