To each his/her own, but Sunday Dicks destroyed. I knew the setlist wouldn't excite everyone, but dont sleep on the Gin, Disease (super dark deconstructed spacey), Light, Possum (incredible peak) and 1st Tube.

The 1st Tube itself contained all the information of the universe conveyed by our 4 phabulous boys.

Plus we got our Dance on with Meatstick 2001 and Suzy!

Thank you Phish Thank you Dicks!
Thank you everyone who came this weekend. You made it what it was and it was good

I moved to Colorado a year before the annual Labor Day run at Dick's began and I feel considerably lucky to get these three days every year. In '15, I had a family obligation and flew back to the midwest Sunday morning, missing the famous THANK YOU show. And tonight was my second missed show because....old age. Okay - I'm still in my '30s, but Friday and Saturday kicked my ass, so I did the stupidest thing you can do as a Phish fan and chose to deliberately miss a Sunday show. Furthermore, missing a Sunday show at Dick's compound the stupidity if you just glance at the records: '11 second set obliteration punctuated by Guy Forget, '12 Sand Bliss, '14 Dark Sand Bliss and funky Wolfman's, '15 THANK YOU, '16 Crosseyed &hose& Painless / Light II. I watched the free feed tonight (Thanks Phish!) and it was a really upbeat show with a couple of highlights, but not a barnburner by any stretch of the imagination. Side note: Most Events Aren't Planned is fast becoming one of my new favorite Phish songs (do we call it a Phish song or cover if Page wrote it?).
I noticed something on Friday that piqued my interest on Saturday, and, since I was sitting at home tonight, I actually looked into it a bit. It felt like Phish has been playing a lot of the same songs every time they do their 3 days at Dick's. I'm not a math person, so I can't begin to discuss statistical probability with even a modicum of authority. But this is what I do know - the following is a list of songs played at Dick's 7, 6, or 5 times. I've asterisked the songs that were additionally played at 1st Bank Center during their 3-day run in Fall '10. I know that they don't really look at what they've done historically at a certain venue to inform their setlist decisions and that those are predicated far more on what's been played recently, but am I crazy in thinking that they need to start focusing on '10 - '17 (if and) when they play Dick's next Labor Day weekend? This year, more than anything, I kept getting a bad taste in my mouth and yearning for some variety. I don't go on tour, so these are the only shows I get to see every year. I love this band and I think they did something monumental and historic with their MSG run last month. If they can avoid repeats for 13 straight shows, surely they can take a look at their past setlists and avoid playing Light and Chalk Dust for the umpteenth million time next year, right?
Light (7)*
CDT (7)*
Ghost (7)*
Moma (7)*
Hood (7)
Piper (7)*
Antelope (7)*
The Wedge (7)
DwD (6)
Sand (6)
Tweezer (6)*
Gin (6)
46 Days (6)*
Slave (6)*
Carini (5)*
Free (5)*
WotC (5)
- - WotC played only 36 times in 3.0 (almost 1 in of every 7 at Dick's)
Steam (5)
- - Steam played only 27 times since it’s ’11 debut (more than 1 in every 6 at Dick's)
Carini (5)
Twist (5)*
Mike’s Groove (5)*
Hallye's (5)*
Suzy Greenberg (5)
BOTT (5)*
One more note - I haven't been keeping up with the boards lately, so if someone has already pointed this out, I had no intention of plagiarizing them. Surely I can't be the only one who has noticed this, right?

Wow, What a phantastic weekend! The NMINML>Carini>Ghost on Friday, the Reba and Sand on Saturday (not to mention that encore) were all amazing moments, and I feel so grateful to have been there! I think all of these shows are worth a Relisten, but for me the second set last night was THE highlight of the weekend. It was just so much Type II bliss, and the boys were absolutely locked in!

My crowd neighbor called disease during setbreak and I'm so glad he did. It went deep into another world after a rather quick composed jam section. Fish took this groove and got all up in its business, while the band moved as one organism laying down this meditative atmospheric jam that just felt like riding the vibrations of a stream of light. So of course Light followed with the band gliding right through. And the good vibes came to a more articulated focus in the lyrics of Come Together. They abandoned the standard Piper crescendo almost as soon as it began and took it to yet another gorgeous improv'd creation. More flawless transitions brought a rock solid meatstick and groovy 2001 into a downright evil possum. So much tension!!! Suzy catharsis concluded one beautiful set of music that should not be missed!

Thank you Phish for continuing to blow my mind! Much love to everybody at Dick's for another great year!

This show was awesome. Dick's '17 is getting criminally underrated.

Hot take: 17 > 15. However, the ratings don't say so. BD aftermath affecting this run severely.

Phish came with a decided effort to play "Phish" shows. Hence, no covers (I don't count 2001).

3.7's for SAT & SUN are terribly unfair. These two shows are NOT worse than '15's N1 & N2.

$.02

I totally understand if folks don't rate this show top notch. It is a Phish show and if your scoring a show by the uniqueness of the set list or the 20+ minute jams, then you'll rank it low. But being there was great. I, too was disappointed by the lack of set list hijinks, but the true test of a Phish show is the fun everyone has and last night was fun.

I don't know if the webcast showed what happened during Light. We were in Page-side stands and some folks launched THOUSANDS of glow sticks showering down on us. I know the band had to see it.

Thanks Phish for a great summer of music.

September 3rd, 2017 was the final night of my first trip to Colorado’s annual Phish run at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park (which I had by this time started calling “Dick’s”, much to my own chagrin). It’s rare that I skip out on the option to camp onsite and even rarer that I’m happy about it, but having a suite at the Embassy Suites turned out to be pretty sweet, what with such a large and high-quality crew of friends old and new also inhabiting the semi-luxurious quarters, plus I never really had the option of camping anyway, unless I was willing to do it without m’lady.

Which, of course, I wasn’t.

With my partner well on her way to mending from a nasty bout of bronchitis we managed a fun day in and around the hotel before heading down to the stadium nice and early.

Our target was a rise in the lawn between the soccer field and the parking lot, a spot where hundreds of people meet up and while away the time sitting on blankets and sharing beers, and an area we called the grassy knoll. On this last day I was happy to not only meet up with several of our American friends, but more specifically we managed to round up a crew of at least eight or ten Ottawa friends to share out preshow festivities with.

I always love running into my ever-growing far-flung crew of friends at Phish shows, but it’s always especially great when I run into my hometown homeys. What a treat to find yourself in such wonderful and regular company even after flying to the other side of the continent. And that’s just one of the things that makes Phish tour so damn great.

Another thing is all the great music, and the band sure delivered on this night to close out the run. I remember a particularly awesome Birds of a Feather in the first set, which closed with 46 Days>Bathtub Gin. Of course Bathtub Gin is always a fan-favourite but you know, I really, really like that 46 Days song every time I hear it. It’s funny that I never think of the song as one of my favourites, but I guess it is.

The second set was one big continuous pile of music. Phish jammed the opening Down With Disease into Light and then they jammed that into the next song and into the next and into the next and so on until they finally stopped by ending the set with the straight-up rocker Suzy Greenberg.

So set two comprised a full eighty-three minutes of nonstop music traversing through eight songs. And they do that sort of thing all the time.

(Another fantastic thing about Phish is their light guy Chris Kuroda. Dude is the best in the business and the one song where he generally shines the brightest is during Phish’s cover of Also Sprach Zarathustra, which most people know as the Theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Anyway, they played it in the second set and just like always the lights were outta sight. Don’t get me wrong, the lights were astoundingly good for the whole run – Chris never has an off night as far as I can tell – but yeah, he was especially good during 2001.)

And then it was back to the hotel for a final round of afterparties that went just as long as we felt like, because m’lady and I were clever enough to book an extra night at the hotel so we wouldn’t have to bug out on the day after the last show. Okay, we weren’t actually being “clever”, it was more due to the fact that there weren’t any airmiles flights available on the Monday, but m’lady and I felt like geniuses anyway.

And so it was that I discovered what m’lady had been insisting for years: there’s nothing like Dick’s.

Man, I can’t wait for the venue to get another naming sponsor.

http://www.toddmanout.com

Buffalo Bill opener! That's goofy as all get-out. I'm glad Most Events Aren't Planned is starting to work its way into the Phish live catalogue. Back on the Train is a good version. Leaves makes another appearance. And Bathtub Gin is typically perennial. Set II: Down with Disease opens, and takes more of a textural turn, with plenty of effects from Trey. Light gets funkier, and the funk reappears in Piper. This may not be constructive criticism, but I think Phish should do something different with Meatstick than just the Japanese lyrics. I don't know precisely what that could be, unless maybe they could work in some musical allusion to Big Cypress and the role Meatstick played in *The Show*, kind of like how Trey almost always seems to emphasize the "Filter out the Everglades" lyric in Water in the Sky. Possum is always good value, and I enjoy the Waste > First Tube encore. 9/1/17 at Dick's might've been more experimental or groundbreaking, but the cat's among the pixies now. I give this show 4 stars.