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Live CD of their classic concert performed at Madison Square Garden in New York City
I am the first to admit that I am thoroughly unqualified to review anything by Phish. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to delve into their catalog and start sorting out their music, but I never jumped onto that band’s wagon. When I did make a feeble attempt to understand the band, ‘Phish-heads’ didn’t really provide much help or direction; If I asked six different fans which album was the best place to start, I got six different answers. The stuff that I heard seemed moderately interesting, but it also seemed dense, meandering, and a bit lacking in the melody department. The lyrics didn’t exactly draw me in, either, so I have remained on the outer edges of “Phish’-dom, occasionally glancing in and wondering just what it was that I was missing.
Well, perhaps now a CD exists which most Phish fanatics can readily agree is a great place to start listening. The Madison Square Garden New Year’s Eve show has been semi-legendary among Phish fans for years, and now that show is commercially available in its entirety. Spanning three full-length disks (and I mean full-length, with each disk capping seventy minutes), this set provides multiple highlights of their live show (which is never typical), including mind-bending jams (a twenty-five minute version of “You Enjoy Myself”), and some playful narrative-based music (represented partly by a suite of songs, including a playful stab at Collective Soul’s “Shine”) taken from a musical project called “Gamehenge”. If you enjoy hearing their take on other band’s material, there’s plenty of that here, too. They reprise two Who songs from ‘Quadrophenia’ (which they performed in full two months earlier on Halloween night), then they blast through Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein,” and conclude with a cataclysmic encore rendition of “Johnny B. Goode”. How could I resist?
The musicianship is consistently stellar. Trey Anastasio is one heck of an imaginative guitarist, and the rhythmic consistency of Jon Fishman is something to behold. Their flights of fancy act like supple bookends that contain the band’s broad vision. When jamming, the path of each member’s improvisation is so rich that they seem to border on telepathy. I will admit that I occasionally found myself drifting away during some of the instrumental breaks, and there were times that I wish they didn’t sound like college kids from Vermont, but there is no sense in trying to mold them to match my own expectations. If you like jam band music, Phish provides some of the best combinations of free-form structure that you are likely to hear, and this CD set is probably the best commercially available representative of their live show. My Phish-head friends have confirmed this for me, too. Now, if only I could get them to agree on which studio album is the best place for me to dig deeper…
Grade: 
 
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