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The Daily Cardinal Est. 1892
Friday, March 29, 2024
Brian Weidy

Paradise regained for Phish fans at Madison Square Garden

To continue my quasi-tradition of starting each semester off with a column about my beloved jam bands, welcome back to “spring” 2014.

Over winter break—to be politically correct about this—I continued my annual tradition of seeing Phish on or around New Year’s Eve, for the fourth straight year. The band has played New Year’s Eve 18 times throughout the course of their 30-year history, playing Madison Square Garden eight times on the final night of the year.

New Year’s Eve is one of the two most important dates on the jam-band calendar—the other being Halloween—and Phish have been known to pull out something a little more special for those two days.

On Halloween, the band is known for covering another band’s album in its entirely, starting with The Beatles’ The White Album on Halloween 1994 and continuing that tradition with other classic albums such as The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., The Who’s Quadrophenia and many more. This past year, the band broke from tradition and covered their own, yet-to-be-released album, Wingsuit.

Madison Square Garden is a special place for Phish. They've played the venue at this point 31 times, their third-most-played venue behind The Front and Nectar’s, two venues where the band cut their teeth in the ‘80s. For me, it also holds a special place as I saw my first-ever concert there—Elton John in 2005, for those keeping score at home.

The band played their third consecutive four-night New Year’s Run at The Garden, and this year, much to my parents' chagrin, I made it in to all four.

To open the run, the band chose “The Wedge,” a song that last opened a show in August 1998. Night one did not have a ton of improvisational highlights throughout the first three-quarters of the show until the band broke into their relatively new original “Steam.”

“Steam” is an absolutely terrifying jam, reminiscent of something Led Zeppelin would have done at a live show, as the song stretched past the 12-minute mark into dark spaces as the jam built to a fever pitch, both in terms of volume and tone as the crowd began to go ballistic.

Night two was notable for having both the best first set of the run as well as the best jam sequence of the run. Highlights from the first set included an extended take on “It’s Ice,” one of the band’s trickiest compositions and a well-done version of their 9/11 tribute, “Walls of the Cave.”

But the second set was really where the band found their groove. Opening the set with a 20-minute version of “Down With Disease,” a song notable for being the only Phish song with a proper music video—which was virulently made fun of on MTV’s “Beavis and Butthead”—as well as being a fan-favorite jam vehicle. The jam did not disappoint and segued perfectly into “Carini,” an incredibly dark song about the titular protagonist with a lumpy head, which saw the band take this song out for a walk as well, stretching past the 15-minute mark. So as to avoid this column from becoming a pure rehashing of their set lists, night two is definitely one for fans, new and old, to check out.

Night three was missing some of the flow that night two had in terms of song selection, but still had some extremely profound highlights. The first set saw the great pairing of a stretched out “Bathtub Gin” in the second slot followed by “Wombat,” a song that debuted on Halloween and featured an appearance from Abe Vigoda—Tessio from “The Godfather” and suspected to be deceased for about 20 years—in this funky number. Though this version did not feature Mr. Vigoda dancing in a wombat suit, it did feature a good chunk of improvisation, which got the crowd dancing in time with the syncopated rhythm.

Set two saw its highlight come in the form of a nearly 20-minute rendition of “Chalk Dust Torture,” a song that usually finds itself sitting in the six-to-seven-minute range and is the closest thing the band has to a straight-ahead rock song. This rendition was anything but straight ahead, as the band changed directions multiple times, enough to make the people around me ask whether the song had changed.

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But the main event of the four nights was always going to be New Year’s Eve. The band took this as an opportunity to celebrate their 30th anniversary, particularly on set two. Set two saw the band play on top of a truck using all of their old equipment and playing as old-school a set as possible. After opening up the set with “Glide”—potentially an homage to their feeble attempt to play it at their supposed “last show” at Coventry—the band moved into a ferocious take on “Llama.”

The band then went into their "Gamehendge" catalog, drawn from a piece of lead singer and guitarist Trey Anastasio’s senior thesis from Goddard College called “The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday.” Without explaining all of the mythology and the story of his thesis, I’d strongly recommend listening to it—or not—to get the gist of the story, but the one-sentence synopsis is that it is the story of Colonel Forbin and his quest to help the lizards of Prussia steal the Helping Friendly Book from the evil king Wilson.

If that sounds too weird for you, then you probably aren’t a Phish fan, as this story runs through a number of their songs. The band opened up the “Gamehendge” section of the set with a run through “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent” into “Fly Famous Mockingbird,” a long-running pairing of songs. The band then played “Fuck Your Face,” a song that had taken a 23-year hiatus between 1987 and 2010 and has only been played eight times in the band’s more-than-30-year history.

The crowd hit an emotional peak when the familiar opening notes to “Icculus” began, a song that sums up pretty much everything that it means to be a Phish fan, a song so emotionally powerful for all that it caused the man across the aisle from me to uncontrollably start jumping and embracing everyone around him.

The third set was the icing on the proverbial cake—unlike the 30th anniversary cake, which the band gave out at the end of the first set—as the band displayed their improvisational chops on a run through “Light” and a set-closing “You Enjoy Myself,” which saw the band do the same trampoline routine they have been doing for the past 30 years.

Overall, if none of this makes sense, you’re not alone, as this is a band that has thrived on being outside the mainstream. As they implored during “Icculus,” if everyone “got it,” then they would stop playing the song. With all of that being said, I thank you for getting to the end of this monolithic column and I strongly encourage you to go out and see a Phish show for yourself. You may not be a “jam-band” person, but I guarantee you will have a good time at the show.

Think Phish is flying high or dead in the water? Let Brian know at weidy@wisc.edu.

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