Rescue Squad

• Performances
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  • Phish
  • Fish
  • Mike
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History

This was a spontaneous ditty Trey invented while stranded on a suspended platform in Madison Square Garden at the end of a New Year’s Eve encore. Each band member had been on a separate platform going up and down throughout the second set and encore. Near the end, three of the platforms lowered again to stage level… but Trey’s stayed 40 feet or so in the air.

“Tweezer Reprise” puttered out to silence, and Trey picked up with this “really strange but it’s kinda cool” reaction. He used “rescue” only 17 words into the 74-word bit, as crew were raised on Fish’s platform and he was transferred, then ended with a refrain of “rescue squad” while playing the drums as he was lowered back to safety.

Video by monihampton

It was a poetic end to 2019: a technical flub causing a momentary crisis that was quickly fixed, ending with an underwhelming whimper, and a wonderfully subtle meme for shirts and other merch. And it was all wonderfully oblivious to the dumpster-fire-filled several years that would follow 2019, from the pandemic and racial reckonings, to an attempted coup and economic malaise. It’s tempting to long for the naive simplicity of two techs on an adjoining platform; rewatching Trey’s momentary anxiety is like peeking back to a time of innocence.

Like several other momentary larks (“Wormtown” comes to mind), “Rescue Squad” was teased several times later in the year. But the best tease wasn’t of the song itself but a promo video “43 Weeks Later”, as though Trey had not been rescued and instead spent the start of the pandemic still stuck on the platform. (Can I get a spatchcock?)

Video by Trey Anastasio

The sobriquet has since been applied to the string quartet (two violins, a viola, and a cello) that first performed with Trey during the 2020 Beacon Jams. The Rescue Squad Strings include violinists Katie Kresek and Maxim Moston, violist Rachel Golub, and cellist Anja Wood.

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