Outstanding Improvisation Highlights Phish’s 2nd Show At Hollywood Bowl: Setlist, Recap & The Skinny

The experience of going to see Phish play extends beyond the music and the shows themselves, to the people we go with, the gathering of old friends, the random run-ins with faces from our pasts, and the new relationships that form along the way. These interactions bring the human element to the concert experience and are marked by various types of conversation and dialog.

Phish’s second night at the Hollywood Bowl seemed to mirror the many interactions I’ve had over the past week of seeing shows, the deep discussions and the superficial chit-chats and all sorts of in-betweens.

As a crescent moon and the bright light of Venus hung in the sky, the show opened with “Ghost” which felt like four old friends picking up a conversation that has been ongoing for decades. The four members finished each other’s sentences one after the other after the other in an extended improvisation that would set the tone for a set and a show full of penetrating thoughts and reactive interplay.

The “David Bowie” that followed added layers to the preceding back-and-forth and echoed conversations I had had earlier in the day, old classmates and new acquaintances finding contextual meaning in shared histories. The “Bowie” set the theme for the rest of the night, copious jamming that would find interesting new facets largely within the confines of the root song, focused dialog with a purpose, the band’s creativity pushed by the guardrails rather than stifled by them.

The previous two weeks of shows seemed to have put Phish in a do-no-wrong state, every musical word they injected into their exchanges another mot juste as they followed a flawless “Esther” with a patient “Harry Hood.” “Hood” felt rare and fresh in its mid-first-set position, well-worn ideas coming off as new from this perspective, the foursome once again in easy parley, everyone getting their ideas heard and incorporated into the larger discussion.

Just because the band’s chatting came easily, it did not mean the subject matter was without its depth. Sometimes friends and family members must confront the hard truths and the late set “Split Open And Melt” was a glorious mess of ideas and intense emotion. Phish leaned into the messiness creating a volatile four-way head-to-head, each member jabbering away on their own, resulting in a thick cacophony that was comfortable in its discomfort, my personal highlight of the set.

“Leaves” was a well-earned whispered sweet-nothing in comparison, making way for the set-closing “Squirming Coil” which was rare in its opportunity for monologue, Trey Anastasio handing the composition ably and then Page McConnell getting his say in with a piano solo to finish.

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

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When the conversation is really good, you don’t want it to end and the second set felt like one long look-at-the-time extension to the preceding back-and-forth. The fourth set of the Hollywood Bowl run opened with “Chalk Dust Torture” continuing a Saturday night trend of back-in-the-day, this-could-be-1997-again nostalgia for all the groups of old show-going buddies in the crowd. But the band continually turned such backward-looking around, turning dialog about the past into updated how’s-it-going-now’s and explorations about what’s coming next.

The “Chalk Dust” found its subject matter to just end quickly and went Type II as the best conversations do. After many spates of challenging darkness, the jam was all happy talk, ecstatic on-the-same-page builds, Anastasio’s guitar punctuating the builds from his bandmates, the audience not just content to listen in on the banter, but to push it with their own energy. The jam set the stage for the second stellar set of the night. It segued into “Twist” perfectly, one topic of conversation turning into another and then, when the “Twist” jam didn’t stick, appropriately moving on to “2001.”

The band made the flow from one idea to the next look easy, the move from “Chalk Dust” to “Twist” to “2001” not going off on a tangent, but a natural development of ideas arrived at together. The dance party arrived at just the right moment, not just for the set or the night but for the whole run, as if everyone in the Bowl had been waiting for the “Also Sprach” to drop, an opening in the conversation for the crowd to join in on. Saturday night’s version did not disappoint, McConnell and Mike Gordon delivering deep funk, not afraid to crib ideas from Funkadelic to drive the boogie, Jon Fishman peppering their schmoozing with his own rhythmic interjections. Overseeing it all was Chris Kuroda who jittered lights in a way that made the bandshell look like it was dancing along with the crowd.

The conversation had turned to giggle-inducing jokes, the best kind of interactions for old friends and new friends alike, and the band kept the collective giddiness with another perfectly placed setlist transition to the first “Sneakin Sally Through the Alley” of 2023. This version was a monster, like talking to someone you just met but feels like you’ve known all your life, a shared sense of values and humor, and, dang, ain’t this just the best time ever? “Sally” merged groovejam and blissjam, peaks with valleys. A “let me get your number so we can continue this over text” improvisation that showed the band’s wit is as sharp as ever.

The momentum of the set’s gabfest pushed the quartet through a keep-dancing “Back On The Train” and the final breather of “A Life Beyond The Dream” before closing out with “First Tube.” Sometimes talking things out can bring you to a cathartic high and the second instrumental dance party of the night was both high and cathartic, a dumbed-down, take-home-message version of the down-and-dirty funk and the climactic jamming of the entire show.

As I waited to see what the encore would be, my mind bounced back over a couple of weeks’ worth of conversations and interactions, the easy ones and the hard ones, the shared nostalgia trips, the dumb jokes, the personal anecdotes, the discovery of meaning in unexpected places, the old friends and new friends. The Phish experience encompasses all of it, sometimes blissfully, sometimes messily, but always interesting.

And then the band came out and raged “Run Like an Antelope” and the only conversation I was having was with my body as it tried to keep up with the frenetic pace, my thoughts otherwise cleared of anything at all, temporarily at least. Because this was a show that would certainly kick off a whole new series of convos, Phish, 40 years into their career, still a perpetual motion machine of dialog and thoughts and ideas.

Phish’s Spring Tour 2023 concludes tonight with their third and final show at the Hollywood Bowl. Note the earlier showtime is 6:30 p.m. PT. Watch a livestream at LivePhish.com.

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