Around 3.0 in 20 Sets: A Love Letter
If there are two things you can say about my Phish fandom with any certainty, they are that 1) I’m an avowed and outspoken fan of the last six years, i.e. “3.0”, and 2) I enjoy ranking and making lists of my favorite Phish jams, sets, and shows. With this in mind, a few months ago I came up with a list of my favorite sets of 3.0 so far. Given the wealth of riches we’ve been given in the last three years, this was no small task, but I managed to cull at least 60 sets of quality ranging from “pretty darn good” to “as good as this band can get” into an orderly list of 25 sets, give or take a few honorable mentions.
My original idea, in creating what would become what you are about to read, had been to expand that list, mainly so that I could write about more greatness from this era. But I had a better idea — or, more specifically, that better idea was suggested to me — and I decided to rework that original list into this, a celebration of 3.0, of our collective fandom, and of this band that we all love so much.
1. 11/28/09 II (Times Union Center, Albany, NY)
This seems like a good place to start, mainly because (per Wally Holland, aka waxbanks, and this essay on Phish in 2009) this is where 3.0 really began to open up for a lot of people in a way that the touring year previously had not. I’ve always been on the side of “length doesn’t matter” when it comes to the band’s jams (the fact that the 7/16/13 Chalk Dust Torture clocks in at under 10 minutes doesn’t make it any less of an impressive piece of improv), but I do understand and appreciate that for many length does matter, and that it does hold a special place for folks that came into the band through Phish’s mighty extended jams from times gone by. We all come to this band through different years, in different times in our lives, and for a fanbase that had seen the band struggle at the outset of its rebirth to recapture the magic of those times gone by, a set that included two mammoth twenty-minute-plus jams of high quality was proof enough that the band cared about that same special place as much as the fans do. I think that’s part of why this set is still so beloved today — it speaks in a language that many Phish fans can understand. Two jamming vehicles to start off a set, both stretched beyond that mythical 20-minute boundary, both overflowing with “Type II” improv? Heck, I’m not going to say no to that. Why would I?
2. 7/27/13 II (The Gorge, George, WA)
Then again, there’s more than one way to skin that there setlist-construction cat; just look at how Those Other Guys used to do things. Take a look at early-70s Godchaux-era Dead — let’s go with, say, 10/19/73 II from Dick’s Picks Volume 19, which starts with a very strong China Cat -> Rider combo, then throws three “song” songs at us (Me and My Uncle, Toodle-oo, and Big River) before the big jam vehicle in Dark Star. Or take the unreal 4/14/72 show — Truckin’ to start, then three plain old songs, and then the Dark Star > Good Lovin’ > Caution > Good Lovin’ jam sequence. Of course, nobody thought anything of it back then (nobody was out there playing 4-song second sets, and heck, Dead fans liked those songs), and nobody really thinks anything of it now. Then look at the sort of set construction you’d see in ’76-’77, where you still get the “song” songs, but they get intertwined and “segued” into so that they feel like part of a whole the way those earlier sets didn’t. Look at the incredible 10/9/76 II — nothing is over 12 minutes long, but the unreal chemistry in the way the St. Stephen/Not Fade Away sandwich flows into the Help/Slip!/Franklin’s suite, only with Samson & Delilah thrown in for kicks, makes that sort of stopwatch-examining utterly moot.
Now look at this remarkable Set 2 from 2013, with the longer jam lengths of 11/28/09 II sacrificed for great flow, superb segues (they don’t have a ready-made one like Scarlet -> Fire, but DWD -> Undermind will do in a pinch), and exceptional music throughout (the aforementioned DWD -> Undermind is enthralling). Nothing in the set extends beyond 14 minutes (much like the classic 8/15/11 II “elements” set, which shares a lot of DNA with this set), but does that matter when the improv is this good and the setlist this free-flowing? I would certainly hope not.
3. 8/19/12 II (Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, CA)
I mean, hey, isn’t that part of why people love Fall ’97 so much? Yes, the jams are longer (sometimes much more so, cf. 11/29/97), but the general idea is the same — sets connected by pure kismet, some of the most outrageous segues the band ever devised (lookin’ at you, AC/DC Bag -> Psycho Killer), and their funk-steeped minimalism at its absolute apex due to the band being in peak musical form. But here’s something else to think about — have you ever taken a look at just how long those sets are? Go and check them out on whatever media player you use and see how short they are — 12/11/97 II is 62 minutes long, 12/2/97 II is 65 minutes long (78 if you include Bouncin’/Zero, but do YOU include Bouncin/Zero?), 11/23/97 II is 63 minutes long. The incredible 11/14/97 II set, start to finish, is fifty-four minutes long! And now look at your typical 3.0 second set — anywhere between 75 to 90 minutes, before encore (8/4/13 II and its encore is nearly 2 hours long), without fail.
Now, let’s say you’re the band, and you’re now playing second sets as long or longer than you ever did, and you’re playing to audiences that (let’s be 100% real here) are generally much less finicky than the folks that go onto message boards or onto social media and yell and scream about this show and that jam and whether 10/29/94 is underrated or not. Let’s say that you just dropped an utterly extraordinary forty-five minutes of music on them, like in 8/19/12 II, in which a Crosseyed & Painless sandwich encompasses one of the greatest Lights they’ve played to date and a killer-diller segue into Sneakin’ Sally and segue back into C&P from Sally to boot. And let’s say that, in the old days, you might have gone straight from the end of that second Crosseyed into You Enjoy Myself, walked off stage, and have said finicky fans scream for the soundboard of this show to be officially released from here until Kingdom come — but it ain’t the old days anymore, and you’ve still got over 40 minutes left before you plan on walking off stage.
Now what do you do here — do you play another vehicle of mentally taxing jamming, or do you play a group of crowd-pleasing songs that you know fans will cheer for until you’ve left enough time to play said You Enjoy Myself and still walk off stage knowing that you played one of your career’s almighty sets?
Yeah, I’d do the second thing too.
4. 7/13/14 II (Randall’s Island, New York, NY)
Case in point — imagine a set like Chalk Dust Torture > Piper (as Light did not exist in 1997) > Tweezer > Slave to the Traffic Light, played on November 18, 1997, and imagine all the online fans drooling over that setlist on November 19th. Is that all that different from Wolfman’s -> Piper > Twist > Slave? Or Halley’s > Tweezer > BEK > Piper > Antelope? Or Tweezer -> Izabella -> Twist -> Piper (man, and they said 2014 setlists needed shaking up…)? No, of course it isn’t. But because they don’t play short sets anymore — because they’re looking to give fans more bang for their buck, which is entirely laudable when you consider men pushing their sixth decades playing for at least three hours a night — they throw in additional songs, sometimes songs that you may like and sometimes songs that you may not, and that can change the perception of how 3.0 sets are viewed compared to their 1.0 brethren.
It shouldn’t, in my opinion, and when you put on CDT > Light > Tweezer, it *really* shouldn’t. There are runs (if not tours) that don’t pack in the delights contained in those 3 songs and 56 minutes of music — every segment in that era-defining Chalk Dust Torture, the sneaky Mind Left Body wink-and-nod before the dual peaks in Light, Tweezer cresting a musical hill with astounding flair. This (along with its spiritual brother in the outrageously good 12/31/14 II) is the sort of show that should — should — convince any naysayer that Phish’s current incarnation deserves as much respect as any of the previous ones.
5. 10/26/10 II (Verizon Wireless Arena, Manchester, NH)
Ay, there’s the rub — convincing said naysayer. It’s a tiny bit easier now, thanks to the last three years of tremendous music, but there still remains the problem of making the earlier years of the era palatable to the older generation, and it must have been even tougher back in 2010, when all we had to go on was a year that only really found its greatness in fits and starts (such as the first set I talked about, and one I’ll get to in a moment). And it is that consistency — not even the perceived lack thereof, but the nostalgia-driven ethos of “always there” — that is the worst enemy of this era of Phish. Yes, I wouldn’t bother arguing that Phish in the nineties was a more consistent band on a night-in night-out basis, but there is the perception that Phish’s baseline level was the shows of legend, that every night was a New Year’s Eve ’95, or even a 12/7/97, and even if you can demonstrate that that patently wasn’t the case, it will mostly fall on deaf ears. And when you’re not arguing against a body of work — when you’re arguing against an accumulated legend — your arguments will pale that much more.
Which makes shows like this one all the better to serve as your argument, because (again, like 11/28/09 II) it demonstrates the great qualities of 2000s Phish while still lending itself to translation to 1990s Phish. The entire set just feels like it was ported directly out of the mid-90s in terms of its aesthetic — nothing is jammed out to any major degree (other than the Light, which finds a tremendous rhythmic groove not unlike the massively underrated 11/2/13 Tweezer), but they break out cool never-before-played songs (Night Nurse), segue into unexpected places (The Mango Song working its way out of Ghost), and manage a fun callback to Set I with the Llama Reprise galloping out of an utterly charming and busy Weekapaug Groove (itself full of callbacks to the set they’d just played, along with Can’t You Hear Me Knocking for some reason). I like Fall 2010 a great deal, and it still stands up quite well even in the face of the last three years; this show, to me, is its undisputed crown jewel.
6. 12/29/13 II (Madison Square Garden, New York, NY)
And that last statement plays into why I think the last three years of Phish have been so great — I can pretty safely say that I consider 10/26/10 II the crown jewel set of that year (though there are some darn fine contenders, like Guyutica, or Tweezeppelin, or the wonderful second set from NYE), but I have a much harder time offering that sort of absolute when it comes to 2012, 2013, or 2014. Take, for example, this exemplary set — I consider this the Platonic mean of 11/1/13 II (a set with a personal favorite opening jam that the rest of the set can’t quite match) and 10/29/13 II (a set with a reasonably good jam others like way more than me buttressed by a rest of the set of tremendous quality). You’ve got two utterly magnificent jams to start off the set (my beloved DWD, which dips and dives through the cosmos before returning home in one of the greatest DWD Reprises ever played, and a truly nasty Carini that finds a killer groove and stands as a high point for Trey using the Echoplex), and a second half of very good quality (the Bowie, in particular, is worth listening to again). 12/29/13 is, as of now, easily one of the five best full shows of the era; heck, the only 12/29 show I like more than this one is 1997’s vintage, and perhaps 1995’s as well. It feels nice to be able to say that a show can slot in with the best of a bygone age and not feel ridiculous doing so.
7. 9/4/11 II (Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, Commerce, CO)
But then it also feels good to say that this era does things even said bygone age didn’t do. Phish’s Dicks’ Sporting Goods Park residency is one of those things that truly sets 3.0 apart from the other eras; it’s really something that you’re surprised they didn’t think to do earlier, by which I mean turn Labor Day weekend into a 3-night party in a large outdoor venue with some of their most outsized shows of the era (mainly due to the spelling gags that has marked every run’s Night 1). We all remember 2012 as the best run of them all, and with very good reason, but we wouldn’t have gotten there if the 2011 run hadn’t been such a success in its own right, thanks to the “S” show, 9/3’s glorious Tweezer, and this set right here.
It wouldn’t be a huge stretch to call this the best set of 3.0 up until this point, especially when you consider the wealth of riches contained within — the surprise burst into something resembling Come Together out of Rock & Roll; a fabulous run of segues that ends with a super-charged Piper; very nice versions of Roggae and Hood mid-set; the hilarious resurrection of Guy Forget in Ghost. Sets like these might confound the folks that stare at their watches any time the band bursts into “Type II”, but they’re living proof of what sets Phish apart from everybody else — sure, lots of bands can have fun on stage, lots of bands can jam hard on stage, but nobody does it the same way or with the same verve as this band does. Hell, sets like these are what this band’s fanbase was built on — you could plop this in the middle of August 1993 or June 1994, change the songs around, and nobody would be the wiser.
And speaking of which…
8. 7/27/14 II (Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia, MD)
What’s interesting, with the benefit of hindsight, is how much this show is like an old ’94 Tweezerfest, and how much it isn’t. The similarities are entirely obvious — big cartoon-bold segues, moments of almost psychic inter-band communication, Fish getting to sing something. But the difference — and this is where I think some people get a bit tripped up when trying to suss this show out — is right in front of our nose…the band is different. Their methodology is different. Phish played big seguefests in 1993/94 because their musical hyperintelligence manifested itself in those types of antics, and because they wanted to prove how well their hyperintelligence could translate on stage (give or take a really ugly Mike’s Song or boring excursion in Tweezer or two). Phish in 2014 played a seguefest because…well, because we all love seguefests. They don’t need to prove themselves anymore. And the seguefest we got — I mean, if you could call a set of music like this one “mature”, then this was a mature set of music (Fish’s dick joke nonwithstanding), one where they’re content to play Waiting All Night, content to tone down the manic energy of youth even when playing a song that defined their manic youth like Simple does (the biggest crowd reaction is when Simple comes flying out of Tweezer, an interesting response to say the least), and content to end the set with Page’s piano-bar homage while they strutted around the stage to the beat of Mike’s lone bass. And only a band that had reached that kind of maturity could come up with the devastating segue from Catapult into Slave to the Traffic Light, those opening notes curling forth like tendrils of smoke from the fireworks they’d set off earlier on. It’s a moment that shows you just how far this band has come in 30 years, and it’s a moment that will live on long after the debate over this show has subsided.
Oh, yes, and then John Fishman does sing about his dick a half hour later. This IS Phish we’re talking about, after all.
9. 10/31/14 II (MGM Grand Garden Arena, Las Vegas, NV)
And this set, completely and totally, is also Phish that we’re talking about as well. Who else would come up with an idea like this? Just think of all the work that went into this set; the idea was pitched during the Dick’s 2014 run, so they essentially had a month and a half to figure out which soundscapes worked best with which album effects, put together a stage show (or, at least, part of one) to accompany said soundscapes, assemble the samples for Page to play during the show, rehearse the songs, and do all of this while preparing for the rest of the Fall 2014 tour as well. This is one of those things that could easily be more admirable than likeable or actually good; it says a lot that the music is so compulsively listenable on top. And it’s great that we can now smile any time we hear the phrases “your trip is short” and “they attack!” now, as much as we smile whenever we hear “please, me have no regrets” or some such.
10–11. 8/31/12 I & II (Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, Commerce City, CO)
But then that’s what binds us all as fans, right? Shared languages, totemic markers in time, the little secret handshakes that all fanbases have that make them, well, fanbases. It’s what allows the insiders to give each other the ol’ nod & wink, and it’s what keeps the outsiders outside, as well. Why else would we know to clap during Stash, or use “->” in everyday non-musical parlance, or laugh anytime we see an oversized hotdog, or (and here’s the bit I’m really talking about) why The Breeders’ Cannonball is a big deal in Phish World, or why people mutter about Tube “not being jammed out”, or cheer really loudly for teases of a Dizzy Gillespie song? Don’t we all want to feel like part of that club? And why wouldn’t you want that for yourself, if you came in after 2009 and missed out on murmured conversations about The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday and J-cards with 8/14/93 II printed on them and the time you got way too ripped and saw the face of Jesus while Trey was playing Izabella at Auburn Hills? And how much would you want your own shared legacy, one that extends beyond an era where you were still reading The Red Badge of Courage or (possibly) playing with your toes or, heck, didn’t even exist, one that has as much meaning for you as the Simpsons signals had for somebody in 1993?
That’s what shows like this one mean — it’s part of the building blocks to that legacy, part of a new shared language that can share a seat on the bus with the old shared language, in which FYF means something different now and where “we all love Dick’s” means something different now and where Emotional Rescue isn’t just tied to a Hampton show from 18 years ago anymore. The finest show of this era isn’t so just because of the four major jams (well, not entirely because of that), but because it reveals the personality behind this band and how they think and approach their shows (even very special shows like this one). They gave this show, with its spooky ambient jam out of Farmhouse and goofy 2001 fakeout and Grind/Meatstick encore (those scamps!) and everything else I mentioned above, the same personal touch they gave something like 4/16/92. They couldn’t not do so, y’know? And now it’s part of the club the same way Cannonball is.
12. 8/7/09 II (The Gorge, George, WA)
And then there’s 2009, a year that will never be part of the club Cannonball’s in the way 8/31/12 is. Here’s what I don’t quite understand about the cries of Phish in 2009 being a nostalgia act, besides the obvious factor that most nostalgia acts don’t bother trying to improvise music on stage and only play the hitz, maaaaan — which level of “nostalgia” are you actively screaming about when it comes to Phish? The one that played weird story-songs in bars across New England? The one that played lightning-fast super-complicated prog tunes with nary a spot of improv in them? The one that knotted together half-hour-plus segments of music essentially designed to push atonality to its absolute limit? How about the one that integrated razor-sharp funk and minimalism into an aesthetic that had been designed to be anything but minimalist on its conception? Or the one that lost itself in a fog of ambiance and haze? Or the one that played almost exclusively foggy upbeat hose jamming or grimy and dark jamming because they were too tired of being a band to do much anything else?
Or maybe it should be the band that can morph the semi-dissonant rush of Light into a beautiful, heart-tugging calypso jam that ever so sweetly morphs into Taste? The one that can make room for the fiendishly difficult Fluffhead in the middle of its set? Or, perhaps, the one that saves an utterly superb and powerful Bathtub Gin for its final quarter (I’ll get to what I mean by that later on)? Yeah, I’d say that sounds like a pretty good band to pine for, too.
13. 12/31/13 II (Madison Square Garden, New York, NY)
Which can make this set all the odder to consider, because it essentially is the band a lot of folks have been pining for. I suppose I’d love it more if I had been there; I suppose I’d love it more if I had more of a connection to 1990–93 Phish; I suppose I’d love it more if I’d cherished The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday the way older fans do. I think the fact that none of that applies to me and I’m still writing about it in the same essay as something like 12/29/13 II tells you how much I do love this set. There’s hardly a jam to speak of here (aside from the nice discursion in Reba and Split Open and Melt doing its Split Open and Melt thing), but the sheer joyfulness of the set’s gimmick, which the band commits to from stage setup to song selection to even (mostly) nailing the compositions, is what’s kept me coming back again and again. And, if nothing else, it serves as a reminder of just how good this band was at writing songs even early on in their existence.
By the way, I’ve undersold the Reba here. It really is quite lovely.
14. 7/3/11 I (Superball IX, Watkins Glen, NY)
While we’re on the subject of nostalgia — doesn’t it seem like there’re still far too many people beholden to the idea that they played first sets of this quality all the time in the nineties? I wouldn’t argue that the band hasn’t taken a step back as far as pure improvisation in their first sets, but all that really means is that they hew closer to early-to-mid-90s first sets, where it was mostly well-played versions of their current songbook along with the occasionally very strong version of something like Split Open and Melt or Reba (hmmm…) tossed in. That can make a set like this stand out all the more, one where the band mostly crams in as much early-days material as they can get away with (Forbin’s > Mockingbird! Destiny! BBFCM! The Curtain!), while also making room for some improv in one of the best A Song I Heard The Ocean Sings, a 1980s-referencing Reba, and the shockingly good Wilson > Mound segment. There’s not a ton of first sets in 3.0 that do both the “cool song selection” trick and the “improv” trick this well.
But then there weren’t back in the day, either! You know what those first sets had that today’s first sets don’t have, for the most part? They have the element of newness, of freshness, of hearing songs for the first time. Who in the world is going to get amped up about their 200th Sample in a Jar on tape, or My Friend, My Friend, or even something like David Bowie, if it doesn’t stand out from the norm? Do I wish we’d get more 7/6/13 Melts in Set 1? Naturally I do; I’d be crazy if I didn’t. But I think that something like 7/27/14 I or 10/20/13 I contains all sorts of pleasures, even if it doesn’t have anything like the ASIHTOS here, and shouldn’t be dismissed just because it doesn’t have said ASIHTOS. Maybe that’s just me.
15. 10/26/13 II (DCU Center, Worcester, MA)
I do know, though, that it isn’t just me that considers Fall 2013 the mightiest jaunt of 3.0 to date (although I sway between it and Fall 2014 more and more). I often use the term “1–2 punch” to describe Fall 2013 sets, but that’s not entirely accurate — what I mean is that more attention is paid to keeping jams in what is colloquially called the “third quarter” (the first half of Set II), leaving the “fourth quarter” for very strongly played “Type I” versions of Phish songs before the usual big closer (Hood/YEM/Slave/etc.) takes things out. The best second sets of the tour all essentially follow this formula; as a matter of fact, the formula won’t be broken until it reaches its apotheosis in the next calendar year at Randall’s Island.
Funny enough, it’s not what would be considered the bigger jam here (the near-20 minute super-smooth Drowned, with its Santana inflections) that draws me to this set, but the shorter Light that follows it — a Light that snaps into one of their more dirt-nasty grooves, Page taking center stage on the clavinet as Mike steps into the limelight and Fish shouts “hey!” into his mic. It’s the yin-yang of these jams that really makes the whole thing work; one of the jams is just beautiful and textbook 3.0, the other is the sort of weirdness people think 3.0 had flushed from its system (far from it, as we’ve seen all throughout this list). And I might be the only person that thinks Kenwood Dennard should have gotten a full set with Phish Perazzo-style.
16. 7/31/09 II (Red Rocks, Morrison, CO)
Karl Perazzo looms large in Phish’s legend (probably even more than he does in Santana’s); you could argue that he played as much a role in Phish’s turnabout in the fall of 1996 as any member of Phish did, when they embraced a more stripped-back and rhythmic sound, made more with less instead of just making more, and completely changed what they did while staying true to who they were. And I think you could argue that the Red Rocks run in 2009 should loom large in Phish’s legend, as well — I wouldn’t argue that you ignore 2009 at your complete peril, but after this very fine run of shows and the Gorge run a week later, something snapped into place, and it’s been an upward trend ever since.
So, a word about segues. Segues come in all shapes and sizes — the spacious and luxurious move into Walk Away from a post-Twist jam, Izabella blasting out of Tweezer like the Alien tearing through John Hurt’s chest, Cannonball (excuse me, “Cannonball Jam”) drunkenly swerving out of an already astonishing run of segues preceding it. And then there’s segues like Drowned -> Crosseyed and Painless from this show, segues you don’t even notice until the new song is already there — like, for instance, a few familiar chords rattling out of the haze of a Drowned jam, and all of a sudden Fish is barking out “lost my shape!” and the crowd is going bananas. Yes, I mostly listen to shows for jams (like, say, the very fine jam that comes out of said Crosseyed, and a very fun and wacky Tweezer), but moments like that segue from Drowned into Crosseyed (and the later Fluffhead -> Piper -> ADITL run of segues) are like the finest possible butter for that improvisational bread.
17. 1/3/15 II (American Airlines Arena, Miami, FL)
And now, a word about Down With Disease. I would posit that, at this juncture, Down With Disease is the most consistent jam vehicle Phish has played in their history (even more so than Tweezer; Nassau 2003 aside, the pickings between the 6/9/00 and 7/31/13 versions are more worryingly slim than I’d like). Even its debut, on the much-loved NYE 1993 show, was auspicious; ever since, every incarnation of the band boasts several quality versions of the tune. There’s the brilliant Kent ’94 version, Saratoga Springs ’95, the Went and 12/29/97 versions, Cypress, IT and East Troy in 2003…all exceptional, for certain.
But I would also argue that, of all the eras that DWD has been a jam vehicle for Phish, 3.0 might be the era in which it’s shone brightest. Every year of this incarnation boasts at least one superb version — 2009 has Hartford’s, with its (truncated, but hey) really great Reba jam; 2010 has East Troy’s powerful DWD -> What’s The Use?; 2011 has the DTE Disease Supreme (the song is called Acknowledgement, people!); 2012 has MSG’s multi-faceted masterpiece; 2013 has Toronto’s, Reading’s fan-favorite version, and the aforementioned personal-favorite from MSG; 2014 has the LA raveup (which I witnessed in person) and underrated versions from Orange Beach and Randall’s Island. And then, as we all know, 2015 has one of Those Jams already in the Miami Disease, 25-plus minutes of breathtakingly confident jamming from front to back. That this set has a lovely Light -> Sally and very good Sand as well, helping 1/3/15 II stand up as a more complete set of music, almost seems like an afterthought.
18. 11/2/14 II (MGM Grand Garden Arena, Las Vegas, NV)
And that this set had The Line (gasp! horrors!) in it seems like an afterthought as well — or, at least, it should. I’ll leave aside any discussions about the musical merits of The Line, and mention this — one thing about the nature of Phish’s music is that songs can’t just be songs the same way that they can be songs if, say, Thom Yorke or Win Butler is writing them. Phish songs can be enjoyed as songs (one would hope), but they also have to be considered as “possible jam vehicles”, as well as whether they’re “first set” or “second set” material, and that seems a tad unfair, doesn’t it? A song as perfectly fine and even catchy as this one can’t just exist on its own merits; it serves as a bathroom break when played in first sets, people groan mightily when it pops up in second sets (like this one; heck, even I wondered why it showed up where it showed up), and it serves as another reason why (to some people) Phish aren’t what they used to be. I don’t think that’s ever going to change — actually, having witnessed a message board thread about the “jamming potential” of Fuego songs in 2015, I’m quite confident it won’t — but I think it’s still worth pointing out.
Thankfully, that quibble is the sort of small-fry complaint you only get when you’re obsessed enough to listen to hundreds of shows; no amount of disdain towards a song like The Line is going to take away from the musical power of this set. One of 2014’s finer Chalk Dust Tortures (a year which did not lack for fine-to-exemplary Chalk Dust Tortures) giving way to a staggeringly beautiful and serene Piper (featuring a truly inspired guitar lick from Trey), as well as a bigger-than-life YEM that matches up well with some of the finest from the nineties? That’s more than you get out of a lot of sets, period. That I don’t like a set this good as much as some others tells you a lot about 3.0’s strength.
19. 9/2/12 II (Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, Commerce, CO)
If there’s anything that, in my estimation, tells you the most about 3.0’s strength, it would be Dick’s 2012. I would guess that the vast majority of folks that care about this sort of thing (including me) will tell you that the pinnacle of the modern era is Dick’s 2012, three shows of absolutely sterling quality (including 8/31/12, a show that stacks up against the best of any era); if I was pressed to offer my opinion on why that is, I would say it’s because a) they were playing some very fine music in August 2012, and b) the momentum from going directly into Dick’s from the tour instead of having the customary month-ish layoff allowed the band to stay hot while still playing the larger-than-usual shows that have become customary of Dick’s runs (the nigh-anthemic 8/29/14 Simple is the best example of what I’m talking about here). Time may have slightly dimmed its exceptional appeal from when it was first played, but it’s still a marvel to listen to today, a 1997-like opening triptych of big jam vehicles segued together through perfect chemistry, with a major opening jam to kick things off (Sand, in what is almost certainly its finest version to date), with an icing-on-cake Lizards/Hoods 1–2 to close things out. It’s a superb, superb look at what this incarnation of Phish does so well in its sets.
But it’s not the best example of that, at least not to my ears. What is, you ask?
20. 10/20/13 II (Hampton Coliseum, Hampton, VA)
I don’t think anybody would question it if I’d said that the reason this is my favorite set of 3.0 is just the Tweezer/Golden Age duo, and for good reason. The forty minutes encompassed by those two jams make up some of the most gorgeously dark and unsettling moments of 2013 (if not the era); we all know that Fall shows tend to bring a different vibe than Summer shows, and the two jams here are the quintessential examples of that philosophy. But I keep coming back to this set, over and over, and I can’t imagine that it’s just because of those jams; you could certainly make arguments for any other duo of jams from that tour that are just as good. So what is it about this set, about 10/20/13 II, that makes it my favorite over so many played in the last six years?
Honestly? It’s that this set, more than all but a handful of the great Phish sets of all time, has everything. It has a rarity (Paul and Silas), it has exceptional and deep jamming (as mentioned above), it has one of the heartiest get-your-lighters-out sequences in the band’s history (Piper molding into, of all damn things, Takin’ Care of Business), it has pure dance machine badassery (a particularly wicked Also Sprach Zarathustra), and it has one of their classic closers to finish things off (Slave to the Traffic Light). It encompasses everything that Phish does so well, and does it all in 90 minutes, with no muss and no fuss. It’s basically anything and everything you’d want from a night of Phish music. And that’s why it is, for me, the set of 3.0 to beat, and what I would play for anyone that doubts the power of this band in its modern age.
