SET 1: First Tube > Wolfman’s Brother, Back on the Train, Beauty of My Dreams, Vultures, The Inlaw Josie Wales, Billy Breathes, Llama, Lawn Boy, Runaway Jim

SET 2: Roses Are Free > Piper -> Guy Forget -> When the Circus Comes > Camel Walk, Driver, David Bowie

ENCORE: Waste

Listen

It was a real gamble – no pun intended – to schedule a show the night after the big Vegas bender. The band actually sounds surprisingly fresh though; based on the audio evidence, I’d guess they were more hungover on 9/30 than tonight. Sure, they slip back into default setlisting mode early on, and Trey’s rendition of Inlaw Josie Wales here definitely sounds like his fingers are recovering from several birthday beers. But eventually a Fall 2000 realization kicks in: we don’t know when we’ll be playing shows again, so we might as well make the most of it.

While the band didn’t offer any reason to think they were breaking up for good, there also wasn’t a finite time put on the length of the hiatus. So with the number of remaining dates fading fast, they were running out of spaces to play the final (for now) versions of some of the catalog’s midrange rarities. Hence, a bunch of songs closing 10-20 show gaps: Vultures, Billy Breathes, Llama, Runaway Jim, Roses, Waste, all of which we won’t hear from again until 2002-04.

It’s a move that spices up what could’ve been a sleepy show, particularly once they get to Llama, a much-needed jolt of the “put a plug up my ass” variety. Trey’s solo ascends into Thurston Moore territory, inspiring a round of mid-song band introductions and crowd instructions. It’s that zany, crazed energy from the end of the previous show, mixed with the sex/violence undertones of Trey’s dream as he tells audience members to slap themselves, slap each other, then get naked and “make love.”

But it’s after the break that they cross off their biggest bucket list item, finally handing an official debut to one of their most obscure songs: Guy Forget. Though it’s one of only two originals debuted over the course of the year, Guy Forget is a very old Phish song, a soundcheck favorite in the spirit of Dog Log or Shaggy Dog and a lyric without any set musical backing, like Kung or Catapult. But it’s even slighter than those juvenilia, just a cheery mantra of “I never met a man that I could not forget except for…Guy Forget!” over the jam of their choice. Hilariously, this composition* took five people to write, and it has, at times, made it into the lede of the tennis player’s Wikipedia entry.

Tonight’s premiere manages to freshen up one of the tour’s most tired songs, Piper, and it does a bang-up job, emerging as the jam loosens up from the initial build and giving another frantic jam some much needed levity. On the video (included as a bonus with the Live in Vegas DVD), they’re clearly cracking each other up with the deep pulls, and it’s very sweet – because they’re running out of opportunities to crack inside jokes with each other too. I swear it even upgrades the inevitable Trey keys segment, which he spends tapping out a playful melody on what sounds like synthesized wood blocks – the singularity point of Trey’s mini-kit and mini-keys distractions.

It’s a welcome dose of unadulterated Phish goofiness in the era’s final week, even if it sort of foreshadows similar maneuvers in the bizarre final set at Coventry. A normal band on the brink of a pause might get lost in its own navel, buckling under the weight of trying to pay self-tribute to its own history over the last run of shows. To be fair, maybe that’s what Phish was doing here too; it’s just that for them, summing up their musical contributions at the (temporary) finish line means finally unveiling the pun earworm about the Moroccan tennis player with the funny name.

* - As the phish.net song history extensively delineates, the “Will I dance on grave?” lines featured here were from a separate song entirely, though they do fit with Guy Forget’s spirit of glorious idiocy.