Quick - in two minutes or less, name your ten favorite Phish jams.

Members of the Phish.net working group did just that over email. It's an interesting exercise - since you are answering quickly, you bring all of your subjective biases, feelings and reasoning specific to that particular moment in time to the table. Every single one of us who answered found ourselves in disbelief that we forgot about certain jams that others had on their lists. Many of us wanted to go back and change some of our votes, but for our purposes here I've held all of us to our initial lists. In other words, our individual lists came from the heart, rather than our heads - we tried to keep this as spontaneous as possible.

While the individual lists are very subjective and compiled without much conscious thought, in the aggregate the data coalesces into a very interesting list of some all time great Phish jams. Fifteen members of the working group submitted lists; 86 individual jams were named. Since we had no rules other than "favorite jams" some of the submissions included more than one song - the 12/31/95 Mike's Groove, for example. The jams mentioned spanned from 1992 to 2012, with the notable absences of any tunes from 1996, 2009 and 2010. Shown below is a graph charting total mentions of jams per year:

As you can see, 1997 has the most top jams, followed by 1995. I think we all could have predicted that. Personally I probably would have put 1998 (and possibly 1999) ahead of 1994, but the compiled data disagrees.

Note that the above graph is only counting each mention once; if we count multiple votes for the same jam a somewhat different picture emerges:

Here we see 1995 pulling ahead, indicating that there were more overlapping votes than in 1997 - in other words there were fewer total jams from 1995 that people put on their lists compared with 1997, but more of us agreed that the 1995 tunes were in the top ten.

I'm sure most of you are anxious by now to see the top jams we came up with. Before we get there, I want to reiterate the disclaimer about how this was done. A group of mostly 30-something and 40-something dudes who almost all started seeing Phish in the 90s wrote down their top ten jams, trying to be as spontaneous as possible. There are many many biases in this data. If your favorite jam isn't in this list, please don't fret, it isn't meant to be in any way definitive, just a compilation of a pretty fun little exercise. I can assure you, while all of these are great jams, Phish has easily played 10 times this number that on any given day could be called a top jam. So without further ado, here are the top ten jams (with ties) from the 2 minute favorite jam experiment:

Rank

Song

Date

Year

# of votes

1

David Bowie

12/29/94

1994

9

2

YEM

12/9/95

1995

8

3

Roses Are Free

4/3/98

1998

5

3

Bathtub Gin

7/29/98

1998

5

5

Bathtub Gin

8/17/97

1997

4

5

Halley's Comet

11/22/97

1997

4

5

Piper

2/16/03

2003

4

5

Piper

6/19/04

2004

4

9

Big Black Furry Antelope

3/13/92

1992

3

9

Fixin' To Die Fest

11/30/94

1994

3

9

Tweezer

12/2/95

1995

3

9

Mike's Groove

12/31/95

1995

3

9

Runaway Jim

11/29/97

1997

3

9

Rock and Roll

8/5/11

2011

3

First off - if there is a version here you haven't heard, stop what you are doing and listen - they are all amazing jams that will make your day a thousand times better if you are hearing them for the first time. And I promise you, this blog post is nowhere near as interesting as any one of these tunes.

As I was putting this together, I naturally assumed that 1.0 jams would dominate the list, and they do, but not more than one would expect give the increased number of shows Phish played in the 1990s. I was pleasantly surprised to see a 3.0 tune squeak into the top ten, and a great jam it is. And I want to reiterate, these were our spontaneous favorite jams, it is not a canonical list of the best jams. That said, when we saw the results most of us were pretty satisfied that we had a damn good top ten list.

The list does make one thing clear - for the group that voted, 1994-1998 (but not 1996!) was the golden age of Phish. Let's hope for another one starting with the New Year's run!

Edit: By (semi-)popular demand, here is the entire list of jams that received at least one vote.

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