Phish Pauses Eugene Show To Address Death & Injuries At San Francisco Concert – Setlist, Recap & The Skinny - JamBase

Guitarist Trey Anastasio discussed the tragic incidents that took place during Sunday's show.

Phish Fall Tour 2021 has gotten off to a promising start, highlighted by thrillers at San Francisco’s Chase Center.

While it doesn’t quite seem like a usual fall tour, with the summer and Dick’s only six weeks in the rearview mirror and a Trey Anastasio Band tour that kept guitarist Trey Anastasio and drummer Jon Fishman loose in the interval, it’s refreshing to see the band remain inspired after COVID-19 quarantine shut down tour for over a year and rising to fan expectations in their long-overdue return to the indoor venues on the West Coast.

In a show originally scheduled for July 14, 2020, Phish returned to Eugene, Oregon’s Matthew Knight Arena for the first time since October 17, 2014 and immediately made up for lost time.

The band opened with “Down With Disease,” which blossomed into a sick, +25-minute jam that featured Trey showcasing the new bottom-heavy, gutter-funk effects of his new rig to Oregon crowds and cycling through creative melodies like a kid with a crayon box.

This marked the first time Phish opened the concert with a song over 20 minutes since a lengthy “Scents And Subtle Sounds” began the band’s show in Noblesville, Indiana on July 23, 2003.

“Ocelot,” fresh off its stellar turn on TAB tour, cooled things down, but with Trey performing a soulful, blues-inflected solo over a solid foundation by bassist Mike Gordon and keyboardist Page McConnell, still showed they can “Type I” jam with the best of them.

This was followed by “Stash,” having an excellent year in 2021.

While this version wasn’t up to the peaks set this year in Noblesville, Indiana on August 7 or Mountain View, California on August 31, it still showed that the band is finding new life in the old warhorse, opening the sprawling jam portion with a swinging improvisation kept afloat by Fishman’s deft, Latin-tinged playing.

After “Stash,” Trey took a moment to tearfully reflect on recent tragedies in the Phish community, naming Keith Thompson and Evan Reeves, who were hurt at the San Francisco show on Sunday, and Ryan Prosser, who passed away in a separate incident at the same show.

While Anastasio was hardly unsympathetic or unkind in the 1990s, it’s hard to picture him acknowledging individual fans and their families in such personal fashion from the stage back then — not to mention that the band, crew and fans are all part of the same experience, only from different perspectives!

The band began the second set like the first: with a song that would also prove to be the longest in the set

The “Twist” that opened featured a full palette of guitar effects, before morphing into “Blaze On.” The “Blaze On” jam was brief by 2021 standards — only the band’s July performance in Pelham, Alabama contained a shorter version — and quickly segued into “Plasma.” The “Plasma” jam offered promising outbursts before itself giving way to “Leaves,” in what is somehow only the fifth performance of a song that has been part of the catalog since 2017

The Phish debut of the Lonely Trip track “I Never Left Home” followed, and didn’t disappoint, with Page and Mike in particular carving psychedelic territory in a song Trey composed at home during the 2020 quarantine, and nimbly tossing out melodic ideas in a jam portion that was sadly brief

Phish returns to Matthew Knight Arena tonight