Phish - Toyota Park (8/11/09)

When you're hitting up just one Phish show, in the middle of the week, it can be kind of a crap-shoot. Of course, this was not always the case back in the glory days of Phish, when practically every show on a day ending in "y" was an incendiary barn-burner, and any notion of a "weak show" was based upon the most stingy and ultra-critical of show-attending criteria (e.g., complaining that "Train Song" wasted three minutes of what could have been more "Ghost" jam). But that was then and times have certainly changed.

After a quasi-decent Red Rocks run, Phish opened the last leg of their Summer 2009 tour at Toyota Park in Chicago, a venue where spectators normally watch soccer games that end in lame scores like 1-0. Right off the bat, this didn't seem like the appropriate vessel for a Phish show. There was a sprawling, segmented sheet of metal flooring covering the entire grass field. This "lawn" section seemed somewhat artificial, and killed that natural, communal grassy-hill feeling of Alpine Valley and Deer Creek for everyone stomping along it's rigid and flattened-cigarette-filled surface. Everyone except, of course, the guy in front of us who naturally and comfortably exposed himself to urinate freely among us. This was not a show where one could even lay down a serape or tapestry to rest upon and mark territory. Unless you used urine, apparently.

Musically, the show started off decently enough--I am enjoying "Kill Devil Falls"--but quickly descended into a discombobulated two sets of short, uninspired jamming and even stranger song placement and choice. Toward the end of the second set, I simply began to lose interest, and even gained the attention-prowess to notice that the fellow standing next to me was holding his digital camera up and gazing through the view finder for nearly the last thirty minutes of the show. And he wasn't video-taping, so I hope he got the perfect shot that he was painstakingly looking for.

What's most interesting is that the entire online Phish community seemed to have similar thoughts on the show (e.g., it was discombobulated and uninspired). This type of negative consensus rarely happens, and I've never seen so many reviews start with phrases such as "Now I don't mean this to a bashing review but..." Even Mr. Miner, a cult-ish blogger who praises Phish so much that you seriously have to question his sense of reality or purpose of existing, gave a lukewarm review, and used the intriguing analogy of jigsaw puzzle pieces that didn't fit as a fitting descriptor of the show. I still had a good time, so I guess none of the opinion--theirs or mine--really matters. It's probably just part of the dice-rolling that's now involved with Phish shows.