Phish Continues 2018 New Year’s Run – Night 3: Setlist & Recap

On Halloween this year in Las Vegas, Phish introduced the term “faceplant into rock” and now, it seems, a faceplant is a good thing and you can do it into just about anything (e.g. their second set Saturday might best be described as a “faceplant into Tweezer”). So, it was only a matter of time before the band delivered a “faceplant into a Sunday show,” and that it happened on a December 30th seems all the stars-are-aligned better. Before you could turn to the woman next to you in Madison Square Garden Sunday night and utter the words “how are they going to top last night?!?” the band brought their metaphorical finger to their lips as if to shush all doubters, opening the show with the rarely seen “Alumni Blues/Letter to Jimmy Page” combo, played not only like it comes around every fifth show, but also with a ferocity saved for a show closer.

It would be the first of many surprises in a first set for the ages. Do you like surprises? The band pulled out several flavors of them, following up “Alumni” with the first of many “jam vehicles” of the night with “Mike’s Song.” So often you can accurately describe sections of a jam based on what Page is doing, and so the early-set Mike’s Song was characterized first by a Cap’n Crunch darkfunk clav and then a dizzying organ-fueled thing that had many in the crowd back to second-set-Saturday-night level of energy (am I supposed to be sweating this much so early in the show?). The Weekapaug was a series of short vignettes with Page going lengthy on the piano, the band doing some intergalactic saloon thing, then hopping to electric piano, then the whole thing going untethered back on the clav.

The classic “Mike’s Groove” is all well and good, but, the real surprise was the {checks notes} “Glide II” (!?) that came in between. Yes, almost 900 shows after its debut and sole performance on May 16, 1995 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the band it-ain’t-no-thing! landed the “flip-flip-flip-flip” lullaby again as if it were in the regular rotation, a perfect fit in between “Mike’s” and “‘paug” and even though Trey did perform it on his recent solo tour, I bet you didn’t see that coming? Or maybe you did?

Maybe bust outs aren’t your thing, you’re more of a hell-yes! segue surprise kind of gal? The transition from “Weekapaug” into “Crosseyed and Painless,” a slow morph, tempo-and-key-change acrobatic maneuver came as a shock if only because it had the frenzied crowd marveling at the audacity of the mid-first-set placement. The energy in a room when a set that had already charted some ground hits an everyone-on-their-feet time-to-boogie song like “Crosseyed” is a wild-eyed untamed thing that’s best not to mess with. “Is this Saturday’s third set?” was a much-tweeted ha-ha-ha thing at this point and the occasion certainly called for a patented Phish “cool down” song. They obliged with, what else?, the second monster breakout of the set: the debut performance of “Bliss” (did you see this one coming, too, you Phishtradamuses?), Trey moving to acoustic guitar for the delicate instrumental from the Billy Breathes album, the band doing quiet just as well as they’d already done loud, funky and explosive already in the set, then following it with an equally appreciated “Billy Breathes” (also off the Billy Breathes album). For the midway-point of the first set, it should be noted, the L3TP of this show was uncharacteristically high, if you keep track of such things.

Saturday night’s second set was a true get-yourself-lost kind of set, often difficult to remember where jams had come from let alone where they were going and it was in this spirit that the final surprise of Sunday’s first set popped up. “Tube” went into a deepgroove territory that playfully meandered long enough that it was no longer quite recognizable as “Tube,” so that when it magically shapeshifted into “Weekapaug Groove” the dancing masses were justified in the “wait, what?… where?… when?” expressions and equally justified in their massive dancing. That the jam halted on a downbeat and returned to the end of “Tube” was, at this point, a natural end to the proceedings, the crowd welcome to determine what was sandwiching which on their own. Insofar as faceplanting is a desirable thing, the first set of 12/30/2018 was a decidedly cheek-to-asphalt affair.

As many twists and turns, bust outs, breakouts and intertwined segues and mash-ups as the first set had, coming out of the intermission, it still lacked a signature 15+ minute listen-and-relisten-the-next-day jam that highlighted many of their most loved shows this fall. That, my friends, is what the second set is for, and Sunday’s show delivered with three let’s-go-to-the-videotape excursions. After opening things up with the second version of “official” faceplant’er, “Cool Amber and Mercury,” debuted this past Halloween, it was the “Everything’s Right” that got things going. When Phish really locks into a “type II” improvisation, it typically means that the four members are listening to each other just as well as they are playing, the music a quadrophonic conversation that locks into themes and rides them to their natural place. The “Everything’s Right” jam found that rhythm quickly, Mike Gordon and Jon Fishman creating complexity and texture while Trey manifested newly minted melodies out of thin air, Page countering and doubling down. A rarer level of improv happens when it feels like they all actually stop listening to each other and just do their own stream-of-consciousness thing and yet, when they’re really in the zone, it still works because … well, because they’re Phish.

Somewhere in the middle of that jam, this is where they found themselves and it was, in my opinion, a let-go-of-your-feelings-Luke moment, perhaps the highlight of a show filled with them. The return from that gelatinous bit of jamming found Trey building to one of his now-patented ecstasy peaks, a happy-place build that felt all the more refreshing because he had largely resisted that style of jamming thus far into the night.

The second major jammer of the set was “Light.” Songs have jams and so by the time “Light” began, the show had already featured the “Mike’s” jam and the “Crosseyed” jam and that smile-inducing “Everything’s Right” jam. But when things really get past the thin layer of gas that is the Earth’s atmosphere, the band sometimes seems to jam on their jams. And so “Light” featured a triumphant arena-rock jam and then that seemed to spin off its own jam, an alloy of Phish-funk and dark-meets-light rhythm-changer and right on down in a recursive daydream of ever-multiplying bits of full-band real-time composing. Officially timed at just a hair over 20 minutes, the Light jams-within-jams was a keeper. The third and final dig-deep-and-boogie jam-o-rama came in the show-capping “Split Open And Melt” which has recently come back into vogue for the band as a psychedelic brainfuck of a set closer or, a faceplant into weird, if you will.

Sunday’s “Split Open” was 18 minutes of evil, changing gears several times as the lights, which Chris Kuroda had dialed in all night, went into we-need-more-colors! overdrive. Phish fans know that the lights can play a huge role in not just how the music is perceived, but also influence the directions of the improvisation itself. This seemed to be the case with the Melt. Kuroda brought the light rigs down to their lowest point of the night, effectively caging in the band, hues flickering at a maddening pace. Almost immediately Phish responded, turning to an extended claustrophobic weirdness, ranting and raving in guitar, bass and synthesizer. Things escalated, then escalated some more, the quartet taking the audience up the mountain, but acclimating everyone to the altitude at several stages along the way. When the Split Open coda finally came out of the murk, it was as much a relief as it was a climactic end to the set.

A show like that called for an encore, no doubt, but the band seemed to be in agreement with the audience: just one song wouldn’t do. Instead, Phish treated the encore like the proverbial Jewish goodbye, but in lieu of one last hug or bit of chit-chat on the way out the door, they added one more song, just one more song, until the encore was four rock-em-if-you-got-em tunes, each of them — “Funky Bitch,” “Wilson,” “Rocky Top” and “Cavern” — a top-this! high-energy rager. Faceplant into rock, indeed.

One more show left in 2018 … what surprises await?

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