Good first set - Camel Walk makes a welcome return, they slay It's Ice again like they have the whole tour, Yarmouth Road is getting tighter and tighter, and they play a very nice, tightly wound Stash that grips at the throat and squeezes at about the 8 minute mark. You don't care.

The second set...three thoughts here:

1) I've talked a *lot* the past couple days about how much I like what Phish is doing with their sets now - stringing together songs via jamming, creating cohesive sets of music instead of big long jam/rest/big long jam, that sort of thing. I was expecting that by the time we got to Dick's they'd have turned this form of music making into an art form. I was not expecting them to take everything they'd been doing all tour and channel it all into the eighth longest jam in their history (info courtesy the estimable Scott Marks on Twitter). Nobody could.

2) Which makes the rapturous response to this jam (my rapturous response will be coming up in a jiffy, don't worry) kind of interesting, because there's just as much jamming here as in Gorge 2 or Alpharetta 1 or (heck) most of the shows so far, only *entirely concentrated into one jam*. I mean, let's think of this as a mental exercise. If you took away the third quarter, what would you have? Tela? Well, everyone likes Tela. A red-hot Twist? Hey, that's nice. Architect/Bouncing...um, well...jeez, this is kinda a short Antelope...where the hell's the jamming? This show must have sucked! Of course, nobody would ever think this, because there WAS a jam, and it was in one song, and it was everything you could have asked for.

So next time they play 5 songs full of great jamming, but none of the jams exceeds 15 minutes, I'd just ask that you pay that some mind. Anyway.

3) So, yes, 36 minute Tweezer, return to the old days, blah dee blah dee blah. But here's the thing - this is not a return to the old days, because the old days of big time long jams featured moments where the band was clearly either marking time, playing some weird idea they probably shouldn't have pursued in the past, or dicking around, and there is not a single ounce of any of that here. Look, I love Bangor and Bozeman and the Fleezer and some of those seguefests, but you can pare away some fat in those jams and be better for it. Not here. Every single segment here *works* - big loud jamming, puddling into bliss, the cathartic moment when they begin start-stopping and urging on the "woo!"s, classic rock freak-outs - and every segment is organically moved into with hardly a pause or moment to catch your breath. They played a jam unlike anything in 3.0 - hell, barely like anything in any era. It's a defining jam. We'll be talking about it forever.

Final thoughts - Phish has played a lot of shows. Almost all of them are fun shows. A select number of them are "classic" shows. And then there are "I was there" shows. For the people in attendance tonight, they got an "I was there" show. Congratulations.

...you lucky bastards.