It's been a strong fall tour so far and this cool Saturday night in north Georgia was no exception. Its pleasures may have tended more toward strong setlist calls than deep and transcendent jamming, but so what, really. When the big jam finally came, it came with a hurricane-force fourth-quarter "Simple" that ranks with the best Phish music of 2016.

There is no original riff in the Trey Anastasio songbook that detonates a live audience like the elementary major-chord fingering exercise that begins "Simple." A versatile song that the band has been comfortable taking very far out since its infancy, when "Simple" shows up in the second set, especially late, it's usually a call for exploration. Last night, with its great future still unwritten, Mike sustained the patient with some high-end color until Trey found a little phrase he liked. You might recognize it from the "Down with Disease" this year at Dick's. He repeated it persistently until the troops fell in line. Page added some classic-rock backbeat behind it, and then somebody in the control room smashed the JAM button.

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[Editor's Note: For this recap, please welcome 20 year vet and longtime .netter and RMPer Chris Cagle (@OrangeSox), who offers this recap of last night's show -- AK]

A week ago, while Phish premiered “Petrichor” before the audience in Charleston, one of .net's finest, @ucpete, performed his first marriage ceremony, betrothing @telaree and me, having graciously answered a call made here in the .net forum for an officiant of a wedding in a redwood fairy ring in Marin County, California. In his wonderful presentation to our families, he necessarily mentioned the band and of course .net, reflecting the important role they've played in our union. After all, it was a jaunt to Deer Creek in 2012 that solidified our relationship, since maintained by a half dozen subsequent trips to see the band together, including the soggy, underrated run here in 2013. So it was only natural that we would make a return trip to Alpharetta and call it our honeymoon.

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What changed, starting in 2009, is this clarity of vision and this clear understanding of what a precious gift it was that the four of us met. It took a couple of years after that for things to get rolling completely, but we’ve realized how important this is for everyone — the way that the primary relationship between the four of us is nurtured, and the way that ripples out into the rest of our families and the community. We communicate. The four of us are texting many times a day.

Fish used to describe our improv in terms of this ‘lifeboat’ concept: If somebody falls in the water, everyone reaches over and pulls him back in. I know I’ve experienced that myself personally with the band, where the other guys have pulled me back in. After Lockn’ and Dick’s, I was thinking about our crew who never come out and take a bow, but who literally make the show happen, and all of the people in the audience who are beloved members of our Phish family, and the big boat philosophy is more appropriate than ever. It's a big boat.... There's room for everyone.

Trey in the upcoming issue of Relix

[Editor's Note: Please welcome professional musician Hunter Sholar, user @Guyute1976, who offers this recap of last night’s show. -CD]

I can’t start writing this blog post without giving a little background about myself and how I became a Phish fan. I’m a late bloomer with this band. I went to Northwestern University and was a Horn Performance Major, and I was surrounded by so many talented musicians with eclectic musical tastes. Some of my closest friends, including Drew Hitz (who many of you know), were diehard Phanatics, but during my undergrad years (1995-1999), I didn’t relate to them, somehow. Nope, I waited until the band had broken up, and then fell hook, line and sinker for them in the summer of 2005, and saw my first show on 3/8/2009 at the Hampton Coliseum. I missed the live pre-Phish 3.0 era, but thanks to their immense catalog of live shows, I’ve had plenty of time to do my research and play catch-up.

Wednesday 10/19/2016 marked my 29th show, and it was significant on so many levels – I’ll get to that in a minute. Since seeing my first show, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Trey. I’m a member of The Nashville Symphony Orchestra, where I play the Horn, and I actually met him after one of my symphony concerts at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center a few years ago, just a few blocks away from Ascend Amphitheater. Our mutual friend, Don Hart (composer/arranger who orchestrates Trey’s orchestral music), brought him in while the band was in town recording Wingsuit. Why is this significant, you might ask? Don and his family were attending the Ascend shows, and this was perhaps part of the reason our guys really stepped it up both nights.

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[Editor's Note: We welcome Craig Hillwig back for this recap. –CD]

Phish returned to Nashville last night for the first of two shows at the still sparkling-new Ascend Amphitheater, a 6,800 capacity open air venue along the banks of the Cumberland River. That Phish is back in Nashville is wholly unsurprising, given that much of Phish’s 2016 release Big Boat was recorded in several local studios. It also seems to be a popular stop among fans with its combination of authentic southern cuisine and honky tonk night life. Luckily for us, the weather was perfect with ample sunshine, temperatures in the mid-80s, and a comfortable breeze. We settled in at Puckett’s to pre-game with some bourbon, brew and ‘que.

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By all accounts, last night's show should have been the sleeper of tour. It was a Sunday show (Friday is for the fans, Saturday is for the bros, Sunday is for the band), it is early in the tour, Phish is touring new material, and it was Phish's first time playing Jacksonville. Not counting Miami, the last time Phish played in Florida was 1999 for Big Cypress. And the last "normal show" in Florida that wasn't in American Airlines Arena was in Fall 1996, in Gainesville. Twenty years later, Floridians were palpably excited: several of us trekked north and many east, joining untold hordes journeying down from Charleston, awaiting the magic of the one, two punch we were all sure would happen. We certainly had the feeling that you had a good chance of catching "It" or that "It" could happen at any moment.

Alas, Phish turned in a performance that, setting aside a few moments of brilliance, fell mostly between adequate and competent. There were, thankfully, several high points and between them, mostly tightropes, in that they were still highs, but they gained their stability from the peaks to which they were tied. For many, Jacksonville felt like it was just not the show they were hoping to see. Almost 20 years to the day after my first Phish show, filled to the brim with my jaded-vetted-ness, I walked into a crowd whose average age was probably 10 years below mine. But this show was very different for me, personally, in that it was another first: the first show for my daughter Jillian, on her 9th birthday no less. I could step you through the setlist with a few creative adjectives, but on the long drive home last night, I realized the real story was the juxtaposition of the show abutting my twenty year Phishiversary with her first show. Experiencing the show through her eyes was maybe the best thing that could’ve happened to me last night.

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Welcome to the 244th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the middle of five MJMs both in placement and in difficulty this month. The winner will receive an MP3 download courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam clip. Each person gets one guess – if no one guesses correctly, I will post a hint on Tuesday, after which each person gets one more guess before I reveal the correct answer on Wednesday around 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!

Hint:

Answer: It was a wire job, but @experiencechuck managed to pull out his first win at the buzzer by figuring out that the picture of Mark Messier hoisting the cup was taken at Madison Square Garden, where Phish played the 12/30/98 Squirming Coil. For those that haven't heard that set (or if it's been a while), be sure to check it out – the full band ambient fog swallows "Coil" whole before moving into -> "Slave" to cap a five song second set. Stick around for the encore too, which features a pre-Undermind (and the only non-3.0) "Grind" and an epic "Possum" taboot. Stop by Monday, when the MJM steps up yet another notch in difficulty.

[This recap, like last night's, is also courtesy of dot net user Zach Stearns (@StepIntoTheZeezer).]

Always nice on a second night of a run, having settled in and gained a little more familiarity with the the city, the venue, the lot, etc. Hope the band feels similarly.

I'm pretty sure I've gained 20 pounds since arriving Friday morning, as all I've done in the waking hours is eat and drink. Will night two of tour bring the heat and help me shed some of this newfound weight? This story and more to come.

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[This recap is courtesy of Zach Stearns (@StepIntoTheZeezer), a NYC area phan whose girlfriend thinks he would leave her for Trey. Zach loves "Tweezer" and has been told he has nice scruff and a great head of hair. -lbc]

Welcome to fall tour everyone! I'd like to start this off with a PSA to all the people who enjoy talking at shows-any shows: Please don't do that. Go outside. Thank you.

This was my first time to Charleston and things seem pretty great so far. Beautiful scenery, amazing food, so far, and the venue doesn't seem to have a bad seat. Let's take a look at things phishy.

Everyone has lots of questions heading into this run. And by everyone, I mean me. Will there be horns? Will the band make any hints at the Halloween album? How will the new songs that haven't been played yet be received by the crowd? How will "Petrichor" translate live? Will Trey wear expensive clothing? Only one way to find out...

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Your headphones don't deceive you – there is no audio in this clip.

Welcome to the 243rd edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday. The winner will receive an MP3 download courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam clip. Each person gets one guess – if no one guesses correctly, I will post a hint on Tuesday, after which each person gets one more guess before I reveal the correct answer on Wednesday around 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!

Answer: Jeez you guys are much better at the video-no-audio format than I could have ever imagined. This week it took @obliviousfool17 a mere 25 minutes to identify the 11/2/96 Crosseyed and Painless from the Coral Sky DVD, collecting his second MJM win, both this year. Stay tuned for next week's MJM, where the difficult steps up yet another notch – and I mean it this time!

READ THE BOOK, SPIN THE VINYL, PLAY THE GAME!
THE PHISH COMPANION / BIG BOAT / SUBTLE SOUNDS

Are you a Phish fan? Do you know your Phish facts? Do you know the band’s music so well that you can call a song on the first note? Come join us on October 15th at Nectar's in Burlington from 2p-5p. Lots of great prizes will be awarded to the winners including a chance to win a pair of tickets to the future Phish concert of your choice.

The WaterWheel Foundation and The Mockingbird Foundation are teaming up with Nectar’s for an afternoon of Phish trivia, Phish vinyl, and a Phish gameshow - “Subtle Sounds” - in the style of “Name That Tune”.

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Welcome to the 242nd edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the easiest MJM of October. The MJM is pleased to introduce last week's and three-time MJM winner @FunkyCFunkyDo, who was so eager to try his hand at clip selection (despite not yet having achieved MJM Emeritus status), that he forewent his winning code from last week to pick this week's puzzle. Thus, the winner of MJM242 will receive two codes good for the MP3 downloads of any two shows, courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of each of the two mystery jam clips, which are connected by a theme. Each person gets one guess – if no one guesses correctly, I will post a hint on Tuesday, after which each person gets one more guess before I reveal the correct answer on Wednesday around 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!

Answer: Congrats to @runlikecarini, who saw right through @FunkyCFunkyDo and his '03 addiction obsession (better word choice) to snag two codes in identifying the pair of Shoreline '03 masterpieces: 7/9/03 Bathtub Gin, and 7/10/03 DEGvided Sky. Though we hadn't yet met, Funky and I both attended these shows in our younger days (he was in high school; I had just graduated college) – in fact, I was at Funky's first four shows, and we've been at 20 of the same shows overall (and have met up at nearly every West Coast tour stop since Fall '14). Thanks to Funky for the fun but manageable MJM, and stay tuned on Monday when the MJM keeps it rolling and takes a small step up in difficulty.

To save the file, right-click on the player above while the track is playing.

Photo taken during the (600 millisecond) clip:

Welcome to the 241st edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the final and most difficult contest of the month. The winner will receive an MP3 download courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam clip and the photo taken during the clip. Each person gets one guess – if no one guesses correctly, I will post a hint on Tuesday, after which each person gets one more guess before I reveal the correct answer on Wednesday around 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!

Answer: Congratulations to now three-time winner, @FunkyCFunkyDo, who laughed at the "most difficult" qualifier and identified the 7/15/16 The Line in the first hour the MJM was posted. Yes, @FunkyCFunkyDo was at that show – I saw him there in person – but no, he didn't know I had taken the picture. As mentioned in a comment I made below, I thought I was being crafty by running to the Honey Buckets right when "The Line" started, but Trey planned it all along and taunted me as I stepped to the (long bathroom) line. @FunkyCFunkyDo has opted to exchange his code for the chance to try to stump everyone next week, so stay tuned Monday when we'll play for two codes, and we'll see how funky the first and easiest MJM of the month will be.

The Mockingbird Foundation and The Phish Companion, 3rd Edition, will get some news coverage over the radio waves (and through the interconnected series of tubes) on Tuesday morning, courtesy of Vermont Public Radio.

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To save the file, right-click on the player above while the track is playing.

Welcome to the 240th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday. The winner will receive an MP3 download courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of each of the two mystery jam clips, which are connected by a theme. Each person gets one guess – if no one guesses correctly, I will post a hint on Tuesday, after which each person gets one more guess before I reveal the correct answer on Wednesday around 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!

Hint:

Answer: Congrats to @dbertsch, who enters a class of now 39 multiple MJM winners with his second win and LivePhish code, both on multiclip MJMs. He must have recognized the picture taken of the HP Hood milk plant in Burlington, VT, just across the street from where the band lived when they wrote a song about Mr. Hood himself. Specials thanks to Anne Rothwell and the kind folks at thehoodplant.com for allowing me to use one of their photos for this week's hint – it's really cool that they acknowledge Phish on their site taboot: check it out! @dbertsch correctly identified the 7/18/03 Harry Hood (from the jam) and the 3/14/92 Harry Hood (from the improvisational intro) – two clips that, in combination with the versions from the past couple years, highlight the storied improvisational history of this fan-favorite tune since 1985. Stay tuned for next week's MJM, the final and most difficult MJM of September (before we reset the difficulty meter to "low" the week after), which will be an experiment with yet another new format.