Phish at Madison Square Garden - Dec. 28, 2018

Happy New Year's Run!  Now that all that Christmas crap is over with, we can get down to the real holiday season.  It is Phish's 17th Dec. 28th show ever (and my seventh!) and by Jan. 1, they will have played at the venue 65 times total, just a few shy of the 69 Elton John will have racked up by the spring.  We see you, Billy Joel, with your 106 MSG shows, and we are coming for you.

For this show, Gloria and I scored floor tickets through Phish mail order, so we got the full sound and lights, with an excellent view of the band and, occasionally, some decent dancing room, staying around the middle.

Being the first show since the Halloween run, it is no surprise that Phish wants to explore the new Kasvot Vaxt songs that they debuted in Las Vegas, so we got two of those songs - "We Are Come to Outlive Our Brains" to open the show and "The Final Hurrah" as a highlight of the second set - and I am sure there are more to come over the next three nights.

"Martian Monster" provided a 3.0 Halloween double shot at the top of the show, but until the "Walls of the Cave" closer (with its awfully bungled intro but high-energy redeeming jam), the first set looks on paper like it could have been from 1998, with a raging "Axilla I"; a rocking "Free" that kept things hot and heavy without pushing any boundaries; "The Wedge", which always feels both out of place and perfectly welcome wherever it is played in the set.

But do not let the set list fool you.  The quick swerve into a major-key in "Ghost"; the herky-jerky, noisy stabs in "Meat"; a "Sparkle" that was well-executed into its speedy coda, but without the frantic, frenetic pace of the old days; Trey's killer counterpoint during Page's organ solo in "Maze"; and an "If I Could" that retained all the beauty of the later versions, but at the more brisk tempo of the earlier versions, this was unmistakably the non-jam side of 3.0 Phish at its best.

Oh, you want to talk about the jam side of 3.0 Phish?  Check out the raging jam that saved "Walls of the Cave", and then follow me into the second set, where "Set Your Soul Free" got things going with a long jam that stayed mostly moored, but explored a lot of pretty textures before getting weird at the end and falling into "Swept Away".

The minute-long "Swept Away" always leads to "Steep".  Any old fan like me remembers the 1990s versions of "Steep" that were merely another brief, two-minute pit stop.  The 3.0-era "Steep" is a beautiful slow jam that builds on the theme of the backing vocal melody. While this version did not quite meet the majesty of the Baker's Dozen version (8/1/17 Maple) at this very venue, or even the 7/10/11 version from Camden, Trey and Page showed - as they did with "If I Could" in the first set and the lovely "Shade" (I am not crying, you are crying) later in the second set - that the tender moments can be some of the best. 

Holy moly, I just realized that Phish has only done this new "Steep" five times since the 2009 reunion, and I have seen four of them!

While it was super fun to have some extended play off of "The Final Hurrah", the bigger, better jam came in "Fuego" which is always reliable, often a highlight.  Count this version, which peaked twice, in that latter category, even if (at only 10 power-packed minutes) it did not stretch out into transcendence like the back-to-back monsters of 7/4/14 and 7/8/14.

Speaking of peaks and transcendence, have you heard this "Bathtub Gin" yet?  After Page gets down on the Rhodes for a while, Fish speeds up the beat and, suddenly, I am transported back to 6/28/00 in Holmdel, for a high-energy, funky/happy jam. The similarity in vibe was uncanny. 

So after all that, does ending with "Possum" leave me a little flat?  Yes, just a little - but watching everyone else, from newbie kids to old dudes, go bananaballs over it always makes me smile.  I am sure it gives Jeff Holdsworth a warm fuzzy, too.

"Slave to the Traffic Light"

And if I can not feel the same about a version of "Bouncing Around the Room" so lame that even I refuse to defend it, at least we ended the show on about as pretty a note as one can, with "Slave to the Traffic Light", perhaps to tie it in with the other such moments on this rainy, yet mild December night in New York City.