Phish Busts Out ‘Fikus’ For 1st Performance Since 1998

Phish concluded their three-night run at Bethel Woods Center For The Arts on Sunday, the same day the Paris Olympics also came to a close. It was a fitting coincidence as the Vermont quartet has been racking up gold medals all summer long as they head into their festival weekend.

After a zippy “I Never Needed You Like This Before” as a warm up, a night full of athletic jamming kicked off with “46 Days.” With cowbell and strategic fills from drummer Jon Fishman, things felt a bit ragged at the start Trey Anastasio’s vocals and then guitar irking some unintentional dissonance until the band found their footing, remembering they were less 1992 Lithuanian basketball bronze medalists and more 1992 USA Dream Team, Page McConnell’s colorful Rhodes passing a theme to Anastasio and then bassist Mike Gordon, Chris Kuroda’s lights moving from pink to yellow and finally Olympic gold as the band hit the peak of the Type 1.5 jam.

From the opening notes of the following “Bathtub Gin,” the band and audience alike percolated with pre-race excitement. The jam got going quickly, a four-man relay, the 4x420m relay perhaps?, Fishman’s triggering drum rolls a baton that passed to Anastasio who matched with fiery trills then Page and Mike. The “Gin” proved to be a relay race within a relay as each phase of the jam passed the baton to the next, a dirty descending melody from Trey found Gordon countering, then the whole band going untethered, McConnell moving to synth for some dark running-outside-the-lanes improvisation where it wasn’t clear who was the lead and who was the anchor. The dark pacing led to an ecstatic spring then a flowing funk in a podium-worthy first set jam.

The Olympics are a time where the here-and-now meets the past and the surprising bust out of “Fikus” mid-set, played for the first time in over 25 years (800+ shows!) was a welcome one, the sun already set with a mid-August chill, the Gordon song sounded right at home with its gauzy psychedelic comedown after the “Gin” jam.

The rest of the set flowed nicely with the band feeling fluid and confident in strong takes on “Theme From The Bottom,” “Timber,” the new “Human Nature,” which showed some promise in its infancy, a future Olympian perhaps. While the “Timber” didn’t go too deep, it was a perfect highlight for Fishman who did all the little things – from cowbell to cymbals to snares – it takes to separate the medalists from the also-rans.

The set ended with a sampling of Phish eras and flavors, the rhythmic badminton shuttlecock being knocked back and forth over the net in “Limb By Limb,” the brute strength of boxing in “Axilla” and the feelgood modern feel of competitive breakdancing in the set-closing “Sigma Oasis.”

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

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The much-needed set break came to a close with the opening choogle of “Buried Alive” which blared like an announcement that the big events were about to begin (and how!). “AC/DC Bag” has filled many roles over its long career in the Phish canon including as a reliable jam vehicle once upon a time, so when it popped up in the two-spot Sunday night, the audience could be forgiven for thinking they might have a Simone Biles situation on their hands. And like Biles, the jam quickly went airborne, leaping into Type II territory like an athletic gymnast defying terrestrial gravity.

The jam gyrated, twisted and contorted around an ever-morphing center of gravity. The band found a frenetic pace that was almost inhuman, then soared, a musical double back layout with a half twist, the band making up new moves in a sport that has been competed in for many many decades. And it was just about at that point that I squinted from the back of the lawn and saw that it was not an up-and-comer young’un like Biles that was re-inventing the game, but more like Mary Lou Retton competing at the highest level some 40 years after the fact. Unprecedented.

The jaw-dropping jam moved into a final phase where each band member seemed to be playing a different “song,” four limbs acting independently, but all fitting together in some uneven-bar craziness, Gordon taking the “Fikus” melody to outer space mode in a perfect callback to the first set bust out. A +20-minute “AC/DC Bag” of pure athletic muscle, not a gram of fat.

Next up was into the swimming pool with “Fuego” which Katie-Ledecky’d its way through the water with power and grace. The quartet navigated the song’s multiple sections and then took a hefty jam there and back, straight freestyle power, elegant breaststroke glides, funky butterfly weirdness and then flipping on its back and somehow returning to the “Fuego” theme in a pulped-up form.

After posting gold all night, it only made sense for “Fuego” to evaporate into “Golden Age” which put a smile on everyone in the venue. Have you ever watched Olympic canoeing, the competitors zig-zagging through, against, and across the current, sometimes going backwards to hit the gate? That was this “Golden Age” jam which went topsy-turvy with practiced dissonance, turning the joyous melody inside out, Fishman and Anastasio paddling the boat through the rapids.

After playing one of the longest “Simples” early in the tour, the version that connected “Golden Age” and the following “Life Saving Gun” felt more like a placeholder, a quick pause from the sponsors, Gordon and Fish carrying the heavy energy straight through.

“Life Saving Gun” has arguably shown the greatest promise of the newest batch of songs and the Bethel version loaded a lot of ideas into a medium-sized package. It used to be called “synchronized swimming” and this version was full-on synchronized jamming, all four in full making-shit-up mode with dark-red-light energy, somehow coordinating their movements together… while upside down… while holding their breath underwater. How do they do that?

Perhaps I was imagining things but I swear Kuroda’s lights perfectly simulated the Olympic rings as the jam hit its peak, Anastasio holding an Olympic-sized sustained note as the band continued their frantic jamming before returning to the theme.

You could feel the “Harry Hood” coming from across the way and come it did and this was a return to the track and field arena, pole vault to be precise. We’ve all seen the pole vault before, they all look pretty similar, but it doesn’t make it any less awe-inspiring, the forward momentum of building speed, the coordinate plant of the pole as power turns to grace turns to inhuman flight, higher, higher, higher, a thing of beauty as the bar is cleared and the band lands safe and sound back on the ground, the audience stops holding their collective breath.

The weekend’s closing ceremony was a celebratory two-song encore that saw “A Life Beyond The Dream” teaming up with “Say It To Me S.A.N.T.O.S.” Another gold medal. Another world record.

Still undefeated.

Mondegreen beckons.

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Phish’s Mondegreen festival begins on Thursday, August 15 in Dover, Delaware. Livestreams for the entire Summer Tour 2024 are available via LivePhish.com.

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