Phish Tour Continues In Las Vegas: Night 3 – Setlist & Recap

Phish returned to the MGM Garden Arena stage in Las Vegas Friday night for the third night of four, the sorta middle-child show that certainly felt going in, like it had the potential for a let-down, but ended up being anything but. Throughout the night I was reminded that a Phish show is both a collective, communal experience shared by everyone in the room, and also an individual one, everyone bringing in their own history and taste and expectations which flavor their enjoyment of the concert. We dance both together and alone. Any given show is likely to be at least one person’s first and maybe just as possibly someone’s 100th or more. Friday night I was in a group that included someone “celebrating” a large-round-number show and it was fun to experience it through her eyes, get excited when she exclaimed “I love this!” before the mid-set “Sand,” or sympathize when she said a bit quieter before another song “I don’t really like this one.”

For many in the audience, the first set contained plenty of treats and surprises, with plenty of mid/late-’90s selections that sit somewhere between rare and rare-enough. The first “If I Could” in over four years, coming three songs into the night, was on the rarer side, maybe the first time seen for many in the audience and definitely it’s-been-a-while for everyone. Regardless of what they played, the band maintained the high level of energy and precision that’s been on display for pretty much every Las Vegas set so far. While the first two-thirds of the first set lacked the longform improvisational fireworks of the other nights, the incendiary “Type I” jamming in that love-it! “Sand” and the following “Back on the Train” were a ragers-and-a-half for first-timers and many-timers alike.

But really, the first set was all about the “Mercury” which clocked in at almost 25 minutes and contained its own multiverse of musical ideas. There was a moment deep into this stellar version where “Taste” was vibed out pretty strongly and the guess-what’s-next subset of the crowd were ready to shift gears in expectation, when instead Trey Anastasio bounced into another space. What ensued was, depending on whom you asked at setbreak, what point of view and previous experiences each listener had, either a “jam of the tour” or possibly “was that still Mercury or something else” or, at the very least, “some very sick shit!” Each of the first three nights of the Vegas run has featured at least one write-home-about-worthy first-set jam and the night three “Mercury” was right up there on the must-listen scale.

In its first year of existence, the opening notes of “Soul Planet” has elicited a wide range of emotions, one of a zillion dividing lines in that Phish crowd of communal individualists. So, while some around me groaned and others got down to dancing when Friday’s second set opened with it, by the time the jam got into full swing, a nooks-and-crannies funk-machine of keyboards and drums, carbonated bass and, of course, plenty of ecstatic guitar soloing, most of the crowd had come around to heck-yeah agreement. Which is to say, like so many jams over the week thus far, the “Soul Planet” was a good one. The whole second set was performed at a don’t-matter-what-they-play level. Mike Gordon seemed especially assertive, opening doors for the rest of the band to march on through, setting up the climb for an abundance of Anastasio peaks, multiple white-light crescendos per song, it seemed. Commonplace second-set residents like “Down With Disease” and “Light” made the can’t-remember-the-last-time-I-saw-its like “Sneakin’ Sally” right at home. Certainly a number of the crowd will be experiencing morning-after joint pain in their shoulders and/or knees after enduring the second set, as opportunities to thrust arms in the air jubilantly or take flight in compelled-by-guitar leaps off the ground were in abundance. Capping off with a majestic “Slave to the Traffic Light” the set was one in which nothing stood out because everything felt like a highlight.

So often the Halloween costume set can set a tone for the following shows and even full tours and beyond. Judging the first two shows of November 2018 through this lens, the enduring characteristic imparted by the Faceplant set is one of playfulness. And sure, this comes through in the band’s setlist choices and improvisational directions, but, to the crowd’s delight, it’s been even more prevalent in the band’s banter and occasional antics. Friday’s encore was a prime example, Trey and Jon Fishman taking part in a two-man musical comedy routine centered on the first cover of “Bike” since Dick’s 2015, a likely-unintentional Pink-Floyd-ian nod to the 20th anniversary of Phish’s surprise cover of Dark Side Of The Moon. There was plenty of goofy fun, but just know that it ended with Fishman standing atop Page McConnell‘s keyboard rig and Trey afterward wondering “how do you follow that up?!?” After declaring that it felt like an “old” night (and from the early-show “Weigh” to the Fish encore fun, it really did), the band treated the audience and themselves to a rip-snorting take on Zeppelin’s “Good Times Bad Times.” Whether it was your first “Bike” or 50th “Good Times,” your only show of the fall, or the penultimate of doing the entire fall tour, it is hard to deny that Phish is firing on all cylinders heading into their last night in Las Vegas.

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