this is easily my favorite show of the west coast leg of this tour, and it is a contender for best of the year. I was not at this show, but i saw oyster head here years later. this place is nice and grungy on the inside. it is pretty small with some bleachers in the back and a nice little floor down below. the first set is a little up and down. sample and fefy don't do much for me, but the uncle penn is a winner. maze starts to heat things up before guyute rears its little head. very nice guyute. i didn't know is nice, loose, and fun before a very serios melt comes out. trey was really on top of this one.

after a fairly straight forward first set, the boys really go off in the second. peaches en regalia is always a favorite opener of mine. mound works well next, but then the boys go off on a very nice romp through tweezer. in a year full of weird and crazy tweezer jams, this one really stands out. these norwegian wood teases are very nice. i like they way they work those in the tweezer jams, both here and in red rocks '96. anyway, here, they take it all over the place before landing in the bbfcfm/makisupa land. they keep that funk/reggae feel going into nicu before twisting back into the tweezer them. this one slows down and works its way into a very inspired jesus left chicago. hood, of course, works after jesus. good version with some nice page work. the rest of the show is pretty straight forward.

i would classify this one as a must hear. this tweezer, in some circles, is over shadowed by bozeman, dallas, and bangor, but don't let this one slip through the cracks. it's a marvelous group effort, and it is the last great '94 tweezer.

Hot second set...really this entire fall/winter tour represents the multi-faceted tour-beast that Phish was at the time. The fact that the band was relentlessly 'plugged-in' to music during this tour (i.e. practicing constantly, bluegrass sessions both on and off the stage, etc.) is evident in this gem of a show. 1st set is excellent but the Phish's true colors shine through brilliantly in the second set, with a Gordo-tinged Tweezer, riotous BBFCFM, always-welcome Makasupa, and a flying Hood to round it all out.

'94 was a year for many great tweezers. This is certainly not one to pass up. Check out that FLAMING HOT second set in its entirety while you're at it

2nd set is truly amazing. The tweez> bbfcfm> makisupa> nicu> tweez> jjlc> hood is just so incredibly creative. i love this show.

I wasn't at this show. Hell, in 1994 I hadn't been west of the mississippi. Wow. I just realized I haven't been east of the mississippi in many years. The west is the best, and I digress.

Anyhoo....I have always loved this second set. This tweezer is my favorite pre-funk version.

Viva Montaigne!

The first set is a typical first set, other than a wicked Maze and a SOAM that explores some dark recesses in a very '94 way with some nasty guitar work and clanging piano playing and a jam that *feels* arrhythmic and off-kilter but actually isn't (and, fine, I Didn't Know is a guilty pleasure). The second set is a monster, one of the finest sets of the latter half of 1994, and the second half of a devastating one-two punch with the previous night's show. Peaches and Mound are a fine start (Mound is another guilty pleasure), then Tweezer gets down to business with a burbling Mike and Fish-dominated stripped-down jam. Things smooth out and Page begins asserting himself with some great piano work as the jam gets a little bluesy, then things start swinging between dissonant burbling-riff grooving and near silence, like the band's playing peek-a-boo with the audience. The jam sections start getting more ominous and grungy, which makes the measures of near silence all the more off-putting.

Finally, the game of cat and mouse ends and the band slides into a powerful rock jam, Trey finally playing some standard rock riffs instead of the low-key weirdness he'd been giving us up to that point. Then, as though regular old rock was boring them, a weird mishmash of noise emanates from the stage, Fish howling in his mike like one of the Mothers of Invention, the jam sounding like all four instruments were smushed together somehow. Everything coalesces into feedback and noise, Fish pounding on the toms, and then the jam gets weirdly majestic, like a less propulsive Horn, a perfect late night jam...and out of nowhere, Trey plays the riff from Norwegian Wood, and riffs off of that as the band continues their relaxed accompaniment.

But, typical of Phish '94, it's time for another musical idea, and the jam brings in some stabbing chords that can only mean one thing - BBFCM. BBFCM's ending somehow leads into Makisupa (they play in a different key for the first half, which should tell you the segue was definitely on the fly), and from there the Makisupa chords bring a wonderful segue into NICU (it's really quite nice and relaxed), which gets frenetic at the end (Trey is playing *something* classical at the end, I can't tell, but it's there IMO), and just because they can Trey leads the group back into a Tweezer jam for a brief few minutes. Then, in a testament to how good these guys know each other, as if by kismet the jam slows down and they segue marvelously into Jesus Just Left Chicago, a super-cool version that caps off a tremendous segue-fest that gives us everything you'd expect out of a 1994 Phish segue-fest. Hood and Golgi are a nice set-closing combo (Hood is really delicate and beautiful in the middle portion; got to love a band that can find that kind of floating on a cloud space after all the sturm und drang of the Tweezer jam), and the encore is an encore. Not much else to say about this one - it's a great 1994 show, one of the top 10 of the year, and fully deserving of its LivePhish.com release.

Back in the tape-trading days I had a sweet copy of this show. in one trade the guy I was trading with asked if the as-reported Norwegian Wood Jam was a real jam or just a brief tease because he loved the melody . . . and since you couldn't just listen to shows like you can now, choosing shows to trade for was partly dependent on the opinions of the person you were trading with.

fortunately for him (and us) the space>norwegian wood section of this tweezer is huge!! like that monster space peak in the hampton halley's and before it goes on too long they rip into BBFCFM.

the melt jam is ridiculous, the rest of the tweezer is really engaging, and transition from NICU to JJLC through the little tweezerjam is four or five fantastic minutes, top-notch playing.

Around 5th minute of this monumental Tweezer Fish gets into the raddest groove ever, and Page plays some real funky keys, going on for about 4 minutes......1 of the best jams I've ever heard them do. Fishman was the fuking mack back in the day....he lead everything.