Detroit Rock City! First Phish show at Cobo, and it was a good one! A small venue that really let Chris and his lights shine (no pun intended). The light patterns on the walls to the left and the right of the stage were something I hadn't seen before. The crowd was really into the show, despite not being sold out. Easily the smallest crowd I have ever seen at a show (probably less than 10,000).

Here are a few of my personal highlights... Page got ahold of Foam and really tore it up! I have a new-found respect for Kill Devil Falls, as the boys jammed-out the second half of the song get a let it get a little dark and dirty. It's Ice and Horn were great additions (Horn was on my "wish list" for that show), the 46 Days was smokin' hot (another newer song that they realy jammed-out), and a Bowie to close the set! SOLID!

The second set had some great moments as well... the 15+ minute DWD into Free was fantastic. Although slow-paced, Waste is one of my favorite "slow" Phish songs, and it was great to hear it. Velvet Sea gave me the opportunity to go to the bathroom and get a beer :), making it back just in time for a really good Mike's>Hydrogen>Weekapaug (first time in more thn 13 years that I have actually heard Hydrogen in between Mike's and Weekapaug).

Overall... a great show. Fall Phishing season in officially open!

My first show in 15 years... and after seeing the setlist from the previous night in CT I guess I was preparing myself for a letdown. Got it. Negatives include that the show ended well before Merriweather's show "curfew" - they started late & ended early, c'mon boys I waited 15 years for this!! I loved KDF, had been listening to it online and was looking forward to hearing it, a good rockin' version. The Sloth was a homerun, but it was definitely a solo HR and the rest of the 1st set was so/so. It was cool to hear Ester live, and Party Time was neat, but the last few songs of the 1st set were a huge bathroom break. I felt so unsatified. OK, 2nd set. Tweezer opener really didn't do it for me, sorry. And I guess Alaska and 46 days were good, but I was really wondering when this show was going to get good. Did I mention it had been 15 years since I last saw Phish live? 15 years people, 15 freaking years and they give me Tube, Stealing Time, Strange Design, TTE, Taste, Let me Lie, Stealing Time, Oh Sweet Nothing.... I was getting restless. Enter Mr Miner. Harry -"HOOD" - Harry "HOOD" (when did the audience start yelling HOOD? Not sure how much I like that). Hood was good. Very Good. The Glowstick wars were going nuts, btw. So I was phinally pheeling really good, back in the groove, when the band came out for the encore. When Trey hit the first few notes of GTBT the place went nuts - they made up for a lackluster show with Hood & GTBT. I hate to say anything negative, but it just wasn't what I was expecting. I felt as though they should have played at least one more song, but I guess I will just have to go to another show! Scale of 1-10? I give this show a solid 5... okay, a 6.25 Happy? Welcome back, boys!

This was a great show, I loved it the atmosphere outside the venue was great. My friends and i walked in with some older dude we met and he lost his brother and we thought he was nuts until 5 minutes before the show started he declared that phish would open with punch you in the eye. Forbin > Mockingbird was excellent. Birds of a feather was long and wonderful, and then to end the set with Character Zero and then open the next set with DWD helped to keep the energy going. The second set was solid, but i think i liked the first set better. Icculus was great too. "when was the last time any of you read a f*cking book?!"

Best-of-the-decade versions of Gumbo(!) and SOAM(!!) and an appropriately evil/silly Carini > Magilla highlight this otherwise standard-excellent summer '03 show.

Dark, dark, dark. If you like 2003 then this show is money in the bank; otherwise you're advised to steer clear, as this is 151-proof Summer '03 midnight madness. So many dark '03 jams were resolved with performances of Bug; this version of Twist is a perfect illustration of why that move was necessary. The half-hour Scents is tempestuous and imperfect and wonderful; Walls gets (surprise!) dark to close the show; late-Set II YEMs are always a little wild, and this one's no exception. If you care about the covers then these covers are something you'll no doubt care about, but it's the long aggressive jams that make this show. The runup to IT was excellent and this is the gnarliest of the pre-Limestone shows. Enjoy.

The fun bits are fun, but if nothing else, please hear the Sally and Scents from this middling-to-swell show.

I just want to put in a word for the tremendous Theme > Jim, authoritative Taste, and swamp-nasty Walls of the Cave. The Bag is long but never quite lifts off and 46 Days hadn't yet transformed at this point into the monster it would occasionally become (cf. IT and Summer/Fall '09). Not as consistently engaging as the shows around it but not without a few highlights.

I've gotta disagree with the earlier reviewer's C+ rating - this is a strong show in the middle of a superb tour.

Seven Below gets an intricate funk workout that keeps referring to the song's original pulse and comes smartly back to the song after 21:00 or so. Tweezer is a monstrous roaring creature that gets as deep as 2/28 (but nowhere near as high). Simple is delicate, then spacey, and lovely throughout. And you even get canonical takes on Pebbles and (ugh) Jibboo to close the two sets!

If you don't like the 'Phish 2.0' style - those long hazy hypnagogic uptempo noise-jams, the intricate unresolved experimentation, the relative sonic homogeneity - you won't like 2/20/03. That's OK. But while this show is less of a crowd-pleaser than the 2/26 party or the 2/28 church service, it's a nocturnal preview of the chemical carousel ride that would take place in Limestone less than six months later. Well-chosen songs, shadowy ocean-floor jams, and collective creativity as yet undulled by rock'n'roll excess...what more could you want?

This one's as strong as 2/16 but in a very different register. Get it.

Standout versions of 46 Days and DWD are reason enough to seek this one out. 46 Days is less driven than the year's-best Merriweather summer rendition; the boys just let their hair down a little and play some spare sci-fi cow-funk grooves for a few minutes, keeping the rhythms going past the point when a typical summer jam would've dissolved into ambient space. Sounds like the Halloween-weekend breakthroughs are paying dividends in fall too.

Meanwhile the Disease is a culminating 2009 version, paying off Trey's yearlong experiment with seemingly out-of-place flatted ninths and minor modes in the middle of soaring major-chord jams. The last couple minutes of this version see the whole band get with him for some woolly eastern-modal fun. Then there's a wonderfully dense, dissonant Taste waiting on the other side of a now-typical Gordon-centric Free. (Will someone please remind Trey that it's perfectly OK to segue directly into that glorious Free riff as in days of old, instead of stopping the momentum with his rhythmic chopping?) As for the climactic Mike's Groove, it doesn't matter. It's Mike's Groove for god's sake. If you're the sort of person who reads these reviews, you'll like it just fine! It's a swell performance anyhow, though I find it difficult to get too fired up about this Weekapaug.

Still waiting on that inevitable universe-destroying version of Stealing Time, but there are worse things than waiting.

There's a story about Trey getting into a fight w/ a security guard in the parking garage near the Metropol before the show. I semi-remember him talking about it during the show - does anyone recall this?
OK... My friends and I showed up for this show w/out tickets after driving 4 hours. Fortunately we didn't need tickets to get in, just had to pay a $10 cover. Unfortunately, none of us were 21 & thus couldn't get in. DOH! Enter Fake IDs. OK, we got in. Ahhh the good old days. There couldn't have been more than 500 people in the audience.
This show was FULL of classic early 90's energy. They came out swinging with Llama in the first set and played a fun, rocking first set complete w/ secret language. They hit it even harder with Buried to open the 2nd, Runaway was great, Maze was quite "danciful"... YEM, Coil and finally I waved my birkenstocks in the air as Trey belted out "whatever you do, take care of your shoes!" Fee encore with Trey singing into a megaphone was also classic 90's and sounded great, as I remember. Closer was a strong classic Hendrix cover of Fire that absolutely WAILED! Great show, gotta make it's way to livephish.com someday.

Great show - tight playing - obvious they've been practicing. Question: I thought I heard a 5 or 6 second tease of "La Villa Strangiato" by Rush at the end of Mike's Song - did anyone else hear it?? Am I out of my mind? Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

This is quite possibly the best all-around Phish show I’ve ever seen. From start to finish, they just didn’t let up. The show started with great, albeit relatively straightforward, version of "David Bowie." As the composed section came to an end, they played a few bars of Aerosmith’s "Dream On". The theme from the 70’s rock anthem disintegrated into the spacy section of "Bowie" and it was apparent that we were about to be taken on quite a journey. "Dream On" made a reappearance at the end of the song – the "Bowie" ended at its typical frenetic pace and we were off! After the always-welcome trip inside the head of Mike Gordon ("Weigh") and a quick version of "The Curtain", "Sample In A Jar" was next. Sure, now we know that "Sample" is pretty much "Sample", but at the time, I remember being excited at how well the song was coming together (compared with the versions from the Spring and Summer). Of course "Sample" never really made it to the proverbial next level, but it was (and still is) an above average version.

Later in the set, we got a great "Forbin." I think the narration was about the floor of the hockey arena breaking apart and floating through space on the planks. Or something. In any event, the arena just might have gone into orbit several times that night. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. The "Famous Mockingbird" took flight (somewhat sloppily) and "Bathtub Gin" followed. Having not heard the Murat "Gin" at the time, I was pleasantly surprised at the improvisation at the end of this version. Looking back on it, it really doesn’t go anywhere that interesting and certainly doesn’t compare to the Murat version. "Free Bird" was next and, as always, was pretty damn funny.

All in all, the first set was pretty strong – better than anything they had played the night before. But they were just getting started. The familiar introduction to "2001" started up and they went right into "Mike’s Song." The "Mike’s" jam just seemed to keep going and going. It went on for about fifteen minutes (which was pretty long for ’93, especially if, like me, you hadn’t heard any August ’93 shows at that point) and never seemed to let up. As the composed part of the jam gave way to improv, they locked into a groove led by some sustained, melodious noodling by Trey. Just great stuff here – I don’t know what else to say. As the jam becomes more bass dominated, Trey starts playing his acoustic and before long they’ve segued – yes, segued – into "The Horse." "The Horse" and "Silent" are their usual selves and "PYITE" – still a pretty major treat in 1993 – follows. Nothing much to say about "PYITE" except that looking back on it, it seems to be a pretty tight version, especially at the end where they go in and out of "The Landlady."

"McGrupp" immediately starts up and the next fifteen minutes of the set are pretty much perfect. The Page and Mike duet out of "McGrupp" is absolutely gorgeous – yet another highlight in a set filled with them. The crowd is absolutely silent. Mike’s anchoring bass line fades into nothing and then comes back, along with the rest of the band, as they crescendo back into the "McGrupp" theme. "Weekapaug" starts smoothly out of out of this and what else can be said about this "Weekapaug"? It’s pretty short and certainly straight ahead, but the entire song is one long machine gun Trey-fest. After the hilarity of "Purple Rain", a "Slave" chant started up near the stage. And sure enough we got it in all its glory. The build starts very slowly with Page and Trey playing beautifully off of each other. Right up until the peak, Page is banging away on the grand piano, perfectly complementing Trey’s screaming leads. All the while, Kuroda’s lights are swirling around the arena in a siren-like effect. Just another one of those Phish show moments that’s permanently imprinted on my brain – talk about a smoking crater. "Rockytop" and "Good Times Bad Times" sent us out into the sub-zero Maine night. What a set! Sure, there have been better musical moments in Phishstory, probably even better sets. But there are few sets that hold up as a whole the way this one does almost 16 years later. Not a single boring moment, every song executed perfectly, gorgeous segues, exploratory jamming. I knew as soon as I walked out of the civic center that night why I had seen eleven other shows in 1993 and why I was about to see one more – to see that show.

(Published in the second edition of The Phish Companion)

For a change, there were going to be wrinkles in our usual New Year's tradition. There would be a new venue and a new city. Huddling in protected areas of the lot in a desperate attempt to stay warm would be out. Going on a pre-show beach run would be in. For once, there wouldn't be a late December trip to the dirty, dreary cities of the Northeast. Instead, we'd get to go to a dirty, sunny city down south.

The first obvious beneficiary of the scene was Shakedown. Freed from the usual constraints of a winter show, it was hopping. The cops just let people set up tents and do whatever they wanted. There were two weird things about the scene though, there was a lot of meat for sale in the lot (this vegetarian actually had a hard time finding something to eat) and the scalpers were out and getting desperate. One almost got into a fistfight with a random hippie who was just trying to miracle someone. It was a scary moment, especially for someone like me whose word association to "Miami" is the murder of his friend Oren here in a car jacking in 1988. Fortunately, nothing became of the fight, and we went back to lying in the warmth before it was time to go in.

American Airlines Arena isn't going to win too many points from the Phish crowd, at least not from Section 309. It made a bad first impression as it didn't have nearly enough bathrooms. The whole point of building these new venues is to not have that kind of issue. The food was expensive, even by venue standards. There were no merchandise stands at all set up in the upper level, so if you wanted a shirt, that required going up and down two flights of stairs. Security was very tight at checking tickets even in the upper levels. All throughout the show, they lit up every single aisle in order to keep them clear. Even though the seats weren't bad in theory (second row in the upper level, a quarter of the way back Mike side), the stage seemed very far away. The acoustics weren't very good, especially in the first set.

The actual show started out oddly. We were looking around, trying to figure out the pattern of the coloring of the seats and speculating about what was behind the large black curtain over the stage when the lights went out. Much cheering. A minute or two passed though and the band failed to come out. They started piping music over the PA and the house lights actually came back on. People booed. Quickly, they turned them out and the band came right out.

The set opened up with a deep space jam. This was a fascinating moment. Would this be a new song? Would they just open up with a weird jam? Alas, Fishman ended all of my speculation about two minutes into it by starting the “Bowie” fill. It's not that “Bowie” is a bad song mind you, but there were just so many interesting possibilities there that didn't come to fruition.

The set started out strongly, if not spectacularly. The “Bowie” and the “Tweezer” were solid, but won't be making top ten lists. The set didn't really come into its own until “Frankie Says”. Yes, “Frankie Says.”

The version didn't start out too promisingly. There was some confusion to the lyrics and it sounded like the whole, "Lost my mind/Lost my way" part wasn't sung. They made up for that, though, with an interesting jam out of the end of it. It started out a bit spacey, with Trey using the effect that he used a lot during the Loaded cover set. This jam soon turned angry and just kept going and going and going. As on the summer tour, any song at any point could go anywhere. I figured this jam would be the highlight of the show. It turned out it was just foreshadowing for the second set.

After a “Llama”, we were to get another treat. For the first time since the Hiatus ended, we were going to get a traditional Fishman front man song. Hearing the “HYHU” theme brought back all sorts of memories. Alas, those memories didn't help out Jon. He forgot the second verse of “Love You” and was first forced into some scat singing before finally improvising, "I can't remember the words/but it doesn't matter/because I can't sing either/so I guess it's time for the vacuum cleaner." He made up for it with his post-song antics. While everyone else just kept playing “HYHU”, he raised his arms in triumph, did a few victory laps, and did a band introduction. It was just like old times.

Speaking of old times, the second set was a flashback to the old days of Summer Tour 2000. There, the ever present “Gotta Jibboo” second set opener was something to lament. This tour, though, it was a bit of a novelty. It was well played too, so there's definitely nothing to complain about there. They came to a complete stop and played “Suzy”. I figured this would be a breather tune. Little did I suspect.

The jam between the first and second verses was nice. It was a Page-led groove jam that went on a bit longer than I was expecting (in a good way that is). As a result, I took notes to see if the second music break would also be longer than usual. This bit started five minutes and forty five seconds into the version. Nearly fourteen minutes later it would still be going strong. The third verse would never actually be sung.

No, this wasn't a long vamp on the “Suzy” chords. Rather, it was a heavy metal inspired jam. It took off where the “Frankie Says” went, and went much further with it. I was hearing hints of Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix themes throughout the jam, but I think that was just the tone rather than any actual teases. Phish rarely play like this and the show is worth hearing solely for this jam.

That was the peak of the show. Sure, it was nice to hear the cheer for "filter out the Everglades," back to a Big Cypress roar and we did get the fun of the double double entendre encore, but when people talk about this show, the focus is mainly going to be on the segment starting with “Frankie” and ending when “Taste” started. This wasn't an all time classic by any means, but it was a solid addition to the tradition of great New Year's Run shows.

(Author's note: this, and my other reviews of this Run, were written only hours after each show, without a chance to listen to the recordings.)

This was a pretty rockin' setlist for my first Phish show since the return. Energy level was at an all-time high for Red Rocks. One of the best versions of "Stash" I have ever heard and looking back on the entire weekend, "Stash" still stands up with Friday's "Drowned > Crosseyed" as the jam of the weekend for me. Listen to it again on the tapes. Stash's jam section was simply AWESOME! Fairly high energy second set as well and even though "Billy Breathes" brought the energy down at bit, it was a welcomed treat, showcasing Trey's intense vocal vibrato. :)

Really great show. 46 Days jam with the light show on the wall was a particular highlight of the 1st set. DWD was absolutely smokin. One thing I was not glad to see was the band being bombarded with glow sticks or rings or whatever. At one point someone threw about 30 of them all at once on the stage. I enjoy a good glow stick war as much as the next person, but keep it in the audience. After 20+ years of giving us some of the greatest music and concerts in the history of the world, not being pounded with glow sticks is something they've probably earned at this point.