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​For nearly two decades, we and everyone else has listed the 7/30/93 show as "The Veranda at Starwood." That's what Phish called it in their newsletter the previous spring (see at left). But the space didn't even exist yet, as a performance space – and that's not how Starwood billed it. A recently unearthed flyer reveals the space's correct name – or, at least, how the venue was billed that week and that night.

Starwood Amphitheatre was a small southern outdoor amphitheatre owned successively by SFX, Clear Channel, and Live Nation, but closed in 2006 and razed in 2007. Akin to the Nissan Pavillion in Northern Virginia, it had a capacity of 17,137 -- far too big for a 1993 Phish show. It still isn't clear why or how this was the spot to play on the way from Knoxville to Atlanta. But staff roped off the concessions area – a large, flat, concrete plaza directly ahead of the entrance gates – and erected a stage along the edge.

Even with the reduction in space, the space was too big, roped off to accomodate 3,500 though fewer than 1,800 tickets were sold. The area was so restricted that attending fans never even saw the venue proper. The entrance walkway seemed to be straight ahead, through the plaza - but the stage was to the right, with a view of the skyline behind the band. That's where the flock assembled, being eyed suspiciously by the local constables, as they themselves were eyeing the skyline and discussing the Stowe "plug the PA up my ass" comment of 8 days prior. But on this night, nature and the fuzz both backed off, and the band and fans locked in.

We didn't even need, or want, their mammoth "venue proper." We knew it would be special, from flyers taped (yes, actually taped) to windshields in Knoxville the night before (see to right), which promised “a stage built behind the hill in the Plaza area. By not using the usual pavilion area, the Phish family will have a close, intimate experience.” They billed it "the debut plaza party," and we're not aware of any other band performing in that space. It was ours that night, and it's never belonged to anyone else. When Phish announced it, it's name apparently hadn't yet settled. But by the time they took the stage, twenty years ago last week, it was – for one night only – the Plaza at Starwood.

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Check back on August 12 for MJM Part 155!

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For our final recap before Dick's, we decided to invite forum regular and significant contributor of reviews, @n00b100, who has already listened to countless hours of Phish, but saw his first live performance just last night in Los Angeles, to be a guest recapper.

It wasn't the drive up from San Diego where it truly hit me that I was about to see my first Phish show after becoming a true fan. Nor was it when I met up with some very friendly .netters and actually got to chat about the band in person, hearing cool stories about first shows and seeing the Giant Country Horns in person and witnessing the Prague Ghost. Nor was it on the walk to the Hollywood Bowl (also my first time for that hallowed venue), seeing people of all ages wearing everything from sundresses right out of Monterey Pop to "Reba" t-shirts using the Reese's logo to a fellow in a full three-piece suit. It was only when I sat in my space on the long wooden bench that constituted my row in Section L2, that I realized it. Almost fifty years ago a young girl sat in my very space and screamed nonsense at The Beatles, and in 20 minutes (give or take) I'd be screaming nonsense at Phish. That is when it really and truly hit me - I was at my first show. All the tapes, the spreadsheet scouring, the LivePhish CDs - that was just spring training. I was in the big leagues now.

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Ahh, West Coast Couch Tour! This fits my current schedule pretty well, unlike most of my adopted East Coast brethren who work normal people hours. There is also a nostalgia factor for me, since BGCA 3 last year was my first recapping experience for Phish.net. I enjoy writing these, but I thought I was done until the fall, so I was excited to get one more crack at it before the break. Now, let’s go to the show!

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OK, Phish fans.... we’re almost at the finish line for this leg of summer tour 2013! It has been a wild ride, and we still have the home stretch over the next two nights. Let’s cut to the action from Saturday at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. This recapper ran into a late-night perfect storm of adult socializing that resulted in an inspection of the sunrise, so today we’re going to necessarily be a bit brief.

“Grind” starts off the gig, giving us our first taste of a cappella for the tour. The first “Weigh” since 6/28/12 Deer Creek (45 shows) also offers enough “stop-start” to allow the crowd to exercise some of the hopefully subsiding “woo” energy. In a silly oddball song like “Weigh” this crowd effort doesn’t seem intrusive – as opposed, say, to during the previous evening’s “Reba” – though hopefully we’re all getting this out of our system. The new-to-2013 start rolls on with the always spirited “Alumni Blues” > “Letter to Jimmy Page” > “Alumni Blues,” only the sixth such performance since 1994.

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From the editors: For this installment of our Summer Tour Recaps, the editors of Phish.net wanted to extend an invitation to Peter Skewes-Cox (aka @ucpete) to offer his perspective on Friday night’s return to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Peter is a San Francisco native and longtime West Coast fan who in the last few years has become a more avid contributor to phish.net by reviewing shows and annotating as many teases as he can.

The 20th show of Summer Tour 2013 (and this reviewer’s 25th show since 1999) brought Phish to the place where being a dirty hippie was invented. A place I’m proud to call “home”. The tour has started off quite well, and has only continued to gather more steam (and rain) as the band knocks out its annual West Coast Swing. The anticipation in the crowd of 7,000 was palpable, and it seems in every direction one could hear a conversation involving “Tweezer”, “Tahoe”, and “37 minutes”. Not only was the “Tahoeezer” fresh in everyone’s minds, but the last time the band was at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, this happened. Would the band drop a 38 minute Ghost tonight, replete with “WOOO”? Or would they “revert” back to the fluid, well-structured, cohesive sets of July? Would the first of three be the “song-driven” show? Would there be a much-wanted Dead sit-in or cover for three San Francisco shows falling in the week between Jerry’s birthday and the anniversary of his death (somehow I got both in my first two shows and haven’t had either since)? Let’s find out…

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The first leg of our journey to see Phish in Lake Tahoe was grueling. After two amazing shows at the Gorge Amphitheater had left my wife and I in a state of complete disarray, we loaded up the truck and began the long descent from the Columbia Plateau to the Klamath Lake Basin. The drive seemed interminably long, owing mostly to the fatigue of three solid days of raging hard against the dying of the keg, but also due to some severe wildfire smoke inhalation. At times the road ahead was lost in a hazy mirage. My whole face seemed chapped from the dry heat of the high desert. After nine hours of hard labor, we pulled up to the Running Y Ranch and settled into our lodging for the night. We were so tired, we couldn’t even be bothered to pull the lid off the hot tub we had at our disposal. The ascent from Klamath Falls to the liquid sapphire in the center of the Sierra Nevada uplift was, in stark contrast, the driving equivalent of a cool mountain breeze blowing up the leg of my cargo shorts. Incredible what a good sleep can do for your performance. If I had any sense I would pay attention to that lesson and take a nap before I wrote this recap. Since I took two, and drove home to Portland, I apologize that you may not read this before the Bill Graham shows begin. Hell, I was only signed up for writing the recap for night two in Tahoe...but since my esteemed colleague Phillip Zerbo was busy training for his epic second place finish at the Phamily Poker Classic and couldn’t stop shuffling his deck long enough to put fingers to keyboard, I had to combine both shows into one ball of earwax. So let’s get to burning it.

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Back in the early age of the internet, and before widespread use of cell phones, fans would usually have to wait until the next morning to find out what happened at a concert. I have three vivid memories from undergrad when, while I was sitting at a computer, I felt myself filling with excitement and joy in reading what had happened the night before. One was March 20, 1995, when I read on rec.music.dead that the Grateful Dead *finally* played Unbroken Chain to close the previous night's first set in Philadelphia (stories were coming back that a few chosen fans held up their cell phones for friends; others rushed to use pay phones at setbreak -- it was a big deal). The next was November 1 of that same year when I walked from Studio near the Pantheon to one of the only computer labs in all of Rome, just north of the Vatican, to find out that Phish played Quadrophenia for Halloween. The third was in the Fall of 1996, reading about Phish's famous "M" set from St. Louis, complete with Mean Mr. John Popper (just a week after seeing my fourth and fifth shows).

Fast-forward seventeen years to yesterday morning, when I woke up to hundreds of messages on my phone in the form of Tweets and GroupMe posts describing what had gone down just a few hours earlier in Tahoe. If I had stayed up, I could have even listened along to the Tweezer by means of a fan's stream from the show. Instead, I quickly downloaded the show and was able to listen to the eighth-longest song Phish ever played twice before I even got into work. And by early morning, I was up to my fourth listen (compared to seventeen years earlier, when I was resigned that I would have to wait weeks -- or months -- before I could even hear a note; I remember anxiously awaiting for a tape Vine or Tree for that Dead show . . . ).

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Good afternoon, contestants. We have an unidentified audio clip labeled "MJM CLIV" that requires your attention. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to be the first person to identify the song and date of this mystery clip. If you succeed, you will win one MP3 download courtesy of LivePhish.com / Nugs.net. Each contestant will be allotted one guess per day, with the second “day” starting after the hint is posted on Tuesday if necessary, with the answer to follow on Wednesday. Also to assist you is the All-Time MJM Results document linked by the image below. If you are caught at your place of employment or educational facility by a superior, the blog will disavow any knowledge of your actions.

This blog will self-destruct in five seconds.

Answer: For the first time in seven weeks we have a first-time winner, as @garcia17 completed the mission in identifying the 8/8/93 David Bowie. Awesome show (of skill), great job!

#155 in five.

The conclusion of Phish’s 7th set of shows at the Gorge brought more heat, reverence for the beauty, and some serious exploration and jams. I am not one to try and pigeon-hole a show as “best of 3.0” or “best start to finish show of the year” but it’s hard to argue with the playing on both nights of this run, and night 2 has some pretty goosebump-inducing moments and a second set that should stand the test of time.

George, Washington is about as close to the middle of nowhere that you can find, and an odd but beautiful place for a music venue. The dramatic scenery surrounding the stage is awe-inspiring and humbling. Contrast that with the nearly inhospitable heat and dryness of the high desert summer landscape, and you have the tension and release that mirrors what a lot of Phish music attempts to achieve. It is a must-see venue for Phish fans, and this year many finally checked it off their bucket list.

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1900 miles separate Chicago and George, WA, home of The Gorge Amphitheatre. That’s already a long way to schlepp a band the size of Phish, but the plan was there’d be nearly a week to do it. Then the Toronto show got flooded out, forcing the band to jog eastward another 500 miles for a Monday makeup gig – instead of westward toward Washington at what one imagines would have been a leisurely pace. Like the forces majeures that plagued the first half of summer tour, it’s the kind of unforeseen circumstance that demands teamwork and improvisation. A test of the band’s mettle.

So what’s the verdict? Will we see a road-weary Phish tonight, or a battle-hardened unit that takes the stage at The Gorge with clear heads, full hearts, and a shared desire to win their westward campaign? Let’s find out.

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Disclaimer, I am one of the people who was originally scheduled to attend Phish’s originally scheduled Toronto appearance on 7/9/13, and went to the show. I sadly did not have an opportunity to make it back to tonight’s show. Thanks to LivePhish for the live music sharing capabilities.

Phish love water. Are you wet yet? If you have been seeing shows this tour, you have no doubt been affected in some way, shape or form by water. You might have experienced this in the form of showers, humidity so thick that to dance in it causes those who don’t sweat to sweat buckets, cold torrential rain, rain on steroids, and even floods. You might have had a set cut short, or an entire set cancelled, or an entire show cancelled.

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Here at Phish.net headquarters, we're always looking out for the general well-being of our fellow Phish fans. Rather than venturing outside into this summer's merciless heat and rain, why not stay indoors and take a crack at solving the one-hundred and fifty-third running of Mystery Jam Monday? Just be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam clip and win one MP3 download courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. Each person gets one guess per day, with the second “day” starting after I post the hint. A hint will be posted on Tuesday if necessary, with the answer to follow on Wednesday.

Answer: @ucpete is the winner of this week's MP3 download, as he was not fooled by the Tweezeresque section of the 6/24/97 Wolfman's Brother. Once again, the contestants impress.

Keep on the lookout for MJM #154 next Monday.

Disclaimer: I watched most of this show via webcast, but the stream died during “Gin” and really only got going again for me during “Lizards,” so I had to fill in the gaps by listening this morning. Now let's do it.

The show starts with a fan request as Trey asks what a “0-172 Dinner and a Movie” sign means, and then announces that “This is for you!” “Dinner and a Movie,” not seen since Deer Creek last year, is slightly undercooked and direct to video, but typical opener “AC/DC Bag” is right behind to get the set’s musical boulder rolling down the mountain. As “AC/DC Bag” dissipates, Trey holds on to the last and highest note while Fish leads us into the “Maze.” This is the kind of strong, complete rendition that makes “Maze” a great first-set tune. Page dances all over the organ, with attentive compliments from Trey, who then fires off a picture perfect solo to bring us back home. “Mound” is up next, and is a bit of a struggle in places, but “Funky Bitch” is served up Chicago style, with a deep Mike crust, swimming in Page sauce, and secret Anastasio spices.

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Before we get to Saturday’s action from Phish’s gig at Northerly Island in Chicago, let’s briefly consider, “well, how did we get here?” The “here” is a three-set show, a structure typically reserved only for Phish festivals, Halloween, and New Year’s Eve performances. The “how” was Friday’s show that was abruptly halted eleven minutes into the second set during “Prince Caspian,” due to the approach of potentially severe thunderstorms. The venue was immediately evacuated, and soon thereafter it was announced the show was cancelled.

The upwards of 30,000 attendees exited the venue as swiftly and safely as the venue’s island logistics allowed. Fans were chill – to everyone that was a part of not making headlines, great job! On the level-headed end of the spectrum, fans acknowledged that while it was obviously a bummer, shit happens. Lightning strikes are powerful, majestic, yet often deadly events. Trey did in fact famously take a more carefree approach when on 7/22/93 in Stowe, VT, in response to the staff talking about canceling the show due to the danger of electrocution during a show that took place in a total downpour, “Fuck that. Put the plug up my ass and count out Llama!” In this spot, however, public safety and a sober assessment of very real risk rightly won the day.

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