For as long as I’ve ever known anything about Phish, I’ve known that they have a tradition of donning a musical costume when they gig on Hallowe’en, which means they reserve the middle of three sets on the special night to perform an entire album by another artist. In the past they have done albums by The Beatles, The Talking Heads, The Velvet Underground, and several others. I had experienced this wonder once before, when Phish covered Exile On Main Street by The Rolling Stones at a blazing weekend retreat in Indio, California, and on October 31st, 2014 I had the great joy to do it again, this time in Las Vegas.

As the calendar would have it, the Hallowe’en show was the first of Phish’s three-night Vegas run, and when the lights went down in the MGM Grand arena on that Friday evening the energy in the room was crispy. The room was littered with remarkable costumes - of course Phish fans do it up right for Hallowe’en - including m’lady and I who were a bona fide hit in our googly-eye covered formal wear. Our eyes certainly turned a lot of heads and it’s a good thing too; m’lady and I had spent countless hours sitting at our kitchen table glueing even more countless googly eyes of all sizes to pants, shirts, skirts, shoes, hats, and so much more. I mean we beat a path to Michael’s craft store and bought them clean out every time they received another shipment. In the end we looked spectacular, and every move we made sounded like the waves of the ocean. We posed for many pictures and didn’t even have to wear makeup or masks (always my primary goal in choosing a costume).

I guess I should back up a little. Part of Phish’s Hallowe’en tradition is the Phishbill, a mockup of a Broadway handbill that is given out to fans when they enter the venue. The Phishbill is always full of weird inside jokes and funny oddities, but it’s main purpose is to tell everyone what album will be covered that evening, a secret that the band always manages to keep well under wraps until the doors open on the 31st. Now, these Hallowe’en shows are very, very special events for die-hard fans, each of whom spends months hoping and dreaming that their favourite band will cover an album by their other favourite band, (whomever that may be).

And then there was this one time (in 2013, the year before this story) when Phish had either the clever idea or the unholy audacity to use their musical costume as an opportunity to debut their very own new and at-the-time still unreleased album, Wingsuit. And while some people liked the idea many others were downright pissed. I mean, you never saw people so angry at something they love so much. It was like watching your two year old spit up all over your favourite Pollock print.

Anyway, the handout we had all been handed as we entered the MGM arena on this evening was pushing the idea that Phish would be covering something called The Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House, inciting much speculation amongst the pre-show crowd.

I had never heard of this Chilling, Thrilling thing but by the time the band started their first set I had overheard and butted in to enough conversations to learn that it was a Walt Disney release from the ’60’s and it was a spoken word album meant to spook out children, if only a little. But from what I understood there was no actual music on the record…

The band loaded the first set with Hallowe’en-y songs, starting with Buried Alive into Ghost, Big Black Furry Creatures From Mars, Lawn Boy, and Wolfman’s Brother, though I suppose if it wasn’t Hallowe’en these rather standard plays wouldn’t have seemed particularly Hallowe’en-y at all. Regardless, during the setbreak the speculation over the pending set picked up where it had left off, amplified by the stage crew who busily cleared the band’s gear and set up an epic haunted stage complete with tombstones, crypts, and a haunted house.

And it was from atop this haunted house (and while made up as well-dressed zombies) that Phish would deliver what would come to be one of their most-loved Hallowe’en sets of all, which was indeed a series of jams played along to keyboard-triggered samples of the Chilling, Thrilling Disney album, a soliloquative narrative delivered by a female voice reciting nearly-creepy monologues following such themes as Your Pet Cat, Martian Monsters, and The Birds (They Attack!). It’s odd that the band got so many cosmic high-fives for jamming grooves along to a record while getting dissed so hard the year before for presenting an entire album of original songs with well thought out arrangements, but really, the proof is in the puddin’: The Chilling Thrilling set truly is exponentially better than the Wingsuit set, and I ain’t no Wingsuit hater*.

After all that it’s easy to forget (unless you were there) that there was an excellent third set taboot, one that was bursting with ragers, but the biggest joke of the whole affair actually came in the form of the first half of the two-song encore: Phish’s only time ever covering Leonard Cohen’s Is This What You Wanted, a song/question clearly aimed at all the Wingsuit critics from last year.

And the other song of the encore? Frankenstein, obviously**. With keyboardist Page McConnell playing the keytar, obviously. What a cool band.

Obviously.

*Never mind that when they actually released the album they had changed the title to Fuego, and no, they weren’t fooling anybody.

**Yet another hint of Hallowe’ening that doesn’t smell a whiff like Hallowe’en when it’s played on any other night.

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