These 2 Laguna Seca Daze (LSD) shows ended Phish's 45-show spring tour the way Phish loves to party, with music and camping! I was not there, but I feel it through the music.

The first night (5/28)'s first set sounded like an early 3.0 "festival" set, but that notion flew completely out the window from that night's 2nd set through the 2nd encore of 5/29. As mentioned, 5/28 is well known for the Reba and Claypool YEM, and the Ice and Tweezer are also fantastic. This night has a looseness and a playfulness that expresses the band's mood at the end of the first leg of a great tour before a 1.5 week break. Especially great are the Bowie, Melt, McGrupp, ANTELOPE, and Hood. And then a double encore! Because as Trey says before Hood, "This is the last bit before we go home and take a vacation, so we kind of feel like, keep playing, you know... what are we gonna do for the next 2 weeks?" This show is a great cap to a great month of Phish.

I love hunting for underrated gems and my hope was that this show would fit the bill. This being 1994, and following the more famous show from the day before with its top notch Reba and Les Claypool's guest appearance, this show has all the makings of hidden treasure.

I'll begin by noting that the recording is a soundboard with a pretty good mix. Opening the show, we get Divided Sky. I love this tune as an opener. It happened a few times in '94 but in general it's not too common. And what a powerful way to open things up as this version delivers. I'm a huge Guelah Papyrus fan, ever since my first listen on A Picture of Nectar, so this was nice to hear. Halley's, DWD, Sparkle, Julius, and I Didn't Know fill in the rest of the middle of the first set solidly, without any of them being remarkable.

And this leads to Bowie to close out set I. There are numerous excellent Bowies in '94, and while this one isn't quite on par with the grandest of them (see, e.g., 6.18.94, 11.26.94, 12.29.94), it holds its own. It patiently builds to its peak, exploring several places along the way. Mike is particularly prominent in the mix here. And then we do get the build, and it's fantastic and a prime example of Phish's tension and release jamming style during this time of their career.

Nellie Kane as a set II opener is an unusual and unexpected choice that is noteworthy for being the only time it's served in the set II opening slot. Things really get rolling with Melt. As with Bowie, '94 was a peak year for Melt and this version exemplifies this. It's a fairly standard take on the tune, which is to say it's excellent and is pretty nasty, just the way they should be. It includes some screaming and other vocals mixed into the heart of the jam and it's during this tune that having a soundboard to clearly hear what's going on is a bonus. The build up to the end is quite stretched out, with more screams coming in. And then it kind of disintegrates before concluding. It's quite an interesting version, worthy of a listen or two, or ten.

The following Esther is lovely, getting a well-deserved noteworthy notation. Chalk Dust comes next. This short version packs a punch. Horn is a treat. As is McGrupp, an always-welcome venture into Gamehenge. The Oh Kee Pah > Suzy combo is nice to hear here, even if the versions are merely solid. It reminds me of when I first started seeing the band and will always be my preferred lead in to Suzy.

Suzy ends and drops deftly into Antelope. While this one starts off a bit quietly, it quickly builds in intensity. Once going, this version smokes. Closing out the set is their fun a capella take on Free Bird.

It's always nice to have multiple tunes in the encore. But multiple encores? That's extremely rare. We get Wilson > Golgi > Rocky Top for Encore 1, all played admirably with a little misstep by Trey in the vocals during Golgi.

And then we get Encore 2, which starts off with a brief jam while Trey was off stage, followed by Hood and GTBT. The Hood is the highlight of the encores and this is solid version.

Overall this is a very solid show, with a few standout tunes but everything is played very well during one of the band's prime eras. This one is definitely worthy of your time.

Warm sunshine, wide open lawn with plenty of space to dance on, you can't ask for better outdoor venue conditions. This is the infamous Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey. Camping on the hill, music below.

The music was incredible. The boys we're coming off 3 nights at the Warfield and these were their last 2 shows of the tour I believe. The Bowie, Esther, Melt, and Freebird were memorable as well as the 5 song encore. This was summer 94 in a nutshell.

The whole weekend was really the ticket though. Felix raged the parking lot and if you know Felix's history, you know the hand of Bear was felt by all who partook. The night before, Fishman hung out at the campground drum circle hiding under a hoodie. This was quite a party all around and the band didn't disappoint. Take a listen to both these shows.

The couple of shows prior to this one contain some pretty high highs, and this cap to the '94 Spring Tour follows suit just swimmingly. Both sets and BOTH encores are played through and through with the conviction and tenacity of a band that questions what they're to do with themselves on their two-week break following 44 shows in two months. Set 1 highlights include a strong Divided Sky opener and a sparky Julius. David Bowie closer has a few nice moments that stray off the beaten path, but is relatively contained and straightforward in comparison to other heavy hitters from the era--including the performance from two nights earlier. Nevertheless, the band pounds this one home before taking a well-deserved set break.

Set 2 follows suit with a few particularly strong, if straightforward, performances of McGrupp and OKPC > Suzy. The easy highlights in this set, though, are a dark and dreary exploratory SOaM ("It gets bigger, and bigger as the song goes on!" Fishman incantates) and a fiery Antelope closer. This 15-minute Split Open and Melt (relatively long, even for jam-chart-worthy editions of the tune) covers plenty of ground in its footprint, at points seeming to open up the Earth and set hell loose before a fragmented and dynamically alternating approach to the literal screaming finish. Antelope on the other hand struck me upon first listen as a more musically rich and precise performance than some other notable iterations, traditionally speaking. Everyone is on fire here, but Trey is demonstrates especially disciplined and masterful playing. The near silent "Rye Rye Rocco" section is a lovely touch.

Slap on top of all that two encores totaling 5-6 songs, one of which is a beautiful Hood, and you've got yourself a damn fine conclusion to a great Spring tour.

This was my very first Phish show! I was in my last semester at SF State and really on the bus w/ the GD, getting ready to see 17 Dead shows that summer. But a pal & I were hearing the buzz about Phish and so we went down to the Warfield on May 27 to try to get tix to see them that night. There were no tix to be had, but someone had a pair for 5/29 in Laguna Seca and we were like, phuck it, why not, Monterey isn't that far...

I don't remember much about the earlier bands, except that I was not digging 4 Non Blondes and was glad I didn't join my pal in eating shrooms, haha... I hardly knew any Phish songs at this point, so it was pretty much all new to me and I therefore couldn't appreciate the magnitude of a Divided Sky opener, something I would then chase until Magnaball. I membah thinking David Bowie was a very weird song and that the show felt like it was kind of all over the place. It was the acapella Freebird closer and epic 5 song encore that made the biggest impression on me and I dug the GTBT finale.

And so I was left feeling like ok, these guys are kinda weird, but they definitely rock... I only saw one more show in 1994 at Kent State when I was back home in Cleveland in the fall and then I saw a handful of summer 95 shows only because they were convenient to hit in between west coast Dead & east coast Dead. I was not even connecting Phish as the Gen-X heirs to the psychedelic rock counterculture throne, not even after Jerry's untimely departure from the planet and the one fall 95 show I saw in San Diego. I was in a spiritual black hole that fall due to the demise of the GD and I just didn't know what to do... But then a friend in Cleveland invited me to join him for the MSG-Woostah run and I was like, "Phish is playing NYE at MSG?!" That seemed potentially significant since I had seen the GD there in '94 and been blown away by the energy from the NYC crowd.

And so it was that I was hooked by the Phish on 12/29/95 during the Real Gin jam & then reeled in for life by the Gamehendge Time Lab show where I grokked that the music gods had provided a next generation to carry the torch. I had visions of Bluto Blutarski in my head that night at MSG saying, "Over?! It's not over, nothing is over until we say it is!" Go Phish!