We Open A Zipper To 2025

A truly zany end to 2024, and a terrific start to the new year.

Going in to this run, my very first experience at Madison Square Garden, I tried to temper my expectations by simply embracing the lack of them: whatever the band offered this week, I was looking forward to experiencing it. Now, this doesn’t mean that I completely avoided all speculation about what they might do over the course of the run; that’s part of the fun, after all. I had no possible theories about what they might do for the New Year’s Eve prank this year, though. It was difficult to imagine how they could possibly follow up to last year’s spectacle, so why even attempt to guess?

Even so, I was shocked and amazed by what actually occurred - but more on that later.

First, something must be said: After twenty-five years and forty-nine shows of seeing this band, I had somehow managed to never catch Bouncing Around The Room, one of their most well-known and frequently-played songs. If you’ve ever run into me a a show, you’ve probably heard me mention it; it’s a good story, and a great example of a Phish oddity that showcases their extensive creativity.

That streak, of course, ended on New Year’s Eve, with an oddly-placed Bouncing as the second song in the first set, in the middle of an excellent Mike’s Song/Weekapaug Groove sandwich. This was not, as I initially suspected, the first Mike’s > Bouncing > Weekapaug, but it was the first time it ever opened a set, let alone the whole show. From there, they went on to a slightly extended Stash that had some nice, upbeat jamming without being extended too far. After the short-but-excellent Stash they moved on to Evolve, a choice that seemed somewhat odd at the moment but would prove to be a hint of things to come. They segued after that into a short Llama before moving on to the meat of the first set, another first song for me live: Split Open And Melt.

This SOAM didn’t go that far, but it did go deep, harkening back to the funkiness and darkness of Sunday night. Although it approached the kind of dissonant jamming that often means the band is searching for a direction at the end, it never quite got there, instead exploring funkiness in a meandering way. Like many of the jams on Saturday night, and the excellent Runaway Jim on Sunday, the entire first set on Tuesday was a prime example of Phish doing more with less. They set the tone of the evening with a rambunctious, electric atmosphere immediately permeating the building.

After the deep jamming of SOAM, they moved on to the more upbeat Backwards Down The Number Line. The constant back-and-forth mood shifts of the first set might seem incongruous just glancing at the setlist, but like the run overall it worked together perfectly as a single piece. At the moment, in the building, I didn’t even particular notice the incongruity of it, and I suspect most of you didn’t either: it felt like one continuous high-energy opening set. Indeed, the mood shifts both in this set and in the run overall were, in retrospect, a perfect foreshadowing of the New Year’s Eve gag.

The shift back to a darker tone with Carini after BDTNL worked similarly well. Like SOAM, this Carini used its time wisely, albeit with more Type I jamming than we saw in SOAM. Towards the end of the song, there was a moment where it seemed as if this Carini might be going in a different, more creative direction, but instead they ended the song gracefully and moved on to The Squirming Coil. The band ended the song, as is tradition, with Trey, Mike, and Jon each departing the stage, giving Page a very extended keyboard solo - even for Coil. This was, perhaps, a recognition of the superb work Page has done over the course of this run by the rest of the band.

Opening the second set with the uplifting Sigma Oasis was a strong, if unoriginal, choice. Moving on to the much darker My Friend, My Friend after was an inspired first, though. It would have typically been an incredibly stark contrast in tone, as My Friend typically leads to very dark jamming, but this one didn’t go spelunking at all. Instead, this My Friend explored more cosmic, groovy jamming that reached more for the stars rather than the depths - and led to the longest version of the song ever. If not exactly upbeat, the not exactly dark My Friend worked as a better transition to Sand and Golden Age - the latter of which was, in retrospect, another foreshadowing of the prank. This Sand seemed to move at a slightly slower pace than usual, allowing it to nicely meet My Friend in the middle. It also included some cosmic jamming of its own at the end, gradually lifting the tone - in a creative and weird way that served perfectly as a transition to Golden Age. I don’t particularly mind the song, but I am tiring of it a bit as of late: they’ve been playing it a lot lately¹, and I’ve gotten it a lot lately², but it fit perfectly here. It was a little long, but they mainly stuck to the script, just slipping in a bit of jamming at the end, before playing the instrumental What’s The Use?

What’s The Use? was, to me, the other highlight of the second set, after My Friend, My Friend. Appropriately, What’s The Use? would revisit the theme of silence from Sunday night, as it so often does. It slowed down to near silence at its usual moment in the middle, but didn’t quite get there and didn’t linger long, gradually ramping back up again. The silence in the middle of What’s The Use? proved to be the final quiet moment of the second set, as the band closed it out with a trio of high-energy songs that got the entire Garden moving: Taste, Golgi Apparatus, and First Tube, all played at their typical tempo and length.

They continued that energy level by opening the third set - in matching blue jumpsuits jackets and blue pants, with Fishman in a blue donut Mimi - with Character Zero, slotted in its usual role with gusto. That would be the end of anything usual for the night, though, as the New Year’s Eve prank began with Pillow Jets, a song that had seemed practically made for it since its inception with its striking visuals. Now, a note before moving on to the prank: my view was a bit limited from behind the stage in Section 114. I appreciated being there, and for the most part didn’t mind the unique vantage point, but it was hardly ideal for New Year’s Eve. So, for instance, I didn’t see the face at all; I haven’t yet watched the stream, so I’m working on my memories of the event live.

Pillow Jets began typically enough, but as Trey uttered the line ‘Conjurers of Thunder’ the conjurers themselves appeared onstage, in the form of women wearing golden crowns, with long, flowing, golden robes trailing behind them. As they appeared, the music shifted notably in tone, getting much darker. It’s appropriate that I’m traveling through Rhode Island by train as I write this, because this darker version of Pillow Jets began to descend into what I can only call Lovecraftian madness. The singing of the conjurers themselves certainly upsold that tone, an eerie, haunting melody that seemed to reach into every corner of the Garden. This isn’t the first time I’ve detected hints of weird horror in Phish songs: Steam, Esther, Turtle In The Clouds, and others contain elements of it as well. The first part of the gag could have been a staging of The King In Yellow, the fictional play from Robert W. Chambers’ eponymous short story collection.

The next song (after Auld Lang Syne), the truly bizarre What’s Going Through Your Mind, usually comes across as darker than Pillow Jets, but on New Year’s Eve it served the opposite purpose. This truly weird song started off very normally but about five minutes in it - like Pillow Jets - begin to change completely in tone. It moved gradually into a more electronically-tinged tone, with Trey repeating the Mind lyrics before the dancers/singers started sing-yelling ‘Dance!’. It then moved into what I can only describe as full-blown EDM mode. By now, the dancers had removed the yellow robes to reveal costumes that were definitely dance club-inspired.

What followed was essentially an EDM-style, or at least dance-club style, Phish review. The thus-far longest-ever What’s Going Through Your Mind contained so many different song teases that it’s impressive anyone managed to keep track; see the whole list here. There didn’t seem to be any real pattern to the teases: some of the songs had been played that night, some earlier in this run, and others not recently at all. The Martian Monster tease was so long that it seemed like they were about to play it, for instance, but instead they revisited Wolfman’s Brother for a bit before quoting Lizards. At the time, I was simply stunned: It was weird, wild, and wonderful. In retrospect, some of the teases seemed on point, like “the trick was to surrender to the flow” from Lizards, and “Everyone started dancing to a song they couldn’t stand” from What’s Going Through Your Mind, but not so much others, like “Cadillac rainbows and lots of spaghetti” from Halley’s Comet. In retrospect, after further consideration, I absolutely loved the New Year’s Eve stunt, and the tonal shifts that had previously characterized the run seemed muted by comparison.

After the craziness of the gag, they shifted into a superb, albeit fairly straightforward and short, Chalk Dust Torture. They went on to the slightly-slower paced Slave To The Traffic Light, always an appropriate choice for New York shows, before returning to some more jamming with Life Saving Gun. It wasn’t that long, but they developed an interesting jam in that Gun that was especially pushed by Page’s work on the keyboard. They finished off the set with another newer song that I’ve seen often lately, Say It To Me S.A.N.T.O.S., performing its usual function as a closer after what was anything but a typical set.

The encore is not to be missed, either. They had a bit of trouble getting Grind started, seemingly because Page’s harmonica had gotten misplaced in the chaos of the prank. Several of them even went over to look for it and Trey performed a dramatic mic drop in comedic frustration before they were able to get started counting the days. From there, they went on to Icculus, with Trey explaining that they had left it out of last year’s Gamehendge performance as a test - one that we should have been able to pass, since we should’ve assembled the pieces of the Helping Friendly Book by now. This was an especially zany version of Icculus, helping to cap off a particularly zany evening before they moved on to finish the day with Tweezer Reprise. The dancers returned during Tweeprise to kick inflatable balls into the crowd, helping to send us off into the streets of New York in 2025 with a burst of unforgettable energy.

All in all, a weird, wild, wonderful show that left me both fully satisfied and simultaneously wanting more. If I can, I definitely want to turn YEMSG into a new annual tradition, just as the band and so many others of you have managed to over the years. I understand if you didn’t get the prank just by watching at home - it was truly a bizarre one - but it went over well in the building. I definitely get it now, and I can’t wait for the chance to come back to New York and see what they get up to next time. Maybe I can knock off another unseen song from my list, but whatever I get, I know I’ll have a good time.

Thank you Phish!

Jim is also a weekly columnist for the Portland Press Herald, Maine’s largest daily newspaper. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) or on Facebook.

1. Sixteen times over the past two years.

2. Three times over the past two years, including the memorable performance with Derek Trucks at SPAC