Saturday Night Special In Seattle: Phish Wraps Spring-Opening Run At Climate Pledge Arena

Peak Phish often involves Phish peaks – the tension and release jams which defined their 1.0 era and which never fully left the band’s playing deck, even during years when they were betting heavily on other hands. Phish opened the first night of their current eight-show Spring Tour in Seattle last Friday reentering jam-space by focusing their headlamps back onto the kinds of climaxes, summits and apexes of yore, opening up speculation that, indeed, in contrast to the tapestry jamming we saw last year, spring could bring us to new panoramic vistas. That pattern held for the start of night two, Phish’s second and final night in Seattle.

Instead of celebrating the recent past, they appear to be nodding to their more distant history while keeping their faces held high to the wind as it blows them down the west coast this week.

In Phish’s modern era, “Free” is often a mustard barometer — if they decorate the song’s mid-jam with condiments, it’s a sign that they came to blow open the nooks and crannies. More often than not, the song has had a different focus, with the band employing it as a fist-pumping hair-raiser, even in standard form, making it a worthwhile choice as the opener for a Saturday Night Special. There was a little bit of extra sauce as the song stretched a minute or two longer than its prototypical eight minutes, but the big takeaway once everyone in the audience took their seats or otherwise found their footing and settled in was that Phish felt synced up and locked into each other from the jump.

Showing that they are in sync at the starting gun is as much of a good omen as a kickoff return touchdown, so the early confirmation was a comfort and the band confidently sailed through the sea whose waters they push the song’s antagonist into. And the ship went sliding into “Bathtub Gin” in the two-spot.

“Gin” is also typically a harbinger: the song requires a certain ration of improvisation, as opposed to a song like “Free,” which gives the band more of a choice (to make an audible or take an out). Here, Phish appeased by not just jamming it out of obligation, but in fact jamming it out of the stratosphere, using the second-slot position to get into Type 2 formation early on.

Sinking into “Gin’s” signature slink, guitarist Trey Anastasio took the composed lick out to pasture in a way that was both par for the course and yet still entirely unique to the moment — this ability is one of Phish’s most overlooked superpowers. It’s not always about whether or not they’re improvising song structure and breaking through to secret recesses of the universe, uniting a room full of friendly strangers in a transcendent ceremony on a vessel soaring through time and space; sometimes it’s just about putting fresh paint on a familiar vehicle.

And in that way, Trey hired this “Gin” to fulfill a function, leading the band to a mini-peak and from there holding tight to intensity, while bassist Mike Gordon found a particularly funky foundation that he settled into, supporting Trey’s parade of larks. While this was happening, Jon Fishman maintained the familiar beat and pace of Gin-ville, giving it the glue of consistency that the dancers require.

Phish serves “Gin” best when the grand piano is in play, bringing a martini bar vibe to an arena rock production, and Page McConnell dutifully continued to reinforce the song’s longstanding ties to “Rhapsody in Blue” with a little rhapsody on the Yamaha C7.

The jam continued to build in intensity, approaching the realm of controlled dissonance and chaotic chunky grooves until Trey hit on a winning idea. As the band instantly fell in lockstep, it felt like they could be mischievously dropping a new debut — but instead of arriving at a destination, all four kept going. Fishman’s encouraging fills and frills kept the engine chugging along at just enough of a clip to make sure that, second song in, they had the audience’s complete attention.

Santana-eque riffing erupted from Trey, as he got closer and closer to the real thing (“Oye Como Va”) but he ended up never fully straying from Gin’s established footprint, even as he left Bigfoot-sized tracks in the mud while pushing deeper into the woods.

Blissful and soaring sustain from Trey led seamlessly back in the gravity field as the “Gin” lick reemerged and the band was able to guide the vessel safely home. Instead of being the omen of good portent that it promised on the way in, in the end, “Gin” was the bearer of its own fruit and, at the 20-minute mark, not only the longest song of the night, but also … maybe the best.

“Evolve” in the third-position earned its keep, “pausing a moment once in time” to remind us just how small and insignificant we are as humans running around this planet spinning around a star.

“Stash” is one of Phish’s bulletproof foot soldiers – the 35-year-old workhorse rarely elicits audible excitement at its opening, these days, but the song always earns the crowd’s enthusiasm by the time it lands back in the refrain. After some guitar-driven jam-rock, and for the second time in just half a set, the band locked into what sounded like a progression for another song — not unlike the “Split Open and Melt” homage at the end of opening night’s “Golden Age.” The entire band was riding one wavelength as they tore through new territory, taking “Stash’s” known chaoticism to a ‘90s-era peak jam — but now the band members are bigger kids with bigger toys, and they confidently brought this one to a playful and emphatic close.

Trey switched guitar woods from a maple to a koa variant, just for one song, as Phish launched into “Pebbles and Marbles.” A tentative start gained confidence when Trey snuck some machine gunning into what would otherwise be spaces between. A slight and slightly amusing wobble brought the song home.

“Farmhouse” was up next, with its acknowledgment of the northern lights (and perhaps cluster flies, alas), while the band performed on a stage less than 100 miles from the Canadian border.

For reasons all his own, Trey got a kick from launching into “Suzy Greenberg” as the set’s likely closer. Much like “Stash,” “Suzy” typically gets a lukewarm reception on the front-end these days and yet almost always earns a standing ovation by the back. For this version, Trey was unable to stay away from whispering Santana’s name, until he was met with Fishman’s woodblocks and Page’s ivory-league grand piano workshop.

But it wasn’t the set closer it could have been. Right before Suzy’s final downbeat, Trey looked at Page, smiled and mouthed “Walls of the Cave.” Little surprise then when Page went straight into the Walls opening upon Suzy’s conclusion, leaving little to no space between.

Walls maintained the band’s presence and intensity without going off script, bringing the same kind of first-night jitters and fresh energy to the song as well as the set, with Trey throwing himself into the build and rocking around his station before the band put down their instruments for the break at 9:30pm, local time.

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

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Intent, with this band, is everything. Great shows happen when Phish is deliberate from the jump, so eager to take the audience to new heights that they refuse to be constrained by composed arrangements, like a baby kicking and screaming its way out of the womb. Hence, early in this “Chalk Dust Torture” set opener, still in its composed section, Trey was already exploring a new riff and the band coalesced around it as if they had practiced it endlessly in training camp instead of making it up on the spot.

The actual “Chalk Dust” jam section was immediately fascinating — Page went with the Wurlitzer while Trey found some intentional chop to go along with Mike’s suey. Always the unspoken MVP, Fishman kept the band on track as Trey took the Mar Mar places that were oddly familiar, the tone of his maple guitar taking us (and him) back to some mid-90s vistas, while the rest of the group made sure the song remained in 2025.

A slowdown instead of a speedup led to some arpeggios till an evil prog-rock lick that initially fell out of Trey was picked up by Mike and Page, who offered their support for the idea, even as it morphed kinetically into a more modern and experimental realm. Jedi Trey leaned into some 4.0 effects before deciding to get chordal with it. The band then let the intensity linger in the air while Trey went back to single-note leads and Mike injected a bounce that Fishman accentuated to keep people moving, allowing Trey to get casual with the lead, on a patient journey of discovery, as he moved around the neck looking for IT. Fishman, meanwhile, worked the kit like a moth in flame … yet somehow kept it steady as she goes for those inclined to stand up and move.

And just as they sounded like they were going to rock, they rolled instead, emerging into “Light.” The second-set, second-song “Light” caught the flame that was promised from the segue. The jam launch made Fishman smile about something, so we know something good was happening. And indeed, with Fish’s blessing, the band shape-shifted “Light” into a tapestry jam, with Mike and Fish weaving the stitch while Trey passed through with needlework precision. Page stuck with his preference for the night – the Yamaha C7.

Trey hit a choppy rhythm reminiscent of the Chalk Dust jam that came before it, but then Mike came in with synthy bass lasers and Page moved over to the Rhodes. Instead of locking into a mirrored space, as they had been on the first night (and on tonight’s first set), the band went full tapestry, Trey’s enveloped single-note staccato complementing the full ensemble’s suddenly alien move.

Spacey and otherworldly, Mike’s distorted bass loaded Spaceship Phish onto the launch pad, while Trey’s Line 6 effects, as played through Blondie, added a slightly new (and slightly old) twist to Trey’s post-pandemic tone and timbre. He went from pretty, melodic, decorative leads earlier in the night into a straight growl, before reprising “Chalk Dust” (not to be confused with “Chalk Dust Reprise”) for a Light Torture sandwich.

“Fuego” emerged from those ashes, four spots into a Saturday Night Special’s second set, raising brief concerns that the rest of the set could turn into Showcase Phish Night in Seattle instead of the caution-to-the-wind band from the night before. But with Trey jumping up and down as they slid into the “Fuego” chorus, it was hard to deny that Phish was present and accounted for at the set’s midway spot, even if the peak was either past or future.

“Fuego’s” jam went suitably incendiary from the launch, and although it never strayed out of sight of the song, it told tales of the stars first seen in “Light,” with Trey’s wah pedal providing some ghost of Hendrix moments in an otherwise fiery “Fuego.” Mike had some surprising things to say here as well, interjecting thoughtful color into Trey’s upper-neck wanderings until the spaceship landed unremarkably — yet, remarkably sliding into relative newcomer (and instant classic) “Monsters.”

“Monsters” has never really broken free from its song form yet, but it has gotten progressively stronger, with Seattle’s perhaps being Phish’s strongest version yet, out of eight total.

Picking “Piper” next felt promising, as instead of running the clock in the fourth quarter like they could, they appeared to be going for a potential touchdown instead. Suitably, they got right down to brass tacks the moment they could leave the song behind, entering a 16-limbed space that had the rickety racket of a freight train going down the rails while maintaining a pace and intensity that the song enjoyed regularly in its younger days.

Trey used a rock riff to cut above the vessel as it continued to morph, quickly finding a groove to weave through. Page had one hand on his Moog and one hand on the Wurlitzer, giving Trey just enough space to start egging the woo… but instead of eliciting the audience call-and-response, he circled the band back around into the Saturday night closer – “Backwards Down the Number Line.”

A “Sleeping Monkey” encore is always fun and always paired — this time with a surprising choice of “My Friend, My Friend,” which added the suitable punctuation mark for the show. Fun fact: it was the first known “My Friend, My Friend” encore in America (they encored with it just once before, in Canada … in 1993.)

As one could expect to say about a Saturday Night Special, it didn’t have the improvisational girth or the peak-after-peak promise of the night before, but it certainly delivered the punches — with presence, intent, and just enough swagger to keep Phish’s dad rock every bit as exciting as it was when it was still college rock.

Off to Portland for their first stop in Stumptown in over 25 years.

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