Phish Journeys Deep Into ‘The Well’ On Opening Night At The Mann

As with all things, when it comes to seeing Phish play live, context and perspective can matter just as much as what and how the band performs. For example, the order in which things happen can make all the difference: if it’s sunny out and then it rains it’s a much different situation than if it’s rainy and then the sun comes out. The former can be a kind of drag. The latter is a recipe for a rainbow.

Tuesday night at The Mann in Philadelphia was the latter, both literally – a massive rainstorm gave way to clear skies and comfortable temperatures at showtime – and metaphorically – the Vermont quartet putting everything in the right place, a recipe for a richly colorful musical rainbow.

The night kicked off with Phish’s cover of “Strawberry Letter 23,” a perfect selection with its line about “rainbows and waterfalls run through my mind” ringing true for the sold-out audience. And for personal context and perspective, it seemed extra fitting as the song was already partially lodged in my head from hearing someone play it in the parking lot wandering around before the show.

Up next was a get-right-to-it take on “Bathtub Gin,” Page McConnell’s grand piano prominent in the mix, a bit of foreshadowing for the night. The “Gin” jam was one of several examples of rainbow jams during the night, the band playing both as a white light whole and a refracted, individual component “ROYGBIV” all at once. Drummer Jon Fishman’s ratatat drumming matching a syncopated melody which seemed to combine and then disassociate multiple times, Phish attacking the improv almost as a jazz band with a running bass line from Mike Gordon, non-repeating drum patterns, and plenty of point-counterpoint work on the guitar and piano. The jam built velocity and then, telepathically slowed down, then sped up again, a musical game of “Red Light Green Light” except using all the colors of the spectrum, called out by Chris Kuroda.

Several minutes of make-it-look-easy improvisation transitioned perfectly into “Get Back On The Train,” an excellent segue into a right-place-right-time placement. Trey once again got a cheer with his acknowledgement of the weather with the “see me standing at the station in the rain” before leading the band in a single-unit build over several minutes to a giddy peak.

Working their way through the first set spectrum, the interesting placement of “Squirming Coil” just felt right, Trey’s occasionally strained vocals somehow working well and Kuroda’s inventive light work very much working well. The mostly-successful composed section gave way to a few moments of impressive downtempo work, all four musicians soloing on top of each other in quiet harmony before Page took a short solo of his own.

The flow of the set seemed to pronounce Phish’s ability to manipulate volume and velocity, within composed sections of their songs, within the improvisational exploration, and within the colors-of-the-rainbow setlist, and so the pairing of the ambient ooze of “Coil” met the raise-the-devil’s-horns rage rock of “Axilla Part II” without friction. The “Axilla” outro found Fishman and Anastasio in each other’s zone, red and blue mixing to a psychedelic purple while Gordon beefed up his tone.

The remainder of the set continued the theme, each song following naturally from the previous, flow coming from context, the band riding a rainbow’s arc over the peak and back down with the laid back vibing of “Ya Mar” with Fishman’s real-time rhythmic rewrites, Trey declaring “the storm is just passing through” in “Blaze On” as McConnell went from Rhodes back to the grand for a funk-to-shred jam section, and then the poignant sing-along ballad of “Waste” in a Goldilocks placement.

“Walls of the Cave” seemed to be a great call to sum up the fast-and-slow/quiet-and-loud motif, although Trey’s vocal and guitar struggles somewhat marred the would-be set closer. He made up for the issues leading a strong guitar jam as Kuroda brought the lights down to a literal cave around the band, but he tacked on one more song just in case, a go-out-on-a-high blazer of a “46 Days” to end the first set for good.

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

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The colors now well-established, Phish was poised to do some serious fingerpainting in the second set and “Down With Disease” again seemed like the right canvas to work with. After making their way through the verses, they went straight into high-level improvisation, another light-through-the-prism exercise that few other bands could pull off. Each member seemed to be doing their own thing, a distinct hue of their own, but ones that each worked with what the other three were doing, so that all at once the dancing crowd had primary, secondary, and even tertiary colors to take in.

Did you know that magenta isn’t even a color, it’s just your brain inventing something it thinks should be there? Phish seemingly recreated the effect during the impressive “Disease” jam which returned to the song’s coda sounding like another song all together.

Once again, their mastery of context and perspective put the second-ever version of “The Well” in the second slot of the second set, Trey once again appropriately referencing “rainbows,” although the post-lyric section was more torrential rain from dark clouds and stark shades of gray than anything resembling color. As with many of the songs debuted this tour, “The Well” seemed ready-made for Jon Fishman’s current drum style which mixes tempo and energy in ways that require an advanced degree in mathematics to decipher. Kuroda turned his lights vertical, giving the stage an almost literal falling-down-a-well feel as the band went scary-but-raging as only they can, off-kilter but somehow still utterly danceable.

The hair-raising improv eventually morphed into a minimalist almost-plinko, Phish working the corners of the canvas with colorful dabs. Where in the past jams like this might have quickly gone to “bliss jam” territory, the quartet these days seems more content to hold off on the happy place and then only barely getting there, as they got into a deep-welled crunch-funk that got spooky and meandering, Trey leading his bandmates to explore just what the new material has in store, uncovering the evil-sounding secrets in real time with the crowd.

The “Disease” -> “Well” pairing found Phish operating at a high level and the rest of the show was of the do-no-wrong category, each song selection getting a nod of approval from the audience, each feeling just right in its placement, each getting the right amount of love from the band. When it emerged from the wreckage that was left of “The Well,” it was clear that the next song had to be “No Men In No Man’s Land,” Anastasio seemingly inventing entirely new off-rainbow colors with rather mind-bending guitar work in yet another prismatic jam. “Beneath a Sea of Stars Part 1” was exactly the right choice for the cooldown slot, opening up into a lovely quietude of keys, bass, and guitar and setting up the last quarter of the show perfectly.

I mean, what else can I say? “Piper” into “Crosseyed and Painless” into “Chalk Dust Torture” was a yes, yes, and more yes way to close out a Tuesday night. “Piper” seems to have regained its position as a forum for high-wire creativity from the band and The Mann version was overflowing with ideas delivered at a high data rate, as if the jamming from the entire show got regurgitated and compressed into a five-minute funkified slop with added exclamation points (!!!) for emphasis.

The drop into “Crosseyed” was artfully abrupt, a clap of thunder that catches you off-guard and gets your adrenaline in full fight-or-flight mode. It wasn’t an extended version, but at this point in the set it didn’t have to be and the segue into “Chalk Dust” was almost hard to believe, indigo wedged between blue and violet, you’d have to squint to see the border. The show ended with “Chalk Dust” because what else could have ended it? Trey double-dipping the ending with plenty of Type I guitar shred, making sure the set-ending stuck this time.

The show had room for one or two more perfect-placements and the encore pairing of “Wading in the Velvet Sea” and “Fire” was the kind of water-meets-flame closing the first night at The Mann deserved. If you were looking for a self-referential status update from the band, you could do worse than those two songs in the encore. One more night at The Mann and then it’s off to the end of the rainbow in The Garden.

Phish returns to The Mann tonight, Wednesday, June 26. Watch livestreams of the show and the rest of Phish Summer Tour 2023 via LivePhish.com.

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