Phish Reprises ‘Tweezer Reprise’ Throughout Tour Finale At SPAC

So, how is your summer going?

The usual, right? Some beach trips, some hikes, some time out on a patio, and if you’re spending your Monday morning reading this, then odds are you’ve also spent some time having your dome peeled back by a quartet of 60-something-year-old men who refuse to rest on their laurels and instead offer new chapters to their considerable lore. It happens.

Those who are more predisposed than I am to ranking Phish concerts and tours can have at it with summer 2025; I can only reflect that they have figured out how to raise the floor of the average show without affecting the potential ceiling, that they now have a range of gear to match their imagination, they’ve honed in on a nightly repertoire that works for them, and that strictly in terms of listening to each other and engaging in musical communication, their ears seem sharper than they’ve been in quite some time.

There was a classic feel to the tour. Stat-heads may refute this but it felt like they shied from newer material (give or take an epic “What’s Going Through Your Mind”) with no 2025 debuts and fewer Evolve songs in heavy rotation than expected — for the first time in the post-COVID “4.0” era they’re exploring established material rather than cramming in a slew of new songs. Trey Anastasio was playing a new-to-him guitar made in 1996, which seemingly inspired him anew. And perhaps most important, the band reassembled their stage formation in the classic, democratic 1990s-era row (L-R Page McConnell, Trey Anastasio, Mike Gordon, Jon Fishman). The tour even began in Manchester, New Hampshire, and ended in Saratoga Springs, New York — venues that are about as close as you can get to the east and west borders of the band’s Vermont birthplace.

So, about the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC). It’s been a storied venue in Phish’s history nearly from the moment they graduated to amphitheaters, and thus an ideal place for a victory lap at the close of a fabulous tour. Both Friday and Saturday were shows with mammoth highlights in the second sets, and were notable to my ears for the furious, relentless pace. If you’re a “1.0”-era grump like myself, you may have lamented the band’s growing affection for the midtempo in the last decade. But this tour suggested we shouldn’t consign them to the Dead and Company retirement home just yet; they spent the weekend at SPAC with their foot pressed harder on the gas pedal than on any run in recent (and maybe even not-so-recent) memory. So let’s get to the (never miss a) Sunday show.

You don’t have to be a wise vet to know that a “Buried Alive” opener, nine times out of 10, means that they’ve got something special in store for the audience — and this evening it didn’t take long before they got to it. As the closing notes of a scorching “Buried Alive” ran their course, the band threw gasoline on the fire with “Tweezer Reprise.” That song choice in the two-spot alone would signify that antics are afoot (it is almost certainly the first time those two songs have opened a show), and then they did the unthinkable by using “Reprise” as a jam vehicle for blistering, fast-paced improvisation.

If you ever wondered how a jam out of “Tweezer Reprise” might sound, then in their fifth decade, the band finally showed you. And then they spent the rest of the night showing you again and again. Every time you go to a Phish concert you’re hoping against the odds that it will be forever enshrined as “the (place name) (song name)” (such as the “Tahoe Tweezer”) or “the [blank] show” (such as the “Number Line” show), and congratulations to everyone in SPAC, you got “the Tweeprise Show.”

This became fully apparent with “Reba” in the third spot. The jam section started off pleasantly enough — the Mike and Trey interplay has quietly been killing it on this summer’s “Rebas” — but as the jam rounded third and headed to the peak, Trey transformed the climax into the evening’s first reprise of “Tweezer Reprise.” This turn whipped the crowd into a frenzy and set up an abrupt, note-perfect transition into “Funky Bitch.”

They elected to keep going with cover songs, offering a choice performance of Ween’s “Roses Are Free” in a rare mid-first-set placement. Again, they built the jam up until they hit the recognizable guitar chords of “Tweezer Reprise” (“Roses are Freeprise”?) once again.

A disclaimer: while I generally dig couch touring — the bathroom lines are short, nobody is shouting in my ear behind me, and if you hear a sound like whippets it’s because I’m making an ice cream sundae — but during “Roses Are Free” a power surge knocked out my internet and took several minutes of monkeying around in the basement to restore it. Let’s just say it was not the only time that evening that I wished I were at SPAC instead of home.

“46 Days” emerged from the “Tweezer Reprise” and kept the party going. This is also where I should mention one important note: setlist gimmicks are great, but they wouldn’t mean much if the actual performance wasn’t there. This evening’s show rode the momentum of the tour and almost seemed like a culmination of all the previous shows. The “Roses are Free” jam was a creative, expansive journey, and the “46 Days” culminated with an absolutely blistering cacophony — arguably the return of machine-gun Trey.

“About To Run” then took things down from there, although it also allowed Trey to do his usual Hendrix cosplay in an Anastasio original. The only way such a first set could end is with “Split Open and Melt,” one of the band’s biggest face-melters. Trey ushered in the jam with an array of crazy guitar loops, but they didn’t linger here long before they went straight to the abstract, psychedelic noise that it’s best known for and then back into “Tweezer Reprise” one more time. As the climax faded away, Fishman returned to the “Split Open and Melt” beat — it was officially annotated as a “tease,” although in the moment it seemed more like a miscommunication. Regardless, the band took their bows to boisterous and well-earned applause.

When the band returned to the stage, they balanced the evil of the “Split Open and Melt” that closed the first set with an extended bliss jam in “Kill Devil Falls” in the second set. An expansive major-key jam buoyed the vibe and built to yet another explosive climax, before turning into “Twist.” The second-set favorite served the function it usually does: it gave the crowd places to “woo” and led to some tasteful, melodic improvisation.

“Golden Age” followed, and by now you don’t need me to tell you what song they segued back into shortly after the jam began. After yet another “Tweezer Reprise” reprise, they sank into a funky swamp driven by Page’s clavinet. They slowly assembled a skeleton framework for this jam, making it more and more solid behind Trey’s melodies before giving way to an ambient bed anchored by Mike’s descending basslines, Fishman’s rolling drums, and eventually an instrumental effect (by Trey?) that sounded like Tuvan throat singing. In the space of 10 minutes, this jam showcased each member of the band perfectly without anyone taking what might be considered a “solo.” They’re the best.

From that section, a highlight of the evening and the tour, they played a fairly by-the-books rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “Boogie On Reggae Woman.” It’s worthwhile to mention that this funky dance party was played in the “cool down” spot of the second set (“Waste” was played in this spot on the previous night), and, along with “About to Run,” was the closest the band came to playing a ballad all night. There were no breathers this evening!

A set-closing “You Enjoy Myself” also played it fairly straight, although no fan would complain. It seemed like they were going to create “Tweezer Reprise” out of the vocal jam like they did on December 8, 1999, but instead they played their instruments out of the a cappella segment and wound their way back into “Tweezer Reprise” to close the set.

In a show that featured the longest “Tweezer Reprise,” it was fitting that they encored with the shortest “Tweezer” in years. After the “song” part of “Tweezer,” they abruptly stopped, and Fishman asked, “Do you get it?” I’m reasonably sure everyone did, and from there they closed the inverted “Tweezer” show with a rousing “Harry Hood.”

It’s so common to see people post messages on social media like “I can’t believe they’re still doing this 40 years on” that it’s almost become a cliché, a knee-jerk reaction when there’s simply nothing else to say. That can mean any number of things: the strength of their playing, the general quality of their newer material, their urge to conjure up fresh inside jokes from their back catalog like a “Tweezer Reprise show.”

It can also speak to the joy they share with each other, with their crew, and their fans. If you watch any band documentary on a streaming service, you’ll get to the part where the in-fighting takes over, the lawyers enter, and the initial spark of joy washes away. With Phish, they seem as exuberant to make music together, for us, as they did back on the campus of Goddard College. Indeed, I’m hard pressed to remember the last time Trey smiled as much during a show as he did on this summer evening at SPAC, and he was far from the only one.

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Livestreams of Phish’s Summer Tour 2025 concerts are available via LivePhish.com.

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