Well this concludes my second venture to Ruoff/Deer Creek, and what a run this year was. I’m still buzzing from tonight’s show as well as Saturday, so clearly I’m biased here. But I’ll try to be as objective as possible.

The bad: Rift and Horn are bold choices because Trey was clearly out of practice for both (and definitely the latter). Mercury *could* have gone on longer, but not ever jam vehicle needs to jam extra hard. Sometimes the song is enough.

The rest: everything else from S1 is pretty well played, even Guyute (or at least I thought so, but I’m not one to usually have hang ups about flubs; AKA, they rarely make or break a show for me). We got funky and Trey got to play with his toys during Wombat, and Moma sent us to break happy!

Now onto the meat of the show: the second set opening Sand>Sigma Oasis>Sand. The Sand by itself is 34 minutes in length, making it the longest Sand played by Phish by a pretty wide margin and traverses so much terrain before settling into Sigma. I can’t really put the words to it; you really just need to listen to it for yourself because there’s so much going on in this jam. It’s bold and psychedelic as Phish can be. After Saturday, I was thinking tonight might be a laid back Sunday show like last year’s 8/8/21. But instead Phish put in overtime with that jam! The whole segment is around 45 minutes In length and wastes very little time or notes.

I got my first Mango Song! Been chasing that since I became an established fan over a decade ago.

R/CT is what it is. I’m not a fan of the song at all, but after that Sand, they could have played the theme from Barney and I would have been just as happy.

Now I need to talk about the Slave. That song is my all-time favorite Phish song. It ended my first show on 6/4/11, and it ended this show tonight. After such an incredible show it’s amazing to me that they can deliver such a momentous piece of music yet again, and to cap off tour! Earlier in the day, I purchased a Slave tee from Shakedown I’d been trying to get for years and remarked how they had to play Slave tonight. Someone in the bands entourage must have heard me (or statistically, it was just gonna happen anyway, which is way more likely haha).

This was an amazing show, amazing run, and amazing crowd. I totally get why Phish make the trip to the middle of the cornfield. Hell, they got me out here twice, and I’d come back a third time, no questions asked.