Phish serves up a satisfying show July 8, 2003 - The Arizona Republic By Megan Bates There was an air of homecoming in the parking lot of the Cricket Pavilion Monday evening. Young people wearing dreadlocks and homemade dresses greeted each other affectionately while unloading water bottles and blankets from a fleet of out-of-state Toyota sedans and SUV's. Later on, the jam band Phish would break it's two-year long touring hiatus with a thrilling performance at the Cricket Pavilion, and for these traveling neo-hippies the night must have marked a homecoming to the rambling life. Phish could hardly have gone wrong; avid "Phans" have been eagerly anticipating their return, and those who missed out on the Phish craze of the nineties, (such as the pack of soccer jocks seated directly in front of me) welcomed the chance to partake of the free-spirited, herbally generous lifestyle of the jam-band follower. By the time the boys walked out on stage, Cricket Pavilion was packed with a young, enthusiastic, and distinctly sandalwoody crowd. Obliging their supporters' taste for a particular intoxicant, Phish started off their first set with a bouncy rock song called "Stash." On hearing the first notes, those in the audience who weren't already standing jumped from their seats and lurched into a kind of lethargic doggie paddle that seems to be the trademark dance-step of the Phish set. The Phish lyrical oeuvre generally features a few audible key phrases connected by incomprehensible string of words, and vocalist Trey Anastasio sounds as though he has a perpetual stuffy nose. Nevertheless, the band rocks its audience with a goofy-yet-sincere energy, and soon I too was doggie-paddling and singing along with the refrain of "Stash," which was something along the lines of: "the smell of rotting garlic."(My companion, a Phish veteran, tells me this is part of a clever anecdote about composting and solar energy.) The band received a hearty round of applause for "Stash" before starting into the jazzy doodling of their second song, "Sample in a Jar." One of the attractions of a Phish show must be the lack self-consciousness that prevails in both the music and the energy of the crowd. While dressed colorfully, none of the ‘Phans' seemed dressed to impress, and in the same way Phish's music is laid back and accepting, allowing for long improvisational riffs that repeatedly build up and then deconstruct a song's theme. Not always easy stuff to dance to, and yet one feels compelled to get up and boogie anyway, if only because everyone else seems to be having so much fun. The first set of the show was predominantly up-tempo and kept the audience on their feet, with the exception of "Billy Breath," a somber ballad in which the members of Phish produce a surprisingly pretty vocal harmony. The set ended with the foot-tapping country-rock "Possum," which was extraordinarily popular among the audience and rounded out the set nicely. Phish started the second set with a fun disco-jam tune featuring very spare lyrics: "David Bowie/UB40"are the only words in the song. From then on, the band's improvisational tendencies were highlighted, as they jammed for extended periods of time and one song turned gradually into another. My Phishy friend pointed out that this is, after all, is the band's distinguishing feature: they play so well with one another. However, as the hot evening grew longer, I found myself wishing that Phish would stop swimming in deconstructed rhythms and echoey reverb and get on with the next song already. The impatient among us were rewarded towards the end of the set by a sweet, slow ballad called "Prince Caspian" after the C.S. Lewis novels. This song is something of an anthem among Phish supporters, and many of them sang along loudly and touchingly, as great swaths of smoke swirled up from the audience and into the flickering beams of colored lights. The band's obligatory encore was "Character Zero," a hard-rocking number dissimilar from most of the songs that had come before it. "Character Zero" is, I am told, a traditional encore song for Phish, and the when it was over the audience stood up and meandered away dreamily, as though they had just finished a very satisfying meal. Article Copyright © 2003 The Arizona Republic