Have to say that I absolutely adored the "New Year's Gag"

The level of audio / visual stimulation of that raging Steam jam going with extremely crowded airspace of the Garden seemed like a great way to do it. Instead of taking you out of the show for New Year's Time, they intensified the experience painting it in broad strokes of surrealist genius. Such a blitzkreig of psychedelic madness easily tops hearing 'Meatstick' sung for 20 minutes.

I like it. In a run full of times where Phish took you to the brink of the stratosphere before gleefully slamming the air-brakes and throwing you for a loop, the Steam/DWD segment seemed like a kind of payoff. So unfortunately, while The Wedge was a much better "back to earth we go" number than the utterly heartbreaking 'Curtis Loew' and 'Bug' on the 28th- two daggers that just kept it from being a Bethel level cohesive, forward-thinking and improvisationally democratic show.
The Alaska on the other hand seems almost comical as I haven't heard people seem so terrified of a song coming along to crush their set since before people accepted Velvet Sea. And oh, there's Velvet Sea.

So while that was kind of weird, I'm going to continue deluding myself into the conspiracy theory that sometimes they just want to play the song or botch the segue so hard that you can't imagine anything else being stranger. It makes me smile to think of it that way. What can i say?
"OMG Fish let's totally 'Bug > The Horse > Silent in the Morning > Weekapaug Groove, Joy > Character Zero, Encore: Show of Life' them- their minds are going to straight break trying to figure out what's going on.

Also love the Light, and nice to see Pebbles & Marbles after Trey either accidentally or purposefully seemed to play it's intro chords instead of the MFMF ones the other night.