10-21-96 Madison Square Garden, New York, NY
1: The Star Spangled Banner*, Sample in a Jar, Cars Trucks Buses, The Sloth, The Divided Sky, Character Zero, Ginseng Sullivan, Stash, Waste, Possum
2: Wilson, Chalk Dust Torture, Wolfman’s Brother, Reba, Train Song, Maze, Life on Mars, Simple, The Horse-> Silent in the Morning, David Bowie
E: Funky Bitch
*A capella.
This show is pretty good. Listening through all of these 90’s shows reminds me how uninterested most people were with the setlists back then because it didn’t really matter. You knew pretty much everything they would play would rage and they didn’t have nearly as many songs in “rotation”. So, this looks like a pretty standard 1996 setlist, because that’s really all there was. But the show rages. The Divided Sky and Stash in the first set are really tight. The flow of the first set wasn’t very good and there was kind of an awkward feeling at the beginning of each tune but that didn’t detract from the playing.
I like the Wilson, CDT combo to open the second set. They continue to take Wolfman’s into some funkier waters in this show and the Reba is beautiful. The Maze is okay, but the highlight of the show is Simple for sure. It’s really the only “type II” jam of the show (which is fine) and it’s a good example of the sort of “space” they focused on introducing into their music during this year and tour. It just feels a lot less rushed than previous jams which creates some cool textures and grooves. I’ll take a Bowie second set closer any day. This one isn’t very experimental but Trey kills it.