Happy Sunday from all of us here at HT! This is a quick reminder that it’s easy to have your finger on the digital pulse of what’s going on tonight
For me, this was the one – a serious, relentlessly energetic Phish concert that rollicked for more than three hours and drew generously on the vibes created by a happy crowd, a gorgeously temperate New England evening, and the assuredness of having spent a week on the road, working out kinks, getting sea legs back, remembering to enjoy one another’s myself onstage.
[All photos by Jeremy Gordon from 6/5]
All four of our beloved Phishermen delivered the goods, and while we’re still far from the point where they feel comfortable (excitable?) enough to take jams deep into the blurry, whirry cosmos, I haven’t seen or heard a better full-length expression of the fairly conservative, songs-first, relax-and-do-your-job well Phish 3.0 yet than what we witnessed at Mansfield last night. The boys were on. They had it. They reined things in where, say, 10 years ago they might have been an exercise in transcendent improvisation, or five years ago they might have been a frayed, sloppy trainwreck, but the crowd was better for it, the vibe was better for it, and the band, well, it’s safe to say it feels like Phish again. “Long live the Phish!” howled a goofy bobber in a Makisupa Police Academy t-shirt, seconds after Phish put the wraps on his apparel’s titular song.
All around, the setlists have been a little oddly paced in the week of shows we’ve seen so far, but maybe that’s a subtle suggestion to throw out old ideas about how a Phish show’s machinery should be oiled. They didn’t exactly lose anybody by opening with a new song (Stealing Time from the Faulty Plan — crisply rendered, if no great shakes) and a relative obscurity from Undermind, the cool, even-keel Nothing. Quite the opposite; when the groovy gallop of Back On the Train set in and had the whole place bobbing along like synchronized pogo, the band had already hit its stride, not yet even a half hour into the first set. From there came balanced moments of familiarity that were briefly, wonderfully toppled with aggressive jamming: a ripping, groovalicious Gotta Jibboo tempered by Page’s calming croon in Lawn Boy, for example, or a Trey solo nugget (Let Me Lie) splayed against Taste; or the laid back snacking of that Makisupa followed by a deceptively easygoing, then full-forced hungry Prince Caspian. Trey had already torched the midsection of Jibboo but it was here where he veered from note-y pointillism to starry-eyed, psychedelic abandon. Simply. Fucking. Gorgeous.
READ ON for more from Chad on last night’s Phish show…
Jeremy Gordon was on hand to shoot night three of Jones Beach…
