Watch Phish Transform Madison Square Garden Into ‘Gamehendge’ Wonderland For New Year’s Eve

Phish is now 40 years old. In human years, that would put the Vermont quartet firmly in middle age territory. In rock band years, though, 40 is downright geological, multiple epochs, enough time for the tectonic plates of their musical Pangea to drift across the ocean of love to the landscape and topography we know today. Ensuring your sound and catalog does not fossilize over that time is no easy feat, and over four decades Phish has been able to manage it through a variety of geological means, all of them on display during the first set of their run-closing New Year’s Eve show at a very sold out Madison Square Garden.

Years of sonic sediment – musical styles and technological innovations – have layered on top of each other, hardening in its place, creating the bedrock of Phish’s repertoire, like the mid-set “Taste” with scintillating peaks, or the explosive arms-in-the-air rock out of “Character Zero.” Time has eroded and smoothed some of that older material, giving us the perpetual wind-weathered beauty of “Reba” which had the room bouncing as it has so many times in the past.

But the churning magma of Phish’s core has continued to spew new material out to the surface, bringing more recent material like the show-opening “Everything’s Right” or the “Ruby Waves” which featured free-flowing four-man improvisation, ideas and sounds contributed by each member of the band, sparkles of quartz and the deep darkness of obsidian. Over the course of Phish’s career, pressure and temperature have taken some songs and turned them into something altogether different, the metamorphic “Tube” delighting the Garden early in the night, Trey Anastasio jamming on the theme to the Mary Tyler Moore show, perhaps cheekily evoking the lyric “you’re going to make it after all!” while fronting a band that has now played the World’s Most Famous Arena over 80 times.

Read on after The Skinny for the rest of the recap and more.

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When the conditions are everything’s-right, some of Phish’s sound crystallizes into the most dazzling of gemstones, musical rubies and emeralds, and “Down With Disease,” which debuted in part 30 years earlier on New Year’s Eve in 1993, has certainly been a crown jewel of their repertoire. Opening the second set, this “Disease” was more a throwback to its origins, with surprisingly minimal improvisation and a quick ending as the crowd started to fully move into what’s-gonna-happen anticipation for the annual New Year’s Eve “gag.” The abbreviated “DWD” made way to an “oom pah pah” and the cheers for the opening chords of “Harpua” were as predictable and explosive as the eruption of Old Faithful.

The “Harpua” narration opened up into the introduction of an actor playing “Jimmy” and his grandmother, played by actress Annie Golden and between the three of them, they turned the dog and cat (and goldfish) story into the telling of Gamehendge. Gamehendge is one of the critical fault lines in Phish history, and the ensuing telling of the story, complete with Broadway-style production numbers, aerial dancing, puppets, and a drone mockingbird flying over the dizzied audience, was perhaps the Phish equivalent of “The Big One,” a musical earthquake where some of the oldest material in their songbook met their most modern of styles, that being the big over-the-top holiday production. An earthquake that may forever alter their landscape, the one you’ll be telling your grandkids about, where you were when you heard it or watched it or, maybe you were lucky enough to attend in person with tens of thousands of other awe-struck fans.

The brief instrumental prelude of “The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday” made way to “the Lizards,” and the appearance of the Col. Forbin character as he entered the alternate dimension of Gamehendge. A troupe of dancing lizards accompanied the song in the first of many remarkable performances in the set. While there may have been some retconning of what went where in the narrative, the telling of the story was a giddy delight with very little left out. Seeing these dirty old stones of Phish’s geology polished anew with Broadway flair and the bands current power-rhythmic style felt like the kind of thing young fans would dream up over bong hits in a dorm room back in the ’90s. Every song felt a new freshness, even if it was only for one night. The night when we got to see the band play from the center of a rhombus, and hear them go very deep jamming as a life-sized “multi-beast” marched through the arena. The night when a real life “Tela” literally soared in stunningly gorgeous aerial choreography and when heavenly voices lifted up many of these songs, elevating them to something we’d never heard before, despite how many hundreds of times they’ve been played. The night when we watched “The Sloth” moved hilariously slowly in an attempt to assassinate the evil King Wilson and then beamed with delight as the rhombus lit up like the sky above for a lovely set-ending “Divided Sky.”

The set break did not break the spell cast by the band and the actors and dancers, instead it only seemed to enhance it, the buzz in the concourse uniformly rapt with what we’d just witnessed, knowing that there was still more to come. The Gamehendge saga came to its conclusion in the first section of the NYE-only third set, which opened with “McGrupp” and “Col Forbin’s Ascent,” which found the Col Forbin character climbing up the side of the rhombus. The tour de force closing of the story came with a larger-than-life mockingbird flapping its wings and flying through Madison Square Garden, holding the Helping Friendly Book in its feet and, because why not?, wearing a top hat.

As the clock struck midnight and Phish’s anniversary year officially came to a close, they kicked off 2024, their 5th (!!!!!) decade, ready to create even more new geological formations. With strong rumors of a new album in the works, a miraculous ability to continue to evolve at this eon of their existence, and an invigorated fanbase very much looking forward to new experiences like shows at the Sphere in Las Vegas and promises of a summer festival in a new location, those tectonic plates continue to move and reform the Phish terra firma. That being said, the volcanic explosion of the last half of the New Year’s Eve show (a volcanic eruption that consumed the remaining lizards, who, if you needed reminding, are practically extinct from doing things smart people don’t do, like jumping into liquid hot magma) was a return to that sedimentary bedrock, found the quartet playing a quartet of their most consistently delivering songs in their repertoire and, if I may say so, delivering on each in a big way.

“Split Open and Melt” was an ooze of melted rock, churning in wonderfully chaotic weirdness, Phish proving that they can keep an audience moving even as dissonance overtakes the room, not to mention the troupe of lizards somehow choreographed dancing even as the jam became increasingly unhinged. A band choosing to start their year off with a song like “Split Open” is a band that is not interested in turning into fossils quite yet.

“You Enjoy Myself” is the band’s perfectly cut diamond, multifaceted and multifunctional after eons of pressure, and Sunday’s version was an absolute after-midnight dance party. The set ended with two set-enders, their cover of “Loving Cup” reaching multiple peaks it doesn’t always have, aftershocks of the night’s earthquake, and then “Possum” thrown in for good measure, spontaneous combustion happening on stage and throughout the arena. Three more bread-and-butter’s in the encore, Phish laying a couple tons of granite down in MSG with the adrenaline-depleting pairing of “First Tube” and “Tweezer Reprise.” Seismic!

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