Phish Summer Tour 2019: Charlotte – Setlist, Recap & The Skinny

Phish Summer Tour 2019 continued in Charlotte on Friday night. It would mark Phish’s seventh show in the building now called the PNC Music Pavilion stretching back to when it was the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater and Blockbuster Pavilion. How things have changed. The Vermont quartet would treat the PNC audience to a varied, 21-song showing that saw the band interlacing “Tweezer” throughout and a monster “Runaway Jim.”

Phish got the mellow moods flowing with The Mighty Diamonds’ “Have Mercy,” a song the band has been playing for over 30 years, but had not played since 2017. Next up, “Gotta Jibbo,” which topped off just under 10 minutes but woke everyone up after the laid back “Have Mercy.” Trey Anastasio conjured some old sounds out of the rig before a fiery solo.

“Free” followed ahead of the bluegrass classic “Ginseng Sullivan,” which also had not been played since 2017. “Ginseng” melted into the first “Tweezer” of the night, a fairly epic first outing at just over 13 minutes. After some obligatory “whoos!” from the crowd, Phish went into a major key jam before jumping between dark and light. There would be more where that came from.

Tweezer segued seamlessly into “Passing Through,” making just it’s fourth appearance after its debut last Halloween with some sultry synth from Page McConnell and a bass bomb from Mike Gordon. Things got islandy again with “Ya Mar” followed by everyone’s favorite reject, “Mercury.” The second “Tweezer” of the night followed, a short one and a half reminder, before fan-favorite “Say It To Me S.A.N.T.O.S.” brought the first set to a close. This is what setbreak smells like.

Phish kicked off the second set with one of those expansive, type II “Runaway Jim”s of lore. Phish likes big “Jim” jams in North Carolina, with the interlaced “Antelope/Jim” coming to mind from Raleigh in 2018. The Charlotte “Jim” saw the band delivering some sweeping, searching jams, shading between light and dark, over Jon Fishman’s rock steady shuffle. Then things got weird. Mike and Trey percolated while Page soaking everything in synth before heading back into “Jim” proper.

Up next, “Scents And Subtle Sounds,” which didn’t have an intro unless you count the nearly 20-minute “Jim” that went down before. The “Scents” jam stumbled into, you guessed it, another quick “Tweezer,” just to keep it real, ahead of an extra crunchy “Sand.”

A brief respite with “Lifeboy” followed ahead of “A Song I Heard The Ocean Sing” keeping with the runaway theme and containing one of the better jams of the night. “Ocean” led into “Taste,” with Trey and Page singing “I can ‘leap’ through the lines” on the first line of the chorus. Up next, a fitting “Twenty Years Later” as Phish made their debut at the venue 20 years prior when it was Blockbuster Pavilion. A rollicking “Possum” closed out the second set.

The band emerged for the encore with “More.” Of course, there was more: the hardest, and most predictable, four minutes in rock ‘n’ roll as “Tweezer Reprise” closed the night out. Overall, the band was tight and exploratory, a good send off to the beloved Merriweather Post Pavilion where Phish will finish out the weekend with two shows in Columbia, Maryland. Live streams are available via LivePhish.com.

Say It To Me S.A.N.T.O.S. Captured by M G

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