This show wasn't at Clement's Brewpub. I'm pretty sure it was the Orange Grove. Hungry Charlie's wasn't sold to Clement's until 1990. I was bartending in the summer of 1990 and Fishman came in one night and we talked about he always wanted to play there (as Chucks). I was actually playing my tapes from the Townsend shows a couple weeks earlier when he came in. So he left me his booking info and the show happened a couple months later in November.

I had been a graduate student in Geology at Syracuse University for about a month and a half. Over the course of that time I invested a significant amount of my period of orientation to the ‘Cuse in getting to know most of the watering holes that were within a one-mile radius of the campus. Clement's Brew Pub was a drinking establishment ahead of its (and perhaps more importantly my) time. It had replaced a campus icon (Hungry Charley’s), served micro-brews instead of domestics, and the locals were seemingly unhappy. It was doomed from the start to go under, which of course resulted in the triumphant return of Hungry Charley’s, and many of my lost evenings composed of listening to the newly invented grunge music, shooting pool, gorging on cheesy fries, and drowning in beer on cup night and kill-a-keg Sunday.

Occasionally, a band would set up at one end of this dank basement room in place of one or two of the pool tables. Usually, this was more of an irritation than anything else. I was into Guns N Roses, Led Zeppelin, and the DK’s at the time, not second rate bar bands, though I would point out that at some point in their careers each of these rock and roll legends was itself nothing more than that. The night Phish played at Clement's was no exception (in either case as it turns out), I mean, this wasn’t Chucklehead people, now those guys were funky. I have two memories from this particular second-rate bar band’s show: they played some bizarre song mentioning David Bowie and the drummer showed a home movie of what appeared to be his summer vacation. I probably left early to go see what was happening at the Inn Complete to be honest. Other than hearing and recognizing the Junta version of “David Bowie” randomly in a friend’s car on the way back from a party (and subsequently listening to “Contact” a number of times at the behest of his girlfriend), I would have no further contact with Phish until the 1992 H.O.R.D.E. show at Empire Court. If I ever truly master the ability to time travel within the bounds of my own experiential universe, a return visit to this show will likely be one of my first stops.