Phish Goes Full Beast Mode With A ‘Sand’ For The Ages In Philadelphia

The Mann in Philadelphia holds a special place in Phish lore. It’s one of the few rooms they’ve been playing in for over 30 years. Sure, maybe it’s not the most special place, but it does hit a sort of sweet spot as venues go, a not-too-hot, not-too-cold Goldilocks. Even among the other Phish-summer-tour-regular spots in the region, like the beach at Atlantic City and the amphitheatre across the river in Camden, The Mann is kind of juuuust right in terms of size, energy and its parklike location. The weather is always some combination of pretty damn hot (but not the hottest ever) and/or pretty damn rainy (but not rainy enough to completely wash out a show). It stands to reason, then, that the band has played many just right Goldilocks shows there over the years, maybe not the best shows ever, but consistently “Phish special” almost every time they have made the trip.

The first set of Tuesday night’s two-night-run opener was definitely in that Goldilocks territory. The band took the stage a few not-too-early/not-too-late moments before 8 p.m. and jumped into “Punch You in the Eye.” And when I say “jumped into” they really jumped right into it, extending the opening pre-vocal section with a few minutes of inventive, full-band interplay that found the band tight and exploratory before everyone had even found their seats. I’m not sure I’d say it was the best “Punch” ever, but it was definitely just right and as if to cement the notion, they did a nice stop-start segue into “Everything’s Right.”

This is not a song you’d usually find in the two-slot of the first set and it almost felt like Trey wanted to get the band back into some jamming after that opening section of “Punch.” So jam they did — first with a dark “James Brown on his worst day” funk, Trey on the groovy rhythm, Page and Fish keeping things dark and moving. This opened up into some cool round-robin improv, Page, Gordon and Trey passing themes in a way that wasn’t clear who was leading and who was following, everyone both proactive and reactive as the jam smoothly rotated from funk to bliss to full Trey-peaky eventually looping back to the song proper, a just-right mid-sized jam. Combined with the opener, the opening 25ish minutes was an example of a band that had come to Philadelphia at just the right not-too-early/not-too-late point in the tour.

The first “Camel Walk” in almost exactly two years and 100 shows came next and it served as both a punctuation mark for the first quarter of the show as well as a trigger for the audience to ignore the humidity and just dance. “Theme from the Bottom” and “Prince Caspian,” two songs that debuted with a couple of shows of each other 30 (!!) years ago, continued the Baby-Bear-comfy-chair mid-sized vibe of the set, the former featuring a short but full-band-theme-deconstructing section in the middle and the latter countering a soaring Anastasio with the beefed-up Gordon low-end, Trey mutating the “Caspian” melody as he reached a near full-shred.

Given the band’s tendency to find nifty little jams in weird spots during the set, it’s notable that “It’s Ice,” a song prone to providing weird spots for nifty little jams, was played pretty straight. After the first real unadulterated rock song of the set in “About to Run,” the band closed with “David Bowie.” Things were set up for another great mid-size’r to close the first half and Phish delivered, executing the take a theme > manipulate it slightly > pass it on improvisational motif nicely. Trey expertly dropped that “Caspian” melody into the jam before the band coalesced around a bright almost-”Jessica” Allmans-y thing. It wasn’t the best Bowie ever, but it did feel like Goldilocks had just wrapped up a pretty darn good set at the Mann.

So, up until this point we had a typically-great Mann show on our hands. When the band returned to the stage after a definitely-not-too-long setbreak, Goldilocks was nowhere to be seen. In fact, I think the three bears may have viciously eaten her backstage. No, what returned for set two was more of a savage, claws-sharpened, possibly-little-child-eating Phish. No more “just right” for these guys.

They opened with “Sand.” Not just “Sand” but THE Sand, the Mann Sand, which I have dubbed The Sannd. The full thing ran 40 minutes, apparently the longest in history, but like all great Phish jams, it wasn’t really the how long of it that made it great (although it didn’t hurt!).

Once they got going out of the vocals section, the jam took on three distinct sections, even as they flowed naturally from one to the next. The first was actually a self-contained “mid-sized jam” an extended Type I section that most more Type I.5, the band showing a patience and a confidence to ride the “Sand” proper for a long while, allowing for some deep listening of some real expert interplay, watching how they anticipate each other, flowering and blooming into new sonic flora even as they stayed in the framework of “Sand.”

At some point in this opening portion of the jam, Anastasio and McConnell seemed to lock in, glorious musical conversation, one creating ideas, the other taking it and finishing it off. This went on for a thrilling stretch, a two-man team simultaneously climbing a mountain peak and spelunking into an underground cave. If they had steered this back into “Sand” at that moment, it would have been a pretty great set-opening version. But the claws were out and instead Page and Trey pushed the boundaries, the rhythm section snapping out of their TAB-like trance and helping the band build to a serious sustained peak.

It was peaks upon peaks, big, bigger, biggest with Gordon giving it the extra through-the-roof oomph. Right around the 20th minute of the voyage, the band fully broke free of anything resembling anything else. They went into a collective spontaneous composition mode of the highest order. Trey was fully in the lead and the outpouring of musical ideas was almost too much to handle, a full 10 minutes of unhinged freeflowing improvisation that, in my experience, one band, and only one band, could create. Right around the 30th minute, whatever trancelike fugue state the band had stumbled into was over, but the jamming continued apace. Major-key rock out seemed to trigger an exit ramp, but the band was too locked in and fell back into their creative mode, fully formed song ideas came and went, another 10 minutes of wow!, Goldilocks nowhere to be seen, things a few chapters past “just right.”

Typically, a 40-minute stretch of straight, no-hiccup jamming would be followed by a little bit of a breather. The classic “cool down.” There would be no cool downs in Philadelphia Tuesday night. The next song was “My Friend, My Friend” which already has a rather unhinged chaotic energy, the furthest thing from a cool down you can imagine. But the Mann “My Friend,” came at one of those very special music-plays-the-band moments and so it naturally opened up into a rather bonkers evil jam, with Gordon going full-throated intergalactic and Fishman fully unleashed. It was raunchy doomfunk from outer space and then the ubercreativity from the “Sand” seeped in and “My Friend, My Friend” found itself somewhere in between spontaneous composition and spontaneous combustion. Somehow this evil blob turned into a rather happy blob, Trey leading the jam into something that you might find in a particularly lovely “Simple,” for a moment I thought they might segue into “Simple.” Instead, they took that motif for a walk and eventually brought it to a soft landing, Trey finding a way to creatively overlay something resembling a kinder, gentler “Myfe” ending to wrap things up.

“Boogie On Reggae Woman” followed and was a short, but funky-as-heck, Phish-is-feeling-it breather … if you can call a sweaty, packed house dance party a breather. Next up was “Blaze On” which had no choice but to have a little extra zip on it, Fishman determined to singlehandedly make the short jam interesting. At some point when the band was ripping through “Blaze On,” lighting director Chris Kuroda seemed to take over, the lights dipping low into that “danger zone” of claustrophobia, multi-hued spirals filling the stage. It almost felt like he was egging the band on to close this big, bad, wolf of a set with something big and bad and when Trey hit the opening chords of “Carini” it seemed to have worked.

“Carini” built to a pure hectic wall of sound, pure energy, all four band members plus Kuroda went full-insanity. Whereas the best jamming of the night had been this wonderful democratic conversation of musical ideas circulating among the quartet, “Carini” was all of them screaming at the top of their lungs at the same time. And yet, you could still understand every musical word they were speaking. It was, to my ears, glorious. The kind of thing that only Phish could pull off as expertly as they did. If it wasn’t the end to a set that already contained all-timer versions of two other songs, it could have been the highlight of the night. Was it the best “Carini” ever? Probably not. But for this special Tuesday night at the Mann, it was just right. As was the extended four-song encore featuring tour debuts of “Shade” and “I Didn’t Know” along with the high energy combo of “Wilson” and “Possum.”

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