Phish Show Review
4/15/2004 Thursday Night Vegas

My first Vegas show after 10 years of seeing the band and I gotta say I wasn’t impressed. The lot was pretty cool even though there weren’t nearly as many people as I thought there would be in Vegas. For the first time I wasn’t just there to see the show but I also had my first novel Portal, self-published, to sell and found quite happily that I was correct that socially conscious sci-fi could sell on a Phish lot.

I got three tix for 20 bucks each which was really nice, this 42.50 a show thing is ridiculous, they need to play more and charge less- these are rough financial times and the high ticket prices are unnecessarily painful.

The whole show was general admission, a nice touch, but I agree that it was immediately obvious that Chris Kuroda is crucial as the lighting would be just that much off the entire show.

They started with Buried Alive and it was immediately obvious the sound sucked. And I was straight in front of the stage albeit in the balcony. Still, the sound was as bad as in the World Music Theatre here in Chicago and that’s reaaaally bad. I don’t know if the sound was screwy down on stage too but something was definitely going on down there. Even though it sounded like a bad old analog tape the ACDC Bag that followed was great until the end when the sound deteriorated even further. Trey said something about an annoying sound, but I couldn’t be sure what he was saying. He played a crazy distorted note that made me think they were going to bust into BBFCFM but it turned into Limb. The rest of the set list featured the band playing pretty, but very slow jams that sucked the life out of what was initially a very loving crowd. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t really interesting either. The Stash>Timber was cool, but very mellow and again the sound was ick.

Second set was a huge improvement. The sound was 100% better and it must have been apparent down on the stage too because the whole show had a lot more energy. Lights were off badly on several occasions. 46 Days was nice. But the highlight was the 2001>DWD>Free>Scent run which was more than worth the price of admission. Jenn came out and jammed with Trey with a sloppy but fairly humorous rendition of Jay Z’s Girls Girls Girls before returning to finish the Russian influenced portion of Scent. Then they played Secret Smile and Crowd Control the first time I’d seen either live and gotta say, I think Trey’s using his best material with the solo band cause yuck. I actually thought Crowd Control was a bad Cheap Trick cover. They ended with a pretty but standard Traffic Light and encored with a nice Sneakin Sally with a vocal jam that featured the cococut song “They put the lime in the coconut and drink it all up” I’m pretty sure I heard Trey saying “The sound was screwed up” during the end of the vocal jam but half way through traffic light the sound dropped out again and I couldn’t be sure.

After Miami, Vegas was a let down. Oh well, everybody has rough days, they’re still the greatest band in the world and I’ll be there with bells on all summer.