Phish at the Comcast Center (formerly the Tweeter Center, formerly Great Woods), Mansfield, MA, 6/22/10

Set One

Lit O Bit: It always gets my attention when Phish opens the show with an oddball pick instead of a crowd-pleaser. See, my greatest wish for the band is that they play what they want rather than play the songs they believe their audience wants to hear, because this entails that the band wants something. (Many things were missing from Phish 2009—musical risk, exploratory jamming, interesting setlists, powerful drumming, melodic leads—but the most serious deficiency was in artistic desire. Trey had somehow recovered the awesome power of Phish, and this was an unthinkable miracle, but what was he supposed to do with it?) I guessed wrongly that this was an NRBQ cover, but my guess was correct in spirit: Phish is out to prove that they are the world's best workaday rock n' roll band. They have been the weirdest; they have gone the furthest; now they want to rock the hardest. If 2009 was primarily about showing that they could still play passably well, 2010 is about being the best. I can accept this as the artistic goal of Phish 2010.

Camel Walk: Continuing the virtuoso bar-band theme. Parodic R&B from the band's early years, and a prescient anticipation of 90s alternative funk. I think of this as Phish's Groovechild song. (Planting the seeds: during 1988 and 89, Phish played at the Stone Church in Newmarket five times.) I thought to myself: these guys are so fucking lucky to STILL be making the music of their teenage years, and I am so lucky to be still be watching it.

Possum: When I read Hammer of the Gods in seventh grade, I wondered what a "war horse" was. You know, like "The Train Kept A-Rollin'." Well, a "war horse" is a tried-and-true B-list tune that's easy for the band to break out at any time, and that no one in the audience is especially excited to hear, but that reliably works the crowd into a frenzy once it gets going. I like Possum because it's a chance to hear Trey playing a traditional blues form; he's almost always better playing over changes than a vamp, because he's more willing to play the kind of chromatic nonsense that is really his strong suit. However, because they seem to trot out this particular war horse whenever I am in the audience, this became an opportunity for an early pee break. A set of inconspicuous steps between concession stands led me into a hidden beer garden with a row of empty and miraculously clean porta johns under the pines. This secret grove stands in stark contrast to the men's room proper, where sinks of the kind you may remember from primary school bathrooms (circular pebbled basins ringed by a sprinkler operated by a bar you depress with your foot) become a sort of pissoir in-the-round.

Divided Sky: Part of the fun of Phish is seeing how they are going to execute a particular improvised bit that's stuck into a more or less static frame—Trey's transitional lick during the modulation in the Moma Dance, the freakout in Tweezer after the "Uncle Ebenezer" line, the initial lightning-bolt of the searing funk siren in First Tube. Listening at home, Divided, being 95% composed, has traditionally been a skipper for me, but Trey's solo at the end has recently become one of those points of curiosity. (Note on terminology: it is silly to say "jam" when it's really just a guitar solo that's under discussion.) And at this show Trey treated it as an opening for urgent, creative, living music—this is one of the hallmarks of Phish 2010: formerly petrified greatest hits are vital again, fully spiritually inhabited. The Manteca-like motif that grew out of the Hartford Tweezer and wafted ghostily through the rest of that set seemed to make a reappearance.

Dirt: The whistled melody has been with me since the show (my bike-riding melody). I love the melody-as-solo solo, something Trey rarely does. Dirt makes me feel deeply sad, and also very free. I love that Phish can make me excited by playing a SONG. Fuck trance jams.

Sample in a Jar: More song-Phish. I never weary of this particular greatest hit. I hated Hoist when it came out—I felt betrayed by the band. Where's the weirdness, the tension, the excess, the improvisation, the atonal fugues, the climaxes, the worked-out proggy stuff, etc.?—but I had a soft spot for Sample because I already knew it from shows, which is a big deal when you're 17. This is one of my favorite Fishman beats—16th note hi-hat playing, punctuated by ghost notes on the snare, is his particular area of expertise—and nothing makes me happier than when he's smashing the shit out of his drums (something he seemed afraid to do during 2009). He's brought back the red donut muumuu, but I wish he still wore the goggles, because it feels like he is driving the band through space. One of the amazing things about being so close to the band was seeing how Trey and Mike seemed to be surfing this wave of sound. The (recording of the) Sample from Blossom totally blew me away (it's amazing that Phish played at Toyota Park one night, then someplace called Blossom the next; "Blossom" is a a more fitting name for the misty vegetal fractal unfurlings that Phish may cause in our imagination, but "Toyota Park" is a more fitting name for the wide swath that the Phish tour machine cuts through our world). Trey's melodic playing has been mostly weak and unstable since Phish's reunion—like, if there's a three-chord jam (e.g., the aptly named "Backwards Down the Number Line"), Trey will sort of play the changes diatonically but almost always land on a wrong note with respect to the chord—but at Blossom, Trey made such music out of the Sample solo, weaving true melodies around the chords; it was astonishing that he could still do this, and it made the his customary scalar stumbling seem more like a choice. At Great Woods, however, the solo seemed disjointed, more about the rhythmic shape of the phrases than the melody. Then again, it was so loud that melody was hardly relevant; Trey was steering something much bigger.

Kill Devil Falls: Best ever KDF? It's easy to think that when you're there. (Yet I know that the Merriweather and Portland KDF were not the best ever.) The solo (maybe even "jam") raged way past the previous boundaries of this mediocre country rocker. In keeping with the night's established theme, this was competent, committed, melt-your-face Phish: intensity yes, musical risk-taking not really.

Dr. Gabel: The debut of a mysterious song about a mysterious man. The song part was overlong, but the stupidity of it felt right. Dr. Gabel has a sense of humor that the 2009 material lacks. Its persistent wrongness (the chords are happily non-functional) reminds me of the material Phish came back with in 1997. (A period of writer's block had followed the pretentious and overwritten Billy Breathes, but they saved the band with a shitload of unserious throwaways, kind of their Basement Tapes.) Besides Number Line, I don't think any post-breakup material has been received this well by the audience, who were going bananas.

Run Like an Antelope: Didn't do it for me.

TWO

Mike's Song: I like to take a little time during each show to wander the venue—find some spot way up on the lawn where I can see the top of the pavilion (a UFO with sound and lasers coming out of it), watch the medics and police carry someone off on a stretcher, dance in some walkway before security clears everybody away, look into the sad eyes of gypsy kids on Family Tour, and so on. On this night, however, I think I was on the lawn for about 30 seconds when I thought, "You have a sixth-row seat—do not waste this amazing ticket!" and hurried back to my section, with renewed permission to enjoy my incredible vantage. I don't recall any specific impressions of Mike's. It seemed brief.

I Am Hydrogen: Really? Again? (The classic "Mike's Groove" is the triad of Mike's Song, Hydrogen (a blissful, phishy instrumental), and Weekapaug Groove. During the best part of Phish's career, this middle spot in Mike's Groove was a wild card: maybe you'd get Simple, or Swept Away>Steep, or Lawn Boy, or Walk Away>Tweezer>Glide, or The Horse>Silent in the Morning>Punch>McGrupp, but during reunion Phish you can pretty reliably count on Hydrogen.)

Weekapaug Groove: For me, this was kind of overshadowed by the Hartford Paug the week prior, which features some of Trey's most inspired whale-call playing yet—that's a topic for another time. (It's kind of insane that I'm writing about Great Woods instead of Hartford, two nights that were sort of a spiritual high-point of my life in music.)

Sneakin' Sally Though the Alley: Although this Robert Palmer cover dates back to the ur-Phish of 1985, Sneakin' Sally is emblematic of metamorphosis of Phish into dance music, and mostly connotes 1998. This was a rare instance (for me) of being thrilled merely by "getting" a desired song. A few nights before, Wally and his metallurgist friend Mike had been singing the refrain over the Tweezer jam, so this felt like a confirmation of something that was in the air. The groove was thick. Apparently Trey cut off the jam early—so said critics the next morning—but at the time I felt like Trey was perfectly tracking the energy of the room. This has been a common criticism the whole tour: Trey has been killing jams right as they promise to break through into something big, either out of fear of the unknown, or in order to move ahead with an artificially planned setlist. A third option: playing high-energy songs in the 8-12 minute range is exactly what Trey wants to do. This is how Phish built their audience. By the late 90s, Phish had enough of a permanent following that they could afford to spend 30 minutes on monotonic funk, aimless ambient plinking, or heavily effected modal suicide-by-shredding. But in 2010, Phish has a much smaller built-in constituency; they need to prove, night after night, that they are the best rock band in the world. And if they leave their audience desperately wanting more, that should be a mark of success for a band that's just played a three-hour concert.

Light>46 Days, Limb by Limb, Golgi Apparatus, Slave to the Traffic Light, Loving Cup; Encore: First Tube: I find myself having much less to say about this whole stretch of the show. By this point, I was THERE, totally immersed in the music, dancing hard among giant abstract shapes. I'm still in awe of what I believe happened, but I shall pass over it in silence.