[Recap is courtesy of user TwiceBitten, Nick Williams (@deepthoughtsjp on Instagram). Please remember that recaps are written by VOLUNTEER FANS. Their views are entirely their own and are not necessarily shared by anyone who volunteers to work on Phish.net. There is no such thing as an "official" dot net recap of a show. -Ed.]

Phish fans are not exactly a homogenous bunch and I find the differences in the fanbase generally line up with geography. Fans in the Northeast are the most persnickety. They are capable of providing enormous amounts of energy, but they are also prone to talking over slow songs, smoking cigs indoors, and groaning and shit-talking the show while the music is playing. Fans on the West Coast are a lot more easy going. There is room to move in the GA section, the crowd is more evenly divided gender-wise and in general they are the most pleasant audience to be around. Still, West Coasters lack the fire and grit when it comes to giving energy back to the band, and we all know the band feeds on that and uses it to complete the circuit.

The Mountain West fanbase is somewhat harder to pin down, seeing as they’ve only played Dick’s over the last nine years, and it’s a real melting pot of fans from all over the country. Speaking of cannabis, I will say that the audience in Colorado can also be a bit unresponsive, maybe due to the strong legal weed, but also possibly due to the vibes dissipating slightly in the large open air venue. Fans from the Midwest are a rowdy bunch, more willing to display enormous amounts of energy without discrimination, but also willing to talk over slow songs like their Northeast counterparts. I think the term “blind unfocused rage” works well to describe them.

Read more...

[We would like to thank user Suzy Barros for recapping last night's show.]

Being a relatively new resident of SC I was especially excited when the Charleston shows got announced as a 3 night run at the end of this fun unexpected Island toury 2019 revamp replete with wildly controversial Sirius XM “OH MY GOD PHISH IS SELLING OUT WHAT WILL WE DO” gig. I thought all of the shows thus far had had lots of good playing and fun song selection (especially once it was figured out that there would be no repeats). The drawback of no repeats being of course that you have, say your "Ghost" which I enjoyed the hell out of as a Nassau opener and thought it had a really lovely bliss jam thrown in there but now there won’t be any 18-minute dark mind expanding/exploding "Ghost" to look forward to. The other drawback being (and you can call this a drawback or a plus depending on what songs are played I guess) but it makes for an even more schizophrenic than usual setlist as in tonight’s situation. With Phish you just gotta take what they give you and hope for the best.

Read more...

[We would like to thank user Josh Martin for recapping last night's show.]

Seasons greetings, everyone, from Charleston, where your favorite band kicked off the first of three nights of music. There are a lot of memorable tours in the Phish catalog, but there are only a handful of historic ones. Right at the top of the list are Falls ‘95, ‘97, and ‘13, and with some distance ‘18 may make the list as well. There’s something about this time of year that lends itself to scorching shows. Heck man, tonight was the 22nd anniversary of one of the greatest shows EVAR.

Read more...

In episode 3, we emerge from the traffic jam, and we are officially on Big Cypress. We hear Trey and Tom reflect on cruising Big Cypress, and talk to Jon Fishman, Brad Sands, John Paluska and lots of fans about their experiences on site. And we start to get to the music. There's music!

Read more...

[We would like to thank user Aaron Presuhn for recapping last night's show.]

On a cold Wednesday night, The Phish from Vermont returned to The Petersen Events Center, University of Pittsburgh campus. Contrast tonight’s weather with the last time they played here in 2017...when it was about 95 degrees. Walking up that damn hill in searing midday heat after drinking a Founder’s KBS was no fun. That show happened to fall on my birthday, and it was a heater to go along with the weather. I was excited to see how tonight shook out!

Read more...

Howdy folks, or I guess that should be PHOLKS right??? My name is Bill and I am substituting for my brother-in-law Martin (@Doctor_Smarty) for this article. He had intended to tell you guys about the Phish concert at The Met last night, but there was a problem. I am subscribed to SIRIUSXM and he isn’t. When I got the email asking me if I wanted to go to the concert, I entered the drawing assuming I could just give the tickets to my brother-in-law and he and his wife could go see their favorite band. Unfortunately, the tickets were non-transferable, so my brother-in-law and his wife stayed back in Oregon instead of coming out to spend Thanksgiving with the rest of our family. That meant that me and my wife went to the concert instead. He told me that you guys would be interested to know how it all went down, so this is my attempt to do that. Obviously I won’t know any of the lingo you guys usually use to talk about this stuff. But here goes.

I’m not very big into going to live concerts to be honest. I’m more inclined to be at home with a glass of Crown Royal and puff on a Cuban cigar while sitting next to my fire pit listening to classic rock on my Sonos. In fact, the only concert I have ever been to before last night was when @Doctor_Smarty took me and his sister (my wife) to see Guns N Roses at the Florida Suncoast Dome on December 28th, 1991. That was quite an experience, let me tell you. But probably best I don’t. Suffice to say, I had not been back to a concert since. I also never listen to Phish Radio on SIRIUSXM. My favorite channel is Classic Rewind. My favorite band is arguably, with all due respect to Bob Dylan, Bearsville Records’ greatest artist...FOGHAT!!. Man...I just can’t get enough of that “Slow Ride” if you know what I mean? Alright, take it easy. As you can imagine, other than when Martin comes to visit, I haven’t really heard any Phish and don’t really know the songs. My ears were a blank canvas in that respect. After last night, I’m feeling like they are more like one of those Jackson Pollock splatter-gram deals now. Are rock concerts always like this?

Read more...

Welcome to the 398th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the first and easiest of December. The winner will receive THREE (!) MP3 download codes courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net and our friend @raisinsnacks, who tossed their codes back into the pool for a n00b triple crown this week. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery clip. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday Thursday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!

Read more...

[We would once again like to thank Alaina Stamatis, user @farmhose (twitter @fad_albert), for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

Ah yes, Long Island. The New Jersey that nobody talks about. The land of sports cars smashed into trees with smoke slowly rising from them and no driver or passengers to be found. The only island you can visit where you'll see a housewife driving a fat Benz with a vanity plate that reads XANAX. Long Island, where you can advertise that you're driving on Xanax with no recourse.

Which naturally leads us to Long Island's prodigal son: Billy Joel. Many of us in the Phish community know of Mr. Joel's real and/or exaggerated and/or entirely fictional rivalry with Phish (for hogging MSG every New Year's Eve despite being a "second rate cover band"); but what y'all might've missed is that Mr. Joel already had a longstanding rivalry with Long Island for requiring that he drive his sports cars "safely" and "on the road." For when I was in high school Mr. Joel wrecked his third hot rod in two years when he swerved off the road, over the curb, across the lawn, and into a sleeping old man's living room. And while this sleeping old man was probably the only Long Islander who didn't double as a Billy Joel fan (a Piano Fan?), when the police arrived on the scene, the officers were quite starstruck. Harkening back to moments ago when we were discussing a brazen use of Xanax while operating heavy machinery: despite driving directly into someone's house, Mr. Joel was not given a breathalyzer test.

So what was going to happen to us tonight? Would a fuming Billy Joel drive through the center of Shakedown? And more importantly, was Phish going to mow down our psyches and egos with some searing, soaring, and face melting hetty jams?

Read more...

Ok turkeys it’s recap time! For everyone at home keeping score the year is 2019. The date is November 30th, and it also happens to be Thanksgiving weekend. (Here in the USA anyway; back home in Canada where I’m from we do Thanksgiving a month earlier. But don’t worry, we have a long terrible genocidal history with respect to our indigenous population too.) Anyway, a lot to be grateful for tonight, and I’m sure a lot of folks went home happy. I’ll start my recap by offering some gratitude for finally having met @Icculus face-to-face, a solid 25 years after our initial exchange via a B&P of what I believe was the Bomb Factory.

On that note, the band certainly brought out some heavy artillery tonight, but count me among those who hope that “Plasma” reprise is now safely stored away in its holster for the foreseeable future. I thought the show had some powerful moments, and also some surprisingly rough ones, but we’ll get to that…

Read more...

IT has been almost twenty-five years since Phish first played the Civic Center in Providence (12/29/94), and sixteen years since a version of a song performed on November 29 made the jam charts. But then again, it’s been ten years since Phish last even performed on November 29 (in Portland, ME).

Did Phish perform a 59 minute “Runaway Jim” last night, like they did at the Worcester Centrum twenty-two years ago on November 29? (Of course not, WTF is wrong with you.) But did they play a lot of songs that “Trey’s Notebook” predicted they would play? (Remarkably, only a few!) Ok, but did they perform any versions of songs that were so unquestionably “above-average great” and noteworthy that the jam charts team will undoubtedly vote them onto the charts in due course!?

Read more...