Back To Bethel: Phish Delivers Balanced Mix At 2nd Bethel Woods Show

My first time attending a show at the Bethel Woods Center for the Performing Arts in Bethel, New York, was on July 9, 2006, for the Phil Lesh & Friends / G.R.A.B. (Phish‘s Trey Anastasio and Mike Gordon and The Duo’s Joe Russo and Marco Benevento) tour. It was a confusing time for band members and Phish fans alike. Here we were less than two years removed from Phish’s messy breakup at Coventry, and Trey was leading a quartet of the same instrumentation as Phish, playing music that wasn’t exactly a massive departure from their sound.

Later that evening, Trey sat in with Phil & Friends for a full recreation of the set the Grateful Dead played nearby at Woodstock – and Trey even sang lead on “Touch of Grey” in the encore. This from a man who broke up his band in part because he didn’t want them to become a nostalgia act?

All the while, it was an immensely enjoyable evening at Bethel Woods, and I stood there, as I imagined many Phish fans did, and thought: Man this would be a great place for Phish to play sometime. That day in 2006, whether or not there would ever be another Phish show felt like a 50/50 coin flip to me.

The 2011 three-night run at the venue had a 2-out-of-3 winning record as it relates to shows immediately being logged as fan-favorites for the year, a good ratio – especially for a year when the band was still getting its sea legs back. The venue seemed loved by both band and fans alike, so the 11 year absence that followed was quite a surprise. To the delight of many fans the band returned for a two night run in 2022, and this year back for another three.

The first show of the run on Friday felt like an instant classic, arguably the strongest of the tour. It was a well-balanced and well-executed show that was deep with improvisation and energy, while not needing to lean on any one single long epic jam, though the “Tweezer” did cross the arbitrary threshold of being a 20-minute jam. So the stage was set and the bar was raised, could Phish keep it rolling and notch another one back-to-back?

The opening framing of “Back On The Train” and “Sample In A Jar” were standard plays, no repeat of the 14+ minute romp on “Sample” at the same venue back in 2022 this time around. I don’t want to imply that Trey was having a bad time in this early portion of the set, but he did seem a bit “all-business,” and not as joyful and relaxed as we saw on night one.

“Hey Stranger” also had a standard reading for this relatively new Phish tune before the night’s first surprise, a bustout of “Dinner and A Movie,” its first play since Mexico 2023. Fans paying especially close attention would have known this was on the reported soundcheck setlist from the night before. Drummer Jon Fishman‘s vocal stylings and yelps during “Dinner And A Movie” started to crack up Trey, and that seemed to loosen him up a bit and any worries this writer had that Trey was going to be pissed about something the whole set were wiped away.

Fans of the “Halley’s Comet” jam would be left wanting more as when the song proper wrapped up, there would be no open jam section, but instead a quick drop into the always dependable jam-vehicle “Sand.” As Trey seemed to want to push the jam out of its standard A-minor up to D, Mike did not follow suit, and this “Sand” while it included a soaring jam, stayed put inside the confines of its structure. In fact, I can’t recall a recent “Sand” where Mike stayed so close to the standard “Sand” bass line for the entirety of the jam.

“Gumbo” would follow, another song that during Phish’s run at Bethel Woods in 2022 took an unexpected ride out for a longer reading than has become standard in the modern era of the band. Would tonight’s be the first jammed out “Gumbo” since over two years ago at the same venue? Not really. The rest of the band played along a bit more than usual during keyboardist Page McConnell‘s standard honky tonk outro, the crowd roared a bit thinking something a bit abnormal was going on with this version of the song, but the band quickly segued into “Maze.”

Keeping with the album Rift, came the set’s next big surprise, the bustout of the Mike Gordon-penned “Weigh.” Much like the “Dinner and A Movie” earlier, both songs were played quite well grading on the curve of this band’s massive repertoire and the relative infrequent appearances of these songs. If you prescribe to the eras of Phish that defines the current period as “4.0” and starting on July 28, 2021 (the band’s first show post-COVID shutdowns), these were only the second play for both “Dinner and A Movie” and “Weigh.”

The tour’s second offering of the Talking Heads’ “Cities” would follow. Much like “Halley’s Comet,” and many other songs, there’s two versions of “Cities” when Phish plays it: There is the exploratory jammed-out version like three out of the four versions of 2023, and there is the shorter and to the point variant, like the one played a couple weeks earlier on this tour at Alpine Valley. In a first set that was running out of time to have a big jam this was perhaps the last opportunity. And the band would deliver. With a jam that transitioned seamlessly first from B minor to E major, more abruptly to Ab minor, and finally returning to “Cities” proper for a quick outro.

As the opening notes of “Run Like An Antelope” rang out, my mind immediately went to one question – would the band nail the landing on the climax of the jam this time? Somewhat humorously, two of the other “Antelopes” (Great Woods and Deer Creek) from this tour had a bit of a trainwreck where Fishman didn’t exactly stop-on-a-dime with the rest of the band. In fact, he seemed to rage a little extra hard after seemingly missing the cue for extra effect both times? Spoiler Alert: he nailed it.

One of the more adventurous first sets of the tour it was not, but a 14-minute “Cities” certainly gave the lovers of jam something to chew on, there were also two pretty huge rarities, and if you are more of a fan of the earlier portion of the band’s catalog, well, “Hey Stranger” was the only song played that wasn’t at least 25 years old and able to book its own rental car without the surcharge.

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

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The second set kicked off in the high-octane fashion with “Wilson” before the familiar fuzzy sounds of Mike Gordon’s bass effects made it apparent “Down With Disease” would be next.

One of the many highlights of this tour for me has been the ease at which Trey and Page have been able to sync on improvised melodies throughout the jams, and there was a plethora of guitar/keyboards seamless interplay in this gem of a “Down With Disease” jam that traversed many keys and moods over its 18 minutes. Kudos also to bassist Mike Gordon for the impressive work of finding the right combination of effects to really cut through the sounds when the jam called for it.

Up next was a great segue into “Waves,” only the second song of the night debuted this century, and it also has a bit of a history here at Bethel Woods. There is a fan-favorite recording of this song, not played at an actual Phish show, but from the tech rehearsal the night before the band’s 2011 run at the venue. Fans had the treat of hearing this extended rendition as part of the From The Archives on Bunny Radio from Phish’s Superball festival (and it was officially released as part of the LP On LP vinyl series). The band would also play a perfectly lovely version of “Waves” the following night in front of a packed crowd in 2011 as well, but the tech rehearsal version remains the longest version ever played.

What felt like it might be the beginnings of an outro jam to “Waves” quickly turned into “Twist.” It has been a while since “Twist” has broken out past the 12-minute mark, in fact it was Beth Woods 2022, funny how this venue keeps coming up. Tonight would break that streak as “Twist,” while having some great full band jamming and exceptional work from the legendary Jon Fishman on the drums, clocked in at about eight minutes.

“Kill Devil Falls” was up next, and “KDF” has been going through somewhat of a jam renaissance in this “4.0” era, seemingly more often than not getting taken out for a more extended ride. And what a lovely ride this one was, deep into this summer tour – this quartet can really show the world just how dialed-in and connected as a cohesive unit ensemble they can really be. More so than any other jam this evening, this section displayed how effortlessly Phish can listen and quickly play off each other’s musical ideas to produce inspiring results.

As “Beneath A Sea Of Stars” began, I navigated over to David Steinberg’s zzyzx “Show Finder,” curious if it had ever been played in the same show as “Waves” before. The answer? Yes, once – August 15, 2021. Cousins in the catalog in you ask me, and on this night the band seemed to not fully reach the full potential of either, though both songs are always most welcome in a setlist, even if brief.

What felt possibly to be a set-closing “Backwards Down The Number Line” gave the band a chance to show off some volume-control skills but they had more as they quickly wrapped up “Number Line” and launched right into “Ghost.” Only eight or so minutes into “Ghost,” which certainly felt like it didn’t have enough time left on the clock to go very deep this night, the band segued into a set-closing rendition of “Tweezer Reprise,” closing the chapter of the book opened the night prior with its wonderful performance of “Tweezer.”

Phish took their customary bow and walked off a set that featured two wonderful 18-minute jams, and some top notch full band collaboration. Kicking off the encore with the tour’s first “Wading In The Velvet Sea,” Page had his first opportunity of the show to sing lead. The evening concluded with the first “Runaway Jim” played during an encore since December 12, 1999 in Hartford, Connecticut.

When we close the book on Phish Summer Tour 2024, I believe most fans would prefer the peaks reached on the first night of this Bethel run, but tonight was a great Phish show, with a number of musical highlights. The band has one remaining show, tomorrow night again at Bethel Woods, before they take a few days off and prep for their Mondegreen Festival. They surely are headed into Delaware with a full head of steam and more than warmed up from the road. If the current trajectory and the quality of playing at past Phish festivals are any indication, those attending Mondegreen should be ready to receive a band that is up to the assignment.

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Phish’s three-show run at Bethel Woods wraps tonight, Sunday, August 11. Livestreams for the entire Summer Tour 2024 are available via LivePhish.com.

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