I haven't seen anyone say it was the best show in decades. Miner said it was the best show in the last week though. I guess I can see how "a week" and "decades" are interchangable terms, if you don't believe in time.

News flash- middle of the pack for 1997 is something like 7/30/97 or 12/12/97. Amazing shows. If You think Phish playing a middling 97 show 15 years later is a bad thing, I don't know what to tell you.

Chalkdusts outro through the last note of Limb contained some of the most creative four way group improvisation heard since those halcyon early days of the late 90s. I don't think it tops the first two nights of Bethel, but I like it more than SF3 or the Undermind set if UIC or Dicks or any of the other highlights from the past year or so. Maybe it had to do with Frankie Says-> Undermind being an outright dream sequence to me, or the realization that this is the 2nd Chalkdust in a row to be more interesting than 90% of Chalkdusts, or my love for Limb by Limb and awe at hearing it blown to smithereens and taken further from its structure than its gone since Valentines 03. Or the way they passed up the typical Walk Away segue, weaver the opening chords into the Sand ending and launched into the 2nd segment of the song- the way I wish they'd do with -> Free since they usually have to backtrack to get to the intro.

Thinking of this show as Trey-centric cock rock is baffling to me. I thought the decision to extend Limb and the decision to go into a Chalkdust outro were the only times that Mike and Page and a fish weren't equally involved in the process, and both times they sound overjoyed to be making this music. The rest of that hour, they're the ones forging new wrinkles in the iron.

As for the YEM. I'm more into the San Fran one. I love how subdued Trey is in it. Because I'm into that kind of Phish, and yet this set is an easy "A".