[Thank you to Nick Williams (user @TwiceBitten) for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

Phish, the band, what can you say? An American original: full of the awe, spectacle and big top excitement of P.T. Barnum’s circus; as majestic as the Rocky Mountains and as thick as New England’s forests; as powerful as the magic that existed in this land before the white man came, and sometimes as dark and sinister as the evil that those settlers brought with them (well maybe only on a headful). So what does such a band do after playing a show up in Bangor that seems to be unanimously regarded as IT? They had options: Phish could have tried for a repeat, stretching another jam past 30 minutes; they could have relied on a bunch of bust outs to keep the fans satisfied; they could have phoned it in even.

As the years have gone on, Phish has largely moved out of the shadow of the Grateful Dead and into their rightful place as the elder statesmen and torchbearers for a spark that was ignited almost 60 years ago in a series of rented halls around the Bay Area. While the Dead largely settled into a standardized show format less than halfway through their career, Phish has always been keen on freshening-up the flow of shows from night-to-night, tour-to-tour, era-to-era. Still, much as there are only 12 notes in western music, there are only so many types of Phish shows (not counting more subtle variations within each format).

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