Phish
Jones Beach Theater
Wednesday, July 4

Better than: Putting the freak flag in permanent cold storage.

"Goddard College!" Phish leader Trey Anastasio called out between verses during "Alumni Blues," the band's opening number at Jones Beach on Wednesday night, a rare onstage shout-out to the band's Vermont alma mater. Anastasio wrote the doofy blues-funk number around the time he transferred into Goddard in the mid-1980s, a school with self-structured curriculums that make Hampshire look comparatively square. The band members threw themselves into their obsessions, studiously following their curiosities through jazz, fugues, classic rock, improvised music, and intense practice routines, absorbing the idyllic weirdness of the place as they formed their identity. In a sense, Goddard thusly became the spiritual alma mater for pretty much every jam band formed in the past 20 years. Nobody to blame or credit but the wonders of progressive liberal education.

Wednesday night, during the second of two sold-out shows at Jones Beach, the Vermont quartet celebrated the birth of the nation during a pleasant evening at Robert Moses's cement and sandstone jewel, but mostly showed why they're Goddard's most distinguished alums (give or take David Mamet). Long before it became fashionable to hate Phish—or even to like them—the band was blessed with a profound and palpable outsiderness, which they channeled into their music and made a successful career. This outsiderness keeps away many and draws others defiantly close. During the two set, three-hour show, the band did almost nothing to invite in the former, plenty to please the latter (plenty to confound them, too), and continued their decades-long battle with whether or not to let their freak flags fly. Sometimes, they flew.

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Trey at MSG last year

I got in a lot of trouble the last time I suggested you go see Phish at least once, but the suggestion stands, and as 2010 morphs into 2011 you'll have three chances: They're playing Madison Square Garden December 30-31, plus an apparently wildly anomalous January 1st gig, presumably because the chance to play on 1-1-11 was too good to pass up.

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Despite launching himself off of Jones Beach's dauntingly tall mezzanine and falling 25 feet into the seats below, the Phish fan who was carted out of the band's Wednesday show by paramedics will live. The Post is reporting that the guy, who remains formally unidentified (Gothamist pegs him as 25-year-old Luke Southworth), came away from his plunge with relatively minor wounds. "It's really a miracle, man. He's just got some broken bones, but he's going to be fine," a friend said. Southworth, or whoever he is, remains sedated at Nassau University Medical Center, and his pals profess ignorance as to whether or not he was on drugs when he decided to push through the crowd and leap. A happier outcome than the one today out in California, that's for sure. Let's not do this anymore, OK everyone? [NYP]

Click on the photo that is being linked to there at your own peril.

In what the New York Post is already dubbing a "horror leap," a 25-year-old man at last night's Phish concert dove headfirst off a 25-foot Jones Beach balcony, landing "with a sickening thud" on the seats below. It happened around 10 p.m., during an intermission, which meant that hundreds of the roughly ten thousand people in attendance saw the fall. Said one witness: "I was sitting two rows behind from where he hit. He hit a chair and he broke the back of another chair. There was blood everywhere. Everyone was yelling, 'Clear the way! Clear the way!' "

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Props to Zach for intentionally running the words "Phish in a barrel" on this website. Starting today, the legendary jam band wanks three nights away at Jones Beach.

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