With summer tour in full swing, on June 18th, 2009 m’lady and I started another little mini-run seeing Phish in the distant-but-drivable northeastern United States.

Our first stop was in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania. This was my first time seeing a show at the Star Lake Amphitheatre; we camped fairly close to the venue and I’m guessing we walked to the concert.

It’s always fun going to a show where there is no need to worry about a designated driver or getting anywhere but to your tent at the end of the night. It’s liberating and generally makes the entire experience that much more fun.

Surely that was the case here. The band was rockin’ and we had a great time. They opened with Golgi Apparatus (the first Phish song I had ever heard, courtesy of my friend’s stereo back in 1994) and followed with a little facemelting chord-riff gem called Chalkdust Torture. Then Bouncin’, Wolfman’s and one of their compositional masterpieces of randomicity, Divided Sky.

So good, and that only brings us to barely halfway into the first set!

The second set was equally fantastic, with a Harry Hood (a song that I’m always game for) and a set-closing You Enjoy Myself (ditto). The encore started with a couple of barbershop butcherings and continued on with a Bike/Hold Your Head Up sandwich before closing with their great cover of The Rolling Stones’ Loving Cup.

Ahhh.

At this show I bought what is still possibly the ugliest poster I’ve ever had framed, an infantile crayoned nightmare that is printed on stock so thick it couldn’t be rolled without creasing. I was pretty new to poster collecting at the time and of course I rolled it. Now I’m stuck with it forever.

At the end of the night we had a very, very liberating walk back to our tent-on-a-hill, as it proved to be pretty far away after all. In fact it was so far to the campground that when I think back on it now I’m surprised we’re not still walking.

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