Posted by [Quite some time after I finished writing the entries for Phish’s 2009 comeback run in Hampton I found notes/logs that I had written back when the whole experience was still fresh in my mind. So auspicious were those three nights at the Hampton Coliseum that I feel it prudent to preserve these earlier memories – edited for style and legal reasons of course – as they ushered in a whole new era for me as an unofficial aphishionado. Behold, as I add to an already loaded canon:]
After a very busy work week that saw the days starting as early as 7:30am* and ending well after 9pm I was in a hurry to get on vacation. The moment I got off work on Thursday night I tossed mine and m’lady’s prepacked bags into the back of my big honkin’ Mitsubishi Montero truck and swung by to pick up our friends Jay and Kyla. We were on the highway pointed south by 9:30pm. With our minds set on driving straight through to the state of ham and smokes I put the pedal to the metal until we got to the border.
Four freshly scrubbed smiling faces beamed at the border dude. “Why you going to Virginia?” he gruffed.
“To see some Phish concerts,” I chimed, all cherub-like.
“Oh,” the border dude says. “I used to work with a guy who liked Phish; he quit his job to go to their concerts.
“Guy was a complete stoner,” he added, eyeing me closely.
“Well, there ya go,” I replied with a shrug, all the while inwardly repeating my border mantra: We’re not the droids you’re looking for…we’re not the droids you’re looking for…
It works nearly every time and it did again; we cruised on through.
Careful not to speed in the United States of America I set the cruise control firmly at 64mph and almost immediately saw flashing lights on my tail. I soon learned that I had failed to notice a 40mph sign. Oops! Turns out doing sixty-four in a forty costs upwards of a couple hundred bucks US. Damn.
I only lasted a few more hours before handing the wheel off to Jay. He did a splendid job and earned nary a speeding ticket at all while I slept like a baby in the seat beside him. I retook the helm at 6am and we were in Hampton, Virginia by 10:30.
After loading up on booze and snacks we waited in the hotel lot until check-in time. Seeing hippies all over the place made my heart swell with comfort and familiarity and I finally found myself getting exited about the shows. When the time came we checked in, put our beer on ice and found ourselves some lunch at a nearby Applebees (it was my first and only time eating at an Appleby’s; vegetarians should definitely avoid the place).
M’lady and I left Jay and Kyla napping in the hotel room and headed out around 4pm, walking a couple to miles to the venue wth a stop along the way to arrange a heady ticket trade. At the Mothership (Phishy people call the Hampton Coliseum “the Mothership”) m’lady ran into friends who agreed to hold seats for us and after securing our tickets at will call we hit the lot for some beers and a preshow walkabout.
The lot was meagre, but it could have been worse (see: Virginia Beach, 1998). We got some beers in short order (two for $5) and walked the entirety of Shakedown in three minutes phlat (jamband people call the fan-run popup tailgate merch areas that are ubiquitous at jammy shows “Shakedown Street”, though nobody – and I mean nobody – uses a term like “phlat”). We lingered as long as we could and ended up back in front of the Mothership just as the coliseum’s Museum-Go-Round-like lights started to glow, highlighting the cool architecture of the unique arena.
Also cool: In front of the venue was a fountain that contained a nifty art installation/happening. Large white blocks had been stacked in the centre of the fountain to resemble a huge robot with a simple smiley face painted on it. Two people dressed in white and wearing smiley-face blocks on their heads paddled a canoe around the fountain, meanwhile the fountain itself was full of floating blocks with that same smiley face painted on them. Make of it what you will. We sure did; m’lady and I sat on the edge of the fountain with our beers and watched the scene go by.
And all the while I could feel the anticipation building…building…BUILDING…This would be Phish’s first show in almost five years and people were getting more excited with every passing moment. When the doors opened you could feel the adrenaline in the air as the relatively orderly and civilized lineup almost immediately deteriorated into a General Admission crush-crowd trying to squeeze through the gates. Stragglers with their fingers in the air were looking for trades, with tonight’s ticket at a heavy premium. Naturally, everyone wanted to be inside when Phish started all over again and every passing minute just added to the mania. The going rate seemed to be two Saturday or Sunday tickets for a single Friday, or a ticket for tonight in exchange for cash plus a ticket for another night. I, like everyone else, was very much looking forward to experiencing the feeling in the room when the lights went down to begin Night One, and I wondered if the crowd’s fervour wouldn’t overshadow the energy of the band somewhat, but I needn’t’ve worried.
We joined that crush crowd about an hour after the doors opened and waited another forty-five minutes to get in, which seemed pretty darn excessive for the relatively-small 13,000-seat venue. They weaved us all through one unnecessary gate and then a second where tickets were lethargically beeped by staff who moved like they were working underwater. Security was lax at best but everyone was working so slowly you’d think they’d been expecting a few hundred people. It was ridiculous.
Once inside the excitement was everywhere. The room was packed to the rafters with a crowd ripe for a celebration five years in the making. We found our held seats well before showtime and became part of the vibration. When the lights went down…well, you could apply pretty much any cliche in the book to describe the surge of sound the crowd made when the lights went down and it would still come off as an understatement. “Thunderous”, “explosive”, “maniacal”, pick your adjective, the crowd went nuts.
And well we should. Here we were, the lucky few that found tickets to the re-re-emergence of what is quite simply one of the best bands ever. The fervour leading up to the darkening of those lights was ten miles wide, the collective joy in the room unmistakeable, the sheer bliss of release undeniable as the band ended once and for all the “what’s the opener gonna be?” game that the crowd had been playing for months. I suspect the one-two punch of Fluffhead and Divided Sky may have been chosen to quickly prove to the audience that this wasn’t going to be any Coventry. The band was obviously well-rehearsed and if not on the very tippy-top of their game they were at least prepared to take a good swing at this whole comeback thing.
[Okay, okay…I’m not sure I’m doing anyone any favours here but for the sake of even just a shred of expediency I will dispense with “style” and edit forthwith with a mind solely towards self-incrimination and the avoidance of same. Or am I just getting lazy? Read on and decide for yourself!]
You can find the setlist anywhere on the ‘net so I won’t repeat it here, and aside from pointing to Stash as a personal highlight in the first set I’ll just say that it felt like the band had spent a lot of time meticulously creating a well-paced and extensive opening setlist for their return, though maybe it was off-the-cuff…what do I know? Well, I know that Farmhouse slid in well between Suzy Greenberg and NICU and I sure knew that David Bowie was the obvious end of a set so monstrously euphoric that felt like a set-and-a-half.
I didn’t move during the setbreak. Even for a man in his forties who could easily pass for a man in his fifties there would be no securing a wristband without picture ID (which I had forgotten to bring), so there was no beer run for me. Instead I placed an order with m’lady and sat down to listen to the chatter around me, which was wholly positive. Phrases like “…the first two minutes beat anything they played post-hiatus…” and “…the boys are back for real…” bounced around a crowd giddy to share what they had just shared with the people they had just shared it with. The community that had been surging with excitement just an hour before was now teeming with satisfaction, secure in the knowledge that the band had done their homework and seemed determined to blow everyone away. Expectations for the second set were suddenly huge, and once again the band stepped up to the plate and delivered.
The Tweezer was splendid, with a truncated jam that freed up room in the setlist for more gold. Possum proved to be a crowd-cleansing singalong with its blissful crescendo shared among 13,004 smiling happy ticket holders. Theme From The Bottom was played with such aplomb that I finally noticed what a brilliant piece of songwriting it is. Harry Hood brought a tear to my eye, as I finally “got” the main lyric. I even resisted my usual bathroom break during Waste. Mike was on fire all night, Fishman was great as usual, and Page often sounded like he was channeling Stevie Wonder. Trey wins the award as most improved player hands-down, but that is more of a comment on where he had been pre-hiatus.
Of very special mention on this opening night is lighting genius Chris Kuroda, who as always was in control of the visual aspect of the show. Let me start by saying that five years of technological advancement in the area of concert lighting hadn’t hurt things one bit, and if there is one person involved with the concert who wasn’t at all rusty it was CK5. His light show has always been integral to the Phish experience, but during this comeback oeuvre Koruda was nothing short of brilliant. A fantastic bonus feature was the enormous balloons that hung from the ceiling in two circles, an inner ring of ten balloons and an outer ring of eleven. Kuroda was able to light the huge balloons individually and collectively and his incorporation of these balls of coloured illumination added enormously to the visual spectrum of an already cool-looking room.
After an evening of stunning visual candy Chris truly extended himself during the set ending YEM (I had been wondering all night if the band had bought new trampolines and to the immense joy of the crowd, they had). It was all so very very good, but the song-ending vocal jam provided the backdrop for CK5’s piece du resistance. His light show became so arresting that the band and their visual director fell into a symbiotic creative loop; Koruda so perfectly represented the sounds the band were creating he was in turn inspiring them to create more. In a closing salvo that scared the sh*t out of me Kuroda seemed to land a 747 on top of the Concorde just above the stage as the band decrescendo’ed their entire comeback with a swooping vocal cadence and left the crowd in a nearly stunned silence, as a select few (myself and m’lady included) managed to muster the wherewithal to cheer for an encore.
Which we got (you’re welcome).
After kicking off the encore with a barbershop tune that cutely included the number of days each of the four have been alive** they went into Bouncing Around The Room. And that is when they tried to do something brilliant. I was beside myself with glee as the first of those twenty-one massive balloons above our heads was set loose and dropped from the ceiling. I grabbed m’lady by the arm and jumped up and down. “Dear lord, they’re going to drop all these balloons on the crowd during Bouncing!” Amazing!!!
Unfortunately I was only half right. One by one the inner ring of balloons fell onto the cheering crowd below, and I could only imagine the band’s disappointment when all but one balloon burst almost immediately. I gaped in unfulfilled disappointment, hoping like hell that they would try the trick again, with thicker balloons next time.
When the show ended m’lady and I sat in a daze. Though a little bit rough around the edges the band was definitely well rehearsed enough on this, their second rekick at the can to take another serious shot at becoming one of the greatest bands in the world again. There had been moments during the second set where I felt like I was back at my first show, except there was more than a couple of hundred people in the room. And they played Waste.
It didn’t hurt the illusion/allusion that Fishman was back on Fishman side, like he hadn’t been but he was before. That move was perhaps one indicator of a new/old attitude in a band humbled after an embarrassing farewell, a band that desired a return to where they began, and in doing so they fostered amazed excitement amongst the crowd. When the show finally ended without a word everyone in the room – band and audience alike – were buoyed by an unmistakeably triumphant return to live performance by one of America’s premier hobby/cult groups.
In fact, the show was so good that I didn’t hear a single person mention the train wreck that had occurred at the start of You Enjoy Myself. Though he could argue that Fishman threw him off, Trey came in a sixteenth-note too late and created an out-of-phrase situation that the band couldn’t find a way out of, and likely with hazy memories of Coventry in his head Trey opted to pull the plug and restart the song again. The pressure that a move like that puts on a musician is pretty heavy (you’d damn well better get it right the second time) and right or wrong I think the decision only proved how much Trey cared about putting on a quality show at this, their redebut. And like I say, the fact that nobody was talking about it reiterates that the show was easily epic enough to set aside such an obvious blunder. Good for Phish, and good for the fans.
Afterwards the tanks were flowing and every hotel in the area remained sleep-free until the wee hours. I partied a bit, opting to stagger back to the Hampton Inn in a wearied state of numbed pleasure sometime before 3am.
Unlike last time I was in Hampton for Phish’s return from hiatus I’d be sticking around for the rest of the shows, and I was pretty happy about it too.
*Immediately preceding this trip I completed the first of what became an annual two-week gig playing for gyms full of K-6 kids twice a day with my buddy Doug. We ended up being part of Blues in the Schools for years and though we really enjoyed it we were always really, really excited for the two weeks to be finished every year. Guitar players tend to be averse to starting their days during the morning hours.
**At the time I would have known it as nothing other than “a barbershop tune that cutely included the number of days each of the four have been alive” as this was only the second time Phish had ever played their formerly-obscure composition Grind, with the debut coming more than ten years earlier – 3,720 days to be exact – at Madison Square Garden on New Years Eve eve, 1998.
Todd Man Out 