Phish at the Sphere: Weekend One Recap

It was during “Run Like an Antelope” when the giant guy in the Godsmack shirt behind me finally lost his shit. 

Those of us sitting near him at Night Three of Phish’s nine-show, three-weekend run at the Sphere in Las Vegas had seen the telltale signs coming hours before: He’d never seen Phish before; a friend brought him to the show; he was a metal guy but open-minded. At the break between the first and second sets, he talked with us about how impressed he was, how he didn’t know what to expect on his way in, and how compelled he was by the visuals, which by that point had included a deep dive into Phish history, an ode to their lighting designer propelled by the man himself, and a story of a newborn chick who becomes a bird, then flies free into the world, with all of the 17,000 people in the dome watching through her eyes (if none of that makes sense to you, don’t worry, I’ll come back to it). But during “Antelope,” as guitarist Trey Anastasio climbed up and up the neck of his guitar, frenetically building a crescendo along with his bandmates — keyboardist Page McConnnell, drummer Jon Fishman, and bassist Mike Gordon — the guy just started screaming, uncontrollably.

I looked back and saw pure joy on the same face that, hours before, I would have bet belonged to someone who got lost on his way to the WWE event up the street. This man could not, on the surface, have had less in common with the Phish peace-and-love-and-tie-dye stereotype, yet, here we was, bouncing nearly literally around the room. The climax hit, and as every Phish fan knows, nearly collapsed the song before Anastasio brought the chicky-chicky guitar back in.

 “Rye, rye Rocco,” Anastasio said from the stage. 

“Holy fuck,” I heard from behind me.

That’s how it happens. That’s how they get you.

IT’S MOMENTS LIKE this that hook Phish fans and keep them coming back — even as, more than 40 years into their career, they’re one of the most divisive bands in rock. If you’re a fan, you’re a fan for life: Every absurd lyric, every deep dive into words nearly meaningless to the uninitiated (the Rhombus! Gamehendge! The Rescue Squad!), every breakout set means another hit of the dopamine that has you checking your calendar right now to see if you can make the next two weekends of their run in Vegas. If you’re not a fan, well, you’ve probably stopped reading by now, but if you’re still here you’re probably thinking, “Aren’t they the band that just goes on and on forever, with all the fans who smell like patchouli? Ugh!”

First of all, there was no patchouli to be smelled anywhere in the Sphere; second of all, if you do fall into that latter category, you’re missing out on an unparalleled story in rock history: a band in its fourth decade still as ridiculously creative as it was in its early years, using the world’s biggest palette in ways that it likely was never intended to be used. The Sphere —  the $2.3 billion, 17,000-seat dome that has quickly become the most talked-about venue in the world — was built for spectacle. Its 160,000-square-foot LED screen wraps around the audience like a digital sky, capable of anything from hyper-real landscapes to full-blown sensory overload. It’s the kind of place where every moment can be perfectly preprogrammed, every cue locked to a click track, every visual synced to the millisecond.

Except, that’s not how Phish works. Where most other acts have used the Sphere to deliver precision-engineered experiences, Phish — even more now than during their previous, four-show stint in the venue in 2024 — treat it like another instrument, one they can bend, stretch, and occasionally break. Instead of locking into rigid sequences, they built a Sphere show that remained, at its core, improvisational. Songs expanded and contracted. Set lists shifted. And, most remarkably, the visuals followed along in real time.

When Madison Square Garden billionaire James Dolan dreamt about what would light up the screen at his venue, it’s unlikely that he thought one of the greatest visuals to grace the Sphere would be a re-creation of a band’s iconic lighting rig: Why use this technology to re-create something that actually exists in the world? 

But, for this run, Phish have invited their legendary lighting director Chris Kuroda to do just that: Each night so far, for at least a few songs, virtual versions of his iconic lights — already responsible for some of the best visuals in traditional venues like arenas and amphitheaters — prance up and down the 366-foot-tall, 516-foot-wide curved screen, bouncing and shifting and replicating in ways that literally defy gravity, because, clearly, there is no gravity holding them down anymore. Even more impressively, Kuroda is actually behind the console, running the whole thing — no AI or synced cheat codes here, just a human making interactive, improvised art in real time on a device that was likely never intended for that use.

Phish’s penchant for weirdness and surreal stuff wasn’t left behind for these shows, either (after all, a band equally influenced by Rush, the Grateful Dead, Talking Heads, and Frank Zappa wouldn’t likely be caged into anything resembling ordinary). The trio of shows opened with an animated suite that first explored the barn in Vermont where the band famously records most of its records, before segueing to a truck ride through ephemera from the band’s history as it noodled its way through the relatively recent jaunt “Evolve.” Eventually, the audience made its way into an animated “Phish Hotel” during a groovy “Wolfman’s Brother,” where we were greeted with a swimming pool/breakfast mash-up, a disco elevator featuring both a shredding Anastasio and a clawing cat, and a weightless bowling alley. 

That’s all in the first 10 minutes of the first show. Later moments through the run included a hot-dog spaceship making its way through constellations made of chicken nuggets (“2001,” Night One), a windstorm of portalets blasting through recreations of the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe (“Free” on Night Two), and the previously mentioned life of a bird on “Sigma Oasis,” on Night Three, a roaring blast of a song with the repeated lyric “You’re already there,” made even more poignant when flying over gorgeous mountainscapes, racing with the wind, and flirting with death.

OUTSIDE OF THE SPHERE, the ecosystem that supports Phish remained unsurprisingly intact. Die-hards populated the fan-propelled daytime “Shakedown Street” (where vendors at the Tuscany Hotel sell T-shirts and ephemera with Phish-related puns) and the fan art show at Brooklyn Bowl. Those folks likely left this weekend most impressed by the visuals during “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent” > “Fly Famous Mockingbird,” which made some of Phish’s most-beloved characters into brilliantly colored dancing animations. 

But the true connective moments didn’t always need the most impressive visuals. “Waste” was accompanied by a replay of a neon-tree forest that made its debut at the band’s first Sphere residency; the visual was as simple as the song’s refrain — “Come waste your time with me” — and pierced through the heart in the same way. A Night Three acknowledgment of the Eagles’ Joe Walsh in the crowd lead to a snap decision to cover Walsh’s classic James Gang hit “Walk Away,” delivered here with a kaleidoscopic view of the band members onscreen, a rare use of live-video montage rather than brain-melting animations. And on Night Two, the band led its encore with the Phish debut of “Brief Time,” an Anastasio solo song that bucks all of the Phish stereotypes: in a simple, non-jammy, visual-free two minutes or so, Anastasio sang plaintively about the truths of life: “It’s such a beautiful world, and such a brief time.”

For those in the room, it was a bigger statement than it sounds: the acknowledgment that the capacity to create beauty never goes away, and it’s a choice you can make, even 40 years on, in the brief time you’ve got.

Holy fuck.

Set Lists (via Phish.net):

April 16
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 17
Set One:
“Free”
“Birds of a Feather”
“Martian Monster”
“Guelah Papyrus”
“Divided Sky”
“Hey Stranger”
“Mull”
“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 18
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“