On November 11th, Phish released their live show in New Haven Connecticut. I have been listening to it for the past month to get a good review. This show was part of the 1995 fall tour which had a total amount of 54 shows. This year is regarded to be one of the best tours Phish ever has done. “We were on fire, we were like unstoppable,” says Phish bassist Mike Gordon. “1995 was intense,” remarked Trey Anastasio, guitarist of Phish. This is also the tour where Phish played chess versus the audience, at every show the band would move a piece then, to start the second set, a random audience member would make a move.
This show followed the December 1st show in Hershey Pennsylvania and was on December 2nd. Tickets cost $22.00 and the show was sold out. This was the first time the song Prince Caspian opened a show in Phish history. The energy throughout the first set rose as it kept going on. Prince Caspian went right into Runaway Jim and Mound. The first set of this release shows the fire that Mike was talking about. The big jams out of the first set were Runaway Jim going for 8 minutes and Possum going on for 14 minutes. Other important notes/events for the first set include, Reba did not have the whistling ending and Possum included an All Fall Down signal.
The second set started with the audience chess move and it was made by Dean Budnick, the move for this show was not noted or stated, but was found on an unofficial tape. The band reacted musically to the move with a dark diminishing sound hinting at them losing a piece in the game because of Dean moving a pawn to H3, threatening Phish’s Knight on G4. The first song in the second set was 2001 and went straight into a fury-filled Maze. After Maze, the band went into Simple which included a small jam. The next song was Faht and included Jon Fishman on acoustic guitar. This was the final time Phish played this song at a show.
The fifth song in the second set was the highlight of the whole show. Tweezer has always been known to be Phish’s big jamming song and this version held the Phans up to that expectation! The jam starts out with a nice smooth floating feel. It rises intensely to the first change which is around the 7-minute mark. This is where the song goes into double-time and now is going twice as fast. Around the 9:30-mark, the jam hits its first peak, this is when Trey hits a high note repeatedly on the guitar and the lights go crazy. The song quickly lowers and then goes right back up to another peak around the 10:30-mark. It only takes another minute for Trey to go completely into what is known as machinegun-Trey mode and start shredding and sounding like a machine gun. The band starts to build to the final peak around the 11:45-mark and hits it at the 12:02-mark. The rest of the jam lowers you back down for the next song, A Day in Life, which is a Beatles cover.
The rest of the second set included Golgi Apparatus, The Squirming Coil (including Carol of the Bell teases), and ended with Tweezer Reprise. Phish came out for an encore and played the famous Jimi Hendrix song, Bold as Love to end their fire-filled magic night in Connecticut. This show is very good and should’ve been released a long time ago. This shows Phish in one of their best moments. I recommend this to Phish fans and people looking to listen to something new and exciting. This show has a lot of pure Phish energy and is definitely one of my favorite LivePhish official releases.
