i was there, directly in front of CK5.

First set was a mindfuck. just rarity after rarity. i think they planned Demand and The Curtain With, but past that something just gave way and they decided to make the whole set a stats phreak's wet dream. I guess you just get sick of playing wolfman's brother and need to fuck your own face sometimes. it was totally whacked, the whole place was laughing laughing fall apart. My girlfriend was there (show #3) so she didn't quite appreciate it in the same way. but now she's got better stats than your significant other, probably.

what this did mean, though, is that after a musically stellar night two they fell back to tricks and...gimmicks?...manipulating song economics to go over well is not as impressive as good patient listening and improv, to me at least. I'd trade a solid padding of my stats for a 30 minute Tweezer any day of the week. but damn set 1 was fun. Set break was spent wondering what they could possibly do next. Everyone around me was giddy.

Set two was a letdown, given the buzz coming off of set one. It started out phish-mediocre: NMINML didn't really launch from its homebase, Mike's had a good groove to it, but it was clear that coming out of mike's, Trey didn't have a vision for what was to happen next. Things simmered and there was some back-and-forth on stage. As noted there was a HUGE song request banner for fee, so there it happened. Almost as if the band couldn't come up with anything on their own. Sometimes Fee opens up at the end into textures and colors but that was shortlived as well. Through jibboo it was...meh. Jibboo had a nice build but stayed close to home, things were played very safe.

Then things came off the rails. Miss You is a pointedly sad song - this requiem for trey's sister who died is full of pain. Emotional pain isn't an experience you have with phish very often, hardly ever. Tension? Yes. lots of that. but emotional pain has never been part of the phish pallete. You listen to Ray LaMontagne or Pink Floyd for emotional pain, not Phish, because when Phish does it, it comes across as cheesey. trey/phish simply don't do heartbreak well, or explicit emotions for that matter. Phish is much more impressionistic: splashes of light, color, texture. An explicit rendering of any emotion, the "tell" instead of "show," just never works. and that range of emotions is just out of place at a Phish show. I know Trey's themes in songwriting as of late are about getting older, confronting mortality and middle age, time slipping away, and so on. Which is fine, but I'd rather he cut a solo album full of those songs and leave Phish as its original vision and bread and butter: one big overblown word salad cartoon. I'd be a much more satisfied phan if we never heard Miss You, Joy, Show of Life, Summer of 89, Time Turns, Sleep Again, or similar (although some of these are actually good songs, they're just out of place in the phish context).

I digress. Somewhere in Miss You i think Trey got into his own head a bit too much and completely shut down any ability to pull himself out of it. I mean, the song is absolutely wrenching. Trey phoned it in for the rest of the night after Miss You, never really took a leadership role to bring us all home. He spent Weekapaug absolutely uninspired, not even playing his guitar and banging on that marimba (i guess i can say i now got a drums/space at a phish show, can we count that as a bustout?), he flubbed oh kee pah, handed suzy over to Page to lead, peppered standard blues riffs in Julius that he could do in his sleep, and then again gave Page the lead in Velvet Sea. The objection to Velvet Sea wasn't to me the song choice, but the fact that Trey was sidelining himself. Even Character 0 (possibly the biggest no effort gratification of an encore/set closer in the Phish Catalog, and for that reason i don't like it) was a path of least resistance attempt to make something of the encore, but he didn't even sing the lyrics, he literally turned his mic to the crowd who did his job for him. And then he bolted off stage and was out of site before everyone else was done bowing. i haven't ever seen Trey do that before, but clearly something was off. i guess everyone's allowed an off night, but damn. Should have encored with Coil.

All in all from the BGCA run this year, night 2 set 2 is the pick to click, and while the bust out set 1 of night three was cool, it was one of those things that probably doesn't translate to tape well.

$.02