To recognize, celebrate, and commemorate our favorite band’s first 40 years, Phish.net will be presenting a series called “40 for 40” featuring curated selections by the Phish.net/Mockingbird Foundation community that highlight important aspects of the band’s history. First, get ready for 40 epic JAMS! Each Friday for the next four weeks, look out for 10 jams to enjoy that speak to the depth of Phish’s incredible live improvisational performances across the decades.

7/10/99 “Chalk Dust Torture” by BozakAxel (Chip Parker) - Mockingbird Foundation Director and President

As President of the Mockingbird Foundation Board of Directors, I am honored to have this opportunity to thank all the amazing contributors who have made and continue to make Phish.net the incredible community it is! Everyone volunteering with the foundation understands that Phish.net is an integral part of our mission to “broaden access and educational opportunities for young people in music and the musical arts,” because we know the critical role the .net community plays in generating support for our grantmaking, which currently stands at nearly $2.4 MILLION of charitable giving.

With your continued support of the Mockingbird Foundation, Phish.net will continue to evolve, improving its services and enhancing its content. It’s incredible to think that even after 40 years, the future is still somehow so bright for our community! I encourage you to consider supporting the fundraising campaign we are coordinating alongside this “40 for 40” celebration by making a gift of $40 (or $122.83, or any amount you want!) to help us continue our support of music education programs across the United States. It is important to note that contributions to the Mockingbird also enable and support Phish.net, as maintaining the website is among the Foundation’s few overhead costs–which are minuscule compared to our capacity for giving. We all deeply appreciate your support!

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Back in January 2022, I was checking out www.treysguitarrig.com (as usual) and noticed a post about a new guitar of Trey’s. But it wasn’t a Languedoc. It was by a maker named Circle Strings, also from Burlington. The guitar itself was absolutely gorgeous: a brilliant Koa flame on the back and sides and a beautiful classic Spruce on top.

Whoever built this guitar must have a pretty impressive resume and backstory. That someone turned out to be Adam Buchwald who I have been fortunate to get to know this past year. I presumed there was more of a story for Adam to tell besides making a few guitars for Trey. I also figured others might be interested as well.

In addition to Circle Strings which builds custom instruments, Adam runs IRIS Guitar Company which makes an affordable line of acoustic instruments, Allied Lutherie which sells top quality vintage and new woods to builders around the world and Ben & Bucky’s Guitar Boutique which is Vermont’s top guitar store – an impressive resume indeed!

Hope you enjoy learning more about these amazing guitars and the people behind them!

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[The following opinions are not necessarily shared in any way, shape or form by any Phish.net or Mockingbird Foundation volunteer. In reading any words in this post, you agree to hold Phish.net and The Mockingbird Foundation harmless from any and all liability arising therefrom, and you accept any and all responsibility for such liability arising therefrom. -Ed.]

IT is beyond peradventure, as has been established ad nauseum on this website, that rating a work of art on any scale is stupid, frivolous, and offensive. Accordingly, Phish fans have been assigning ratings to and ranking Phish shows for decades.

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Thank you Grant Calof, user @That_Guy, for authoring the "Evolve" song history, and thank you Tom Marshall for helping to ensure its accuracy!

We are very grateful to Cassidy McManus, phish.net user @donttouchthatknob, for authoring an all-new song history for the Stephen Sondheim number "Send In The Clowns" performed as the introduction for the NYE gag on 12/31/19 at MSG.

If you'd like to author a song history of a song on the site that lacks a history, please don't hesitate to ask, as this site relies on volunteers to author its content.

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IT was not uncommon in the 1990's for fans with too many cassette tapes to either give them away or "liquidate" them for the cost of buying a new tape (at the time, around $1.50 a tape including shipping costs). I liquidated hundreds of tapes because I had too many and wanted them to go to better homes. And at that time, there wasn't access to Phish's recordings online, and so I preserved certain versions of songs (usually jam segments only) that I wanted to hear again (or again and again and again) and didn’t want to lose for all eternity by dubbing them onto two dozen or so 100-minute mixtapes or mixed tapes.

And here are the first 13 of them for your amusement. It's surprising to me that not everything on those tapes circulates today online (sigh), so I may be giving such tapes to someone to digitize the material that has yet to circulate online (more sighing). In any event, if this post gets enough attention, I’ll consider posting the "setlists" (so to speak) of the other ten or so mixes that I have, which I do not seem to have ever typed-up, and so I would need to pull the tapes to type them up (not easily done without the full use of my right leg, as I continue to recover from ruptured right anterior tibialis tendon repair surgery). So please, if you appreciate this content, indicate as much in the Comments. Thank you!

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IT will be the fortieth anniversary of Phish's first gig in about forty-some-odd days. Over the course of Phish history, fans have often considered what Phish jams they would put on a 100-minute cassette “mixed tape” (aka mixtape) or a 74-minute CD (the Regular volume CD) or, more recently, on a playlist.

But what if that playlist were limited to only 74 minutes? Or 100 minutes? And what if instead of being a playlist of your favorite Phish jams, it was a playlist of what you believed to be tracks that best represented Phish's music and history in a given year over Phish's FORTY YEAR HISTORY OF PLAYING SHOWS?

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[We would like to thank user DrAyers (Michael Ayers) for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

Greetings from inside the United Center! This is my second night seeing the boys in Chicago, as Jimmy Carr has announced a show in Chicago months before Phish did, and thus I was already on the hook. I was seated in the 200s for both nights (Saturday night behind the stage, Sunday night Mike side), making friends with the gentleman to my left (a fellow vinyl collector) and the WSP fanatic (Narrator: Poor soul) to my right.

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[We would like to thank user Farmhose, Alaina Stamatis (@Fad_Albert on Twitter), for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

Because of *ahem* legal troubles as documented in my last .Net review I’m not permitted to leave where I live, and I don't live at the United Center, so this Phish show recap was generated in my living room instead of the NBA’s largest arena. The band came out to roars and applause but I didn’t feel compelled to stand up and instead chose to remain on my ass in my pajamas. No Hawaiian shirt, no face gems, no dudes offering me a finger dip into their mysterious baggies; just pure, unadulterated couch. And I still had a better seat than 8,000 of the nosebleeds.

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[We would like to thank user Brettsinthebathtub (Brett F.) for volunteering to recap and recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

Once again, we are at Phish. This time at the United Center; a building that proudly displays the achievements of some of the greatest athletes of all time in its rafters. But you can watch The Last Dance on your own time. Tonight, the focus is another GOAT.

If there’s any uncertainty about the tone of the night, it’s made clear up front: Shit is about to get real spooky in here. The theme from Friday the 13^th” plays as the band takes the stage. I’m caught off guard, as I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything other than the crowd when the band is picking up their instruments.

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[We would like to thank user Aaron Presuhn, for volunteering to recap, and actually recapping, last night's show. -Ed.]

Phish at the Nutter Center. Fall tour. October. I love this venue and they obviously do too. It’s kind of hard to believe that these shows were only the 4th and 5th played here. Hopefully there’s more to come in the future.

Everyone knows THIS show. 12-7-97 was my soundtrack to a fun LSD-fueled sunrise hike among the woods and rocks of southwestern PA, and it holds a special place among my favorite shows.

The Nutter show in 2017, along with the Pete (Pittsburgh) show the next night were the best birthday present one could get. And now, six years later, the band returns to the Nutter for a two-night stand before the tour-ending run in Chi-town. Weather couldn’t have been more perfect for these shows, too…60s, sunny, great for spending a few hours relaxing on lot.

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[So both the person who signed up to recap last night's show and also the backup recapper were unable to submit a recap in a timely manner today. So we respecfully request that you recap the show yourself in the Comments. My two cents:

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[A Phish fan since 1996, Brian Weinstein has been running the Attendance Bias podcast since the spring of 2020. We hope you enjoy this interview of him, and subscribe to the podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. -Ed.]

How did you first get into Phish, what was your first show?

I first heard Phish in the summer of 1996. I was at a summer camp in Charlton, Massachusetts, and we were driving to Mt. Washington in New Hampshire for an overnight hiking trip. At some point on the four-hour drive, the head counselor put A Picture of Nectar on the van’s CD player. It was like time froze. This was new music that I hadn’t heard before, at a breakneck tempo, and I was hooked. I loved “Llama” and “Cavern,” but it was “Glide” that sold me. Once I heard that cowbell intro and the thunderous chords interrupting it, something inside me sparked and I had to listen to the rest of the album again ASAP.

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[We would like to thank user MGOLIA6 for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

Let’s cut the bullshit, as of late, as tours come and go, an unrealistic expectation has been placed on the band. Fault can clearly be placed, at least partially, on the band, for setting such high standards to begin with. Add to that a limited set of fall tour dates, the band’s 40^th anniversary, a 2000^th showversary, and the proverbial let down is all but inevitable. The remainder of the blame lies with us, the listeners. Why are we so needy? Then I got to asking myself, why the fuck did I volunteer to review this show? A Sunday show, an early flight home, the list of cons goes on and on. But the answer is simple, I love this band, warts and all, regardless of expectations, seemingly because of expectations and the simple fact that in the face of all the bullshit in the world, experiencing a Phish show live is quite possibly the one place that I can find solace from the deafening external noise that abounds these days.

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[We would like to thank user JMART, Josh Martin, for recapping last night's show. Pax tecum. -Ed.]

Greetings, everyone, and welcome ....

Every once in a while down at the jmart household, we like to throw on our tuxedo t-shirts, compare SAT scores, and break out our most favorite Latin phrases. Never fear: If high school seems like a distant memory to you, or you just happen to be a dorkus malorkus, your old pal has you covered.

Before we get down to business in earnest, a brief caveat emptor: Your reviewer was not in attendance last night. If you were, and you're wondering why the review wasn't written by someone who was, then you understand that the answer, as it almost always does, lies within.

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