Phish’s Career-Spanning Halloween Highlights

The earliest footage of Phish performing on Halloween comes from their 1989 show at Goddard College. Taped for public access TV, a shirtless, horn-wearing Trey Anastasio can be seen leading the band on just the 10th live rendition of what would become a classic in the band’s repertoire in the clip of “Bathtub Gin.”

The next video skips ahead to the Glens Falls Civic Center from ‘94 for a highlight from The White Album. The band continued to keep fans guessing even as they took the stage that night, playing the start of Dark Side Of The Moon over the P.A. before beginning the second set. It would be another four years before the Pink Floyd LP was covered, and instead, the foursome lit into “Back In The U.S.S.R.” (which they would bust out to open a return to the arena in 2013). Here’s the record’s opening track and “Dear Prudence” from 1994.

Phish employed a horn section at Rosemont Horizon for their show in 1995. They also utilized an acoustic setup with Page McConnell playing upright bass, Mike Gordon on banjo and Jon Fishman on his “Madonna” washboard for “I’ve Had Enough.” Check out their performance of The Who cover.

More horns and percussionist Karl Perazzo were part of Phish’s Halloween concert in Atlanta in 1996. A funky standout of the second set Remain In Light musical costume was the rendition of “Born Under Punches” from the Talking Heads album issued in 1980. Watch the debut from the Omni.

Las Vegas hosted its first Phish Halloween concert at the Thomas & Mack Arena in 1998. The foursome spent nine minutes on their second set-closing performance of The Velvet Underground’s “Oh! Sweet Nuthin.” Watch Page singing lead on the instant classic.

Vocalists Sharon Jones and Saundra Williams as well as Dave Guy on trumpet, David Smith on trombone and Tony Jarvis on saxophone joined Phish in Indio, California in 2009 to cover Exile On Main Street by The Rolling Stones. Here’s pro-shot video of the guest-aided “Loving Cup” from Empire Polo Grounds.

The lone live album to be tackled by Phish came during the second set at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City in 2010. Legendary percussionist Giovanni Hidalgo was a special guest along with a five-piece horn section for the Waiting For Columbus set. A clear highlight that evening was the lengthy rendition of Little Feat’s “Spanish Moon.”

There were no guest musicians and no covers during the second set at Phish’s return to Boardwalk Hall in 2013. Surprisingly, the band debuted a batch of songs that made up the bulk of what became their studio LP Fuego. The “Wingsuit” set featured dancers and late great actor Abe Vigoda (who was 92 at the time) making a costumed cameo during the name-checking debut of “Wombat.” Watch the antics in the officially shared video.

Phish returned to Vegas in 2014 to play their first Halloween show at MGM Grand Garden Arena. The band blended the concept of the “musical costume” with their all-original approach of the year prior by re-interpreting a mostly sound-effects record released by Disney in 1964. The successful Chilling, Thrilling Sounds performance incorporated narration and an extensive set design and resulted in many of the sample-assisted originals regularly entering the band’s live setlists. Watch footage of “The Birds.”

The band’s 2016 Halloween show saw them honor David Bowie, who passed away the previous January. Phish was joined by Sylvia D’Avanzo, Alisa Horn, Todd Low, Antoine Silverman, Alissa Smith and Hiroko Taguchi on strings and Jennifer Hartswick, Celisse Henderson, and Jo Lampert on backing vocals for portions of Ziggy Stardust. The short but incredibly sweet set came to a close with Trey Anastasio putting down his guitar and going full-on frontman for “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide,” which is captured in the video above.

Continuing to implement new approaches to the Halloween musical costume, 2018’s concert was quite the undertaking. Phish distributed a playbill to fans entering the venue heralding a musical costume of í rokk by a Scandinavian outfit called Kasvot Växt, which they claimed translated to “Faceplant Into Rock” in English. Phish created an intricate backstory for Kasvot Växt that included bio pages on music websites and other misdirections. The resulting set was an ambitious suite of original Phish music played in the style of a fictional ’80s prog-rock band. Production elements included an all-white stage and incredibly cool cubes that hung above the stage and moved around the venue. Watch the set’s opening song, complete with choreography, “Turles In The Clouds.”

Phish’s Fall Tour 2021 concluded with their most recent Halloween concert in Las Vegas. The band’s musical costume was the fictitious band from the future called Sci-Fi Soldier. The set was made up of 12 new originals from an album entitled Get More Down. If 2018’s Kasvot Växt was Phish channeling a Scandinavian synth-rock band from 1981, Sci-Fi Soldier saw Phish work original music through the lens of a band from another planet in the year 4680. Watch them kick off the futuristic set with “Knuckle Bone Broth Avenue.”