Phish roared back into Madison Square Garden for the 27th time Monday night, capping off an instantly-sold out four night stand with a raucous four-and-a-half hour celebration replete with ping pong ball cannons, speeding golf carts, scantily-clad sunbathers, dancing dwarfs, backflipping acrobats, and a small ocean of balloons unleashed from the ceiling at the stroke of midnight. Say what you want about Phish, you can't accuse them of skimping on the New Year's balloon budget:
The fun started early for those in the general admission section on the floor, which was covered with fake grass and featured a smattering of lawn games to match the evening's "Garden Party" theme. Before the concert kicked off, blondes in bikinis "sunbathed" on a riser behind the stage, which was also covered in green turf and crowded with flowers, plants, and trees. As the newly remodeled arena filled up, audience members killed time playing mini golf and chess with giant pieces, recalling that time in 1995 when the band played a series of chess games with the audience, culminating in a humiliating loss to their fans at Madison Square Garden on New Year's Eve.
Phish is famous for staging elaborate theatrical stunts to ring in the new year, and when a group of preppy golfers later strolled on stage to swat squishy commemorative "golf balls" into the crowd, it was obvious that this year's shenanigans would revolve around one of their weirdest and obscure numbers, "Kung". Written by drummer Jon Fishman, "Kung" is less of a song and more of an incantation, a sort of Spinal Tap parody of bombastic hair metal antics that also alludes to rituals performed by Bushman people living in the Kalahari Desert. Chanting over a current of creepy, atonal sound, the band exhorts the audience to, among other things, "STAND UP! STAND UP ON YOUR HEELS!" and "stage a runaway golf cart marathon!" Whatever that means. Anyway, here's what went down just before midnight:
In the immortal words of Otto, the Simpsons' bus driver, "I don't need drugs to enjoy this—just to enhance it." At the stroke of midnight the stage was suddenly filled with a cast of thousands for a chaotic Busby Berkeley-esque song-and-dance number, as thousands of ping pong balls were fired into the crowd and a deluge of balloons turned the garden into a childlike cartoon fantasyland. Glow sticks flew in every direction, and at one point I felt something land in my front breast pocket; reaching to grab what I assumed was a glow stick, my hand touched upon a cold, slimy substance which, upon further investigation in the chaotic dark, was determined to be a slice of roast beef. Revolting, but I guess there are worse things than cold cuts that can fall on you at a Phish show. Like PEOPLE.
Meat. (John Del Signore / Gothamist)
After the outstanding backup singers catapulted the thunderous tension-release rocker "Tweezer Reprise" into another dimension, Phish escorted the crowd slowly back to reality by way of frontman Trey Anastasio's space groove crowd-pleaser "Sand," and a completely out-of-left-field cover of Steve Miller Band's "Fly Like an Eagle." And if you've read this far, don't try to pretend there wasn't a month or two in your tweens when you bobbed your head to "Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' into the future" like it meant something. Phish nailed the cheesy classic rock staple hilariously yet unironically, and closed out the set with their head-banging rocker "Wilson" and a scrambled a capella arrangement of "Lawn Boy," a lounge lizard ballad about "smelling the colors" on the front lawn and getting "overwhelmed by olfactory hues."
By then it was almost one a.m., but after three sets there were still more daffy surprises to come. After the lovely balled "Driver" (which blames the "driver" inside the singer's head for his terrible fashion sense) keyboard player Page McConnell emerged from behind the boards to take the lead on a first-time-played cover of Black Sabbath’s "Iron Man." They killed it—the arena was literally bouncing, and every fist in the garden went out pumping into 2013:
It was a perfectly madcap conclusion to a night of absurd, exuberant frivolity, which began with another completely out-of-left-field cover, Ricky Nelson’s "Garden Party." Hidden Track's Scott Bernstein explains, "The former teenstar wrote the song in 1972 after getting booed off the stage at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Revival concert held at MSG in 1971 because he played new material and not the classics from his youth. Its chorus of 'you can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself' fits nicely in a world of Phish fans who all want different things from the band."
Monday night, however, it seemed everyone in the house wanted the same thing: music to party down to, something that Phish has in abundance—the rollicking song that opened the golf-themed set three is unambiguously titled "Party Time" and features lyrics consisting solely of the words "party time," sung repeatedly like a statement of purpose. It goes without saying that a think cloud of pot smoke hovered over the crowd before the band even took the stage, and that was just the tip of the bacchanalian iceberg. To be fair, you'll find brazen drug at rock shows ranging from Radiohead to They Might Be Giants. But few other bands attract such over-the-top hedonism, which is suddenly ironic because, since reuniting following a five-year breakup, Phish is the biggest straight edge band in the music business. And even when they partied, they were rarely sloppy, and, in my experience, always serious about taking musical risks. And golf.
For innocent bystanders whose only exposure to Phish comes from the burnout trustafarians stumbling around Penn Station in mortifying patch pants every December, some fans' rowdy decadence can be a tad unsettling. For me, there's usually an uncomfortable moment of self-doubt when I'm walking into the venue observing some spun-out white dude with dreadlocks screaming gibberish about "slapping a custy with his meatstick" or discovering—as I did at the Garden before a Phish show even started—that someone had defecated on the men's room floor. Such behavior does give one pause, especially for anyone with an aversion to crowds and irrational exuberance. (On the other hand, I also met quite a few intelligent, functional members of society in the audience.) Surrounded by a sea of manufactured tie-dyes and tinted visors, it's hard not to think, "You know, maybe my presence here reflects badly on me."
But like any other decent band, when the performance starts I usually stop caring about the crowd. And as Phish approaches their 30th anniversary this year, they're playing with a vitality and depth that's rare for a group in its third decade. Part of that may be attributed to the clean and sober backstage scene. “I fucking hate drugs," Anastasio told Rolling Stone in a recent interview. "I really do. It’s funny, coming from me.” Yet that's only part of it—Phish obviously isn't for everyone, but there's no denying that each member is a talented musician with serious chops. And as they approach middle age, the musical conversation between these four weirdo college buddies sounds like it's getting deeper.
For the complete New Year's Eve setlist, check out Hidden Track.
