SET 1: Back in the Bubble, Haywire, Marissa, Tilting, Peel, Connected, Tiny Little World
SET 2: Say Something, Louisiana Sun, Sughn Never Sets, Got To Be More Careful, Human Nature, Jones, Mull, Crazy Sometimes
ENCORE: Guilty Pleasures
SET 1: Mull, Steps, Jones, Crazy Sometimes, Meat, Louisiana Sun, Back in the Bubble
SET 2: Haywire, Human Nature [1] > Got To Be More Careful, Peel, Guilty Pleasures, Connected, Sughn Never Sets
ENCORE: Carini
The Philosophy School of Phish has been offering “chalk dust without the torture” at Oregon State University since 2014. Registration is open for this summer’s online course.
This summer’s class features an extensively redesigned course, offering new weekly podcasts, interviews with course authors, and a reorganized syllabus with updated readings and assignments.
Enroll now, as space is limited. Class begins June 24th! (Note: You do not have to be a current OSU student to take the course.)
SET 1: Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway), My Life, The Entertainer, Vienna, Born to Run, Zanzibar, Start Me Up, An Innocent Man, Don't Ask Me Why, New York State of Mind, Allentown, Turn the Lights Back On, Movin' Out (Anthony's Song), Keeping the Faith, She's Always A Woman, Sleeping with the Television On [1], Layla [2], Only the Good Die Young, Sometimes a Fantasy, The River of Dreams, River Deep, Mountain High, Nessun dorma, Scenes From an Italian Restaurant, Piano Man
ENCORE: We Didn't Start the Fire, Uptown Girl, It's Still Rock and Roll to Me, Big Shot, You May Be Right[1]
[This post is courtesy of Ryan Smith, dot net user @ryansmith534, a data scientist formerly at Spotify.Thank you, Ryan! -Ed.]
Every Phish fan undoubtedly has their own answer to this question – but is there a universal truth across all fans? Using setlist data and user ratings from Phish.net, we can attempt to answer this question empirically.
To do this, we can borrow methodology from basketball and hockey analytics, specifically the concept of RAPM (regularized adjusted plus-minus). This metric attempts to quantify an answer to the question: how much does the presence of a given player on the court contribute to a team’s point differential? In our case, the question becomes: how much does the presence of a given song in a setlist contribute to a show’s rating on Phish.net?
We first need to gather the necessary data, a process made significantly easier because of the convenience of the Phish.net API. After doing a bunch of cleaning and manipulation, we get a dataset that looks like this:
We have one row for every show, a column with the show’s rating, and a column for every song in Phish’s repertoire – with a 0 or 1 value representing whether the song was played at a given show.
[The following is courtesy of Jake Cohen, user @smoothatonalsnd. Thank you, Jake! -Ed.]
“The reverse culture shock is real…”
“Having a tough time with re-entry.”
As Phish fans, most of us are used to feeling some version of this after a run of shows or a festival. Phish transports us into another world, one bound by community and a shared, intense experience, and it can be hard to readjust to “normal” life afterwards. Yet these are two texts that I got this past Monday, not after seeing Phish, but after attending an academic conference.
That sentiment is more or less unheard of after a typically staid affair, but this is exactly how I feel this week after the conclusion of Phish Studies 2.0. Co-hosted by The Mockingbird Foundation and Oregon State University in Corvallis, the conference left me spiritually charged up in the way only a Phish show can, and professionally stoked for the future of Phish Studies as a field.
The Mockingbird Foundation is once again offering three options to golf with fellow Phish fans this Labor Day weekend and help fundraise for music education:
[The following is courtesy of The Phish Studies Conference Program Committee. -Ed.]
Your time is near, the mission’s clear! The second ever academic Phish Studies conference, co-sponsored by The Mockingbird Foundation, will take place next week at Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR, conveniently located between Portland and Eugene. In 2019, the first Phish Studies conference took place at the same university and it was a rousing success. Although academic conferences in general have taken a break since COVID, many are now back and we figured it was time to open up the helping friendly book again!
The coolest thing about the Phish Studies Conference is that it’s not just for academics. Our slate of over 50 presenters this year is full of professors and professional scholars, but also a ton of people working outside of academia who are passionate about Phish and trying to figure out ways to seriously analyze and better understand what it is that we all intuitively know and love about this band. We’ve got presentations about the legal ethics of tarping, gendered norms within the jamband scene, Phish’s place within the history of tech communities, and even the intersection of Taylor Swift and Phish culture, presented by scholars from all walks of life and careers.
[This recap is courtesy of Mark C. Lynch, dot net user @Mondo_Butts, and he (and we) would also like to thank his friends users @FunkSuckle, @andrewfreeborncreative, @Sarahlyn710, @phishbiscuits11, and @juju.campbell90 for their support and input. -Ed.]
I woke up Sunday morning tired. Saturday night took a toll on me. Night 3 at the Sphere was a late one that spilled into an even later night hugging the tables. I woke up in a little bit of a fog. Grabbed some coffee and prepped for a work meeting I had scheduled. Coincidently, I spent a couple hours reviewing VFX for a TV show I work on. Later that night I found myself recapping VFX on a much larger scale. Soon thereafter, I realized it would be nearly impossible to accurately describe them in words.
[We would like to thank Rob Mitchum for recapping last night's show. Rob is a science and music writer in Oak Park, IL. He tweets about Phish @phishcrit, other stuff @robmitchum, and he has undertaken the Sisyphean task of writing about every Phish show on its 25-year anniversary, which will take him until at least 2047…and counting.Thank you Rob! -Ed.]
For all the billions of dollars invested in audiovisual technology at the Las Vegas Sphere, the thing I was most curious about for these shows was decidedly less flashy: would the members of Phish stand in their usual spots? For 99.9% of Phish shows, they have set themselves up in the same way – four-across on a rectangular stage at one end of the venue. But the few times they deviated from this layout have almost always produced memorable experiences and unusual music, from the alternative stages of late-night festival sets and the inward-facing square of the Chilling Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House costume to the flatbed truck in the round and the hourglass stage of MSG NYE stunts.
[This recap is courtesy of Silas Cole, user @ObviousFool (Instagram @nice_shades), thank you Silas! -Ed.]
There are many things that set Phish shows at Sphere apart from other Phish shows, first and foremost, the visuals. I will do my best to describe the visual accompaniments, but words cannot possibly do justice to the spectacular displays, so I’ll also provide pictures. I also found myself less immersed in the music, for better or worse, and this recap accurately reflects that.
When we first entered the room, we were greeted by an enormous 3.67-acre LED array with a resolution of 16000x16000---the highest resolution LED screen on the planet. Once we sat down, we noticed the glaring lack of a light rig or stacks of speakers, but hidden behind the screen and throughout the venue there are over 168,000 separate speaker drivers, amps, and processing channels, an auditory nirvana.
[This recap primarily of the scene is courtesy of dot net user @saw_ita_Jen, Jenny Chadbourne. As with all recaps, the views expressed are those of the recapper and may not reflect the views of any of the volunteers who run this site. -Ed.]
With night one on the books, I sit here in my room trying best articulate this experience, which is not easy. It's akin to trying to describe the sky and the colors of the sunset, or what it feels like to be in a redwood forest at sunset. The full emergence of the experience is truly grand, beyond anything you can comprehend. In this case a picture (of Nectar) is really worth a thousand words (so there a bunch in this recap).
The Sphere is a force of color and light on the strip, it’s hard to miss in the day or nighttime. It’s constantly radiating light, and color. A true work of psychedelic genius. For reference, the Hampton Coliseum is 84,827 cubic feet (26,263 square foot arena floor and a 70-foot ceiling), but Sphere is 875,000 cubic feet, as it's 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide. As the cherry on top, we get graphics for Dead and Co---it’s really special to have that steal your face imagery in the mix.
[This post is courtesy of Dr. Stephanie Jenkins. -Ed.]
The agenda for the 2024 Phish Studies Conference (May 17-19), hosted by Oregon State University and The Mockingbird Foundation, is now available! The complete schedule of panels, performances, exhibits, and vendors is available at phishstudies.net.
Registration is open to the public -- fans and scholars alike.
IT has been twenty-five years since April 1999, a musically awe-inspiring month for Bay Area fans of improvisational rock. Those who loved the Grateful Dead, Phish, Steve Kimock (and Zero and KVHW, among the greatest improvisational rock bands in history imnsfho), and Carlos Santana couldn’t be happier. That's because in addition to the three Warfield PhilSH shows mid-month---which you can (re)listen to here or on Archive.Org or even watch video of on YouTube---April 1999 began with two legendary KVHW shows at the Great American Music Hall. The month also featured two Zero shows at the Maritime Hall the weekend of April 9; three Santana Fillmore shows, the third of which on April 18 featured Trey and Page on a few tunes (my review of it on this site is at phish.net/review-archive/shows/4-18-99.html; a stealth-taped fob-daud of this show used to circulate on DAT, CDR and cassette but I can't find it online today); two Jazz Is Dead shows at the Maritime Hall with Kimock on April 23 and 24; and then a Kimock, Vega, Hertz and (Jimmy) Herring (“KVHH”) show on April 30 up 101 north in Petaluma! This was certainly among the greatest months of music in my life and the lives of many others.
The magnificent, transcendent music of the April 1999 Phil Lesh and Friends Warfield shows, featuring Phil on bass, Steve Kimock and Trey on rhythm and lead guitars, Page McConnell on keyboards, and John Molo on drums, has been exhaustively discussed by many, including in detailed reviews posted in the glow of the events 25 years ago. The shows continue to be among the greatest improvisational musical performances I have ever seen, and you'll hear more from me about that than you ever needed or wanted to know if you listen to the Attendance Bias podcast episode about these shows with host Brian Weinstein; you can listen to it wherever you listen to your podcasts.
PHISH has announced a summer tour that begins with three shows at Great Woods on July 19, 20 and 21, and then continues at the Mohegun Sun on July 23 and 24, Alpine Valley on July 26, 27 and 28, St. Louis on July 30 and 31, Deer Creek on August 2, 3, and 4, the Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids on August 6 and 7, Bethel Woods on August 9, 10, and 11, the previously announced Mondegreen festival in Delaware August 15th through the 18th, and finally four shows at Dicks from August 29th through September 1st. Tickets through the Phish Tickets lottery process for everything except Mondegreen are available now through Monday, March 11th, at noon e.t. Public onsale begins Friday, March 15th, at 10am e.t. For more information, visit Phish's website.
PHISH's next festival, MONDEGREEN, will involve four days of shows (so perhaps more than four shows) on August 15-18, 2024, at The Woodlands in Dover, Delaware. For more information about the event, please click here. Although passes for the festival go on sale this Friday, January 19, at 11am e.t., through AXS (create a fan account, or update your current AXS info (perhaps with a New Device) for a smooth purchase experience), travel packages go on sale this Thursday, January 18, at 11am e.t. For more information about mondegreens, there's a YouTube video here, an entertaining New Yorker piece from nearly a decade ago "The Science of Misheard Lyrics" here, and, of course, lest one e'er forget, heaven's just a funky moose.
PHISH released video today of its performance of Gamehendge on December 31, 2023, which spanned two of the show's three sets. This video not only contains footage that was broadcast to viewers of the webcast on New Year's Eve, but also previously unseen footage.
In celebration of Phish’s four-show New Year's Eve run at Madison Square Garden (Dec 28, 29, 30, & 31), the all-volunteer and fan-run Mockingbird Foundation has announced that it is sending an unsolicited $1,000 Tour Grant to four music education programs nearby:
This is the 26th round of unsolicited Tour Grants, an effort that now totals over $268,000, which is 11% of all disbursements made by the foundation. These grants are part of a long-standing effort to help support music education in the local communities that Phish touches. They follow Mockingbird's largest competitive grant round ever, and a total of 66 grants this past summer alone! Mockingbird has now made 661 grants in all 50 states, totaling more than $2.3M.
PHISH will perform at Madison Square Garden on December 28, 29, 30 and 31. The ticket request period for the phoi pholloi is underway at tickets.phish.com and will conclude on Monday, September 25th, at Noon eastern time. The public onsale begins Friday, September 29th, at Noon eastern time. A limited number of travel packages (hotel + tickets) will go on sale Wednesday, September 27th at Noon ET here.
Phish.net is a non-commercial project run by Phish fans and for Phish fans under the auspices of the all-volunteer, non-profit Mockingbird Foundation.
This project serves to compile, preserve, and protect encyclopedic information about Phish and their music.
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The Mockingbird Foundation is a non-profit organization founded by Phish fans in 1996 to generate charitable proceeds from the Phish community.
And since we're entirely volunteer – with no office, salaries, or paid staff – administrative costs are less than 2% of revenues! So far, we've distributed over $2 million to support music education for children – hundreds of grants in all 50 states, with more on the way.