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theghostpinesmusic · 10 days

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Alright, so with an afternoon off from "real" writing, I wanted to take the opportunity to get back in the saddle writing about some of the live music that I've enjoyed lately.

The obvious starting point is Phish's four-night run at Las Vegas's Sphere. With a reputation as a band that always goes above and beyond when it comes to production and as only the second act ever to play this crazy new venue, I always fully expected Phish to use the technology in the Sphere to blow people's minds. I was just hoping they'd webcast it. And they did! Both, I mean! Blow people's minds and webcast it! My mind was destroyed! Completely! Clearly!

Exclamation! Points!

To be totally honest, as a guy who is on sabbatical and who has a bit of disposable income, I seriously thought about buy tickets for these shows when they went on sale. Vegas is literally my least favorite place on Earth, but it's a day's drive away and I guessed that these shows would be worth making the effort. But, when the tickets went on sale, the only point of reference I had for what the Sphere was like was video of U2 playing there and (no shade to U2, an all-time great rock band) they made it look sort of basic and gimmicky. I was also worried that, as a person with a history of finicky but malevolent-when-triggered motion sickness, I might spend over a thousand dollars to see this run only to then spend half of each night in the venue bathroom while everything spun endlessly around me. So I didn't buy tickets at first, and then the secondary market was...insane. So I did not buy tickets later, either.

Now, having watched the webcasts of the run, I mostly regret my decision. But, you know, life goes on.

As amazing and unique as these shows looked and sounded on my average-TV-and-soundbar setup at home, I can't imagine how astounding the sound and visuals were in person, paired with the fact that Phish also played four of their best shows I've heard possibly ever in a row while there.

So, obviously, I was always going to share some of the highlights on here.

Despite my long intro, though, this first share is going to get only very brief commentary. That's because, while it is one of my favorite examples of trippy visuals from the entire run, it is also an eight-minute version of "Carini."

"Carini" is loud, aggressive, crowd-pleasing (for the aforementioned reasons), and, often, jammed out to hell (or heaven, depending on the night) and back. This version is not really "jammed out," though, as much as it just features the band extending the song for a few minutes instrumentally by getting louder and louder before things end.

So, that's it. Instead of my usual 5,000 words of commentary, that's my summation of the music played during this version of "Carini."

Don't get me wrong, it's really good. Played as it was as an end to the first ever Phish set at the Sphere, and on the tails of a fantastic version of "Life Saving Gun," it was the ideal call in this situation, so no complaints from me. But I'm sharing more as a visual example of how awesome the band's production was throughout this run. And how awesome the drone footage makes the Sphere look (in my experience, the first time the band has ever used such dramatic, moving drone footage to document a show). But, you know, you can also enjoy the eight minutes of insanely loud "Carini" if you'd like. I won't stop you.

#phish #live music #music #videos #jams #jam bands #sphere #tour journal #Youtube

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theghostpinesmusic · 10 days

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youtube

Our second deep-dive jam from Sphere is going to be the "Fuego" from night three. I already did a write-up on a huge version of "Fuego" from summer 2023 here, so I'll skip the introduction and get right to it.

While I think the Sphere visuals for this song are neat, and appropriate to "Fuego," they aren't quite as dynamic or as interesting (in my opinion) as many of the other visuals from the run, so I'll be focusing a bit more on the music than I did in my previous post about the Sphere "Sand."

"Fuego" takes a bit longer to get to the jam from the song proper than many latter-day Phish tunes, but to my ears even the composed part of this song sounds tighter than usual. Everyone (Mike and Fishman especially) sound super locked-in. In retrospect, it's not surprising they ended up taking this tune for a nearly thirty-minute ride.

"Viking warriors with animal heads / The girl begins to levitate" is maybe one of my favorite hilarious and cryptic Phish lyrics. The jam starts right after, around the 5:00 mark.

As is fairly typical, Trey leads at first by playing around with the "Fuego" melody a bit while, in this video at least, we get a ton of cool/slightly nauseating drone shots panning over the band and crowd. I like how Trey's multiple guitar loops sort of coincide with the image of the band playing getting replicated all over the Sphere's back wall. Maybe I'm reaching for symbolism there.

We start to depart from the "Type 1" around 7:20 as, even though Trey leaves his loops going, he starts playing something a bit darker and more distorted in parallel with them. There are a few more brief reprises of the "Fuego" melody here, but it's clear that we've departed the shore for the ocean.

Things start to get wonderfully drone-y around 8:10 (in terms of the audio, not the drone camera). I really like what Trey starts playing around 8:30, as it reminds me a lot of some of my favorite "2.0" (early 2000s) Phish jams. In fact, this whole ensuing jam space has that feeling to it, in the best way.

We modulate out of the minor-key ambient stuff around 10:00 toward something a bit more uplifting, and I really love what Fishman starts playing here: it's complex alongside the mantra-like repetition of what the others are playing, and it's a great contrast.

This section is solidly played, but honestly feels to me like the band is taking a minute to recalibrate and figure out where to go next. That's not a bad thing, and it's pretty typical to have a lull or two in any freaking thirty-minute jam, but it's not really until 12:15 or so that things start to pick up momentum again.

At first, this feels to be a result of Mike's and Fishman's playing, but before long Trey and Page jump onboard, too, and even though this section still feels spacey and a bit ambient, there's more a driving behind it, especially at 13:10 when Trey starts playing around with an ascending, major-key riff.

Often, at this point, the band is destined to explode into a full-on, peak-heavy bliss jam, but this time around they pull it back to some more reserved funk/blues starting around 14:00. The next few minutes are fairly stock Phish, but they play through it with so much verve that I would have to actively try to make that a complaint.

Right before the 16:00 mark, Trey comes up with a repeating riff that then everyone else plays off of (especially Mike, who is absolutely going bonkers here). This pulls the band out of the funk space into something more buoyant. At this point during my first (chemically-assisted) viewing of this, the many burning Trey silhouettes on the back wall were freaking me the hell out. Less so this time.

Things start to get (guitar) loopy around 17:20, and even though the jam continues its previous trajectory for a bit, the band's desire to take it somewhere weirder is clear. This transition feels completed by 18:10, when we change keys (I think) and we're actually back to the funk, albeit in a murkier and more staccato incarnation.

I could seriously only listen to Mike for an entire Phish show and go home happy. And I'm a guitar player, for God's sake.

Things really start to decouple from reality around 19:20, and it turns into one of those jams where it's hard for me to keep the beat, also known as The Best Kind Of Phish Jam.

At this point, the only one playing anything that makes any sense to me is Mike, and the chaos is wonderful, especially when combined with the many shadows of the band undulating, merging, and separating above them. I am super enjoying relistening to this chaotic section sober because my brain absolutely just could not handle it the first time through.

We come out on the other side of The Madness at 21:50, and Trey takes a stab a reestablishing some sort of temporal order. Fishman joins in by playing a beat humans can actually recognize.

Then, just when we thought we were free, at 23:00 we fall back into the darkness. Here, it's Trey and Page holding down the melodic end while Mike and Fishman add tension and destabilization. What Trey does at 24:15, whatever it is, deserves mention.

Starting at 24:45, this starts to feel like a blissful reprise of the "Fuego" theme to me, even though nobody is explicitly playing the notes. Maybe we're taking the long way back? Regardless, this jam space does something I feel like Phish has gotten exceptionally good at over the last year or so: improvising blissful, major-key spaces that feel great without relying on huge, shrieking guitar peaks to "pay off" the jam.

Trey wonderfully, inexorably, returns us to the "Fuego" theme at the 26:55 mark. I physically applauded this the first time I watched it. Unfortunately, the band struggles a bit re-entering the vocal reprise. But. Holy shit, that initial return is amazing. Then, at 28:05, they seem to add on a little outro jam...and maybe this is to cover up the sort-of sloppy vocal reprise, but regardless, I'm here for it. It results in a few more, weirder vocal reprises of the "Rollin'..." lyric before Trey starts playing something like the "Golden Age" riff in a different key, and then the band segues into what goes on to be a great version of "Golden Age" proper. But that's beyond the scope of this video, so I'll leave it at that for now.

Because I don't want to spend all day writing about music, I'm going to save the final pro-shot jam from the Sphere, night four's "Ghost," until tomorrow. And then man, do I have a Goose jams backlog to catch up on!

#phish #music #live music #jams #jam band #videos #tour journal #Youtube

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