VIDEO: Phish | Gamehendge NYE 12.31.2023 MSG

Phan shot video of Phish performing the complete Gamehendge with live performers as Lizards, Wilson, Forbin, Tela… New Years Eve 12.31.23 Phish Gamehendge part 1 Phish Gamehendge part 2 Part 3 coming soon…. Full Setlist and details Phish.net Jambase recap and The Skinny

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Fly, Famous Mockingbird

photo by Rene Huemer

"We can stage a runaway golf cart marathon!" 8.5x11 print of a watercolor illustration inspired by the song "Kung" by Phish. This print is part of my Gamehendge-inspired series. Although not part of TMWSIY, the song was a chant sung in front of the rhombus to enter the land of Gamehendge.

prints available

phishy business, or how to watch a concert for free

The first thing that you’ll notice at the Phish concert is that you’re probably the youngest one there. I found myself surrounded by an assortment of deadheads, dreadheads, and middle-aged men who looked like they’d just finished up a shift at the local record shop. You know the type. Many held in their hands the largest whipit balloons I had ever seen, purchased from the numerous enterprising vendors with nitrous tanks large enough to supply a dentist's office for weeks.

Let me be completely honest here: I am not a fan of Phish. Before the concert, I found their music to be mediocre at best, a jam band whose music should have perhaps stayed in the garage. What I am a fan of, however, is people, places, and things with a cult following. And if I have to give Phish credit for anything, it’s their fans.

The line into the Greek Theater spanned several blocks. Walking through was a funny experience due to the juxtaposition of the Phishheads and the intrigued Greek life students walking home or to class. I found myself somewhere in between the two groups- dressed in a long skirt and sweater I felt a bit like a kid dressed in hippie cosplay. And the Grateful Dead bucket hat didn't help.

So, what is Phish? By definition, Phish is an “American rock band formed in Burlington, Vermont, in 1983. The band is known for musical improvisation, extended jams, blending of genres, and a dedicated fan base” (Wikipedia).  What they're really known mostly for their live performances. Their fans claim that no two shows are ever the same, as they rely heavily on improvisation in both music and lighting.

The music started to make more sense as I got higher throughout the night. I suppose being able to openly smoke weed is one of the benefits to not being willing to spend $300+ on a general admission ticket, or $500 for the three-day pass, although the people inside didn’t seem like they were having any trouble. My friend and I watched from the parking lot above the theater, where several other groups had set up camp.

The band continued their semi-melodic tunes into the chilly Spring night, waltzing about with their improvisational guitar tunes. While I couldn’t quite make out the performers, the sound was just fine, perhaps even better, from up above.

When the three days of Phish-tivities were finally over, I found myself walking by the Greek Theater on my way home, melancholically missing walking through the block-long lines of the people who I will likely one day join. And when I do, I hope to see people like me walking by; young, curious, well-dressed, and in search of aneurism-inducing quantities of nitrous.

Side story: I went out to a bar the next night and met a man whose word slurring I thought was simply from his incredible inebriation. Turned out he was just from Virginia. But I knew who he was here for.

We talked about the band for a bit, and frankly if I weren’t so inebriated myself I likely would have picked up some interesting tidbits. I told him what I thought about the band (I don’t love them, but I love things with a cult following) and he laughed and said he liked my answer. He was having a great time here in the Bay, he said. All I really remember from the conversation was that he loved Phish.

He bought me a drink later (as a Southern gentleman, he assured me, he had a wife at home). Unfortunately, the bar was cash only and he had none, so I ended up paying for it myself. But all was well, it was closing time anyways. He wandered out into the streets in search of an afterparty at 2 am on a Tuesday. I headed home.

Glossary

Phishheads-  According to Urban Dictionary, a follower of fish; one who hates wilson

Wilson- A song by Phish, described by some as the seed that sprouted the whole thing. Wilson is a song in the overarching saga called “Gamehendge”, which spans about 10 songs. Wilson is a character who embodies corruption, unchecked ambition, and greed.

Jam band- a musical group whose concerts and live albums are characterized by lengthy improvisational jams. Famous jam bands include the Grateful Dead, Blues Traveler, the Dave Mathews Band, Phish, and Santana.

Shakedown-  Shakedown Street is a phrase coined by the Grateful Dead which describes the parking lot of a jam band where vending takes place. Food, alcohol, clothing, jewelry, and tickets are sold in this lively little community area.  

Phish Lot- The Phish take on a Shakedown. The Facebook group describes It as “a connection network of sellers, buyers, and kids who just like to look!” Aww, I feel included :)

Phish.net- your ultimate source for all. things. Phish. There, you can find recaps of pretty much every show.

Seeing as how I haven't done a music-related write-up for a bit and how it's currently 4:30pm and therefore too late in the day to start on another work-related project of actual substance...I'm going to tell you about this version of "Bathtub Gin" that I like!

As I said (threatened?) in my last Goose post, I'm consciously branching out a little between now and whenever the hell the next Goose show will be. In my own personal listening, "branching out" means I've been listening to a lot of stuff I've never heard before, both stuff that's totally new to me and stuff that's been sitting ignored on my "Try this!" list for a long time. In my blog writing, "branching out" apparently means "writing about the band I've listened to the most by an entire order of magnitude for the last twenty-five years."

Hey, if I can't be perfect I'm sure as hell going to stop trying.

I am not going to start this post with a primer on Phish because a) if you're reading this you either already know them or you don't know them and don't care, and b) there are literal books about this out there because these guys have been playing for forty years and every little thing they do is steeped in weird mythology and inside jokes and as much as I love all of it, I don't love it enough to write a hundred thousand words about it.

If you're somehow entirely new to the band and also feel an obsessive need to learn/dive in, my super idiosyncratic recommendation is to listen to their album A Live One a few times, and then buy and read through this very short book by Walter Holland, who in my humble opinion is sort of like the Hunter S. Thompson of writing about Phish jams.

I will henceforth only be writing in the micro- and macro-cosms about this particular version of Phish's "Bathtub Gin" and my reactions to it, despite not being the Hunter S. Thompson of writing about Phish jams.

Biologically speaking, I almost certainly, technically have THC in my bloodstream right now if that somehow makes you feel better.

So, Phish was one of the first places I turned at the beginning of this little Goose hiatus. For a lot of reasons, despite being the band that most immediately jumps to my mind when the phrase "favorite ever" is used in a variety of contexts, I haven't listened to Phish much over the last few years. I wrote a little bit about why in this previous post, and to keep my promise of staying focused and save myself some time typing, I won't say any more for the moment: suffice to say that I overdid it a little bit with The Phish and The Phish's Internet Fandom, which soured me on the band's music and left me sitting on the sidelines for years, wondering if it was the band that had come, over time, to suck ass, or whether it was just me.

Well, I'm relieved to report that it was, in fact, me who was doing the ass-sucking.

I learned this, in large part, by diving into the band's recent New Year's Eve (NYE) run at Madison Square Garden (MSG). I actually started my Goose Interregnum concert-viewing here only because the run had just ended and I'd seen online that the band had played all the way through its storied, elusive, and utterly dorky "Gamehendge" saga on 12/31, for the first time since 1994 (or maybe 1995, kill me in the comments Phish fans, I'm ready to die).

I wanted to see this, even if after the fact and from my couch, because back in my early Phish fan-Hood (see what I did there?) Gamehendge had been a big part of what drew me to the band, and I was excited by the prospect of being a grown-ass, middle-aged man bawling his eyes out on his basement couch because in a video another old man was on a stage singing a song about a bulldog and a cat fighting to the death while a comet crashed into Earth, bringing about the end times.

When you're a straight, white kid growing up in suburbia, you either become an absolute monster or your brain finds really fucking weird things to care a lot about. I like to think I fit into the second category.

Anyway, with a more-than-usual amount of spare time on my hands, I decided to try watching the entire MSG NYE run, starting with 12/28 instead of jumping straight to 12/31. I thought, maybe, I'd have a decently fun time and get a good sense of where Phish was at musically (an important thing to know when all the band members are sixty-ish years in age and you haven't heard or seen them play since 2021). Then I watched 12/28 and it destroyed me. Like, this band of aging dork-rockers literally lit the entire arena on fire with their instruments and it burned down around them while they just kept jamming. I'm not sure how anyone escaped MSG alive, let alone how there were concerts there for the next three nights.

12/29 was just as good, if not better, and 12/30 was an incredible show that only paled in comparison to the previous two. My reaction surprised me, and so that's why I cranked up the ol' typing machine, shoveled some fresh coal into the boiler, and sat down to write about...wait, what was I actually writing about, again?

Oh, yeah. "Bathtub Gin."

I'm not gonna give you a lengthy history of this song, for all the same reasons I cited above for not giving you a long history of Phish as a band. I will tell you it's a "classic" Phish song in that it was played live for the first time in 1989 and has been played three hundred and four more times in the one thousand, seven-hundred and fifty-one shows the band has played since. There also a studio recording of it on Lawn Boy, which I always forget because who the fuck listens to Lawn Boy?! The song is used frequently, but not always, as a jam vehicle, and I tend to enjoy hearing it live due to its quintessentially Phish-y sound: Phish writes and plays songs that sound a lot like many of their influences, but they also have songs that sound only like Phish, and this is one of them. Well, it sounds like Phish and Gerswhin, I suppose. "Bathtub Gin" is also my wife's favorite Phish song, but I'm not entirely sure if that's because she likes it or because she knows that liking "Waste" or "Shade" or "Farmhouse" more would put her firmly in the "Stereotypical Phish Wife" realm.

This 12/28 version of the tune is a great one for jamming, but as usual I'll (mostly) refrain from commenting until the point in the video where the composed portion of the song leaves off and the improvisation begins.

I do want to start by saying I love the retro feel of this year's "Live Phish" intro/logo sequence. Also, yes, Page's opening keyboard banging is supposed to sound like that. It's how he lets you know he's having fun! Gershwin tease at 2:26 if you're keeping track. Otherwise, this is a pretty straightforward reading of the composed part of the song. I absolutely love the sound mix here, as you can hear all four members' contributions to the song more or less equally. It blows the old days of tapes essentially mixed to make Trey's guitar 80% of the band's sound out of the water. It also leads to me basically just listening to Mike Gordon play bass for the entire show because if you can, why wouldn't you?!

It often sounds like the band might be singing actual, English lyrics during the outro portion of the song, but I don't think they ever are.

The jam starts at 4:50, and basically immediately Fishman is playing stuff on the drums that my simple brain can barely comprehend. This is perhaps one significant difference between Phish and the Goose jams I've been covering previously: the rhythm section of Phish is much more directly involved in the direction of the band's improvisation, whereas it often feels like the drums and bass of Goose are just laying a foundation for the melody players to improvise over. One is not inherently better than the other, but I do often feel like there's a lot more to listen to with Phish, despite them having fewer members.

Anyway, this first chunk of the jam feels a lot to me like being lost in a fuzzy, pleasant labyrinth: the tempo is slow and the playing is soft, but there's an undercurrent of tension there. By 5:30, things have started to straighten out a little, though the lights have gotten absolutely weird. Fishman starts playing a more straightforward beat, and the rest of the band falls into a rock-sounding jam that makes me think of what Goose might sound like if their fingers were thirty years older.

Trey starts to sit back a little bit at 6:45, and the jam mellows out in response. It feels a little bit like he can't figure out where he wants to go next here, but Mike and Page take some turns adding ideas to the mix in the meantime. Eventually, Trey joins back in the fun, but still in a restrained way. For awhile here, everyone's just sort of playing together, with no particular standout or soloist, which is great.

Whatever keyboard tone Page switches to at 8:58 is fantastic. He follows it up pretty quickly with some weirder synthesizer stuff, and at 9:40 this pushes the jam in a more sinister direction. At 10:20, Trey switches over to a very Portal To Robot Hell guitar effect, and now we're in full-on latter-day Evil Phish jamming territory. Fishman is, of course, keeping a beat here, but it's odd and off-kilter (not a drummer, sorry to be imprecise) and makes the whole thing feel like it's just barely hanging together in the best way.

This kind of "almost-falling-apart" sound is, paradoxically, when Phish often hits their stride in jamming. I think it's what makes them sort of a love/hate proposition even among people who listen to a lot of improvisatory rock music. It's not particularly fun or comfortable, but I've never come across another group of musicians that can improvise with each other consistently in this way.

Trey's playing finally comes a bit to the fore starting at 13:00, but even here this doesn't feel like a rote jam "peak": instead, the backbeat that Fishman is playing keeps things feeling a little out of sorts and not entirely resolved. Trey and Page playing off of each other at 14:15 is nice. I'm not sure what's going on with the lights at 14:30, but I do know these guys consistently have my favorite light show in show business. There's some almost Allman Bros-sounding playing from Trey at 15:15 as we reaching peak craziness...

...then some initial teasing of the "Bathtub Gin" theme at 16:30 or so, teasing a return to the song proper to wrap things up!

The video fades out on a segue into what would turn out to be an excellent version of "Ghost," for those keeping score at home.

Anyway, thanks for reading my first (at least lately) Phish write-up. I'm going to try to do a few more of these from the run, including (I think) two new songs: "Oblivion" from 12/29 and "Life Saving Gun" from 12/30. Should have those up soon!

Phish at Madison Square Garden

December 31, 2023

by Everynight Charley Crespo

Phish made Phishtory yet again when the jam band concluded its four year-end concert series at Madison Square Garden on New Year’s Eve. Phish surprised the audience by introducing a lavish theatrical presentation of the complete Gamehendge for the first time in nearly 30 years.

more ....

Chat what if I said errand wolfe gamehendge from phish was my wife and she loved me very very much :((

Phull disclosure pholks is that I only saw the 30th and the 31st of this run. i am not sure how the shows began this week and nor did I even hear a note before…

🎵 The Lizards by @phish

🎼 by @treyanastasio

📸 by @stacy.b.klein.3

Affirmations by @iam.affirmations

The last time Phish played “The Lizards” was at Alpine Valley 8/12/22, just sayin.

#TheLizards #phish #gamehendge #welcometomyphishylife #dailyaffirmations #affirmations #iamapp #spiritualtiktok #AttitudeOfGratitude #Love #Perspective #phishtour #phishtok #reels

Whether you’re a physicist, a fast food employee or a robotic hangman who wears a bag over their head and is tasked to hang an accountant who embezzled funds, everyone deserves a little break every now and then. Here’s AC/DC Bag enjoying a quick smoko out the back of @theuglypigannapolis . #acdcbag #gamehendge #phish #annapolis #annapolismurals #theuglypigannapolis #houlart #houl (at The Ugly Pig LLC) https://www.instagram.com/p/CH3umu1hWBV/?igshid=4q1kpjonyq3k

"Llama taboot taboot"

prints available

🖤🖤🖤

15 years ago: Newport State Airport - Coventry, VT - 2004

Phish • August 15, 2004 • Newport State Airport • Coventry, VT

Set 1: Mike's Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove, Anything But Me, Reba, Carini > Chalk Dust Torture -> Possum > Wolfman's Brother[1] > Taste

Set 2: Down with Disease[2] > Wading in the Velvet Sea[3], Glide, Split Open and Melt -> Ghost

Set 3: Fast Enough for You, Seven Below[4] -> Simple > Piper -> Cool Jerk[5] -> The Dickie Scotland Song[6], Wilson > Slave to the Traffic Light

Encore: The Curtain With[7]

[1] Explanation from Trey as to the history of the song; also features Trey's mom, Mike's mom and John Paluska on "sexy bump". [2] Unfinished. [3] Page and Trey break down. [4] "Seven Below" shouted by all band members sporadically during the jam. [5] Phish debut; lyrics changed to honor Mark "Bruno" Bradley. [6] Debut; lyrics referenced Hadden Hipsley and Dickie Scotland [7] Jam segment stopped and restarted in correct key.

This was the second show of the Coventry festival and was the presumed “Final Show.” When Trey made his “break-up” announcement the preceding May, he indicated that Coventry would be the final Phish shows. In reality, this turned out to be the final public show for over four and a half years. This show was simulcast in movie theaters nationwide. Before Anything But Me, Trey announced that, for the first time in 21 years, he was nervous performing a Phish show. During Wolfman’s, Trey revealed that the Wolfman’s Brother is, in fact, Fish (as well as the fact that he handed the phone to his friend Liz Durfee). Also, during Wolfman’s, Trey and Mike invited their mothers onstage (and later John Paluska) to do the “sexy bump” dance. Disease was unfinished and featured Trey briefly playing his guitar with a glow stick. Both Page and Trey broke down during an especially emotional Velvet Sea. After a thoroughly botched Glide, all four band members offered words of thanks to the fans for their continued support and dedication and brief reflections on their twenty years together. Trey then stated that what they really needed to do was “blow off some fucking steam” before starting up Melt. There was an enormous glow stick war during Ghost featuring hundreds, if not thousands, of orange glow sticks. This version of Seven Below saw all of the band members sporadically shouting “Seven Below” throughout the jam. The Phish debut of Cool Jerk contained alternate lyrics honoring monitor mixer, Mark “Bruno” Bradley. The Dickie Scotland Song was spontaneously created and included lyrics in honor of production manager, Hadden Hipsley, and tour accountant, Richard Glasgow (a.k.a. Dickie Scotland). Before Wilson, Trey asked the crowd to sing to another of their friends “for the last time.” There was a fireworks display between the end of the third set and the encore. Before the encore, while explaining the origins of The Curtain, Trey jokingly announced that the entire Chicago Symphony and the Twyla Tharp Dance Troupe were going to perform Gamehendge. Trey explained that they chose The Curtain With as the last song to bring them full circle, because, not only was it one of the first Phish songs he wrote, but he wrote it in a cabin one town over from Coventry. Trey stopped and restarted the jam segment of the Curtain With, because they were in the wrong key or, as he explained, ”Since we are going to be bringing ourselves back in time, we may as well do it in the correct key.” There was no P.A. music after the Curtain With.

Night Eight... and a little Gamehendge. . . . . . #photography #concertphotography #PhishFromMyPhone #MSG #BakersDozen #Phish13 #Phish (at The Garden)