Before Tweezer was a disco-ball dance tune it was an all-bets-are-off mid-90's free-improv springboard, and this small-venue second set is a relatively coherent Tweezer medley. Apparently the band did shots at setbreak and decided to experiment with playing open-endedly without stopping; it's busy music and the experiment isn't 100% successful (that 6/8 blues jam is misguided) but once they swerve into a medley of covers and joke tunes the band achieves the ecstatic fluency that marks their best sets. (Fantastic DDLJ > etc. in particular.) The HYHU > Tweeprise jam is good enough to stand on its own, and what a segue! This show isn't quite in line with the marvelously inaccessible 1994-95 free Tweezers (cf. 'A Live One'), but it's an important example of the band flying without a net in front of an audience, which would become the norm in 1997. Luckily it's also a welcoming and enjoyable set of rock'n'roll (and HQ SBD copies circulate, of course - including the official release).

This was, honest to Jah;-) my first show. I had been listening to Phish for 2 or 3 years by that point. Friends I knew would spin a show or two off for me and I truly thought I got IT. I was sooo wrong. Looking back I kinda wish this hadn't been my first show. The first set was fun but then the second set Tweezer kicked in and didn't let up for like an hour. Now, I had listen many hours of the boys on tape but this was something different. I had never heard anything so loose, full of interesting musical ideas, and a down right mind phuck. I couldn't fully wrap my mind around what I was hearing at the time. Well, over the next ten years I continued to see them as much as I could, which was quite a bit. I went to anywhere from 3 to 7 or 8 shows a year until Coventry. I was chasing that first time I saw them around the country and although I saw many epic shows over the years nothing was like the Dallas Tweezerfest. I was blessed with this as my first show but I wish I had been able to fully appreciate what I had witnessed on that night. Great show to listen to. I remember, after watching a long already trippy show, Fishman coming out and singing Purple Rain with Trey on drums screaming "suck it mother fucker" during the vacuum solo. I mean, it was blissed out insanity at it's finest.

Although the 2nd set is rightly considered one of the all-time great Phish jams, the first set also contains excellent playing. Trey's soloing in Llama, Divided Sky, and FEFY suggest he is already thinking about pushing the boundaries of the songs and the setlist. The jam out of Horn and a huge Split Open and Melt also feature a group improv approach that would fully flower in the second set. I love this arrangement of If I Could where the rest of the band drops out and Page gets to shine on the piano. The solos in Suzy Greenberg are fun, with Page on the Rhodes, then Trey on his wah-wah. And when Trey says, "don't do anything we wouldn't do", things are only going to get crazier.

I studied music at the University of North Texas from 1993-96, and I knew a couple guitarists who were planning on going to this show (The previous week was finals week). I didn't hear about the legend of this show until I came back and talked to the two guitarists, who now had Hoist and Rift on cd and Phish stickers on their guitar cases. It sounded cool, but I was skeptical. A couple months into that semester, I heard Junta and fell in love.

As with many fans, the second set of this show was one of the first sets I heard on cassette. This noob loved all the covers of classic rock songs that I was familiar with, and I still appreciate the band's approach to covering other artists. Listening to it today, I can hear the band's confidence in their musicianship taking a step forward from 12/31/93 and 8/13/93. This show makes a great LivePhish release, and even if the band never plays another note, I'll always have 5/7/94 to lift me back to the heavens.

I probably listen to at least part of the Tweezerfest at least once a week (Set 1 I've given the token listen probably everyone who has heard this show has given it - as @HighNote points out, it's a very solid set, but nothing you'll really feel the need to revisit); it's one of those sets that's stuck with me ever since I first heard it. It's kind of interesting to hear how everything gets swept up in the jittery, super-energetic flow the band was wading in that night (compare the Walk Away here, played at nearly double time, with the more relaxed 8/14/93 version and the sedate, majestic Fukuoka version); there are plenty of moments where things slow down and it feels like the band is groping for where they want to go next, but for the most part the music is played with an energy bordering on manic, for good or ill.

And it's mostly for good. The closing HYHU>Tweezer Reprise is a truly amazing jam, the DDLJ ->Sweet Emotion ->Walk Away stretch is inspired, and Purple Rain is a real hoot, Fishman vacuum solo and all (why don't they pull that one out anymore?). This show, for me at least, stands as one of the linchpins for what it is that makes me so happy to be a Phish fan.

The Legendary Tweezerfest!

- This show shines through and through! To kick things off, the band opens with a very solid first set, including gorgeous renditions of Divided Sky & If I Could, down right nasty bass from Mike in Split Open And Melt, a tasty Mound, and the fan favorite Suzy Greenberg to finish things off.

Its the second set that makes this show an absolute MUST HAVE for the Phish fan who loves them for their ability to play with reckless abandon for 70 + minutes.

The Tweezerfest opens with a 25+ minute Tweezer with a heavy hard rock jam in the middle with mind-bending improv from Mike and Page that will send waves of pleasure up your spine! The "Fest" includes a nice "Sparks" (the Who tune), a chill "Makisupa Policeman", some "Sweet Emotions" jamming (Aerosmith), an entire "Walk Away" (Joe Walsh cover - included a Simplson's Signal 10 min into the tune), then "Cannonball," which closes out with a quality rendition of "Purple Rain."

The "Hold Your Head Up Jam" -> "Tweezer Reprise" will absolutely dazzle you and certainly left the entire Main Street District in Dallas begging for MORE.

The "Amazing Grace" --> "Sample" is a beautify to finish off a very special show.

Phish's unique ability to put together a seamless second second set is showcased in this MUSICAL ADVENTURE!

-ENJOY!

For those who get as excited about little details as I do:

When they go -> Tweezer Reprise (which is glorious in its own right) Page does something totally sweet when he kicks into the starting piano chords. Maybe he's done this in versions elsewhere but none that I can specifically recall. Basically he plays a reprise of the normal chords (which I believe the cycle of 4 is [D, E-sus4 (A-7/E?), F (D-/F?), G], something like that). Not to get bogged down in the technical detail but he plays the first pass through as normal with the exception of returning to the 2nd chord following the 4th, the next two passes through the cycle are noticeably 'reprised'. It's pretty cool, a tweezer reprise reprise (the original threeprise?), only fitting to cap off Tweezerfest....

5/5. So whatever happened to Phish playing shows in Texas? Those were the days.

I got these tapes about a year after the show, and they got almost as much play as my 12/31/93 tapes. This was actually the first time I heard Phish (or anyone) play Loving Cup. Looking back it's strange seeing it open a set.

Anywho, real tits shows. Top notch.

My absolutely favorite bootleg show of all time! Hands down, shut the front door, period. Done. Amazing!

This set list is why I can’t stand the set list team

On the actual release of this show there is no notation of:

“Sweet emotion jam”
“MLBJ”
“Cannonball jam (they play the song numnuts, not a “jam”)”
“DDLJ”…can’t stand this shit

Please correct this nonsense. You make a cool show look lame. Sorry. Truth. Yes I’m an angry liberal.

But it’s totally acceptable to say: “HYHU jam”

5/7/94 can sometimes feel a bit daunting as a listening exercise. The first set offers some really great standalone tunes: raging Llama opener, common Horn with a rare outro jam, majestic FEFY, an utterly terrifying SOaM that--while still Type I--really pushes the dynamic and rhythmic capabilities of the song's fabric, and very solid playing from the band on everything in between. Set 2 opens with a solid Loving Cup and one of the more frenetic Sparkle's I've heard...then it happens. Tweezer-fest weighs in at over an hour of non-stop playing comprised of multiple covers, teases, segues, and deeply improvisational sections. This is why I call the show "daunting," as a behemoth like this one really demands focused attention and stamina in order to fully appreciate all that's going on. The segments flow together with such impressive fluidity and evolve so greatly that it's easy to lose track of where we are and how we got here. Some of my favorite moments here are the blues jam (sorry, waxbanks), the DDLJ -> Sweet Emotion passage, Page's moment in the spotlight following Walk Away, and the HYHU jam through Tweeprise. Such great diversity and richness of jamming baked in here.

There's a natural comparison to be drawn between the Bomb Factory Tweezer-fest and the 8/14/93 Tinsley Park Antelope segue-fest. Both jams evolve with similar grace, making sure to come back to home base with enough frequency that you know it's still happening. They each work in Sparks, Walk Away, and a reggae tune (Makisupa vs Have Mercy). While I might feel that Bomb Factory comes out on top as more impressive given its length and diversity, it's difficult to say which is "better." The fact of the matter (as is usually the case with Phish) is that you should just listen to and love both.

Bomb Factory is a beast.

This is, of course, one of those legendary tapes. It never worked out for me to get my own tapes of the show when I got into tape collecting in 1999 and by the time the official LP release came out I wasn’t really into Phish at the moment. So it took years for me to come back around to listen to this historic show.

There are many jokes out there about how people forgot there even was a first set for this show but I think there’s a lot to like about Set I. The “Horn > Divided Sky” in particular stands out to me. I just love the pairing of those songs. “Split” is great, of course. It’s a solid set of music and it is a wonderful context for just how UNEXPECTED the second set would be.

Because this show arrives to me by way of acclaim, it was shocking to learn that a 70 minute block of interwoven, set-dominating “Tweezer” was actually the third song in the set and not the opener. I admit that on my first couple of listens years ago, I didn’t really get it. This wasn’t “the definitive Tweezer” I had imagined in my head. It had its moments but seemed to get lost at times too. It was all over the place. But a couple of nights ago (5/7/2020) I decided to give an anniversary listen and see if I could finally “get it.” I think I did.

The thing is, there are just so many ideas swirling around in that second set. It is an experiment so not everything works to craft a perfectly composed singular version of “Tweezer.” But even when it feels clunky for a bit the boys find their footing and build in an interesting direction from there. It is all about how the song morphs from moment to moment, the micro-decisions the band is making as the music progresses. They would have these moments in some of these 90s “Tweezers” that I only know how to describe as “the train breaking down.” That song deconstruction moment was heavily part of the Bangor “Tweezer” on A Live One, or at least it lives heavy in my memory of that version. Here that moment is part of the shift into the next phase of the song about 10 min in, perhaps the moment when it truly becomes Type II.

One reviewer described this set/“Tweezer” as a musical adventure and when you can set yourself there, listening in the moment rather than trying to hear “the definitive Tweezer” or something, this show really comes alive. The interplay between the band members as they jump from idea to idea, as “Tweezer” morphs from Phish song to heavy metal oddity to blues jam to all kinds of other things before finding its way into “Sparks” and then “Makisupa” and “Sweet Emotion” and “Walk Away.” It’s not an easy one to just grab without that commitment to actively listen—this is definitely not my background-while-I-work “Tweezer.” But I understand why it was such a historic moment for the band and why they wanted to honor part of that “playing without a net” legacy with the Bangor “Tweezer” immortalized on A Live One. It's not my favorite show of 1994 but I like it and can definitely understand its place in the legacy of that era and the formation of the band.