Phish | Deer Creek | 2024

Last Monday, following three splendid nights of Phish at Alpine Valley (http://www.you-phoria.com/Blog/2024/July/phish-or-alpine-valley-or-2024), my soul was full, overflowing; why had I booked that hotel in Indianapolis? What more could these guys even give me?

By Tuesday I could hardly wait. My friends all went home, my soul was empty again! (LOL) There would be no fall tour, which meant no more Phish for me until NEXT summer. Unless I could squeeze in Deer Creek.

The only Midwest shed Phish have played MORE than Alpine, the venue now actually called Ruoff Music Center has changed a lot over the years; old heads talk about how it used to be nothing but cornfields where you now see nothing but grids of chain restaurants and hotels, and even since my first visit here in 2001 the area has felt less and less bucolic. Once inside the confines of the place, though, time has little meaning; it tends to bring out the best in Phish, almost regardless of era.

Well, there was that one-off 2016 show, but we don’t talk about 2016. It was the only show Phish played here between 2012 and 2021 and thankfully we all realize now what a terrible idea that was. You gotta keep coming back here and you can’t just do one night.

I could only do two nights this year, which is fine because Sundays are no longer the be-all and end-all of the Phish universe, and as much as I’d love to see more and more, the notion of FOMO gets translucent when the band is on such a hot streak. Also they once again delivered almost as much as I could handle on the first night.

Even before the music started things were going well: almost as soon as I’d chosen a random spot on the lawn, a dog named Cletus showed up and parked himself at my feet and I had a new buddy for the evening! (His human companions were cool too!) Also, there’d been some incredible sky paintings in East Troy this year but Friday night’s sunset cycle at the Creek was one of the most gorgeous extended performances by clouds and a sun that I’ve ever witnessed.

Phish responded with one of the more unpredictable first sets of the year; nothing super rare, maybe, but the first “Scent Of A Mule” in almost two years and the first “A Day In The Life” since 2019 to end the set, plus all kinds of jamming strewn throughout. It was a rather Page-centric set too, with the always-welcome “Halfway To The Moon”, and his bizarre co-composition with Trey, “Life Saving Gun”, which I gotta start doing more diligent homework if I’m ever going to be able to sing along to. The latter and “Pillow Jets” got the best jams, and this song I’m also learning to enjoy, because if it’s supposed to be the apocalyptic part of Trey’s loopy new-age cosmology then it helps me take that whole thing less seriously, and if not, well then it’s just kind of a psychedelic interdimensional fantasia, even better. The improv in “Pillow Jets” really managed to evoke the visual or physical idea I had in my head for the song, too; we were all floating above the grass.

In another odd move, Phish began set II with “The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony”, which usually then segues into “Suzy Greenberg” or sometimes “AC/DC Bag” but “Axilla II”, never before. The outro of this song HAS gone off on a major excursion but not at Alpine and not at Creek; it was getting to be time for “Down With Disease”. They’d played this at Alpine too, but that was just kind of a quick celebratory here-it-is version. At Deer Creek it took over the entire rest of the set. Sure, there were other SONGS in there, but sooner or later the improv was going to lead back into those sweet sweet guitar trills signifying the conclusion of a “Disease”. We love it when they do stuff like this.

Sometimes it can come off as an annoying gimmick, like when they used to insert “STILLLL WAITING” into every song. But even that move, on certain nights, could bring a grand sense of wholeness to a set, or at the very least a lot of laughs, as in the legendary “Moby Dick” show performed on these same grounds in 2000. Even that show, though, was a little stingy with actual jams, whereas Friday night the improv continued to flow relentlessly, and following an epic “Scents And Subtle Sounds” (with “Disease” coda), another beloved callback to days of yore: “What’s The Use?”, in its eighth pairing with “Disease” since the hallowed 2010 Alpine rendering. A light rain was falling, never swelling to more than a gentle reminder that Mother Nature could at any point take this all away from us—i.e., perfect conditions. And closing the set: another Page tune!! “I Always Wanted It This Way”, almost indisputably the best song off Phish’s 2016 BIG BOAT album, rarely gets the royal treatment; tonight it got…well, the exact treatment that was called for, and the love beams going back and forth between the crowd and the stage, that was something else.

Even the encore was a treat: “You Enjoy Myself”, and just when the vocal jam started to lose steam…”doodledoodledoodledoodledoooo” sang Trey, picking his guitar back up and leading the band into yet another “Disease” reprise. All the antics, jams aplenty, anything goes; that’s kinda the Deer Creek way, and this show took me wayyyy back, all those shows reverberating through the years, up out of the grass beneath my feet. People always like to ask ‘which show was best?’ and this year I’m at a point of shrugging my shoulders; every night’s been so different from the others, and although my gut says Alpine Saturday will earn the most relistens over time, I walked out of the Friday Creek show feeling like a kid again, a sense of wonder and happiness I shouldn’t still be able to get from a band I’ve seen so many times.

My neighbors in the parking lot Friday had been three local dudes who recommended the Broad Ripple farmers’ market and nearby Eagle Creek Park to me for Saturday activities; thanks guys! I didn’t make it in time for the farmers’ market but had a nice late lunch at 317 Burger and there was music coming from all directions seemingly throughout the whole neighborhood. Eagle Creek Park, on the other hand, was incredibly peaceful; after a short hike I could BARELY hear the hum of the city, and the trail area is so huge I felt completely alone most of the time. All these years and I’d never once spent any time in the city of Indianapolis, so dumb.

Saturday I parked behind surprise surprise another trio of white dudes, this time from somewhere in Illinois; it’s always fun getting to know strangers and their levels of Phish fandom as you chill in the lot before a show. It was also great wandering around the bustling shakedown marketplace, as East Troy law strictly forbids hippies from making money so the lot scene at Alpine is always so boring compared to literally everywhere else. On the flip side, Friday’s breeze had vacated the area, and last night’s rain had become today’s sweltering humidity under barely any cloud cover. It was beastly.

Not since my Bonnaroo days can I recall walking around in public so drenched in sweat; the pavilion’s a sauna and the lawn isn’t much better and out walks Mike in a fluorescent yellow jumpsuit and Trey’s also wearing layers, dressed all in white like a taller bespectacled Jon Anderson. There’s simply no accounting for Phish fashion; it’s not worth puzzling over, yet they clearly WANT us to. Mike’s jacket just barely outlasted Mike’s Groove; it was a nice relaxed beginning to the show, and when they followed it with “Character Zero” we should’ve all gotten the hint: it’s a wanky Trey Saturday night.

The puzzling thing for me was how dominant the guitar was in the mix once again at Creek; how could the sound at Alpine have been that much more balanced? Yet being in the pavilion made no difference; everything was audible, but the guitar was way too loud, possibly even moreso than the night before. And when I look at phish.net and see that this show is has the highest rating of the tour so far, things become perhaps a little clearer.

Fans just wanna hear Trey wail. And who could blame them? If you listen to Saturday’s second set you will hear some six-string histrionics that will likely bowl you over, and I can tell you that’s NOTHING compared to the sensory overload we experienced in the presence of it. The peaks of intensity in “Chalk Dust Torture” and “Crosseyed And Painless” and especially the set-closing “Fuego” surely split some brains wide open. So many long high held notes. So much shredding. The rest of the band was there, and there was plenty of thick group improv in the “Dust” and “Plasma” in particular, a dosage of funk that was sorely needed. For the most part, though, they let Trey have his night.

Then in the middle of that “Crosseyed” jam we heard a bizarre refrain: “I never met a man that I could not forget/Except for Guy Forget”. The first time I ever heard those words at a Phish show was in Charleston in the fall of 2010; my then-girlfriend had surprised me with a trip out there to see Phish as a dating-anniversary gift, what a keeper!! Then, another surprise: a friend I’d recently made through a website known as “the BB” and had just decided to make Milwaukee his home, was also in Charleston for the weekend! Out of that night’s “You Enjoy Myself” we had our first taste of the mythical song known as “Guy Forget”, which at that time had only been performed in public once.

That night after the show, I surprised my girlfriend with an engagement ring; it remains probably my favorite night of my whole life. She still comes with me to shows sometimes, but not Deer Creek this year; I’d been unable to convince anyone to join me. Saturday morning however, I’d gotten a call—it was that guy I mentioned from the BB, nowadays my most tried-and-true Phish compadre. Fuck it, he was driving out here after work from Pewaukee! I already had the hotel; he took care of the tickets. Made it to the lot just in time. In between Charleston 2010 and Saturday, Phish had officially played “Guy Forget” TWICE, although it’s going to take some serious number crunching some day to separate the teases from the ‘full performances’ of this goofy little song. It’s not a song I had remotely on my radar, like ‘gee I hope they play “Guy Forget” tonight’, nobody in their right mind THINKS that. But it IS a song that, once I learned of its existence back in the year 2000, I’ve been unable to forget.

It took until today for it all to sink in; you can’t spend too much time trying to process such things while the music’s happening. You do your best to let it all flow through you; there’s no magnitude, no statistics, no thinking at all if possible. Getting stuck in your head at a Phish show never leads to a better time, and that’s the trouble; they give us so much to think ABOUT. But you can do that after the show; while you’re in the throes of a feeling, there’s no need to know the reason why.

That’s the story of Deer Creek for this year; I don’t LOVE “Fuego” but I no longer hate it nor begrudge the band or anybody else for liking it, because it has become a legitimate anthem and the feeling in the crowd when they play it is such pure uplift. I will never submit to the idea that it’s a new-school “Fluffhead” surrogate but…in this placement it truly did fill a similar role pretty admirably. And besides, we all know most shows spell something, and you can’t spell “Guy Forget” without “Fuego”. And Sunday turned out to be a true classic church night, with a first set full of (quasi) rarities and massive jams in set II; I couldn’t have cared less about missing it, I already got so much of all that stuff this summer. Phish are hell-bent on delivering absolutely everything they have in their arsenal in every town they visit this year. If they keep playing at this level, there’s going to be a smoldering crater somewhere in Delaware in a couple weeks.