The first leg of Phish Summer Tour 2010 came to a close on Sunday night at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in Alpharetta, GA. We’ll have plenty of recaps of all sorts over the next week, but for now we wanted to present “just the facts.” We’ve put together a list of every setlist (via Phish.net) and have detailed our favorite audio sources, videos, reviews and photo galleries from each of the 18 shows Phish has performed thus far in 2010.
06/11/2010 Toyota Park Chicago, IL
Set 1: Down with Disease, Wolfman’s Brother, Possum, Boogie On Reggae Woman, Reba[1], Jesus Just Left Chicago, The Divided Sky, Golgi Apparatus > David Bowie
Set 2: Light -> Maze, Ghost -> Limb By Limb[2] > Prince Caspian > The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Run Like an Antelope[3], Show of Life[4]
Encore: Cavern > Julius
[1] No whistling.
[2] Ending vocal jam.
[3] DEG tease by Trey in intro. Fishman drum solo. “Jon Fishman” substituted for “Marco Esquandolas.” Lyrics changed to “Been you to have any stick.”
[4] Phish debut.
Notes: After Possum, Trey congratulated the hometown Chicago Blackhawks’ victory over his beloved Philadelphia Flyers in the Stanley Cup Finals that ended two days before this show. Reba was performed without the whistling ending. Limb by Limb included an ending vocal jam. Antelope contained a Dave’s Energy Guide tease by Trey in the intro section. Antelope subsequently contained a Fishman drum solo. “Jon Fishman” was substituted for “Marco Esquandolas” and Antelope’s lyrics were further changed with “Been you to have any stick.” This show featured the Phish debut of Show of Life. [Setlist Source]
READ ON for audio, videos & more from each tour stop…
With no new album to support and after a year of shows under their belts, Phish has been letting it all hang out on Summer Tour 2010. The craziness continued
Phish headed back to Merriweather Post Pavilion tonight for the second of two shows at the Frank Gehry-designed venue in Columbia, MD. Once again, the quartet caught everyone’s attention with an opener bust out as they switched instruments to tackle Walfredo for the first time since September 30, 2000. Gordon handled guitar, Fish played bass, Trey hopped on keys and Page kept the beat on drums for Walfredo.
Sunday night shows always bring out the best in Phish and that trend continued tonight through set one as the group followed the Walfredo bust out with their first cover of Bob Marley’s Mellow since It back in 2003. While Trey, Mike, Page and Fish may have dusted off Tela down in Miami and December 30, 2009, many fans weren’t able to make the trip down south, so we suspect there were quite a few folks who went nuts when Phish performed the Gamehendge rarity tonight in the middle of the first set.
Walfredo, Mellow Mood and Tela were just three of the six tour debuts Phish performed in set one alone. Digging deep into the depths of their repertoire, the popular rock band also busted out My Soul, Ginseng Sullivan and Brian and Robert for the first time in 2010 over the course of the opening stanza.
READ ON for tonight’s setlist and more of our recap…
Words: John Coleman
Images: Rob Chapman
Phish @ SPAC, June 19
After leaving Tweezer ‘reprise-less’ in Hershey last Sunday, Phish reconciled by serving up a double dose of Tweezer Reprise in Hartford on Friday night; appeasing those who feel it only necessary that Tweezer come full circle with a Tweezer Reprise later in the set.
That brings us to Saturday night’s show at Saratoga Performing Arts Center. A muggy affair at the amphitheater set in the tall pines and old oaks of the Spa State Park in scenic Saratoga Springs, NY.
[All Photos by Rob Chapman]
It was said to be a sell out, but tickets were an easy find in the lot. In any case, the powers that be at SPAC really packed ’em in. The Times Union (Albany) reported 25,000, which is a sell-out, but it felt like more. The lawn was busting at the seams and it looked as though there were two heads per seat in the pavilion. Being on the lawn (standing at 5′ 8″) it was tough to turn around without getting a face full of back sweat. But despite the stickiness, the crowd wasn’t pushy and everyone was amicable.
Set I
Feel free to throw on your ’79 Bill Walton Clippers jersey, because it was a throwback first set. The Tweeprise opener was followed by Chalkdust Torture, Funky Bitch and a Runaway Jim, which saw Trey lay the groundwork for for what would be some nice exploratory jams throughout the night.
READ ON for more of John’s thoughts and Rob’s photos…
Phish was all business for the first 2:45 of Friday’s show in Hartford, the second of two nights at the Comcast Theatre. But the encore, which featured a strange dedication and the same song played twice is probably what will be remembered most about this night.
Fee was an interesting choice for an opener on a Friday, when the crowd seemed ready for something with more energy. The song is fairly rare these days – it was played only once in 2009 – but doesn’t do much to get the crowd going and this version wasn’t really any exception. Rift was close and had some good moments but was not quite as tight as it should be as Trey struggled with the “darkness the light from above could not reach” lyric and several of the licks in the buildup and peak. The set got cooking briefly with a very strong Wolfman’s Brother that started funky but turned into more of a straight ahead rock and roll jam and the energy began to rise in the venue.
New Phish songs always sound strange the first time you hear them live. Everyone sort of looks around and shrugs and has that “I have no clue what this is” look on their faces. Summer of ’89 certainly drew those looks on Friday night. I can’t say I enjoyed the song all that much but I’ll reserve full judgment until it’s been worked out a bit. The beginning struck me as a Water in the Sky/Driver hybrid that tried to gain steam with a jam segment that didn’t go very far. But we’ll see how the song develops if it remains in the rotation.
READ ON for more from Luke on Night Two of Hartford…
Widespread Panic, Washington DC, April 21
The more time I spend with Widespread Panic’s forthcoming Dirty Side Down, the more it sounds to me like the most comfortable album Panic’s recorded in a decade. If it’s taken this long for Panic to finish a document that feels lovingly stitched together, not “assembled,” and truest to their live mojo, so be it –- for me, it’s taken almost as long for Panic the live band to be as reliable as they once were.
No, it’s not that I haven’t had epic, soul-nourishing Widespread experiences in the post-Houser era of the band, it’s just that it’s taken a long time to be able to depend on them again. Catching the band early in the tour in mid-April, the second of two nights in the capital’s lovely Warner Theater, was affirmative. To JB, Jimmy, JoJo, Dave, Sunny and Todd: I’m buying.
It was a haphazard show with some marvelous moments – part of Panic’s appeal, oddly, are the groovy, ragged edges that contrast the fiery peaks and soulful zeniths – and it was enough to keep me convinced. It’s not a “the band is back” type of feeling, either; Panic never went away and recovered pretty quickly, all told, from a personnel tragedy that would have derailed, or at least neutered, a lesser band. It’s more that I’m not convinced Panic’s best days are in the rearview mirror. They have miles to go, mountains to climb. Nearly 25 years in, that’s pretty impressive.
READ ON for more from Chad on WSP in Washington D.C….
“I believe whatever doesn’t kill you, simply makes you… [takes off his mask] stranger.”
…transformed into another image, and another drifting away, without beginning, or end, to always be, and not knowing what to do next, trapped in time, and fading into the mists of history, a glimpse of blissful eternity…
Ahhh…eternity, we’ve hit upon that word. Again. THAT word, buried below, like some lost remnant on an island where time has no meaning; and space, even less, just the two concepts engaged in immortal combat, as it were, with each other. Climb aboard as we venture out there into eternal bliss (or, is it madness?) in the first episode of the fourth season, and a nod back to the final episode of the third season, with a journey through the American version of a science fiction novel written by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris.
Transformed into another image, this film was produced by James “I’m King of the World” Cameron betwixt his minor Kate y Leo celluloid ride upon the waves of joyful rompery before remembering that they are, in fact, on the tragic Titanic (didn’t they see the movie? Didn’t they hear about the iceberg?), and a tiny 3-D science fiction docudrama called Avatar, starring an evil jarhead, the cool Latino chick from LOST, a miscast Ripley Weaver, and a bunch of little fairies and birds that are quite fascinating to watch when a) high, and b) catching the overwrought film on a towering 26-story screen.
Having passed on Avatar and hearing mostly meh things about Alice in Wonderland, the last time I saw a 3D Movie in the theaters Dennis Quaid was chasing a giant shark and Darryl Strawberry was a lanky rookie. So I was a little unsure of what to expect from the Phish 3D preview on April 20 in Brooklyn. Since the music has been reviewed ad nauseum (and for the record – I am in the “the Exile set was amazing, the acoustic set was cool and the rest was pretty average” camp when it comes to the music played that weekend), here is a quick rundown of the things that I liked most about the movie and a couple of things I would have done differently.
READ ON for more of what Luke liked and didn’t like about Phish 3D…
Words: Daniel Schneier
Titus Andronicus played one of their most high profile gigs to date recently, celebrating the release of their sophomore album The Monitor
At the core, Titus Andronicus is the brainchild of frontman Patrick Stickles, a slight, stern-faced New Jersey native with a taste for English literature, a proclivity for long onstage rants and a massive black beard that summons the image of a guitar-strapped suburban sorcerer. On opener A Pot in Which to Piss, Stickles rips through feedback-heavy guitar solos while keyboard player Dave Robbins cuts through a sheen of reverb and distortion, delivering a bluesy barroom style piano solo as a mosh pit takes shape in front of the stage. READ ON for more of Dan’s review of Titus Andronicus…
While we didn’t make it out to Indio for this year’s Coachella Valley Music & Art Festival, plenty of bloggers and journalists did make the trip. We wanted to point
