Phish Tour Continues In Las Vegas: Night 2 – Setlist & Recap

Phish returned to the MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas the night after making history, once again, on Halloween, creating a complex, dumbfounding story-within-a-story for their traditional October 31st musical costume set. But when then band is at their best, they are always elaborate storytellers and Thursday’s night-after-the-night was no different, the Vermont quartet layering their tale for the second of their four-night run.

The story of the first set was a dense yarn that revealed Phish’s uncanny musical flexibility, each song, from the opening “Everything’s Right” to the closing “Walls Of The Cave” showing off a different style and genre. They bounced effortlessly from straight rock to the deep disco-funk of a monster, high-fives-all-around “Wolfman’s Brother,” bluegrass, psych-rock, blues, soul, prog and beyond. Within this grander narrative, other stories overlapped and took on life, each member of the band telling their own side of things, like some musical Rashomon, details picked up and spun in different ways, depending on the point of view. That opening “Everything’s Right” went in multiple directions, turning into a 14-minute epic, eventually finding a tonight’s-gonna-be-special bliss jam with Page McConnell‘s grand piano creating avenues for Trey Anastasio‘s bright major-key soloing.

If there was any doubt that the band was feeling it, Trey’s little hop-step before singing “I’m breathing hard, open the door” in “AC/DC Bag” sealed the deal. The centerpiece of the first set’s extravagant storytelling was the midway version of “Chalk Dust Torture.” After a shreddy “Type 1” jam, it felt the “Chalk Dust” was ready to end when the band swerved back out into a truly explorative space that had not just each member of the band, but also [LD Chris] Kuroda and, really, the entire crowd interacting in real time. Kuroda seemed especially in tune with guiding the band, playing his light rig like a chessmaster, seeing several moves into the future, so that when the improvisation hit that point, the lights were perfectly in sync. The blue shafts entangled with each other, like a spider web to be plucked and as one unit, the band hitting its thrilling peak as a single vibration. On Halloween, Phish played the music of a band that doesn’t really exist, but from that version of “Chalk Dust” on down to the peaks-upon-peaks closing of “Walls Of The Cave,” they reminded everyone in the audience that at times they seem equally as fanciful, mastering so many different genres and then improbably combining them into music oftentimes indescribable.

If the story of the first set was a journey of variety in styles, the story of the second set was jams, good ones, and lots of them. They opened with a “Blaze On” for the ages, a version with three distinct sections. The first was a chunky, textured thing, Trey/Page/Mike Gordon/Jon Fishman creating something you felt you could reach out and touch with its funkified crevices and feels-rough bass-drum contours. Where the first jam was a heterogeneous surface, the second was the opposite, so homogeneous and smooth that it was difficult to tell who was making which sounds, the effects blurring the boundary between bass, guitar, keyboards and even drums in perhaps the most inspired jamming of a night filled with it. Finally, Anastasio locked in and the final stanza of the 20+ minute version was a straight fire guitar-rip that found some bliss-out peaks before landing in “No Men In No Man’s Land.”

Looking back, I believe the entire second set was played in a strangely idealized reverse-chronological-order of song debut date, a backwards-down-the-number-line history lesson in Phish’s jam-vehicles. “No Men” was straight fire, as it has been, and the ensuing “Fuego” was an appropriate middle-ground part cool down, part heat up, it dissolved into its own proggy “let’s-see-where-this-takes-us” space. After the trio of 3.0 jammers, “Twist” felt like a welcome throwback. Where the “Blaze On” revealed three very coherent movements, the three books of a single trilogy, the “Twist” was more of a collection of short stories. It bounced from one quick narrative to the other in succession, but rather than giving off a rushed, “focus-guys!” feel that can often overtake the band on their more scattershot days, each little tale moved easily to the next and felt to sum up its plot before wrapping up.

Somewhere well into this compendium, the band started howling and when they eventually segued into “Prince Caspian.” A couple years younger than “Twist,” it became clear in retrospect that those howls were the “oh!”‘s from the opening to “Caspian,” a nifty shift into a fiery version that reached yet another Anastasio peak before returning, full circle, to close out “Twist,” the kind of literary device the band employs only when they’re really in the zone. Going back further in time, “Bouncing Around The Room” was a worthy breather before we reached wayback Phish history time with a set-closing “Harry Hood.”

In a night filled with story upon story, Trey, Mike, Page and Fishman had one more whale-of-a-tale to tell inside the “Hood” jam. The story started as it usually does with a beautiful build-to-peak, but then things started tumbling out from each of them. As if finishing each other’s sentences, the traditional anecdote revealed a series of and-then-what-happened divergences until they were in “wait-what-was-I-talking-about-again?” territory, a jam that felt like a “Harry Hood” jam but also, didn’t at all. As far as stories go, it was adventure, fantasy and maybe a little science fiction, with more rising action and can-you-top-this climaxes than can be believed. It was the story of a band that sometimes can feel as made up as a Scandinavian multi-language prog group, but, as the wild-eyed crowd was well aware, as they encored with a one-two “Contact” > “Rise Up” encore, is as real as it gets.

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