Friday, 12/30/1994 Madison Square Garden, New York, NY
Set 1: Wilson, Rift, AC/DC Bag, Sparkle, Simple, Stash, Fee, Scent of a Mule, Cavern
Set 2: Sample in a Jar, Poor Heart, Tweezer, I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome[1], You Enjoy Myself, Purple Rain > Hold Your Head Up, Harry Hood, Tweezer Reprise
Encore: Frankenstein
[1] Acoustic.
Notes: I’m Blue I’m Lonesome was performed acoustic. This version of Wilson appears on A Live One.
12-29-12-31-94 were some of the best days of my whole life…Prple rain was great…YEm also was sick
I was 17 years old and had a brain full of acid at this show. I had seen 12/29 the night before reasonably sober and basically felt that anything else that happened in my lifetime was just icing on the cake. This was one of those eternal now experiences… I felt like I was in a timeless state from start to finish. Time extended without end in both directions and I was suspended in an infinite moment. After it was over I felt like I was sucked through a vacuum tube directly to the subway station and the whole thing seemed like a past life memory, but I wasn’t saddened to be back on Earth. I had a unstoppable laughing fit on the train that actually forced a clearly intoxicated homeless man to wake up and move to another car. Does this make me the type of fan I hear get chastised by the “serious” lovers of the group? You know… too stoned to remember the music, MAN. This might have been the first time I didn’t write down the setlist of a show I went to. I am pretty sure 12/31 was the last night I ever did, realizing that being consciously attuned to the music that was being created in those moments was inhibited by my pen and pencil.
The stage was 1,000,000 miles away… a pulsating orb floating in a writhing human ocean. We were in the nosebleeds, but right by a speaker and the sound was excellent and not too loud. This was like a “Greatest Hits” set… but that didn’t bother me the least. I remember Sparkle, a number I hated and seemed to see every other show creating a vortex of joy in MSG as we all experienced the lyrics literally, resulting in the psychic shedding of spiritual armor liberating us so we could enjoy the sonic vibrations from a place of non-identification. YEM, Hood and Stash were all transcendent, but honestly it was Purple Rain (my first, I think - and a childhood favorite) that brought me to some kind of maniacal absurdist enlightenment. Great job, Phish.
LSD FTMFW
Purple Rain is near the top of my want-to-but-have-not seen list