A few disjointed thoughts to match a disjointed show:

1. The Tube was what I want Tubes to be - funky, meaty, and interesting enough to separate it from the other funky and meaty Tubes. Mike, in particular, did some fine work.

2. You guys all remember the 11/22/97 Tweezer, which gets ripcorded (if we're gonna use that term for 3.0, we damn sure should use it for 1.0) for BEK because it doesn't quite go anywhere? Yeah, this is the opposite of that. The Tweezer jam here is milky-smooth and melodic like Charlotte's last year, and it feels like it might take off MSG style, but then Trey slams on the brakes (the rest of the band's still going with the Tweezer jam for a few seconds, so abrupt is the shift) and we go into a (quite good, but still) Sand. Quite the buzzkill.

3. Everything felt a slight bit off all night, like the entire band was playing at different frame rates from each other at certain points. I'm fine with flubs in the composed section of songs, but if the band's sliding away from each other like tectonic plates, that's way more jarring.

4. Just a lovely Carini. Just lovely. I wrote in my entry for @LawnMemo's 33 for 33 series (you can find it on his website, I'm not going to plug myself in a review) that Phish can play a jam that mutates 4 or 5 different times, and that's what we got here. Every weapon in the arsenal gets pulled out - upbeat bliss, tempo shifts, a Page/Trey/Mike triumvirate of spiraling solos (with Mike teases aplenty - at least Meatstick, probably something else), semi-threatening rumbling (as opposed to the MSG Carini's just plain threatening rumbling) - and all in less than 10 minutes. This is why pulling out the stopwatch for jams now is such a waste of time - they may not go 20 minutes, but they can do a TON in 12 minutes. Nifty segue into Architect, too.

5. And finally, the SOAM, which is probably forever going to be the calling card of this show (and maybe a flashpoint for the whole summer, depending on how things shake out). @Slothberries pointed out in the show thread that it sounded like they flubbed in the regular jam and sorta lost their way, and I think I agree with him, but I love that instead of just rolling back into the regular jam they decided to take the road less traveled. I don't always love the path they took (see point 3 - there were moments where the band's on one track and Trey's on another), but I *really* liked that they started throwing things at the wall instead, opening up the jam, switching keys (check out what Page is doing), speeding up and going for pure rock, then finally sloughing off the fat and puddling the jam before reassembling itself for a more cohesive finish. The 6/7/12 Ghost tried a lot of different things, like this jam did; I'd say that tour turned out all right.

I also liked the supposedly butchered finish - Fish's huge grin at the end shows that they were just having a laugh, if the 200 different fakeout endings wasn't enough of a tipoff. And, most of all, I *love* that all of this happened in Set 1. They could easily have bailed on all of this and played Suzy, but instead they went for the gusto. MORE OF THIS, PLEASE.

6. Lots of smiling and fun to be had from the band on stage (other than when Page was getting into the Boogie On jam, Trey makes a left turn into Possum, and Page just stands there looking nonplussed). That's just as important as anything I blathered about above.