Phish: Blossom, 8/7/2015

My primary gripes about Phish 3.0: the crappy new material, the tight song rotation, the bungled compositions, the terrible first sets, the lack of jams, the second sets that peter out into cock-rock jukebox mode. None of these things happened at Blossom.

Okay, "It's Ice" had a brief rough patch. It's a pretty tough song. There were a few flubs here and there in the first set. I can't think of any other negative things to say about the show.

The best part was all the talk leading up to this show about how they hadn't played any Gamehendge tunes. So Trey drops "Wilson" as the third song, one of the eight tour debuts of the night, like 'OOPS, WE FORGOT" except actually it's "haha you dumb hippies, we're not gonna do THAT."

"We're gonna do THIS" he says in the second set, then plays the exact kind of set I've been hoping for years I might some day be in attendance for again.

I've never been in the position of 'touring'. A life of catching only local-ish shows with few exceptions inevitably yields stretches of agony. The thing you chase keeps appearing somewhere else. You keep chasing, though, and eventually, Blossom 2015 happens. The Midwest finally gets a real "Tweezer" after all these years.

It's kind of cheating on this tour, though. It almost doesn't count, because they've been on such a tear this summer that there was no way a Friday night at Blossom was not gonna be amazing. It was like the final opportunity for the tour to go bad. You lay an egg at Blossom and the superlatives get tempered and expectations go down and maybe the peak of the tour already happened. Blow up Blossom and there's no turning back, this tour is REAL.

They broke their twenty-minute-jam hitting streak, though. "Tweezer" was just over 19 minutes. So the show was actually not that good.