Phish Concludes April 2022 Run At Madison Square Garden: Setlist, Recap & The Skinny

Every few years the calendar works out so it makes sense to have a Phish New Year’s run show after New Year’s Eve. The show-after-the-show. Some might call it the Hangover Show, typically with good reason. Last night, however, the Vermont foursome treated Madison Square Garden to what I call the “Breakfast Show,” the meal eaten after the big visual-and-musical three-set feast offered up Friday night. And like parents shaking off the cobwebs of a long night, Phish was content to just let the crowd get silly in the cereal aisle.

The night opened with “Fluffhead,” guitarist Trey Anastasio quickly dropping into what I call the Rice Krispies tone — for its snap, crackle and pop! — that he’s been employing to great effect all run. After so many shows at MSG, it feels like every song in the repertoire can consider New York City or MSG home, but “Fluffhead” always had that “New York!” lyrics to amp the crowd and the cathartic white-light, bundle-of-joy peak and the immediate drop into “Mike’s Song” definitely had that big-lights/big city energy. The early “Mike’s,” with plenty of succinct full-band jamming, ambition and execution aligned as well as it had been all weekend, was the “go crazy, kids!” signal that the sugariest of sugar cereals were on the table for breakfast. The light palette strayed from the primary colors, fixating instead on purples, magentas and oranges, metaphoric blends for a band that seemed to be fully mixed after 3 nights of finding their groove. A smooth slip through “I Am Hydrogen” ended up old-school-style in “Weekapaug Groove,” Trey working old school trills and double-melody, stay-crispy-in-milk licks as bassist Mike Gordon pumped the low end, Page McConnell dropped keyboard pearls and drummer Jon Fishman leading from behind as always.

With the higher-than-recommended sucrose levels coursing through the audience, the band went in for the first set kill with “Simple,” another at-home-in-NYC song, the audience cheering in their recognition of high-rises and cloud-touching architecture. This “Simple” had its shoes tied nice and tight and went for a walk right out of the gate, quickly dissociating from the theme, each band member taking a different direction, seemingly moving faster and slower, funkier and spacier, right and left, up and down the stairwells at the same time. In succession, each player seemed to find a theme that the others latched onto, chocolatey Coco Puffs cereal turning the milk chocolatey in turn, Fishman finding a flavor-country boogie on his toms that the band joined in on. Then Mike going total sludge and the band slowing down in a sea of red lights, the quartet dipping their collective spoon into a full metal riff that effortlessly turned into the first “Egg In A Hole” since its debut on Halloween, a brief but raging addition to the breakfast theme, before sliding back into “Simple.” The set ended with the yin-yang (mostly-)instrumental pairing of “Divided Sky” and “First Tube,” the latter being the full-on ah, screw it! Cap’n Crunch sugar rush of the Phish repertoire, whipping the room into a hyperactive frenzy to bring things to a much-needed intermission.

On a personal note: I brought an old friend who hadn’t seen a Phish show since the early ’90s and the retro first set was greatly appreciated. Pretty amazing how a set seemingly so soggy in nostalgia can still be so alive with fresh flavor. Which is to say, the Cheerios you ate when you were a toddler are still pretty delicious and nutritious.

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

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The second set opened a touch on the newer side of the catalog with the 55th “No Men In No Man’s Land” in the band’s 2000ish-show history. As far as sweetened cereals go, this “No Man’s” was a heaping helping of Lucky Charms, an array of sonic marshmallows, each with its own shape and color, each hurts-your-teeth-so-good delicious. The quartet poked and prodded at theme after theme, starting with some cool plinky digitalia from Trey as Mike went low and the rest of the band went high. Things got deeper and denser as it went along, every bite seeming to find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow of Kuroda’s buckling lighting rig. The jam found the four in the proverbial zone of deep improv like they hadn’t been all weekend, the band going back and refilling their bowl for seconds and thirds, pretty much polishing off the entire box with increasingly creative explorations.

Eventually they broke from their spell and segued into a “Prince Caspian” that managed to carry the energy over into a kinda-slow-building “Piper” without losing any momentum. As good as it was, I hesitate to call the “NMINML” the highlight of the set because there’s this “Piper.” One of the treats of this not-NYE NYE run has been some of the inventive improvisation the band has pursued. A band approaching their 40th year of existence could be forgiven for just adding marshmallows to the old stuff and calling it “new,” but throughout the weekend, Phish continued to invent new flavors of jamming, and this “Piper” with its multi-tiered real-time composition and extended on-point “Dave’s Energy Guide” vamping, and Mardi Gras lights (for some reason?) was the Dulce De Leche Toast Crunch (a personal favorite) of the night.

The so-called “fourth quarter” of the show went from packed-house dance party with “Gotta Jibboo” and “I Always Wanted It This Way,” to a cooldown MSG-debut performance of “Lonely Trip” to another feels-like-a-NYC-song “Walls Of The Cave,” which peaked multiple times and then a few more for good measure, the audience working off the sugar with fist pumps and dancing as Kuroda angled his lights to frame the band with bursts of white lights, a visual bookend to match the lights from the opening “Fluffhead.”

The encore is time for some more, so a fitting time, of course, for some S’mores cereal. Did you know that there’s both a S’mores cereal and a Smorz cereal? I’m not sure the graham cracker/chocolate/marshmallow combo is worthy of two completely different cereals, but I am pretty sure that the four night New-Year’s-in-April MSG run was worthy of a three song encore. Hearing a hyped MSG chant to the opening of “Wilson” is one more quintessential Phish-in-NYC experience, and the band and audience delivered in the encore opener slot, Page and Company setting the rage-rock graham cracker base for the ensuing slab-of-chocolate “David Bowie,” bringing back that old school feel, and only the third “Wilson” > “Bowie” pairing for two songs that have been in the repertoire from the start (the doublet last being performed way back in 1994, for your stat junkies). The S’mores (or Smorz, if you prefer) encore ended with, what else?, some more in the form of “More,” pure marshmallow for one last jolt of both natural and artificial flavors, before closing out the weekend. Wash it all down with a glass of OJ and it’s all part of a balanced Breakfast Show.

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