What surprised me most about last night’s show was the length. It was a fucking marathon. About ten songs into the first set my friends and I started asking if they decided to forego a setbreak, but no… they played two monster sets filled with the classics we all grew up on. As each song started, my mind wandered to the first time I had heard that song or special versions I had seen the band perform over the years. The whole experience was quite surreal and fairly emotional.
The crowd went absolutely ballistic when the band busted out the first Fluffhead in nearly nine years. The post-hiatus version of Phish couldn’t handle Fluffhead, so it was a great sign they made it through the song’s complex changes with only a few flubbed notes. I thought the band was tight throughout the night with a few major exceptions including the brief “Coventry version” of YEM before they started it up again and a few miscues in Taste, but for the most part the Flubber Langs – as I like to call them – were few.
After the Fluffhead, Divided Sky, Chalk Dust trifecta the audience seemed absolutely beat. Most had waited in line for hours to get in and everyone spent so much energy celebrating the return of Fluffhead that the energy seemed a bit down for the middle of the monster first set, but luckily the band didn’t seem winded at all. It appears we all have to recalibrate our plans if the band plans to rock the fuck out for four hours each night. We’ll see what happens tonight when Phish returns for night two of this three night run. We’ll have a full photo gallery from the incredibly talented Dave Vann tomorrow if all goes according to plan, but he was nice enough to let us use some of his photos from last night in this piece.
Set 1: Fluffhead, Divided Sky, Chalk Dust Torture, Sample in a Jar, Stash, I Didn’t Know, Oh Kee Pah Ceremony > Suzy Greenberg, Farmhouse, NICU, Horn, Rift, Train Song, Water in the Sky, The Squirming Coil, David Bowie
Set 2: Backwards Down the Number Line, Tweezer, Taste, Possum, Theme From the Bottom, First Tube, Harry Hood, Waste, You Enjoy Myself
Encore: Grind, Bouncing Around the Room, Loving Cup
10 Responses
Been waiting for this review. Short but sweet. Page looks so happy.
FLUFF- Nuff said – Welcome back
I am still trying to process the Mothershit that just went down. Unreal. Wowza. What a night.
The advent of youtube is key in this modern era of Phish. To be able to essentially watch the whole show the next day is amazing. You can watch Fluffhead from last night here:
http://gotchamedia.blogspot.com/2009/03/phish-open-with-fluffhead-at-first.html
I was waiting to hear your thoughts. Game time should be happening in another hour. I heard it was a blast! Can’t wait to watch the setlist come in tonight – enjoy!
Calls for tonight: PYITE, Ya Mar, Free, Mike’s.
you rock scott.
I’m assuming the screw up at the start of YEM was intentional and done as a joking reference to the last time Phish tried to play YEM in the mothership, back in 03.
they botched the intro and had to restart it.
being able to laugh about that and, more importantly, play in such a way that it’s clear that 09 isn’t going to go down like 03/04 speaks volumes about what i think we’re going to get from this version of Phish.
I’m very excited.
Soylent, thanks for making the YEM flub joke comment before me. It blows my mind how many people didn’t get that joke. Learn your Phishtory people!