[We would like to thank David “Zzyzx” Steinberg (@zzyzx) for recapping last night's show. If you like this kind of writing you can find more on The Phish Stats Facebook Page, Twitter (mainly for Phish content), and Bluesky (much more present and engaged in conversation). -Ed.]

9/1/24 was Phish’s 42^nd time playing Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. Only three venues – Madison Square Garden, Nectar’s, and The Front – have reached that status. For fans of science fiction, that is a bit of a sacred number. In Douglas Adams’ humorous The Hitchhiker’s Gude to the Galaxy, a massive computer is built to discover the answer to the ultimate question: that of life, the universe, and everything. It was a tricky one that took millions of years and when the distant descendants of the programmers and philosophers who created Deep Thought finally got the information, it turned out that the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything is – well – 42. You see, it’s that no one really quite knows what the question is. Oh, sorry, spoilers for a 45-year-old book. Oops!

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[We would like to thank Rob (@mikh2wg) for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

So far, this has been a pretty good vacation. My friend and I got into Denver on Friday. We hadn’t planned it, but our flights landed within 30mins of each other. We pulled into the first taco place we spotted, and it was wonderful. The hotel had our room ready when we got there. We saw a pretty damn good Phish show Friday night. A great start to the trip. My friend recently adopted a four year old and I have had a lot of stress at work so far this year, so we were both ready to relax. We started off Saturday with a hike at Lair O’ the Bear.

It was an easy walk, with the biggest incline coming from the parking lot. There were beautiful views and a babbling creek. Lots of time to look out at nature and muse about all the people who have lived and worked in these hills before us. On the way home, we spotted a sign for something called Dinosaur Ridge so we checked that out too. They had a bunch of dino tracks and some cool rock formations. The brontosaurus bulges were our favorites. Then it was back to the hotel to enjoy a few hours of rest and relaxation before lot dinner and showtime. At this point, I may have blissed out too much on nature and hot tubs to bring an entirely objective eye to Dicks’ Night 3, but I will do my best. I take my responsibility to dot net very seriously.

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[We would like to thank Steve Plock (@howiep) aka @steve81573937, drummer for The Curls , and manager of the world famous iO Theater in Chicago, and Justin Mercer @piperpiperworm for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

In a year of Phish already marked by so many monumental events and runs, it’s natural for anyone coming to Colorado this weekend to wonder how the band is going to treat these final four shows of summer tour.

2024 came off the heels of the band’s first full Gamehendge performance in 24 years, then came the Mexico run that showed the band stretching out to new lengths in their jams, a hint of things to come later in the year. In April, Phish took the Sphere for a four night run that makes the Dead and Co subsequent performances look like Cocomelon for hippies, and the last two months have seen some of the longest and most exploratory jamming from the band in their entire history, culminating in their first festival in 9 years.

There isn’t much to say about Mondegreen that hasn’t been said in other reviews here, so I’ll only add that as we drove home from Delaware back to Chicago for 13 hours, I couldn’t help but wonder how Dick’s was going to feel as the coda on a year filled with so many milestones and highly memorable moments.

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[We would like to thank Josh Cohron (@cohron1) aka @JoshCohron for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

When a band has been around for as long as Phish has and has created the devoted following they have, expectations are naturally going to arise. The fanbase has little idea how much our expectations are felt by the band. When there is a collective disappointment or unrest among Phish fans, does Phish know?

This question was on my mind as I traveled out for the show. With the abrupt, confusing ending to Mondegreen eleven days prior, would the band want to come out firing in their first show since? Did they even need to, given what happened seemed out of their control?

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[“From the Forum” is a new blog feature series that highlights quality posts from the Phish.net forum to share more broadly. This inaugural edition was originally posted by @Profjibboo on August 18, 2024. -Ed.]

38 - The number of shows Phish has played at Dick's Sporting Goods Park. In 2022, Dick's passed The Front to become Phish's 2nd most played venue of all time. It trails only Madison Square Garden, which has had 83 shows. Dick's accounts for 2% of all Phish shows. Commerce City is also securely #3 on the most played cities list, behind New York City and Burlington. At the end of 2024, it will have a 10 show advantage over #4, Noblesville, IN.

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[Thank you Christy Articola for Surrender to the Flow and this post. -Ed.]

The Dicks Colorado 2024 issue of Surrender to the Flow is available here. This issue is FREE to download, but if you would like to pay something for it (donate), we will gladly accept!

This issue is full of good stuff for you! It includes information about Dick's Sporting Goods Park, things to do in Colorado in your free time, and our regular features like recipes, My First Show, My Favorite Jam Ever, 20 Years Later, Phish Changed My Life, Everybody Loves Statistics, Celebrations, fan fiction, a puzzle, and other things we think you'll enjoy.

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[We would like to thank Paul Jakus (@paulj) of the Dept. of Applied Economics at Utah State University for this summary of research presented at the 2024 Phish Studies Conference. -Ed.]

This is the fourth and final blogpost regarding the current rating system. Previous posts can be found here, here and here.

Post #2 showed how two metrics—average deviation and entropy—have been used by product marketers to identify anomalous raters; Post #3 showed how anomalous users may increase bias in the show rating. Many Phish.Net users have intuitively known that anomalous raters increase rating bias, and have suggested using a rating system similar to that used by rateyourmusic.com (RYM). RYM is an album rating aggregation website where registered users have provided nearly 137 million ratings of 6.2 million albums recorded by nearly 1.8 million artists (as of August 2024).

Similar to Phish.Net, RYM uses a five-point star rating scale but, unlike .Net, an album’s rating is not a simple average of all user ratings. Instead, RYM calculates a weighted average, where the most credible raters are given greater weight than less credible raters. Weights differ across raters on the basis of the number of albums they have rated and/or reviewed, the length of time since their last review, whether or not the reviewer provides only extreme ratings (lowest and/or highest scores), and how often they log onto the site, among other measures. These measures identify credible reviewers and separate them from what the site describes as possible “trolls”. Weights are not made public, and the exact details of the weighting system are left deliberately opaque so as to avoid strategic rating behavior.

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[We would like to thank Paul Jakus (@paulj) of the Dept. of Applied Economics at Utah State University for this summary of research presented at the 2024 Phish Studies Conference. -Ed.]

The first two blogposts in this series can be found here and here. This post will address the statistical biases believed to be present in the data, and how anomalous raters may contribute to bias.

Statistically, a show rating represents our best point estimate of an unobservable theoretical construct: the “true” show rating. To the degree that an estimated show rating deviates from its true value, the error is composed of sampling variance and bias. In the figure below, think of the bullseye as the true show rating, and the red dots as our estimates (best guesses) of the true value.

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[We would like to thank Paul Jakus (@paulj) of the Dept. of Applied Economics at Utah State University for this summary of research presented at the 2024 Phish Studies Conference. -Ed.]

Numerous Phish.Net Forum threads have hypothesized about the effect of people with extreme ratings behavior on show ratings, so this post will focus on the behavior of (anonymous) individual raters. The most well-known of extreme raters are “bombers”, or those who rate all shows as a ‘1’. “Fluffers”—those who rate every show a ‘5’—have received less attention than bombers.

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[We would like to thank Paul Jakus (@paulj) of the Dept. of Applied Economics at Utah State University for this summary of research presented at the 2024 Phish Studies Conference. -Ed.]

As many of you know, the coding/architecture of Phish.Net is currently undergoing a major overall. While the ability to rate shows has been restored, we continue to study the ratings database with the goal of improving the accuracy (and credibility) of show ratings. This is the first in a series of four blogposts about that effort.

This post will focus the raw ratings data.

All analysis is based on an anonymized database downloaded on October 26, 2023.

This date allows us to sidestep problems associated with possible ratings shenanigans in the aftermath of the NYE Gamehendge performance. Ratings for 592 dates that were soundchecks, TV appearances, side projects, false dates (on which no show was performed), and shows for which there is no surviving audiotape were deleted. The final data consist of 343,241 ratings from 16,452 users for 1,736 shows. The shows ranged from Phish’s first, December 2, 1983, through October 15, 2023.

Show ratings are tightly concentrated at high values.

A smoothed distribution for show ratings (the simple average of individual ratings) appears below. Ratings have a heavy concentration of shows packed in between 4.0 and 4.8, and a long tail of relatively fewer shows spread across the relatively low ratings (<4.0).

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[We would like to thank Brad Strode (@c_wallob) for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

My first Phish show was in December 2003. Subsequently, my first Phish festival was Coventry. I have a lot of great memories of Coventry, harrowing though it was. Being 21 at the time, I didn’t mind the long wait in traffic, the 14 mile walk we took to get to the grounds, or even the mud; those were shared experiences with my friends and fellow fans. I remember the kindness of those around us, sharing with our neighbors to pool limited supplies we could carry in, and even that “Melt” jam was pretty fire. Another core memory of that festival was the trek off the concert field after the last song, “The Curtain (With).” I have never seen tens of thousands of people that silent, save maybe a sob from a disheartened fan (truly believing it was over), or maybe the occasional disgruntled shout of, “What the fuck was that?!?!?” Over the past 160+ shows I’ve had the privilege to see, I have frequently thought of the despair that everyone felt leaving that concert field, and I reflect on how fortunate we are to have this band back in our lives.

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[We would like to thank Alaina Stamatis (Farmhose on dot net and Fad Albert on Twitter) for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

Terry Gross: You’re listening to Fresh Air. My guest today is the seminal improvisational rock band Phish, who formed 41 years ago and continue to innovate and excite across every living generation. They are in some ways torch bearers for what the Grateful Dead ignited, but in many ways they are a “Fuego” unto themselves. Last night they performed their Saturday night set at their 11th festival called Mondegreen, which has an estimated attendance of upwards of 40,000 strong. Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

Phish: Thank you for having us.

Terry Gross: So, tell me about Mondegreen.

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[We would like to thank Cotter Smart (@Cotter_Smart) for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

There seem to be special times in life we are given a third opportunity. Be it college, with our significant other, or an extra Phish set. I say this not knocking the first two sets of music we all heard in the woodlands last night, they were good. The band sounded very intentional, they came out and played with a purpose. Nothing was bad, but outside of a few amazing moments during a “Pillow Jets” into “Your Pet Cat” jam there was nothing got to the heights reached previously in the tour. The secret set felt like culmination of it all.

I tend to get the difficult tasks of writing reviews for out of the ordinary shows. I wrote the Gamehendge review, and prior to that put pen to paper when Trey got stuck. Those were not easy to do; this represents an entirely different challenge. Trying to accurately describe the intricacies of a 50-minute behemoth as someone who’s not musically well endowed. I’ll do my best.

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[We would like to thank Your Name (@ObviousFool) aka @silasioak for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

There is a palpable excitement on the first day of a Phish run, when the waiting is finally over and the day of the show is finally here. This is especially true of a Phish festival, a truly singular experience, and one that many in this fanbase have yet to experience. It’s been almost a decade since Magnaball, the last Phish festival to actually occur, and some of us have PTSD from the last time we were supposed to be doing this.

As I arrive in Baltimore at the crack of dawn, I’ve barely slept, kept awake by an intoxicating cocktail of anxiety, anticipation, and excitement. The day before, when my wristband arrived in the mail, some of the anxiety was replaced with goosebumps, but after our misadventures in 2018, I’m not counting any chickens before they’ve hatched, grown, and been turned into spicy chicken sandwiches.

I grab my rental car and after quick stops for snacks and coffee, I make my way towards Dover. I arrive at my hotel shortly after 9AM, naively optimistic that my room might be ready for me six hours before check-in. After a couple hours of napping in the A/C in my backseat, I return to the lobby to find Reed (@DaleCooper) and his brother Nathan (@DriftlessMN) - it turns out they’re actually staying at the hotel across the street, but by the luck of their error, I’ve found my first friends.

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[We would like to thank @drbeechwood and his friend, photographer Tony Stack, for this photoessay -Ed.]

If you were there, you remember…the highs, the lows, the rain, and the sun. Some of you walked for miles, others like us somehow found back roads and drove really close to the venue with no problem, while listening to the radio and hearing Mike tell people to turn around. No way! The music…speaks for itself? These were some of the lowest rated shows ever, but in the end, we got together for a celebration of the end that ended up NOT being the end.

A lot happened between the sad final notes of "The Curtain With" at Coventry on 8/15/04 and the jubilant first notes of "Fluffhead" on 3/6/09 at Hampton…and here we are, 20 Years Later, about to celebrate another East Coast festival in Delaware.

My friend, Tony Stack, from Boulder, Colorado (“Rocksteady Studios”) was a freelance photographer for Jambase and got a photo pass for the weekend. This resulted in the shots from the on-stage scaffolding and a few pictures from the pit, but he also took some photos of the crowd before and during the shows, reminding us that it wasn’t all a muddy depressing weekend. Enjoy!

All photos used with permission © 2004 Tony Stack

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