Suggested soundtrack: “Bathtub Gin,” 7-29-98, Maryland Heights, Missouri
Today is the first day of MLB’s expanded playoffs, ushering in a new period of chaos in a season of chaos.
The Cardinals and Marlins made the playoffs despite huge chunks of their season interrupted by COVID-19 outbreaks. The Cardinals played almost half their games via doubleheaders and the Marlins made it to the playoffs a year after losing 105 games.
The Cubs were the only team to not report a single positive COVID-19 test within the organization during the regular season.
The Blue Jays made it while playing most of their home games in Buffalo, New York while the Red Sox, Phillies, and defending champs Nationals are at home.
On Wednesday, the same day the NBA Finals start, there will be 8 playoff games. EIGHT. They will start once an hour, on the hour, from 12pm through 5pm ET, then a 7pm and 10pm ET doubleheader to cap the day.
CHAOS.
And you should probably get used to most of the changes you saw this season. The NL DH? It’s here to stay and, honestly, I’ve come around. I won’t miss it at all. Starting extra innings with a runner on second? I could definitely see it sticking around after we move back to “normal” baseball. These were things MLB was looking into, the pandemic just gave them an excuse to fast-track them.
That goes for the expanded playoffs, too. There are plenty of reasons to not really be thrilled about this, a watered-down playoff field and a structure that puts top teams more at risk of being knocked out by a weird best-of-three opening series to name two.
If this were a “pandemic season only” situation, well, fine. There’s a LOT of weird stuff about this postseason, from low seeds playing a “home game” in the first round at the high seed’s stadium to the neutral site “bubbles” to the complete lack of days off during the first three rounds (yes, the LCS could see 7 games in 7 days; the World Series will incorporate the off days).
But more playoff games also mean more money for MLB. Way back in June, while owners and players were in a staring contest about the start of the season, the league signed a new lucrative contract with Turner which followed a similar 2018 renewal with Fox. ESPN is expected to renew at a rate similar to Turner.
TL;DR: no matter what you hear about baseball’s decreasing popularity, it’s still worth $$$$$. And postseason games are big draws for the league and networks alike. More teams, more games. More games, more money for the league from those networks. Of the potential 24 first-round games, 21 are being shown on ESPN, ESPN 2, or ABC. That’s a lot of baseball and, also, a lot of money.
Is this a bad thing? To some, yes. To me, I don’t know. Let’s see how this plays out. I’m skeptical yet I’m definitely psyched for 8 playoff games, including 4 potential elimination games, on Wednesday. And every time MLB has expanded the playoffs before, there was resistance and, then, acceptance. Would this mean more mediocre teams making the playoffs and inducing more chaos? Probably. Is it still preferable to the old structure where each league had only 2 divisions so we just went straight to the LCS? Yeah, to me it is.
Though if the Marlins upset the Cubs in the first round, I’ll definitely jump on the “3 GAMES IS ABSURDLY SHORT FOR A PLAYOFF SERIES” hot takes bandwagon because EMOTIONS.
For the time, though, we’ve got a postseason, a postseason I didn’t think was going to happen. Embrace the chaos, I guess, and let it rip.
Phenway Park, Vol. 1
A quick warning: if you’re not a fan of Phish and reading a 2,500 words about an 11-year-old show doesn’t seem very appealing, you’d be forgiven in moving on. Also, any typos and errors are completely intentional and my memory of Phish lore is not always the greatest so don’t @ me, Jaded Vets...
One of the reasons I started this newsletter was to write about all the weird ways I saw the world of baseball and world of Phish overlap (not that I’m the first person to make this observation). As the spring and summer of 2020 unfolded and the pandemic caused upheaval in MLB’s schedule and canceled Phish’s summer tour until 2021 (which is still probably overly optimistic), my focus drifted away from that overlap and came more to baseball-centric topics.
Welp, here’s me getting that effort going again, in a recurring series looking at Phish shows played at baseball stadiums. I touched on the Wrigley 2016 shows in my first newsletter and while the number of these types of shows aren’t that big (the band gravitates towards amphitheaters in the summer and arenas in the fall and winter, especially the last few decades), there are enough to make them fun.
This week’s entry is the first of three shows Phish has played at the famed Fenway Park in Boston.
Return Redux: Phish at Fenway Park, May 31, 2009
The one thing that stands out to me for this show is that, on paper, this should really be a momentous entry in the (quite substantial) history of the band. In March 2009, the band played a trio of glorious, cathartic reunion shows at Hampton Coliseum, their first shows since they broke up following the Coventry Festival in August 2004. But those “return” shows were a stand-alone mini-run.
That leaves this 2009 Fenway show in a weird limbo: it’s not the official “return” show but it’s their first show of the first full post-reunion tour. So kind of important? There’s also the setlist, which has fan favorites mixed with general crowd-pleasers, a pair of bustouts, and debuts that would go on to become staples of the band’s sets over the coming decade.
SET 1: The Star Spangled Banner, Sample in a Jar, The Moma Dance, Chalk Dust Torture, Ocelot[1], Stash, Bouncing Around the Room, Poor Heart, Limb By Limb, Wading in the Velvet Sea, Down with Disease, Destiny Unbound, Character Zero
SET 2: Tweezer -> Light[2], Bathtub Gin, David Bowie, Time Turns Elastic[2], Free, The Ballad of Curtis Loew, You Enjoy Myself
ENCORE: Cavern, Good Times Bad Times, Tweezer Reprise
[1] Debut.
[2] Phish debut.
It all made for an interesting stew that’s in one way underwhelming but in other is still a great document of a band shaking off the rust, finding their feet and, yes, finding their groove.
But first…
The Home Team
On May 31, 2009, the Red Sox were in Toronto where they won 8-2 thanks to a great performance on the mound from Jon Lester and a pair of Kevin Youkilis home runs. The Sox finished the day at 29-22, a half-game back of the rival Yankees in the AL East. Ultimately, that’s where the Sox would finish (second place) which was good enough for the AL Wild Card berth. The season ended, though, with a sweep at the hands of the Angels in the ALDS, a series that ended right there in Fenway, and those damn Yankees topping the Phillies for the World Series. So there was no Phish blessing a la the Cubs and those Wrigley shows in 2016.
However! Since 2009, the Red Sox have won two World Series while the Yankees haven’t won one since. If you were to just forget the year 2020 entirely for the Red Sox (which you would not be blamed for), that’s pretty GREAT.
(You know what else happened in 2004, the year Phish “broke up”? The Red Sox won their first World Series in 86 years! Did Phish fade so that the Red Sox could finally live again? It’s not NOT possible…)
The Art
The poster, by Nate Duval, is pretty great, IMHO. Duval has done a few more Phish posters as well as posters for Trey, TAB, and Mike. From the Red Sox lettering to the Green Monster scoreboard, it’s a fun homage to the band and baseball that I would not be mad about having on my wall. It also feels like it’s styled after old baseball cards which makes even more lovely to my heart.
Via Relix
Duval’s actually pretty well-known in concert poster circles and he’s got the press clippings to prove it. This Fenway poster was his first for Phish and in a 2016 interview with PASTE, Duval noted, “Growing up in Massachusetts as a lifelong Red Sox fan, it was almost surreal to have that be my first Phish poster.”
The website EspressoBeans, a popular clearinghouse for the buying and selling of rock posters, has a quote on its page for this poster attributed to Duval which reads:
"It was my great pleasure and honor to work with Phish, in creating the official poster for the start of the 2009 Summer Tour for their recent show at Historic Fenway Park! This hand-drawn poster was screen-printed using 5 colors in a signed and numbered edition of 1000. It measures 18" x 24" in size and I am very pleased with how it turned out. The concept and direction were approved and suggested by the band themselves. Also, Yankees suck. Don't try to tell me that the Yankees rallied in the 9th to beat Boston either :) (in regards to the score I made up on the scoreboard behind our canined friend)."
That the band had a say in the concept and that it features a dog are things that grab my attention and those are topics I definitely hope to get a chance to ask Nate about if I get a chance.
The Show
So what about the show itself? Well, it’s… fine. The 2.99 rating (out of 5) on Phish.net feels harsh, especially considering the context: the band still shaking off the rust, playing in a big, special venue like Fenway to a crowd that’s filled with hardcore fans and passive fans alike (attracted by the spectacle and increased capacity).
There’s also something a bit weird about the recording, or at least the official soundboard recording available on the LivePhish app: the crowd is barely audible. I don’t know if that had to do with having a different system at a venue not usually equipped for these rock shows, that it was the first show of the tour, or maybe just weird acoustics at the old stadium. Either way, the AUD recording, linked above, is a solid listen and preferable to the SBD to me.
Not the quality of the recording really did much to sway my opinion of the show. The quality of playing, though? That’s a different matter.
Things start out fun with the band, in Red Sox jerseys, taking to the mound to sing an a capella version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s a fun nod to playing a baseball stadium and serves as a fun opening to, really, the next full phase of Phish.
Through the first few songs of the first set, you can feel the band (and especially Trey) playing things safe. There’s a missed note here, a brief disconnect between guitar and rhythm there, and generally safe improv. The band’s stretching and easing into things, not pushing things too far out. Baby steps, right? It’s fine music! There’s nothing here I’d ever revisit but it’s also not bad. It’s just fine. “Chalk Dust Torture” injects some energy even as the jam on the song’s back end shows the band still limbering up its communication and transition skills, Trey slipping from the dissonance build to the peak jam just a bit too far ahead of everyone else.
That’s followed by the night’s first debut, “Ocelot,” a slinky mid-tempo number that can either stay in a mellow mode or sometimes building to something pretty ripping. Here, it’s, well, it’s the first drive of the tune that will eventually wind up on Joy, Phish’s first post-reunion album, a few months later.
Phish fans can be fickle and pretty lukewarm to new tunes, especially in the 3.0 era. “Ocelot” still isn’t really a favorite and the debut version here doesn’t do it any justice, but it usually takes a few times out before the band gets really comfortable with new songs.
The version of “Stash” that follows isn’t the cleanest but it’s also the first time in the show that the band feels like it’s really pushing itself with the improv. In a way, it feels like the band’s exhale moment: Listening to the show, I could almost imagine the guys getting through it and relaxing a bit. It’s not the band’s most complicated composition but it’s also a skill level above anything that comes before it in the set. Even if it’s a version that few will revisit, just by virtue of getting those muscles activated again you can sense that the band is really getting its feet.
And that feeling holds through the rest of the set: when “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” gets teased, it’s that sense of playfulness fans love about the band. A fiery “Down With Disease” followed by “Destiny Unbound” (the night’s first bustout) and a ripping “Character Zero” close out a first set with it feeling like the band has its sense of self intact even if there’s still a little rust in the execution (hardly a new thing for the band).
If the first set was a bit uneven to start, the second set is better for it. “Tweezer” gets a taste of funk from Page before Trey takes it more towards lighter, blissful territory and the song dissolves before kicking into the debut of “Light,” one of the 3.0 songs that’s been more widely embraced by fans than “Ocelot.” While this song will grow over time, you get just a glimmer of the promise of the song’s bright future as it barely sprints past 5 minutes, giving way to the delightful “Bathtub Gin” / “David Bowie” back-to-back.
If there’s one thing I take from this stretch, it’s the jam that closes out “Gin” where the rest of the band sounds in lockstep while Trey sounds a bit like he’s still figuring things out and experimenting along the way. Whether it’s the unique tone or insistence on bending notes here, it sounds like both a rust issue and a bit like Trey asking himself, “What if I did this?”
It’s something that comes and goes throughout the show and another element that roots it at this very specific time in the band’s career. It doesn’t quite work here but it will much better even just a few days later in with the Camden “Sand” (one of my favorite versions of this song) and the Asheville “Ghost.” Knowing what’s to come makes listening to parts like this that much more fun for me. You know, the guy who’s writing 2,500 words on an 11-year-old Phish show.
Of course, what’s a Phish show without a curveball so halfway through the band drops in “Time Turns Elastic,” one of the tunes Trey wrote with a lending hand from composer Don Hart and a song that would get 17 times over the next 18 months before disappearing from Phish sets completely. I really enjoy the studio version and I’m fine with the live versions but songs TTE and “Petrichor” tend to be treated with less love by Phish fans (remember the part about them being fickle?).
Their reward, then, is a strong close with “Free,” the Skynyrd cover “Ballad of Curtis Loew” bustout, and a strong “YEM” to close the set. By the time the boys close YEM with a typically-surreal 5-minute jam, it feels like I’ve heard the band fully shake loose the cobwebs and get their confidence back. That’s my projection, of course, and, as with most Phish shows, a hundred listeners will give you a hundred different opinions.
The three-song encore consists of all straight-forward, rock’n’roll songs with the Zeppelin cover “Good Times, Bad Times,” sandwiched between “Cavern” and “Tweeprise,” a trio of uptempo, feel-good bangers to send the crowd home happy. And despite all the flubs (Trey even starts “Tweeprise” in the wrong key before switching up), it’s hard not feel happy about the results.
While there’s not a stand-out jam here that people still talk about (though, as I pointed out earlier, there would be in just a few days time), it’s still a great milestone that’s worthy of acknowledging. A band making a celebrated return (again) at a storied baseball stadium that itself was seeing happier days (until it didn’t).
The biggest impact playing in Fenway probably had? Besides the sound issues I mentioned up top, I wonder if it added nerves. I know this is probably a shock but I’ve never been in a popular and successful rock band nor have I been a professional baseball player but I imagine both find comfort in the familiar: playing at your home stadium is preferable to the road like playing in a familiar amphitheater you’ve played 10 times over the years is preferable than playing in a stadium that’s not a traditional music venue.
Throw in the fact that it was the start of their first full tour since the reunion and, yeah, I can see Phish being a bit intimidated and even a little in awe when they took the stage.
It would be 10 years before they returned to Fenway, though, and when they did, it would be with much more fanfare and turn into more of an adventure, which I’ll get to next time…