When the Phish New Year’s run at Madison Square Garden was postponed, it was quite a large disappointment and a great inconvenience for tens of thousands of fans. The rescheduled dates corresponding to “4/20” was cute, sure, but the real gift was the ability to experience this special holiday week in April. For us, that meant we’d be attending and recording the first two nights, and frankly I couldn’t have been happier.
The Wednesday night show was recorded and we’ll post it later this week, but honesty this Thursday night show was so far superior that it earned the right to jump the line. This was, not hyperbolically speaking, a top five Phish experience for me personally.
The night began with a “Suzy” dedicated to the song’s main character who attended her first Phish show on this night. And what a version — energetic and fun, it propelled this first set to a nice momentum, with “Wolfman’s” and “Ghost” as the highlights. But the very best was yet to come.
Any show that packs Chalkdust, Tweezer, 2001, Maze, Hood, and Zero into a single set is naturally going to be a winner, but it was more than that. This was just top notch playing, crisp and inspired. The band locked into a glorious melodic jam that lasted for the final nine minutes of Tweezer and was such a peak that I hoped they’d never transition to another track. The Phish scholars can correct me, but I believe that this was just a spontaneous first-time creation by the band on the fly and represented for me the beautiful possibilities of any Phish performance. At this point, less than halfway through the set, the balance of the night was just gravy. And the band kept piling it on, as one highlight followed the next. I was certain that Hood was the set closer and would have been more than satisfied, but Phish was not letting up on this night and crashed into a crazy “Character Zero” that celebrated the magic of this special evening.
I recorded this set with the Schoeps cards from inside of the Taper’s Section, elevated behind the soundboard. The mix was dialed in for this show, and I’m really pleased with this recording. Enjoy!
Download the Complete Show [MP3] / [FLAC]
Stream the Tweezer (with that amazing jam):
Phish
2022-04-21
Madison Square Garden
New York NY
Digital Master Recording
Tapers Section Behind Soundboard
Schoeps CCM4u Cardioids > Sound Devices 744t > 24bit 48kHz wav > Soundforge (post production) > CDWave 1.95 (tracking) > TLH > flac (320 MP3 and tagging via Foobar)
Recorded and Produced by nyctaper
Setlist:
Set 1 [Total Time 1:11:28]
01 Suzy Greenberg
02 46 Days
03 Plasma
04 The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday
05 Avenu Malkenu
06 The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday
07 Wolfman’s Brother
08 Esther
09 Ghost
Set 2 [Total Time 1:40:44]
10 Chalk Dust Torture
11 Tweezer
12 Also Sprach Zarathustra
13 Maze
14 About to Run
15 The Mango Song
16 Harry Hood
17 Character Zero
18 Tweezer Jam
19 Character Zero Reprise
20 [encore break]
21 A Life Beyond The Dream
22 Tweezer Reprise
What a night. Thanks for recording!