It was a festive Friday in the parking lot of The Pavilion at Star Lake, where a vibrant Shakedown Street offered a wide variety of homemade Grateful Dead and Phish merch — a lively mix of skulls and donuts. If you were feeling dangerous, you could go for the edibles (not sure about that dude) or the donut grilled cheese.
This was the lucky 11th show of the Phish summer tour and Vermont jam band’s first visit to the venue since 2012.
Show 10 was not a complete and total success. The band was four songs into the second set at Live Oak Bank Pavilion in Wilmington, N.C., with the rain pouring down. With the thunder cracks, they never got to finish “Scents and Subtle Sounds,” sending everyone home with unfinished Phish.
It would’ve been cool to start right there in the middle, Phish got a fresh start Friday night, launching the set in funky fashion with “Party Time,” showcasing the barrelhouse piano chops of Page McConnell, and “AC/DC Bag,” with a hearty chant of “no future at all.”
Thus far, the tour, which began in Alabama, has featured more than 110 songs and repeats of only seven — “Chalk Dust Torture” and “You Enjoy Myself,” among them.
“46 Days,” the first killer jam of the night, made it eight, and soon after Phish had Star Lake grooving with one of its signature song “Bouncing Around the Room,” the tune you would hear in snippets back in the day during radio commercials for their shows.
With concise jams, at a half hour in, Phish had already blown through five songs on its way to pulling out its calypso-flavored “Stash,” punctuated by the cha-cha-cha claps from the phans and a jam that took us into the “Dark Star” zone with the guitar heroics of Trey Anastasio.. (It all comes back to “Dark Star.”)
The first change of pace was the new song “Leaves,” a slow groove emphasizing the beauty of the melody and harmonies on the way to soaring climax.
Shout-out here to the rhythm section not only for pulsing wall of sound but the splash of color in the neon green hazmat-looking track suit of bassist Mike Gordon and the purple donut mumu of Jon Fishman.
They took us out the first set via the dizzying spell of “Maze,” with Anastasio screaming at the bottom of the neck, and a beautiful return to “Scents and Subtle Sounds” without the rude interruption of a thunderstorm.
Set two started, under a crescent moon, with a second song from the new album, “Sigma Oasis,” beginning with a hint of Rush in the riff and then taking us off into dreamy orbits with a load of wah-wah, segueing into “The Final Hurrah,” with what may have been some “Samson and Delilah.”
Anastasio was throwing thunderbolts of his own in the Phish debut of “On Pillow Jets,” a song he first played at a solo show in June. A white-hot “David Bowie” gave way to the choogling funk of the Talking Heads gem “Cities.”
More second-set fire came from “Fuego,” a song they also did on their last Pittsburgh trip, at the Petersen in December 2019.
As stunning as the music was the constantly changing rainbow of color in the second-half light show, especially during the furious peak of the Anastasio song “Ruby Waves” and the dreamy flow of “Slave to the Traffic Light.”
It was an 11-year wait for a Phish show under the stars in Burgettstown, and there’s no doubt whatsoever that the boys shone brightly.
They are back again on Saturday night for round two.
Phish Set List:
Set 1
Party Time
AC/DC Bag
46 Days
Birds of a Feather
Bouncing Around the Room
Stash
Leaves
Maze
Scents and Subtle Sounds
Set 2
Sigma Oasis
The Final Hurrah
On Pillow Jets
David Bowie
Cities
Fuego
Ruby Waves
Encore:
Character Zero
Slave to the Traffic Light
First Published: July 22, 2023, 3:14 a.m.
Updated: July 22, 2023, 4:15 p.m.