Phish | Alpine Valley | 2024

Almost 33 years ago, I went to my first real concert: Sting at Alpine Valley. Back in those days, EVERYBODY played Alpine; Sting, on a co-headlining tour with Don Henley, played TWO NIGHTS on that SOUL CAGES tour. Inconceivable nowadays, and not just the idea that Sting was once so popular; hardly any touring acts can pull Alpine-sized crowds these days, and those who can tend to play technologically-enhanced sports stadiums rather than rustic old amphitheaters.

Every year I wonder if it will be Alpine’s farewell. After seeing a couple of great Dave Matthews shows there this summer (http://www.you-phoria.com/Blog/2024/July/dave-matthews-band-or-alpine-valley-24/) I decided to tally up how many times I’d been there. I haven’t seen anyone other than Dave and Phish there since 2011 (Pearl Jam’s last visit FOR SOME IDIOTIC REASON: http://www.you-phoria.com/Blog/2011/September/PJ20/), but prior to that there were multiple PJ shows, Aerosmith, Tom Petty, Radiohead, Tibetan Freedom Fest, Ozzfests galore, the list goes on. All told, 45 nights.

So I probably SHOULD’VE called the opener on Friday, but “46 Days” didn’t even cross my mind. (For the record, yes! they also played this song at my 46th Phish show…but I never thought to look that up either until last year or so.) These aren’t things a normal person would think about. Taken to extremes, thinking along these lines is unhealthy; Phishhead culture has become far too focused on individualism over the years, the notion that they’re playing a song JUST FOR ME and whatnot. Shows are communal experiences, not your fifteen minutes of fame.

Yet these dumb little quirks can sure enhance the experience if you happen to notice them. A little rosy glow right from the get-go. After this I think I need to temper my scorn a bit; after all, here I am WRITING about it like any old narcissistic Phishhead. At least people stopped bringing those giant signs with song requests on ‘em, right? There are plenty of perfectly fine ways to Phish.

The last time they’d played Alpine, though (http://www.you-phoria.com/Blog/2022/August/phish-alpine-valley-2022/), was one of the toughest shows I’ve ever endured—no jams to speak of, and lots of bad songs. Friday ’24 was a very different story. “46 Days”, vintage 2002, was one of the newer songs they played; only “The Well” (from brand-new album EVOLVE) and “Mercury” (debuted in 2015) were more recent. It was a sick throwback for kids of all ages, a greatest-hits show in a sense but not without its jams.

To think that a show featuring 16+minute versions of “Down With Disease” and “Ghost”, plus a quasi-surprise massive first-set “My Friend, My Friend”, could be considered par for the course, is crazy talk, unless you already heard the tour’s opening weekend in Massachusetts. If you had to wait weeks for a tape to arrive in the mail, you would’ve had no choice but to float out of Alpine Friday night on a cloud. Everyone can listen to a show within minutes of its completion, though, so expectations are high once again this summer; however I’ve been around so long that a major first-set jam still wipes those expectations away almost completely for me. While they were jamming “Limb By Limb” was when I felt the weight of all the years; most of my oldest and dearest friends, after all, are Phishheads too, at least to some degree, but these days you never know who you’ll get to have these experiences with or when the next time will be. Friday’s crew was for that night only, but the bittersweetness could wait until later. Did anything mindblowing occur onstage that night, not really. Out on the lawn, though, funner times could not have been had by humans, and the music was excellent taboot.

It’s wild times indeed when Saturday can be the best show of a three-show run. Saturdays in the Phish tradition tend to be the n00b-pleasing cock-rock bonanzas, but that wasn’t the case this time. The first set didn’t reveal much; mildly extra helpings of improv in “Halley’s Comet” and “Birds Of A Feather” were sweet, and the “David Bowie” that ended it…well at least it broke ten minutes. Set II opened with “Sigma Oasis”, which was cooking along nicely when Trey happened upon the “Simple” riff, and once Trey gets an idea in his head he won’t be denied; after a couple minutes’ worth of wrestling he managed to drag the whole band into this signature tune, and that’s the song we remained in for the next 40 minutes. Noooo length isn’t everything; still this was unquestionably one of the greatest freeform Phish excursions I’ve ever been a part of. The way they even managed to bring it back around for a coda in…whatever key they were in by then. Totally unnecessary, but if you want to be looking out from the stage at nothing but smiles, a smooth move.

A little bonus jamming in “A Wave Of Hope” and “Sand”, even, with a lovely “Lifeboy” interlude between; this was the recipe for a near-perfect set of Phish, and “Esther” in the encore? Let’s just pretend Sunday ’22 never happened!

Sunday ’24 rounded out the run in confident fashion, opening with a 15-minute “A Song I Heard The Ocean Sing” as if that were a totally normal thing to do. Making it even less normal, however: it ended up being the longest jam of the night. That’s happened a handful of times before, but surely not in the past two decades; normally one would assume automatic extolment, another halcyon-days height re-ascended. However we ARE a rather spoiled fanbase these days, and we require at least 20 minutes out of a single song, and it must occur in the second set.

Let’s hope nobody in East Troy thought along those lines in real time, though. Sunday’s first set was such a generous outpouring of mini-jams (am I crazy or was Trey teasing “Miss Gradenko” towards the end of that “Wolfman’s Brother”?? in which case, is Trey crazy??) that it lent a festival-like feel to the proceedings; we had the feeling that absolutely anything was possible. In hindsight, I can understand how some might’ve felt taunted as the relatively song-y second set unfolded. My experience, though, was very much irrespective of time. The jams in “Set Your Soul Free”, “Prince Caspian” and “Chalk Dust Torture” all felt grand and fully-realized; I lost track of what song they were within a minute or two of departure and was amazed to discover later that all three combined didn’t reach the length of the previous night’s “Simple”. The more I read fans’ griping about short jams—gripes I’ve often made in the past—the more I wonder if they’re thinking about things like personal glory or statistics rather than listening to what IS there. Need I remind you all that ten years ago you were liable to get “The Line” in the middle of a second set? That only three jams that year even broke 20 minutes? (YEMs AND FUEGOs DON’T COUNT.) This year we’ve already had four that broke 30!

It was easy to lose myself in the loose string of pinners, maybe, because Phish continued to play mostly songs that are already deep inside my bones. I can only suspect a similar motivation in the band members themselves; keeping setlists relatively familiar allows them the freedom to stretch without feeling like they’ve gotta be vigilant for unfamiliar changes (not to mention cringe-inducing lyrics). They released a new album two weeks before this run and only played one song from it each night. On one hand, it kinda flies in the face of Trey’s stated wish NOT to become a nostalgia act. On the other hand, maybe the time was simply right to give fans at this beloved venue a very old-school throwdown featuring, well, MOST of our favorite songs.

I haven’t even mentioned THE most crucial improvement over Alpine ’22, though: the sound. I was so angry about the lack of bass last time that it soured my lasting memory of the weekend, even though for the most part it was a terrific weekend. This year, Mike was not only loud and clear, he was THE MAN. I could’ve just listened to him the entire weekend and been completely satisfied musically; he moved my body in ways I seriously don’t think it had moved before. What’s more, Trey was not hogging the spotlight; his sporadic heroics fit the occasion every time, and he wasn’t constantly drowning out the rest of the band as had been the case the past couple of years, not just at Alpine. Endless kudos to Phish’s sound crew for getting this mess resolved; everything is better now!

I single out Mike perhaps because I had been missing his contributions the most; the truth is everybody in the band was locked in all weekend. The total comfort-zone setlists surely helped, and now that we can think back on it all, we can probably admit that only “Simple” will go down as an indisputable classic and/or groundbreaking piece of music; the rest of the jams were pretty safe and contained. Even the deep mindfuck of “Split Open And Melt” that closed Sunday’s second set, that’s just what they DO now. We have to be really careful about taking such incredible things for granted. That’s why I have to make the argument against caring too much about whether or not anything LEGENDARY is happening, particularly when all other aspects of the show are at such a high level. (Speaking as someone who has OFTEN IN THE PAST cared too much about such things.) Thus far, Phish’s summer ’24 tour is about cruising around in their most comfy vehicles, resulting in a tight, broadly crowd-pleasing presentation, not entirely unlike summer 2015, one of 3.0’s most-loved tours. They’re keeping rarities rare while still surprising us in other ways, and the formula has already yielded some superb jams and all-around shows.

At Alpine they even toned it wayyyy down on the newer material, not that their new stuff is by any means ALL bad, yet across three nights they played…zero bad songs? (Yes, I’ve grown to actually like “Mercury” despite some comically bad lyrics, and no, “555” haters, I am not among you.) It’s unthinkable. I realize how subjective that statement is but I doubt this had happened ONCE in the previous 15 years. The FUEGO and BIG BOAT albums—there are only a handful of decent songs between ‘em! I think about the whale years, the echoplex years, the godawful discordant singing years, the years when Trey was just plain sloppy night after night—these encompass a LOT of Phish 3.0. But while we’ve all admittedly lowered our precision standards since whenever our gold standard was, I’m listening back more critically now to this past weekend and this band is as far to the ‘tight’ end of the tight-but-loose spectrum as I’d ever want them to be. AND they gave us the seventh-longest jam of their entire career.

As of Tuesday I’m still sticking with this as one of the greatest Phish weekends of my life.