It's a Phish tradition to don a "musical costume" on Halloween night and cover an entire album by another band. Conventional wisdom says that the album they pick reflects some aspect of the band's current direction and self-image. When Phish turned their back on progressive rock and tried to become a pop group, they recorded Hoist, a jumble of cliched forms, and covered The Beatles (1994). After Jerry died and Phishtour absorbed Deadtour, Phish, who had made an artform out of real-time feedback with their audience, had to adapt to playing giant arenas; hence the football-riot rock of the Who's Quadrophenia (1995). Having worn out the multi-peaking tension-and-release jam model, Phish found inspiration that would last them the rest of the 90s in the multilayered rhythms and repetitive dance jams of Remain in Light (1996). As the drug scene, both on lot and backstage, shifted from psychedelics to club drugs and narcotics, Phish saw fit to cover the Velvet Underground's Loaded (1998), an album whose hipster detachment suited the band's newfound lack of care; after earnestly striving after the ineffable in 1997 (no musical costume during the "Phish Destroys America" fall tour), suddenly it was no big deal to be Phish. It's harder to see what the band was up to in covering Exile on Main St. (2009), which seems conceptually unrelated to both the writing and jamming that year—maybe the theme was touring the Earth as old men, and mastering the extraction of wealth from other aging males. This year, smart money was on Queen's A Night at the Opera, on the basis of a leaked photo of a printing block for a tour poster that seemed to reference its cover. Or London Calling—Trey said he listened to lots of the Clash during his house arrest. Or Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The (fucking jaw-dropping) Broomfield 46 Days (10/12/10) seemed to argue for Smashing Pumpkins—a surprise bVII-IV-I groove straight from the psychedelic 90s supplanted the usual one-chord outro jam, with Trey harmonizing through the chords in sliding octaves of fuzz. I was personally hoping for Kid A. But to the disappointment of those who thought the $400 they gave the scalper would be rewarded with a performance of Physical Graffiti, Phish picked rock non-icon Little Feat's 1978 double live album Waiting for Columbus, a record that previously existed in the consciousness of maybe 2% of their audience. Mr. Miner writes pretty well about the significance of this selection (though "Smell My Feat" might have been a wittier title than "Little Phish"). I've only checked out the first couple tunes, and Little Feat is apparently weird (I kind of don't believe what I'm hearing; the chords are sort of from Randy Newman land; the bullshit quotient is unclear; the weirdness usually wraps up well). It is amazing to hear Phish playing unfamiliar music, to be a couple minutes into a tune and realize you're in the Phish place again, but you've arrived there by none of the usual paths. It's significant that Little Feat is a band much like Phish: showy cornball hodge-podge Americana for white people to dance to, where inessential complexity is essential to the sound. The effect is like peeking into an alternate dimension and seeing this uncanny double of Phish—it's amazing to realize that they don't need any of their own material to sound that way, and could have become the same band even with a completely different catalog. (This is one reason that the first set at Manchester was so powerful: it represented a total rewrite of the Phish canon.) Conclusion: Phish is real, and totally free.