Kim Hannula kim@pangea.Stanford.EDU 6-26-95 SPAC I won't do the setlist thang as such since Catphish has posted it already (and I wouldn't want to take a chance breaking my perfect record of incorrect setlists!). The lawn part of SPAC reminded me of a university quad more than a concert lawn -- most of it was flat enough to play ultimate on. People aren't allowed into the pavilion until ~20 minutes before the show was supposed to start -- of course Phish didn't actually come on until 20 minutes after they were scheduled to, so the pavilion was maybe 3/4 full when the show started. The acoustics from where I sat (Page side, under the balcony) were really echo-y -- I could barely make out the pre-show PA music over the murmur of crowd conversation. The first set opened with "My Friend". The crowd rushing into the pavilion was rather distracting. "Don't You Wanna Go" is fun & joyous -- I wanna go! The jam in "Bathtub Gin" flirted with chaos as Trey & Page played the theme out of time with Fish's drumming, but it never fully dove in to the uncharted waters of the legendary Murat "Gin". "NICU" (fun) was followed immediately by "The Sloth" (it was a stop & start type segue, as opposed to the smoother changes found in the second set). "The Sloth" has some weird time signatures in it that I never noticed until I tried to dance to it. "My Mind..." indeed does have a mind of it's own, sometimes. "It's Ice" segued into "Dog-Faced Boy", but I don't remember exactly how. The crowd was rude during this -- lots of shouting, some off-time too-fast clapping at the end. The beautiful "Tela" that followed seemed to soothe the crowd into a more attentive state that held through most of the rest of the evening. The set-closing "Possum" was on fire. Something let loose -- maybe in my mind (I suddenly stopped being bothered by the muddy sound, envisioning myself as one of Allan's Phishstory's pre-lizard fishies swimming in a sea of music), but maybe in the band too. When Trey announced they would be back, I hoped that the momentum built during the Possum jam wouldn't be lost during set break. The second set opened with the strange feedback-y noises that mark the beginning of "Down with Disease". I thought even the non-jam parts of this were better than last years -- last years' live DwD's always sounded a bit rushed to me. SPAC's DwD slid into the comfortable groove that the "Hoist" version is in. But the "Hoist" version is short enough to be a single, and SPAC's version... well, Catphish mentioned that it was ~25 minutes long and wasn't finished. The jam (that usually precedes the final chorus) quickly wandered away from anything that resembled DwD into a vaguely threatening-sounding jam, with a driving bass line that reminds me of the one in "Pablo Picasso" from the Repo Man soundtrack. Mike's bass provided a solid anchor for the jam -- it was exploratory without becoming arrhythmic or "spacy". Did anyone else think the lights on the middle Minkin panel looked like a dragon? That started flaring its nostrils late in the jam? (I swear the only chemicals acting on my brain were manufactured by my own body...) Eventually the tense chords resolved, and Trey started playing something that sounded classic-rockish compared to the previous jam. Tempo & drum beat & accompaniment changed into something vaguely familiar that I didn't recognize until the lyrics "floating weightless in the room" -- a smooth segue into "Free". The post-lyrics jam got much spacier than I remember from Red Rocks. At one point it sounded as if Fish was drumming in a divisible-by-three time signature, while Trey was soloing in four. It ended with an everybody-play-the-same-chord-at-once several times, with the downbeat marked by Trey jumping. "Poor Heart" started immediately (similar amount of time to that between chords) and ended with a similar series of chords. "YEM" featured some wild lights during the vocal jam (which sounded like a train whistle at one point to me, complete with Doppler effect) -- white lights spinning across the stage rapidly, which for some reason reminded me of being on a county fair vomit-ride. The lights slowed gradually at the end, too, like a ride coming to a stop. "Strange Design" fit really well after the wildness of the vocal jam -- it's a reaching-for-mental & emotional-stability type song. Just relax, you're doing fine... But then we were off again with "Antelope". There's a new light effect that I hadn't seen before -- little points of light like stars between the Minkin backdrops. The little lights flickered on & off like fireflies on too many iced cappuccinos during the ending part of the jam. And that was the end of the set. The encores, "Sleeping Monkey" and "Rocky Top", weren't mind- blowers, but after the second set whose mind needed blowing? I like this band. Kim --------------------------------- 6/26/95 Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Saratoga Springs NY (Charlie Dirksen) Like Mud Island and Walnut Creek, this show just SLAMS the other shows on this tour! Everything in the first set is great, including the Gin, NICU, Sloth, and Possum. Second set, though, contains a fiendishly groovy DWD (unfinished)-> **JAM**-> Free, a killer You Enjoy Myself and sick Antelope. At least get this second set. This is probably my favorite show of the '95 tour, although Mud Island and Walnut Creek aren't far behind. I'm embarrassed that I saw family instead of going to this show ;)