Tags: Live, Shows, History

New Year's Eve has been a big show for Phish and their fans for many years, often with four shows from December 28 to 31. The 1989 and 1990 New Year's shows were held in the Boston World Trade Center Exhibition Hall, and 1991 was at the Worcester Memorial Auditorium. Past special events have included:

• 12/31/91: Great setlists, good sound comes through on tapes, and hot performance!
• 12/31/92: Flying Mockingbird -- Brad Sands, stage hand at the time, was suspended from above the stage in a chicken suit (well, it was something yellow and funny, anyway) for a rendition of "Fly Famous Mockingbird", a Gamehendge character from TMWSIY.
• 12/31/93: In the Aquarium -- The entire stage was inside an aquarium prop.
• 12/31/94: Tropical Hot Dog Night -- The band climbed aboard a giant hot dog, complete with headlights and smoke/exhaust, and "flew" from one end of the (former) Boston Garden to the other, above people's heads, playing "Auld Lang Syne" and throwing printed ping-pong balls, "peacock" feathers, and glittery confetti.
• 12/31/95: Time Science -- Involving Vandergraff generators and lots of noise and lights and smoke, the Phish "Time Factory" (designed in Gamehendge) was used to advance the new year. Tom Marshall sang a Collective Soul tune ("Shine") to illustrate the danger of getting stuck in time, perhaps a nod to Rudolph's Shiny New Year, in which the loss of Happy means the year won't end.
• 12/31/96: Never-ending Balloon Drop -- A record was set for the most balloons dropped (79,627), breaking the record help by the Democratic National Convention (est. 65,000). The balloons each had a design related to the event, four designs total.
• 12/31/97: Amazing Animation: -- A large white bubble was hung from the ceiling of Madison Square Garden, covering the scoreboard. Onto this bubble were projected incredibly intense graphics (fish, lightbulbs, pink pigs, olives, water baloons, fried eggs, plants growing, clock for countdown at midnight, and more), incorporating narration from the previous night's show, random craziness to hose to during 2001, and the countdown to the New Year.
• 12-31-98: Glowrings in the Garden: -- A four-night run at Madison Square Garden began with a garden on stage and ended with growth in the audience. The stage on 12/28 was decorated with a border of grass (making a terrarium somewhat like the aquarium of 12/31/93), enormous flowers, three sprouts (that erupted into tall stalks by the end of the show), and three day-glow (hint: GLOW) caterpillar/inchworm things. The stage settings were gone by 12/29, and instead of worms, there were half a dozen dancing flowers and, on 12/30, half a dozen sprite faeries. For 12/31, the countdown to midnight (see photo) included on-stage pyrotechnics (bursts across the front of the stage at 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1, and large bursts at the back of the stage at midnight), the obligatory balloon drop (circa 200 large ones -- not the mega-sized white ones of earlier years, but the human-sized ones, like the largest from 12/31/96), and a dozen dancing things (unicorn, elf, bee, faerie, butterly, spider, Vikingess, etc.) tossing out thousands of glowrings. See also, Adam Foley's Pictures.
• 12/31/99: Outdoor Festival -- Phish performed an outdoor extravaganza at the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation in Florida, Dec. 29 and 30, 1999. The first day featured an afternoon set and two night-time sets; the second day featured an afternoon set and a seven-hour-plus, midnight-to-sunrise set. (Sunrise was about 7:11 a.m..) Tickets were $150 until 11/30, then $175, and many counterfeits. Advance estimates for attendance ranged from 50K to 100K; 60K tickets were initially allotted; over 50K have already been sold and 15K additional were released in late November (according to Addicted to Noise, 11/25/99); an estimated 80K showed up. ABC aired part of the event (planned as approx. 5 minutes at around 12:50 a.m. EST, but aired as approx 4 minutes at around 330 am), hosted by Peter Jennings.
  • Maps: close-up detail (unofficial)
  • chant
  • Photos of the site
  • Tara Fowler's travel page
  • LiveDaily story
  • Palm Beach Post story
  • ABC aired part of the show (Heavy Things, lasting about five minutes, at 3:30 a.m., but not with Trey's intro babble about driving in the right lane. The airing was pre-announced at Army Archerd, Daily Variety Senior Columnist:
    

    The 23-hour ABC New Year's global show -- 5 a.m.-4 a.m. -- has just added Elton John. Producer Gary Smith will tape him a day earlier at the Mack Arena in Las Vegas, so Elton can be seen at primetime during the New Year's Eve show. Billy Joel will be live from Madison Square Garden. Also live Faith Hill from Nashville, Barry Manilow from Foxwood, Phish from the Seminole Indian Reservation in Florida, Blondie on the beach in Miami. Enrique Iglesias will be taped Thursday in Madison Square Garden.

  • The Seminole: According to the New Year's Eve 1999 Tour Extra, "Thousands of years ago, long before the arrival of the Europeans to the southeastern part of North America, nearly 400,000 Seminole ancesotrs lived throughout the Florida penninsula and its surrounding areas. Though disease had killed many by the time the Spaniards explored the territory in the early 1500s, several of these tribes carried on, such as the Euchee, the Ymasee, the Abalachi, and others. In their core language of Maskoki, these tribes were known as isti seminoli (Seminole), which means they were "free people" because they had not been conquered by the Spanish or the English. With the formation of the United States in the late 1700s, clashes between white inhabitants and Native Americans were widespread, with Presiden Jackson illegally entering Spanish Florida to burn villages and destroy resistance leaders. Even after Spanish Florida was declared US territory, unequal rights resulted in two more wars during the 1800s. Over 3,000 Natives had been forcibly removed from Florida to the western territory of Arkansas and Oklahoma. Possibly as few as 300 remained in Florida, taking refuge here in the swamps of the Everglades."
  • AFTER:
  • Photos of the event from the Sun-Sentinel
  • Photos from Tall Images
  • Photos from Kevin McCormack
  • Photos from the Sandman
  • Photos from Dr Pong
  • Photos from Ebay (??)
  • Condorito's Photos (Balloons, Fireworks, and Trey on screen - best show photo ever?)
  • Other photos:
    
    http://w3.sarkcincinnati.com/~jmills/ http://www.starcom2.com/BIG_CYPRESS/ http://www.web-point.com/~billster/nye.htm http://www.angelfire.com/music/boogietarpbliss/ http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~kmmccorm/nye2000/nye_front.html http://www.helixpro.net/nye/frames.htm http://homepages.go.com/~sandman242/phish/bigcypress.htm http://hometown.aol.com/drpong007/myweb5/index.html http://members.toast.net/edd/ebay/phish/phish.html http://www.howareyou.com/homes/1063/ http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/photogallery/phishgallery.htm http://www.phans.com/pictures/nye2k/bigcypress.htm http://www.sickestever.com/bigcypress/index.html http://blueridge.etree.org/ http://www.web-point.com/%7Ebillster/nyepics.htm
  (Previous plans -- reportedly for Kualoa Ranch in Ka'a'awa Valley, Hawaii; Southern California; Madison Square Garden, NYC; Syracuse Carrier Dome, Syracuse, NY; and Lake Okechobee, FL -- have obviously been scrapped, for various reasons.)
• 2000: Since there's no year 0, the decade, century, and millenium end on 12/31/2000. Moreover, 2001 has been a Phish favorite since opening most second sets during the summer of 1993. Nonetheless, strong rumors are that there will be no New Year's run this year.

   

• 2002: The band returned from its 815-day hiatus with a New Year's show at Madison Square Garden 12/31/02, followed by three shows (1/2-4/03) at the Hampton Coliseum. The new year's show included dancing pixies (on stage, in the audience, on stilts, and on step ladders), enormous white balloons, snow machines (in the rafters, raining down throughout "Seven Below"), confetti (in small pyrotechnic bursts right at midnight), and a gag: Just prior to Wilson, a clip from the movie Castaway was broadcast on the scoreboard, showing Tom Hanks' character yelling at a Wilson ball and then kicking it into the ocean. Phish then began playing Wilson, during which Trey introduced Steve McConnell (Page's brother) as Tom Hanks. Most fans fell for it (some thought it was actually Tom Marshall), as did the press: The Associated Press and MTV reported that Hanks had appeared, the New York Times and various other papers printed that "news", which salon.com was then able to falsify by contacting Hanks' agent. Even Page's father fell for it, asking backstage to be introduced to "Mr. Hanks". Trey teased about it later in the same run, introducing a non-existent Tom Hanks on 1/2/03 and Al Gore on 1/3/03. (Phish had appeared on Dave Letterman with Hanks and Saturday Night Live with Gore, both during December 2002.) ... While Hanks was not at the show, those who were reportedly included Fred Savage, Al Franken, and the guy who played Kenny Banyan on Seinfeld.

   

"To me, historically, there's always been so much art going around on big periods of change like this. At the end of the 19th century, there was so much important art and literature. So I'm looking forward to it and we've been throwing ideas around to do something. Who knows, maybe we'll play the space shuttle or have concerts in four different time zones. I want to do a 30-hour show. People need to be able to cut loose for many days.""
-- Trey Anastasio, quoted in the 1/1/98 New York Times"

"That is why all parties political, economic and confessional, are careful to have periodic reunions where their members may revivify their common faith by manifesting it in common." -- Emile Durkheim, 1912