Live on David Letterman
Concert Review
By Alex Buschiazzo
It was New York. It was The Late Show with David Letterman….It was Phish.
Exploding out of the gate with their first album in 5 years, Fuego, the 4 minstrels took to the small stage of the Late Show at CBS Studios to check-in with the world. A free live web-cast event was supplied to the public via the network station which gave me the feel that so many more eyes would be watching than just ours inside that TV studio. Phish recently held a contest for Instagram and Twitter users to submit a picture of specific creativity, using the song lyrics, song titles, or the simple ideas of the songs contained on Fuego and to be tagged with the hashtag #PhishFuego (you can see all the entries searching this hashtag).
Over 100 winners were chosen and had the opportunity to bring a guest to the show and I assure that many of us still don’t believe that luck came our way.
The excitement was visible. Anxious fans facing an unknown, excited to be in New York City, excited for a live intimate show with their favorite band. What would happen here? Will they play all Fuego songs? Where will I sit? All of these questions entered my mind. By 8pm the entire audience filled in the balcony and the lower seating section. Just as the band came on I was swept through the door and brought down to stage-side, just about leaning on the stage – at this point still in disbelief where I was. The show opened with the fan-familiar 46 days and quickly jumped into Undermind from the title-track album Undermind which was a pleasant surprise. I thought immediately we would not be hearing the long jam vehicles seen live or just about anything near that. Cue the McConnell-designed Halfway to the Moon: a delightful melodic piece where our story teller takes on his journey, a favorite of mine from Fuego album – this piano driven piece with soft cries of Anastasio’s guitar puts us right in place….to be stunned.
Along came Carini.
The heavyweight jam vehicle that made a rise to calculated monstrosity showed its fangs as our fourth song of the evening. The roar of the studio audience assured you this is just what we all wanted, yet did not expect. I do have suspicion that may have been an audible by band-leader Trey Anastasio because Mike Gordon seemed a bit surprised himself to hear those heavy opening Carini chords. A “focused Letterman Carini” I called it, with much of the meat trimmed off this jam, we still saw great parts with McConnell and Gordon completely synched with Fishman and Anastasio. The evolution of Carini has been an interesting path and I feel the maturity of this song has taken many of us by surprise in the past two years.
More Fuego please!
The hoppy Devotion to a Dream rang in as the fifth song for the night, a track from the Fuego album that hints at brighter days, suggests a ‘clearing of the clouds’ if you will. Although we haven’t been clued in so much as to meaning or origin we can certainly assume Devotion to a Dream is quite possibly an introspective and affirmative peek into the lives of the band members themselves, leaving the bad ideas of yesterday behind, focusing on the delights of the future and of today…It’s Today!
Closing out the set was Twist off the Farmhouse album from 2000, which seemed to be an old fan favorite inciting the “WOO”s from the crowd and lots of hip shaking. Phish took their bows and left the stage for a short moment to return for the encore, Character Zero from the 1996 album Billy Breathes. Almost 20 years old, the familiar favorite solidly displays Anastasio’s guitar playing as the coda begins. Many times when I’ve heard this I’ve gotten the feeling Trey could keep playing this for hours as the guitar solo tends to get dark and nasty in the live arena. Very much like the New Orleans Jazz Festival performance in April, Character Zero remained a steadfast insert as an encore leaving the energy in the room buzzing with many of us not wanting to leave after our 56 minutes were up.
Fuego has been released, Phish has re-asserted themselves as a major player in the musical and creative arena, and the band embarks on their summer tour in less than one week in Mansfield, Massachusetts. The outlook is overwhelmingly positive with this group and it has most certainly spilled into the fan-base. The Late Show performance on David Letterman reminds us that the band once referred to as “the most important band of the 90s” is still by far a major force in music in the 2010s, and still has the Fuego burning inside them. They keep it Rolling.