Phish at SPAC, July 5

We have a winner!

Friday may have had the best jam of the SPAC run in the epic "Fuego", and Thursday may have had the close-second "Limb by Limb", but last night's show was the all-around champ of the run, maybe of the tour so far.

Perhaps part of it had to do with similarities to previous great SPAC shows - the "Crowd Control" show opener (7/6/13) and the "You Enjoy Myself" second set closer (8/16/09, 6/20/10 and 7/7/13). Though no version of "A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing" will top the 6/19/04 SPAC performance this one was nestled nicely in a fantastic first set. 

The crescendo in "My Friend My Friend", the fluidity of the best "Divided Sky" in a long time, and the freak-out climax of "David Bowie" all provided peaks throughout the set. And the surprising "Wading in the Velvet Sea" brought me back to my very first SPAC show (6/19/04).

Jon "Moses DeWitt" Fishman took two spotlight turns - wailing on the vacuum cleaner in "I Didn't Know" and playing his Marimba Lumina in "Scent of a Mule" - as well as providing deliciously funky fills during my first ever "Undermind" (at long last, after seeing 44 shows since they started playing it!)

All this and "Wombat", too, during which I was glad I took a pee break in the previous song (a standard "Foam"), because I boogied hard. 

And that was just the first set.

What followed was a flawless run of music that alternated between darkly intense ("Carini"), gorgeous and flowing ("Waves"), and gloriously soaring ("Wingsuit" and "Slave to the Traffic Light"). Add two early classics (a flawless "Fluffhead" and a kick-ass "YEM" during which Trey danced like a crazy man because Mike Gordon's funk was so deep) and even an oddly placed but somehow perfect "Heavy Things" (much like Thursday's "Sparkle") and you have a set that will provide listening pleasure and fond memories for a long time.

The "Suzy Greenberg" encore that I totally called was the icing on the cake for this show that is an excellent representation of Phish in 2014. It is the one to play for the people in your life that somehow still have no idea who Phish is and what it sounds like. It is a keeper.

Set list:

Set I: Crowd Control, My Friend My Friend, Scent of a Mule, Undermind, A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing, I Didn't Know, Foam, Wombat, Divided Sky, Wading in the Velvet Sea, David Bowie

Set II: Carini > Waves > Wingsuit > Piper > Fluffhead, Heavy Things, Slave to the Traffic Light, You Enjoy Myself"

Encore: Suzy Greenberg