Today Jambands.com concludes its two-part look at Phish’s New Year’s Run past with David Steinberg, the original unofficial Phish statistician (aka Timer). The quartet opens its five-night New Year’s Run tonight at Worcester’s Centrum, now known as the DCU Center. The itinerary includes three nights at Madison Square Garden, featuring their first New Year’s Eve at the venue since their return from their first hiatus on December 31, 2002. The Mockingbird Foundation board member (a charitable organization setup by fans to distribute funds generated from the Phish community) was at the first Phish New Year’s Eve event (12/31/89), and has been back ever since.
Part I of our discussion featured Steinberg’s introduction into the world of Phish, and concludes with a look at the Vermont Quartet’s first gig at Madison Square Garden on December 30, 1994. Now, in Part II, we offer Steinberg’s commentary about the next night of that 1994 NYE run, while tracking the rest of the legendary dates along the New Year’s Eve trail and beyond through the years as we venture back with a celebratory nod towards the history of Phish from a legendary longtime fan’s perspective.
RR: Do you feel Phish was getting used to Madison Square Garden at their first gig at that venue on December 30, 1994? What were your impressions of that show?
DS: What I remember is that I think every single song on that New Year’s Run had one jam that went the 20-minute length, which was new, obviously, as you know. That would happen once in a blue moon, not something that would happen every night. The other thing that struck me is that they were starting to open up their songs quite a bit. At Madison Square Garden, it was “Tweezer.”
RR: And we’ve got the Hot Dog Show on December 31, 1994 at Boston Garden. It seemed like everything came together at that show. It was a special gig, planned in advance, and the fan base had exploded. Describe the vibe on that night.
DS: Oh, yes, the Hot Dog Show. Well, no one had any clue that was going to happen. That’s the whole thing, it’s like the Hot Dog Show now: “Oh, yeah, that was a New Year’s stunt,” but at that time…yeah, they did the aquarium, the giant clam thing the year before…I guess that was, in retrospect, a fairly big thing; it was more like goofy, though. The giant hot dog—when you actually have a hot dog flying around the stadium with the band inside it—was definitely…I was up near the top, so I did not know they were throwing ping pong balls down on the crowd until after the show. That is a perfect example of the New Year’s shows—something could happen, and people could be unaware of it. The venue had gotten big enough to the point where you wouldn’t know if there was anything else happening anymore.
RR: It’s funny you should say that because these days people can get tipped off by certain things due to easy access to information while expectations are also so high. Back then, one might have been expecting the unexpected from Phish, but the band would still throw something different into the mix.
DS: Well, two things. One is that before that tour, I mentioned earlier that the band would just hang out after the show. If you wanted to talk to a band member, you just hung out by the buses, and there they were, so it’s hard to have the same level of expectations when it felt more like “oh, yeah, these are these cool people playing this music,” and not “here are these unapproachable rock stars on stage that are there to be our puppets and dance for us.” That was part of the expectations being lower; the band was much more approachable.
And it felt like every single year was getting bigger like something new was going to happen like ’93 was so much better than ’92, and ’94 was so much better than ’93. No one knew when it was going to stop. It was like “My God, where does this thing end?” And, obviously, ’95 was much better than ’94.
RR: Right. Let’s talk about December 31, 1995. It pretty much took on a sort of interdimensional status, at certain points, depending upon whom you speak to, and their feelings about that year, in comparison to other landmark New Year’s gigs. Jerry Garcia passed away in August 1995, and by the fall, Phish had really kicked it up into a higher gear. So, it’s New Year’s, and Phish is back at the Garden.
DS: Yeah, that was actually a year where I saw very few shows because I just left grad school and moved to Seattle, and someone had hit my car right before summer tour, so I couldn’t afford to do anything. I missed out on all of the summer of 1995. The difference between ’95 and now is that you couldn’t just go to archive.org or etree or whatever, and download the show the next day. I was reading the setlists, and it was obvious from the setlists that something was up. It was still a long time between the show and when you actually could get a tape, so I didn’t quite realize just how far they had evolved because I had missed the whole tour, and I even missed the first few nights of the New Year’s Run.
I get to Madison Square Garden, and the 30th, the 30th is a very underrated show. Obviously, it is going to be because the next night is so incredible. What I can tell you about the 31st—I thought the stunt was a step down from the year before; the Van de Graff generator and the Baby New Year were more like “O.K., I get this one this year.”— is musically (the “Weekapaug,” the “Mike’s,” the “Drowned,” and the “Johnny B. Goode” was the best version of that song I had ever heard any band do), I walked out of that show not thinking I’d seen the best New Year’s show, but thinking I’d seen the best show Phish had ever played. Charlie Dirksen still argues about whether or not there’s a “Fire in the Mountain” tease in that [in the post-“Drowned” jam]. He and I were in an e-mail argument about that yesterday, so that show is one of the all-time great shows.
RR: Let’s do the unexpected and skip over 1996 for now, and move forward to their return to Madison Square Garden with their longest run at that time in that venue during the 1997 New Year’s Run. Phish’s sound changed quite a bit in 1997. How did that impact the scene and the New Year ’s Eve run in general?
DS: First thing that I always think about ’97 is that no one ever talks about that first night.
RR: 12/29?
DS: 12/28. See—I rest my case! (laughter)
RR: There you go. You got me and I’m Super Fan Deluxe.
DS: No one ever talks about the first night at the Capital Centre. There’s a reason. The Maryland show is a sloppy show; it definitely is. But the jams in that show were actually very interesting. That entire run—the 29th with all those “Can Turn You Loose” teases, and there is a definite rift in the Phish community between 12/29 and 12/30 that year. There are people that swear by 12/29 [Author’s Note: yours truly], and there are other people that swear by 12/30. I’m a 12/30 kind of guy. I’m a “Harpua” person, you know. And that, I believe, is the best “Harpua” Phish have ever done.
RR: Tom Marshall came out and it was the “Pentagram Harpua.”
DS: Yeah, the Pentagram.
RR: Lost in Space and all of that sort of thing.
DS: The cheese sandwich.
RR: Yeah. Why was that significant? All the different elements?
DS: It was a really interesting story. It was like the one time where Trey’s story—actually he told this bizarre story—that all kind of made sense. It was the first time where they foreshadowed the New Year’s prank. All of these same elements in Trey’s story in “Harpua” were the balloons and the movies on the next night. They were actually premeditating the entire thing, and taking the New Year’s stunt and extending it over two days. That show also had the first “Sneakin’ Sally” since the 80s [5/28/89], and, of course, they played it twice. I always had a theory that they did that because some people got in late. “Oh, you missed the big bust out, so here you go—now, you can hear it.”
It was also the first U.S. “Carini” [which included a stage appearance by Pete Carini, Jon Fishman’s drum tech]. “Carini” was one of those songs…again, I didn’t do the Europe tour, and tapes, especially from the Europe tour didn’t tour that well, and I just heard the legend of this song where the band officially said, “This is not a song,” and it just seemed like one of those things that was just going to stay in Europe. I was doing that show in particular [12/31/97] with a bunch of Mockingbird people. The Mockingbird Foundation was just starting out then, and someone went nuts when they started “Carini.” And I had never heard the song, so I was thinking, “What’s going on? Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of this song…vaguely.” The 30th just went on forever—that whole thing about how they played so late, and, what the hell, two New Year’s shows.
RR: They were going to get fined anyway for playing too late.
DS: Might as well keep on going.
RR: Let’s talk about the Mockingbird Foundation and how you became an important part of its creation and influence to this day.
DS: The Mockingbird Foundation is two-fold. On one level, it’s a charity which gives money to music education for children. So, basically, the questions are “What is the Mockingbird Foundation and what do we do with the Mockingbird Foundation?” What we do—what helped create all this money, is that we are people who, to a large degree, it isn’t the only project we have, but it’s the main one—is to keep the most accurate possible set of information about Phish and their history and their songs. It’s all on Phish.net now, but we tried to have a very well-written song history for every song—who it was written by, maybe some analysis about what the lyrics mean, and they are all written by different people, and everyone can go on a tangent however they see fit.
What we try to do is we try to have as much factual information that we can get about the band, and we’re still discovering new teases in songs, and say, “Hey, we don’t have in our setlist from 3/12/93 that there was a “Careful with That Axe, Eugene” tease in “AC/DC Bag.” There is one, by the way, and I was actually stunned we didn’t have it in our setlist and got very mad that it wasn’t in our setlist: “How could you miss that?” It’s a group of people that, whenever I listen to a tape, part of me is subconsciously listening to teases. Actually, New Year’s ’93, when I listening to it the other day, I just found an Odd Couple tease in the intro to “Harry Hood” that we had to document. There was also a “Smoke on the Water” tease or something like that.
Our goal as an organization is to raise money for children. We’ve given to some pretty impressive groups. My personal favorite is a group in Alaska that was recreating Alaskan Native American instruments as the entire culture was about to die out and it kept it going; traditional instruments and songs—that’s one that really stuck with me. A large part of what we are doing is we are trying to keep this history, and trying to get this knowledge out there.
What do I do for them? I write a lot of song histories. Obviously, I do the stats, which is not an official part of Phish.net, but we’re kind of affiliated these days, and I get the setlists from there, and I feed from Phish.nets to a stats page. I also write song histories. I help try to get new information. I still like discovering old teases back from shows that we’ve missed. “Hey, back in ’93, here was this old tease that no one noticed before, check it out.” We’re trying to get an exceedingly accurate setlist file, and use it to power things like stats. I’m always trying to get new things.
RR: Let’s skip forward to the New Year’s Runs in 1998, 1999, and 2002, which are three vastly different timeframes and events. 1998 featured four shows, Phish’s longest-running stand at Madison Square Garden.
DS: To be honest, that’s kind of the forgotten New Year’s Run for me. I think it’s partly because of the stunt. I finally found out years later that it was supposed to be the four seasons, or at least that’s the rumor I heard. That’s what the whole thing was supposed to be—the plants on stage that grew at the end. The report on rec.music.phish was that at the end of the fourth day it will all make sense what was going on. It didn’t. It was all of a sudden gone [after the first night, 12/28/98], so it was weird. There were really no stunts, other than the passing around of the glow rings. I think the idea was that some people would throw glow rings, instead of glow sticks. But, instead, people made this giant chain that went all the way around the Garden, which was pretty cool.
The first 45 minutes of the first set of New Year’s Eve are actually really, really, really good—“1999,” “Mike’s>[Hydrogen>]Weekapaug are really strong. But, other than that, there was a “Quinn [the Eskimo on 12/28/98]” bustout; there was a “Been Caught Stealin’ [12/28/98 encore]” and “The Divided Sky” encore [on 12/29/98]. The New Year’s Run was kind of…it was just there. Do you ever listen to that New Year’s Run? I mean outside of “1999,” do you ever listen to any of the rest of the run?
RR: That’s a tough one. I really enjoyed ’95 and ’97, and ’96 just felt…well, it was planned out, wasn’t it? It always sounded that way, and that’s how it was done. New Year’s Run 1998? I don’t have anything against it, but I don’t listen to it much.
DS: The balloon drop in ‘96 was just over the top [Author’s Note: arguably a world record]. Do you remember that the people noticed the balloons the first night?
RR: Yeah.
DS: I had a DAT tape, and I was taping those shows, too, but with a real tape deck, not my Marantz mono ridiculous deck. One thing I’ll remember, I’ll never forget, in ’96, people had the one day to notice that the balloons were about the fall? And people had umbrellas for their [gear]? One taper had on his T-bar a giant cardboard hand and he could spin that thing around, separately from his mikes, and swat balloons away. That’s the thing I remember about ’96—people were prepared for those balloons.
In ’98, there isn’t a big spectacle, there isn’t that legendary show that stands out that everyone talks about, and, yet, they busted out “Grind” on 12/30. No one talks about that. It just seems to be the one that falls through the cracks a lot because that was the one year there really wasn’t that big thing. Although, the cool thing was the mail order tickets; that’s the one thing I do remember. There was a subway train, and each night, the train was a little bit bigger. The New Year’s ticket was so big that, even ripped, it barely fits in the back of a CD case.
RR: Unbeknownst to pretty much everyone, that would be the last Phish New Year’s Eve at Madison Square Garden for four years. Moving forward one year to December 1999, we come at long last to Big Cypress. I still believe that you wrote the definitive study of that run, especially the legendary 12/31/99 show, for this site, which appeared to me to be the epitome of what that experience was like. Is there any other way to quantify how important Big Cypress was to you, personally, the band, and the fan base at that time?
DS: Sometimes, festivals work. Sometimes, they don’t.
One thing it means to me is that I never have to think when someone asks me what the best Phish show I ever saw. It’s instinctual—Big Cypress. You don’t have to think about it. It was a weekend where everything…other than the traffic, other than getting in and getting out, which didn’t work at all according to plan, everything just kind of worked.
The weather. One thing we saw from the Miami New Year’s Run [2003] is that the weather isn’t automatically 85 degrees and sunny on New Year’s Eve in southern Florida. In 1999, it was just perfect. On that entire day, I don’t know how New Year’s Eve could have gone any better.
Some people bitch: “Oh, they could have played “Harpua,” or they could have busted something out,” and I could see that a little bit, but, in terms of the way they were playing, the style of the jams, the jams, especially later in the night, especially the “Roses Are Free” jam, you can tell the hour just by listening to the quality of the jam. You can tell it is four in the morning.
Phish were just building up to that, and building up to that, and building up to that. And then, they did it, and I understand why they broke up. There’s nowhere to go from there.
It was that perfect moment where everything worked. And even when things weren’t working, they ended up becoming part of this amazing story. You also have all of these mythic elements. Here you are, and no one knows if the world is going to be around next week. We’re on this Indian Reservation. There were no newspapers coming in. We had our own power, so for all we knew the grid melted, and the only power that existed were these generators on this Indian Reservation. No one had radios with them at the show. We had no idea what was going on. It was this completely self-sustained moment in our community. Now it wouldn’t have worked. Now, everyone would have cell phones, and people would text them: “Hey, no Y2K problems; everything’s good.”
We were completely isolated ourselves from the rest of the country, and went to this weird place in the middle of an Indian Reservation, no less—not just like a military base, but an Indian Reservation, so there were all sorts of spiritual components to that, too.
There were mythic elements to the whole thing—the millennium, where we were, New Year’s Eve, for that matter—that it’s very hard for me to be rational about Big Cypress. It always will be the peak event of my Phish career, barring who knows, this Madison Square Garden run will completely blow it away somehow. But I don’t know how. I guess Telluride could have [Summer Tour 2010]. It’s not just the music, but the fact that they played all night to sunrise, which they will probably never do again.
RR: Now, like you said, it made sense that less than a year later Phish would take a break. No one really knew what was going to happen. All that was known was that Phish was contractually bound to deliver two studio albums to Elektra Records. But, then they came back on December 31, 2002 at Madison Square Garden. How difficult was it for you to get a ticket to that first post-hiatus show?
DS: Oddly enough, I didn’t have any problem with it at all. (laughter) I was getting friends in all four nights. That was the peak of my Ticketmaster skills, actually, when they first came back and the following spring. I had extras to all four nights. For the Hampton [shows], there were constant re-releases where you just thought, “I haven’t gotten any 1/3[/03]s yet, maybe there’ll be a re-release. I’m going to make a phone call and see if there are any.” Ticketmaster online didn’t quite have their act together yet. There were all sorts of loopholes that could be exploited. I do remember that I got a pair of tickets when they were on sale for New Year’s Eve. I didn’t have a mail order come through, so I was actually in chaos with a group of friends, and then, I thought I had lost them, and tried to figure out what was going on. That was when I discovered Ticketmaster didn’t send you the final step, but it still went through—remember those?
RR: Yep.
DS: Even though I got very lucky for the run, I do know how hard it was. My [future] wife was living in Virginia Beach at the time, and could only go to one of the three Hampton shows because that’s all she could get. I know it was a really difficult ticket. It wasn’t as hard as the return show—the 3/6/09 show—but, after that, they were probably the next hardest.
RR: What was the atmosphere like for Phish on that night, December 31, 2002, and why is Madison Square Garden such a special venue for Phish and the fan base?
DS: I wonder how much of that is because they played there in ’95 and ’97. I actually got in a debate on Phantasy Tour the other day. They could have played those two shows in, perhaps, Oklahoma City, and they were so on in ’95 and ’97 that they still probably would have been great shows. The two best New Year’s Eve Runs—excluding Big Cypress, which is its own entity and can’t be fairly compared to any other show—both occurred at Madison Square Garden in ’95 and ‘97. And so there’s always going to be something special about that venue just for that reason. They’ve also played there for more New Year’s Eves than any other place, so there’s always going to be that feeling that it’s home when you go there. And I’m not a big New York City fan—I’ll be honest with you. At the same time, the fact that I’m planning a trip to Worcester and Madison Square Garden for New Year’s Eve just feels very much like how things work in the world. Here’s where I’m going; it’s where I always go. When you walk in there on New Year’s Eve and you see the balloon bags up on the ceiling, it just feels very much like returning home. I’ve never worked out how ’02 felt. I didn’t feel so much like “oh my God, they were gone and they came back,” as much as it just felt natural that it was at Madison Square Garden. Everyone went immediately back to where they were two years ago. It was like that really hadn’t happened. “Oh, yeah, “Piper,” all right—I love “Piper,” and immediately went back into the mold of seeing a Phish show.
Hampton [the March 2009 comeback shows] was a little bit different. At Hampton, the sabbatical was so long that people got out of that mold. It took a little time, even for the band, then to get back into the “oh, hey, we’re Phish, this is what we do.” But at the Madison Square Garden show, they were sloppy during that [‘02/’03] New Year’s Run, but it very much felt like they’d never really left. They had just taken a normal break, a little bit longer than normal, and here they are again. I think coming back at Madison Square Garden was part of that because it is Madison Square Garden on New Year’s Eve, and it just feels like a very natural place for Phish to be playing.
RR: You had some fond memories for the New Year’s Run in 2003 in somewhat of a familiar environment. Yes, it was in Florida, but this time they hit Miami.
DS: Oh, that was so much fun. (laughs) There’s a lot in that run. I preferred 12/30. 12/30, unfortunately, is one of those “you have to be there” shows. Afterwards, I was stunned at how many people hated it. Then, I realized that if you were there, it always is going to be one of those shows that you’re going to remember forever. There were so many moments there—the silliness of the “L.A. Woman;” it’s sloppy as all get out, don’t get me wrong; but, at that time, you don’t care: “Oh my God, this is so cool.” And “Sand>Shafty” is such a hot combination of songs, and when they started “Wilson” one night and finished it the next—there’s a lot going on there. It was a very playful show is what it was, more than anything. Phish having fun on stage is something I never have too much of.
RR: The band had just come back one year prior, on December 31, 2002, and everyone is in the middle of an exciting New Year’s Run. Did you ever feel like that was it? That Phish was thinking of breaking up within the next six months?
DS: I had no suspicion of that whatsoever. Then I went to Vegas. That first night in Vegas [April 15, 2004] was…there are three Phish shows that I went to that I can actually say were bad: 7/17/92, which fortunately does not circulate on tape, and was not the band’s fault—it was the first Santana opener, and, unfortunately, they couldn’t hear themselves on the monitors, Coventry, for obvious reasons, and 4/15/04.
At Miami, everyone was like “Hey, they’re havin’ fun, there’s some sloppiness, and there weren’t that many jams in that run, but it was the most fun we’ve ever seen Phish play. This is great.” Then, they come back, and they go to Vegas and “What just happened? This is not the band we saw in Miami. What is going on here?”
RR: Phish came back five years later at Hampton in 2009. They took a little while to get going last year, and eventually, played Festival 8 over Halloween weekend. What was your impression of that festival?
DS: My impression of Festival 8, I think, is pretty much the impression that everyone has of Festival 8—the incredibly stunning environment, and a really, really efficient and well-run festival. The second day we fucked up. We were hanging out in the desert, and we thought the show started a half hour later than it did, and we were just hanging out in the desert doing a mini-hike, and I accidentally sat on a cactus, so we had to go because we figured “O.K., that’s usually a good sign that it’s time to go when you have spikes all over your pant’s leg.” We quickly changed and ran to the venue, and it turned out that instead of having an hour before show time, we arrived just at show time, and there were three cars ahead of us waiting to get in. And that was the most traffic we saw any day. That was amazing. It was very well-run. You couldn’t ask for anything more in terms of the incredible beauty of the area.
The acoustic set was far, far better than anything anyone could have wished for. We were all terrified of that thing, and it turned out to be one of the highlights of the year. The Exile on Main St. set—I’m not a huge Rolling Stones fan, but they really played it incredibly well, and helped me discover some songs that I had not heard that I now love. And the rest of the run was kind of mediocre. I think that’s pretty much a consensus. I don’t think my opinion is different from the consensus—two really great sets, a beautiful environment, very well-run, and the entire rest of the festival is kind of forgettable.
RR: And then they ended up in Miami again for the 2009 New Year’s Run.
DS: As much as Madison Square Garden feels like home, right now I have to admit that I prefer Miami in many ways. It’s warm—not last year—but it is warm. Because it is a little more of a hassle to get to for Northeasterners, tickets are a lot easier to come by.
There’s a lot less ticket-stress. And they seem to like the place.
Part of the 2010 silliness started to come into play then. The “Hey, let’s play this song; hey, let’s play that song”—they just suddenly started pulling out random songs out of their back catalogue out of nowhere. The whole way they setup the stunt where they made a big deal out of the last vacuum solo of the decade, and two nights later, they did a misdirect where they had Rich come on stage because Fishman couldn’t lie. So it put the expectation in everybody’s head: “Oh, wait a second, people can come on stage and play for Fishman.” The next night, people were saying, “I guess they did it last night, so I guess they can have this girl come on stage and drum.” I think that was the best stunt they pulled off since the hot dog in terms of both over-the-top effect and, also, something that people talked about. People were genuinely confused as to what was going on. I didn’t have a great seat, but I was looking at the drummer and saying, “No, no, that’s Fishman in a wig; that’s got to be Fishman in a wig.” They swapped out before the bow, and so we could see her up close: “No, that isn’t Fishman.” And so I was thinking that I was 98% convinced that wasn’t Sarah playing…I think. So, it was a very well-pulled off stunt. Even now, months later, there are people that think that they actually had some random woman come up on stage and play for the entire third set like she was a drummer from another band or something. That was a great stunt, and they get a lot of props.
RR: And you feel in 2010, Phish carried that spirit over from that New Year’s Run? I don’t mean to make you summarize the whole year, but what is your opinion of Phish’s playing in 2010, and how does it compare with any other era?
DS: I wrote a column a couple of months ago where, basically, what they’re doing right now is that they’re really, really into their songs right now, more than any era, except probably their early days. They’re into songs, but they’re using them as a spring point for their jams, not to spring them straightforward, but they’re into playing with their songs, both in terms of playing whatever comes to mind, even if it’s some songs that they’ve played three times in their career—I think they’ve played “Fuck Your Face” four times; once, in some unknown date in the 80s, and three times this year—but, also, singing other songs in the middle of songs, and teasing other songs in the middle of songs. They have this thing now where they’re really enjoying being Phish—not just playing, and not just playing with each other, but saying, “Hey, we’re in this band, and we’ve written all these wonderful songs. Let’s enjoy that fact, let’s explore that fact, and say, ‘Hey, this is a great song, we wrote it, let’s see what else we can do that we didn’t know we could do’.” They’ll be into “[Prince] Caspian,” and suddenly, they’ll have these random jams like at Telluride. “Caspian” was one of the highlights of Telluride, which no one would ever say before. They got rid of the big, big jams of 2.0; instead, they’re hitting these little, small jams where you don’t expect it, and really keeping me on my toes. You can’t ever relax and think, “O.K., this song, I know exactly what this song is going to do, and I can kind of zone out for a few minutes”…because it might not.
RR: Yeah, my problem is that they’ll go into an interesting area, and then stop. I do agree they are having fun playing their songs again. It is amazing to me that you have been a fan for over 20 years, and you are now in a position where you can’t predict the direction of a song. Would you have thought that a while back? I speak with musicians all the time. That’s what I do. I am always asking what they do to keep fresh. What about from a fan’s perspective? You’ve invested all this time and effort into Phish. How do you keep fresh? How do you keep your ears focused?
DS: Well, one thing is you can’t always. There’ll just be nights where you’ll go, “I want to hear this, and if I don’t get it, I’m going to be annoyed.” Even with some of the jams—the jam will be going, and then they’ll go into another song: “Why did you do that, Trey? I was enjoying that. Why did you do that?” There’s always going to be those moments. But one thing about being a Phish fan is that it has constantly changed. I think there’s a lot of people who jumped on board from ‘98 to 2003, and that’s probably the most self-similar period in Phish’s history in many ways. ’89 was one kind of Phish, ’92 was a different kind of Phish, ’94 and ’95 was a different kind of Phish from that, ’97 was this funk band, ’98 was the jukebox band and the ambient jams, 2003 were these long weird jams, and, suddenly, now they’re doing these song-based things. It seems like every three to four years, Phish is thinking something different, and that, more than anything else, is what keeps it fresh. They’re not really the same band ever. They play the same songs, but they’re not doing the same things ever. For all I know, next year, Fish might start playing the tuba.
