Hey, Craig! How was the Phish Concert?

“How was the Phish concert?”

I decided to type a blog post so that I could give the full length answer that I want, that way anyone that I bore with details can skim to the highlights.

My brother and I got to Alpine Valley around 630, show was scheduled at 7, so it started promptly at 8. They were on till 11:30, which is pretty standard when you figure two 90 minute sets of music with a 30 minute setbreak in between.

First Set:

• Brother
• Wolfman's Brother
• Funky Bitch >
• The Divided Sky
• Joy
• Back On The Train
• Taste
• Poor Heart
• The Horse >
• Silent in the Morning
• The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday >
• Avenu Malkanu >
• The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday
• Time Turns Elastic

Great set, but not really a lot of energy. Kind of a slow set. Still very good, just slow. “Brother” opened with all of the band members’ kids coming out on stage. At the end of the song, Trey introduced each of the children and wished everyone a Happy Father’s Day. Wolfman started up and was a bit of a surprise, it had been in my head most of the day but I didn’t expect to hear it. At the end of Wolfman, Trey spoke again, singling out an audience member in front of the stage who “had amazing dedication, since he has been holding this poster for two days now”. The poster he was holding said “Funky Bitch”, and they made a point to say they were playing it in appreciation of their fans. The change into Divided Sky was good, marking the second time I’ve seen this epic instrumental live.

Joy was alright, but I’m kind of indifferent to it. At the end, though, when they started playing what sounded like “Back on the Train”, I was pretty shocked. I’ve not only never seen it live, but didn’t really think it was still in their rotation. I am pretty sure that everyone around me was just as shocked. Taste is a good song but the vocals are a bit akward to seen as written on the album. Although they usually do it like the album when they play it live, Trey kinda changed up the vocal pattern for this version. It was pretty laid back, and I decided to sit for a bit, since I had been standing for a while now.

But Poor Heart started, I immediately recognized it and jumped right up. Aside from some moments in Funky Bitch and Divided Sky, this was probably the first up-tempo and high energy part of the show. It ended too quickly but transitioned into the opening arpeggio’s of The Horse>Silent In The Morning. I had been aching to see this series for a long time now, especially since its one of my favorites that I haven’t been able to see live. I drove to Alpine hoping for Horse/Silent, and saw that I wasn’t going to be disappointed. I will admit, it was a bit of an emotional experience. Some songs just have a powerful effect when performed live.

They came out of Horse>Silent and started into The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday, Trey’s senior thesis at Goddard http://www.phish.net/faq/tmwsiy.html . They closed the set with a very very long Time Turns Elastic, and although I like the song I was disappointed when I saw the signs that they were approaching a setbreak.

Second Set:

• Crosseyed and Painless >
• Down With Disease >
• Bug >
• Piper >
• Wading In The Velvet Sea
• Boogie On Reggae Woman
• Slave To The Traffic Light

Oh, wow… Where to begin with this set? It was all phenomenal. Over the course of the setbreak it had gotten dark and the stars were beginning to reveal themselves as the clouds broke and departed. They opened with a Talking Heads cover, Crosseyed and Painless. They first covered it as one of their Halloween tributes when they “dress up” as another band by performing an entire album, in order, on stage. They performed the song on Halloween in 1996 when they covered the Talking Heads’ album “Remain in Light”, and the song as remained a regular cover in their rotation since. This song, because it was now dark, also came with a glowstick war, in which phans toss glowsticks all around the audience. Some people were holding smaller glowsticks by strings and tossing them into the air ten or fifteen at a time, which gave them the effect of a firework as they rose as one cluster, and broke away from one another in a fountain of light as they fell. One of my favorite moments of the whole show occurred during this when four-year-old who had been in front of us got some glowsticks from his dad, tossed them down the hill into the crowd, and turned to give his dad a celebratory high five.

Here’s a video that kinda captures the glowstick war, from the concert I was at. The song is Crosseyed and Painless.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2KkEqzQpqc

Crosseyed and Painless went on for a while, and then kind of broke down into a sort of atonal noise with some fuzz and distorted effects. This guy in front of us announced “I feel a disease coming on”, and sure enough, maybe thirty seconds after he announced this, we heard Mike go into the opening bass riff for Down With Disease. This song was the only Phish song ever to air on MTV (the video is pretty messed up, was directed by Mike and features the band scuba diving in an aquarium). It’s a pretty classic jam known more for the first moments of the guitar solo than the lyrics.

Disease gave way to Bug, a slower song off of the album Farmhouse. After the rockin Crosseyed and Disease, it was nice to have a breather with Bug. I should mention as well, to those of you who aren’t used to reading jamband setlists, that a “>” symbol after a song means that the song went immediately into the next one, no stop or pause but rather a change mid-music to the next song. So the second set basically had a series of five songs strung together, no pauses.

They went from Bug immediately into Piper, also from Farmhouse, a song that starts small and simply and then just kinda builds and builds. The song is pretty repetitive, and usually builds into long jams. This was no exception. Here’s an example of the basics of the song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw5pYskaZIk

Piper continued to build and went into a jam that lasted about twelve minutes. Was a good jam, picked the tempo back up from the laid back break we got from Bug. By the end of the Piper jam, it felt like the audience was about spent of its energy, and another break was needed.

That’s when the group really shocked us. Page (keyboard player) kinda ended the Piper jam with some messing around on the keys that sounded like he might be picking up the jam again. But then he just kinda ended it on a solid G major that to me sounded like the end of the Piper jam. He used it to start the chord progression of Wading in the Velvet Sea, and from the audience reaction it sounded like he surprised a lot of people. You can hear the part I’m talking about in this clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNZVrrc-T9c

This starts with the end of the Piper jam, as it is winding down. Page hits the G major chord to start Velvet sea at about the 39 second mark in the vid. What follows are some of the better Velvet Sea live harmonies that I’ve heard from Phish. It’s one of my favorites, as it is the first song I ever taught myself to play and learned on every instrument. It is literally the only song I can drum. I’d seen it before, but was very happy to hear it again. And with the combination of Horse>Silent and Velvet Sea, I was very happy.

Velvet Sea resolved and the band settled, but only for a few brief seconds before Mike laid out a funk riff and the band launched into Boogie On Reggae Woman, a Stevie Wonder song that they regularly cover. They do a great job with this song, keep pretty well with Stevie’s version but still make it their own. Velvet Sea chilled everyone out, Reggae Woman got them back up and dancing right away. Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKAQEi-D0Ug

They closed out the second set with one of their older songs, Slave to the Traffic Light. It’s a song that kinda stops and goes, picks up, stops, then starts again. Listening to it feels like driving in traffic and getting stopped by lights. Then it mellows out into a Divided Sky kinda jam. They tooled around with it for about fifteen minutes, and I knew from the visual and tonal clues that this would be the last song of the set. It was a fantastic set overall, and I couldn’t wait to see what they had in store for an encore.

Encore:

• Grind
• Frankenstein

Grind is one of the a capella songs that they have had sitting around since 1996, but only released as the last track of Undermind, (what was thought would be) their final album in 2004. Page thanked everyone while Fish grabbed a pitch pipe, and they gave us a rendition of Grind with some slight changes. The album version announces “I have lived for twelve thousand days”, and in this live version they each announced their own personal total of days alive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb2G7JNEA5M

As amazing as Grind was, nothing could have prepared me for what they had in store next. During the Hampton reunion run in March of this year, I had heard that Page busted out a white Keytar that he used on Frankenstein, a cover of the Edgar Winter Group’s classic. But the first thing I saw was Mike picking up a large, flashy, flaming bass guitar. The audience went wild. Then Page brought out his white Keytar. I knew we would be in for some fun, as the guys were in pretty good moods and were probably gonna mess around for a while. But then the true surprise came: Trey picks up this guitar that has five necks. Five! He starts screwing around with it for a bit, and then the band launches into Frankenstein.

This video has close-ups of Mike’s bass, Page’s Keytar, and Trey’s five-necked monstrosity. Sound isn’t too great, but it was an up-close shot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raZjwTEz2lw

Great show, and from what I’ve seen on YouTube comments so far, the people who cut out early to beat the traffic (WTF?) are kicking themselves.