At the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami’s South Beach, guests were being charged between $550-$25000 for a New Year’s Eve performance by the one and only Lady Gaga that would last for a little over one hour. However at the American Airlines Arena just across the causeway, fans paid $237.30 for four days of Phish concerts. The shows added up to an impressive nine sets totaling thirteen hours of live music. While they had no backup dancers, or suits made of stuffed frogs, there were fake human cannonballs, vacuum giveaways, audience member sit-ins with the band, Stevie Wonder mash-ups, and most important, four marathon concerts of well-practiced and well-improvised music alike.
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Phish
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American Airlines Arena
Miami, FL
December 28 - 31, 2009
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After a mediocre warm-up first set on the 28th, Phish kicked things off right with “Mike’s Groove” – a three-song suite named for bassist Mike Gordon which had the new song “Light” sandwiched in between the first and second song. Such placement and mash-up are commonplace, and to the uninitiated, it can sometimes seem as though Phish is speaking a musical secret language. While true, the music still stands alone on its merits for the most unaware of concert-goers. A sloppy deconstruction by guitarist Trey Anastasio of “Makisupa Policeman” led into their signature “Harry Hood” which stretched to 19 minutes, only slightly longer than average for the song. 13,000 fans waved their arms back and forth to “Contact” after the band led into it without stopping. Drummer Jon Fishman miraculously managed to anchor the proceedings.
On the 29th, a second disjointed first set was rescued at the end by “Divided Sky” and “Cavern”. The dramatic difference between the two songs illustrated the range and scope of the band’s playing, which is unequaled amongst arena-sized acts. The first piece has seven words in the lyrics, repeated twice, and is 15 minutes long, played legato, and based on Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin”. The second is staccato funk-rock at slightly under five minutes and layered under constant nonsense rhyming along the lines of “Give the director a serpent deflector, a mudrat detector, a ribbon reflector, a cushion convector, a picture of nectar!” The second set began a three-night run of music critically acclaimed by Phish’s most die-hard fans. Starting with the new, rocking “Kill Devil Falls,” the band launched into “Tweezer” which by the end had morphed into another melody entirely – and the band had done so seamlessly and completely improvised the new melody.
Following Tweezer and the Narnia rock of “Prince Caspian” Phish launched into “Gotta Jibboo” which turned seamlessly into “Wilson,” a song about the evil king of mythical Gamehendge, which went right back into “Gotta Jibboo” afterwards. Closing the set with Deodato’s “2001” into “Slave to the Traffic Light” left Phish fans with a smile on their face.
December 30th brought a show that will live in infamy amongst Phish fans as Phish decided to dust off their back catalog and play their more obscure songs. They debuted a Hank Williams cover and brought back songs that had not been played for over ten years. To signify their intentions, they opened the show with Bob Marley’s “Soul Shakedown Party” and closed it with “Antelope” mashed together with Stevie Wonder’s “Boogie On Reggae Woman”. They encored with Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” with their keyboard player, Page McConnell, front and center on keytar before sending us home to rest for New Year’s Eve as we filed out into balmy 70-degree weather.
For New Year’s Eve’s traditional three set marathon and hi-jinks, the insanity reached a new level in the third set. As a disco ball descended from the ceiling, thousands of balloons were dropped at midnight as the band segued from “Party Time” into “Auld Lang Syne,” to be followed by their signature “Down with Disease”. At that point, drummer Jon Fishman climbed into the disco ball, was loaded into a cannon, and blown through the ceiling of the Arena. In reality, he had dropped through a trap door below the ball, and after Phish selected an audience member to play drums with them, the audience member hid and Fishman snuck back into the kit in drag, wearing the same outfit as the audience member.
Fishman in drag complete with breast forms continued to drum through “Fluffhead” and “Joy” before a piano solo by McConnell led into the band’s signature “You Enjoy Myself” to close the night at its standard 20-minute length. Their Rolling Stones encore summed up the night for everyone: “what a beautiful buzz, what a beautiful buzz, what a beautiful buzz!”
In this day and age of our economic climate, Phish brought the fans a bargain. At $60 for a New Year’s Eve show and $50 for one of the other three nights, who could resist such a deal? Phish for New Year’s Eve has always proven to be a special once in a lifetime event and going into 2010 in Miami was no exception.
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