It was during “Run Like an Antelope,” when the big guy in the Godsmack shirt behind me finally freaked out.
Anyone sitting near him on night three of Phish’s nine shows, which they play over three weekends at the Sphere in Las Vegas, had seen the omens coming hours before: They had never seen Phish live; a friend had dragged him along; he was into metal, but was open-minded. During the break between the first and second sets, he told us how impressed he was, how he had no idea what to expect – and how captivated he was by the visuals. Until then, they had offered a deep excursion into the band’s history, a homage to their lighting designer, which the man personally controlled, and the story of a newly hatched chick that becomes a bird and flies out into the world – all 17,000 people in the dome saw through their eyes. (If that doesn’t make sense, don’t panic, I’ll get back to it.) But then, during “Antelope,” as guitarist Trey Anastasio climbed up the fretboard and feverishly built to a climax alongside his collaborators – keyboardist Page McConnell, drummer Jon Fishman and bassist Mike Gordon – the guy just started screaming. Uncontrolled.
I turned around and saw pure joy on a face that hours before I would have bet belonged to someone who had gotten lost on the way to the WWE event down the street. On the outside, this man could hardly have had less in common with the Phish cliché of peace, love and tie-dye – and yet he was now almost literally bouncing around. The climax hit, and as any Phish fan knows, the song briefly threatened to collapse before Anastasio brought the chicky-chicky guitar riff back in.
This is how Phish gets you
“Rye, rye Rocco,” Anastasio said from the stage.
“Holy fuck,” I heard from behind.
That’s how it happens. That’s how they get you.
MOMENTS LIKE THAT are what keep Phish fans hooked and coming back again and again – even though the band is one of the most divisive acts in rock after a career spanning more than 40 years. Anyone who is a fan remains a fan for life: every absurd song lyric, every deep-sea dive into a world full of terms that mean nothing to outsiders (the rhombus! Gamehendge! The Rescue Squad!), every unexpected set highlight means another rush of dopamine that just makes you want to check the calendar to see if you can still make it to the next two weekends in Vegas. If you’re not a fan, you’ve probably stopped reading long ago – but if anyone is, you’re probably thinking, “Isn’t this the band that plays forever and three days, with fans that smell like patchouli? Ugh!”
First, there was not a hint of patchouli in the Sphere. Second, if you fall into that second category, you’re missing out on one of the most incomparable stories in rock history – a band in their fourth decade that’s still as absurdly creative as it was in its early years, taking on the world’s biggest screen in ways it was probably never intended for. The Sphere — the $2.3 billion, 17,000-seat dome that has rapidly become the world’s most talked-about concert venue — was built for spectacle. Their 160,000 square foot LED screen envelops the audience like a digital sky and can do it all: hyper-realistic landscapes, total sensory overwhelm. A place where every moment can be perfectly pre-programmed, every action locked to a click track, every image synchronized to the millisecond.
But that’s not how Phish works. While most other acts use the Sphere to deliver precisely planned experiences, Phish – now even more so than their four shows there in 2024 – treat it like another instrument they can bend, stretch and occasionally break. Instead of fitting into rigid procedures, they built a sphere show that remains improvised at its core. Songs expanded and contracted. Setlists changed. And the most remarkable thing: the visuals followed in real time.
Kuroda and the Living Lights
When Madison Square Garden billionaire James Dolan imagined what would shine on the screen of his home, he hardly expected that one of the greatest images on the giant LEDs would be a replica of a stage lighting console: Why use the Sphere to reconstruct something that already exists in the real world?
But for this residency, that’s exactly what Phish did with their legendary lighting designer Chris Kuroda: Every night so far, virtual versions of his iconic lights – which have made for some of the best sets in the world in regular venues like arenas and amphitheaters – dance across the 366-foot-tall, 516-foot-wide curved screen. They bounce, shift, multiply in a way that literally defies gravity – because there is no gravity to stop them. Even more impressive: Kuroda is actually sitting at the desk and controlling everything himself. No AI, no pre-stored processes – just a human creating interactive, improvised art in real time on a device that was never designed for that purpose.
Phish’s penchant for the bizarre and surreal was not neglected in these shows either (a band equally influenced by Rush, the Grateful Dead, the Talking Heads and Frank Zappa can hardly be squeezed into anything ordinary). The trilogy of shows opened with an animated suite that first explored the Vermont barn where the band is known to record the majority of their albums, before segueing into a truck ride through bits of the band’s history – set to the relatively recent song “Evolve.” Eventually, the audience found themselves in an animated “Phish Hotel” while “Wolfman’s Brother” grooved: a pool breakfast mashup, a disco elevator with a shredding Anastasio and a clawing cat, and a weightless bowling alley.
Hot dogs in space
And all in the first ten minutes of the first show. Later highlights included a hot dog spaceship flying through constellations made of chicken nuggets (“2001”, night one), a storm of Dixi toilets sweeping through replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe (“Free”, night two), and the aforementioned bird life to “Sigma Oasis” on night three – a thunderous song with the refrain “You’re already there” that becomes even more touching when hearing about breathtaking ones Mountain landscapes glide, rushing with the wind and smiling at death.
OUTSIDE THE SPHERE, as expected, the ecosystem surrounding Phish remained intact. Die-hard fans populated the fan-run “Shakedown Street” during the day (where vendors at the Tuscany Hotel sell T-shirts and memorabilia with Phish puns) and the fan art exhibit at the Brooklyn Bowl. These people may have left the weekend most excited about the visuals for “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent” > “Fly Famous Mockingbird” – some of the Phish world’s most beloved characters in brightly colored dance animations.
But the truly connecting moments didn’t always require the most elaborate images. “Waste” was accompanied by a neon forest that was featured at the band’s first Sphere residency; the visual was as simple as the song’s chorus – “Come waste your time with me” – and hit just as straight to the heart. A spontaneous moment on night three, when the band spotted Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh in the audience, led to the snap decision to cover Walsh’s James Gang classic “Walk Away” – with a kaleidoscopic view of the band members on the screen, a rare use of live video montage rather than brain-melting animation. And on night two, the band opened their encore with the Phish premiere of “Brief Time,” an Anastasio solo song that throws all Phish clichés overboard: In a simple, non-jammy, imageless two minutes, Anastasio sang hauntingly about the truths of life: “It’s such a beautiful world, and such a brief time.”
For everyone in the room, that was a more weighty statement than it sounds: the admission that the ability to create beauty never expires – and that it is a choice you can make, even after 40 years, in the short time you have.
Holy fuck
Holy fuck.
Setlists (via Phish.net):
April 16th
Set One:
“Evolve”
“Wolfman’s Brother”
“Foam”
“Theme From the Bottom”
“Rift”
“Scents and Subtle Sounds” > “Steam”
“Split Open and Melt”
Set Two:
“Everything’s Right”
“Down With Disease”
“Twenty Years Later”
“Gotta Jibboo!”
“Lifeboy”
“You Enjoy Myself” > “Also Sprach Zarathustra”
Encore:
“Space Oddity”
“Harry Hood”
April 17th
Set One:
“Free”
“Birds of a Feather”
“Martian Monster”
“Guelah Papyrus”
“Divided Sky”
“Hey Stranger.”
“Garbage”
“Limb by Limb”
“Suzy Greenberg”
Set Two:
“No Men in No Man’s Land” > “Light”
“Joy”
“Mike’s Song” > “I Am Hydrogen” > “Weekapaug Groove”
“Beneath a Sea of Stars Part 1” > “Most Events Aren’t Planned”
Encore:
“Brief Time”
“Carini”
April 18th
Set One:
“Buried Alive”
“AC/DC bag”
“Reba”
“Colonel Forbin’s Ascent” > “Fly Famous Mockingbird”
“Sigma Oasis”
“Walk Away”
“Bathtub Gin”
Set Two:
“Oblivion”
“Simple”
“Tweezer”
“Waste”
“Twist”
“Run Like an Antelope”
Encore:
“I Am the Walrus”
“Tweezer Reprise”
