Divining Summer from Spring

What does the short West Coast tour mean?

Seemingly out of the blue this week, Phish announced an extremely brief 8-date Spring tour, focused entirely on the West Coast. At a certain level, this makes some sense: Phish hasn’t really visited the West Coast since before the pandemic, apart from an odd five-date stopover at The Gorge and Shoreline Amphitheater in 2021. Now, clearly, that quick visit wasn’t enough to satiate West Coast phans, but in all fairness to them, this abbreviated Spring Tour - an ideal time to visit the West Coast - is only marginally better.

It does, however, follow Phish’s on-again, off-again relationship with the West Coast: They tend to, somewhat, alternate, if one discounts both Dick’s Sporting Goods Park runs and Madison Square Garden runs. In 2018, they did nine West Coast stops; in 2020 they were scheduled to do 10, but those never materialized due to the pandemic, instead morphing into that five-stop swing in 2021. So, really, there hasn’t been a major West Coast run in four years.

Now, that means that even this shorter Spring Tour will be much-welcomed by West Coast phans, who are deservedly somewhat starved for attention. They’ll complain that it’s not enough - and to be fair, this time they have a point - but at least it’s a real, complete tour.

So, the question is, what does this tell us about the upcoming summer tour?

Well, let’s start with what we know. Officially, that’s nothing. But, we can bet that come next Labor Day weekend, we’ll be back out in Colorado for at least a three-day run at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. Hopefully, they’ll continue what they did this year and turn it into a four-day run again. While it hasn’t been officially announced, those dates and location seem to be pretty much etched in stone on the calendar by now, just like Riviera Maya and New Year’s Eve at MSG.

We’ll all be back here this year.

Even though we might not know anything officially, there are a number of rumors floating around, and we can rule some things out. For one, Mike Gordon has already announced that he’s doing a number of festivals in June, so that whole month is pretty much off the books - which makes sense with the west coast Spring tour. So, that presumes that the true Summer tour won’t really begin until July.

One consistent rumor that has been constantly floating around is a summer stand at Madison Square Garden, like the infamous Baker’s Dozen. At first, this seemed unlikely to me: doing the same thing yet again doesn’t really seem in the nature of Phish, a famously creative and unpredictable band, even amongst jam bands. Yet, they have gotten into a routine with certain venues and dates as of late, so perhaps it’s not totally unreasonable.

The recently-announced Spring tour certainly fits in with that. We can assume there will be no more West Coast dates the rest of the year, and since last year’s summer tour was East Coast focused, a lot of venues are unlikely to be immediately repeated. New York City might be expensive and far away for a lot of phans, but it’s still one of the largest cities in the world, and really the only one where they could pull off doing this sort of lengthy residency. So, if we presume the ‘Baker’s Dozen II’ rumors have legs, and the dates are approximately the same as the original, where else might they go?

Well, the Saratoga Springs Performing Arts Center (SPAC) is a favorite venue, and the band hasn’t been back there since before the pandemic, so that would seem to be a serious possibility. Similarly, the Atlantic City boardwalk has become a common venue as well, even though it’s not quite as firmly established as Dick’s or RM. The argument against these venues is that one is in the same state as MSG, even if not nearby, and the other is just a few hours south. Their relative proximity to MSG might make for easy logistics, but is the band really going to make half their tour within a few hours of New York City? It seems implausible, but who knows?

So, what other East Coast or Midwest locations haven’t been visited since the pandemic? Well, they haven’t been back to Fenway Park since 2019; even if it isn’t necessarily a great venue for music, as many seem to think, it’s easy to see them returning there nonetheless. They also haven’t been back to the Mohegan Sun Arena since 2019, although Trey Anastasio Band was just there with Goose in last fall’s joint tour.

Chicago’s Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island also must be considered: it was a venue during the 2017 summer tour during their last residency at MSG. That summer, apart from the residency, they only did a few other dates, so if history repeats itself, they won’t need to find a whole lot of other venues - just enough to flesh out the rest of the schedule apart from MSG and Dick’s.

At any rate, if the rumors about a second MSG residency do indeed prove true, it’s wise to pay attention to the rumors about dates for the rest of the summer as well. For one, any of them are bound to be more affordable than time spent in New York City at any time of the year, but for another, often those off-the-beaten-path type of shows end up being sneaky good, sometimes even better than the main event.

Even if none of them happen to fall on a Sunday.

You may follow Jim on Twitter or Facebook. He is also a weekly political columnist for the Portland Press Herald, Maine’s largest daily newspaper.