Phish: Deer Creek 2026

'Cause two outta threeeeeeeee ain't bad?

As I mentioned last week, there ARE more important things than Phish. In my case, Friday afternoon was a memorial I had to attend for a man who made a greater impact on my life than Phish ever could. By my best calculations, I could still make the show at Deer Creek that night if I left Milton by 3:30; with perfect traffic we might not miss anything, or so I thought. Well, I didn’t get on the road quite as early as I’d hoped, traffic was not perfect, AND I was wrong about the show’s start time; we missed the whole first set. Yep, the first-ever jammed-out “Bouncing Around The Room”, ladies and gentlemen. It’s one of those things that will strike some as trivial, others as the thrill of a lifetime; most fans who were there will always remember the feeling when it happened, but few will agonize over having missed out on it. The message was pretty clear, right? ‘We might jam ANYTHING!’

We sauntered up to the box office about five minutes into the second set…and discovered that it was closed, and no amount of pleading would convince any employee of the Ruoff Music Center to take our money and let us into this show. Which in hindsight was…SORT OF a blessing. Even at a bargain price of $55, I would’ve eventually found out that I’d paid for the less-interesting set. We heard most of set II from various areas outside the venue and it sounded typically great for the bounteous era we find ourselves in, just not something I was crushed to be shut out of. I’d already seen 100 Phish shows and was okay with postponing #101 an extra day. These are the things we tell ourselves sometimes.

Regardless, we were on lot shortly after it opened up on Saturday. I could hear the strains of “My Soul” from the box office and walked over to the best listening area we’d found the night before. There I was treated to what I thought of as a good omen: “Buffalo Bill”! Almost every longtime Phish fan has a favorite ridiculous personal stat; mine is that I caught four Buffalo Bills (out of 16 that had ever been played) prior to my first Simple (its 150^th outing)—and then caught a fifth Buffalo two nights later! But I hadn’t seen a Bill since before the pandemic; I was beginning to think the relationship had cooled. This soundcheck version was extra weird from the beginning as they were obviously testing out synth patches and whatnot; it went on for over 15 minutes and I was on cloud 9 hours before the show even started.

As it turned out, Bill WAS a good omen. From “AC/DC Bag” through “555” it was five tunes that would’ve taken Phish all of a half hour to burn through ten years ago, but they jammed ALL of them. “Punch You In The Eye” wasn’t as epic as the Vegas version from April but it was so well done, virtually turning into a “Tube” jam for a while, the “Landlady” slowdown coming so naturally nowadays. None of these were epics, but relative to their standard selves, “Theme From The Bottom”, “Timber” and “555” all boasted that same Moment from Friday’s Bouncin (to a lesser degree), where fans realize it’s not wrapping up tidily the way we expect, followed by brief stretches of lovely flowing improv.

Oddly enough, it’s the former workhorses that still have trouble asserting themselves in the 4.0 era. That doesn’t mean we’ll ever take “Reba” for granted; it’s one song they’d have to completely bungle for it to be unwelcome, and Saturday’s was perfectly life-affirming. Eschewing the whistling coda, they went instead into “Dirt”, which also features whistling, and then wrapped the set with “Most Events Aren’t Planned”. While it strikes me as preposterous, I swear both Page and Trey were teasing a lick from Paul Simon’s “Armistice Day” in this jam. Sometimes it hurts, carrying this catalog of melodies around in my head. It was almost…too good, the first half of the show. Like the second night in Madison, we might’ve been set up for a rather deflating second half.

Deer Creek had one thing going for it that the Kohl Center didn’t, though: the sunset. The big Indiana sky has put on some great shows for us over the years and this was one of the most gorgeous and enduring spectacles I can ever recall. I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened in terms of electric lights; I know Chris Kuroda is the greatest but from up on the lawn his work couldn’t compete with the whole rest of the visible universe. The clouds that had served to help cool us down on this relentlessly humid afternoon had become the stars of the show.

“Everything’s Right”—d’oh!! Not the song I was hoping for to open set II, but its track record is certainly better than “Kill Devil Falls” as a jammer, and they got down to business, complete with all sorts of Fish-triggered goofy samples. It lost steam pretty quickly, though, and as it seemed to be fading into ambience, Trey layered in the riff we were ALL hoping to hear: “Tweezer”!! Does everybody remember when they did segues in 3.0, the way they’d always have to stop the flow and awkwardly start the song from its scripted beginning? None of that nonsense tonight; they just let the riff ramble for a couple cycles, chose their moment and slid into the first verse. And a half hour of bliss unfolded from here. There have been longer and far more dynamic and experimental Tweezers, even recently; that’s what made this one unique. The jam started out so quiet; the guys seemed so relaxed and unhurried, finding various fruitful themes and dwelling as long as possible in them, but also constantly aware of their bandmates’ whims and willing to follow them. My own Tweezer track record is rather unimpressive; the big ones very rarely happen in the Midwest! Noblesville hadn’t even hosted a version since the memorable storm-drenched 2009 show, but St. Louis finally landed a monster in ’24 and now Creek has its own for the trophy case.

The rest of the set (i.e. “gravy”) played out beautifully as well, with the centerpiece jam segueing fluidly into an era-appropriate “Golden Age”, then “My Friend, My Friend” adding the dose of evil we needed before transitioning into a reprisal of the Tweezer jam! In the ensuing ambience came the same feeling we had after Madison’s “Life Saving Gun”…is this the night??? It was!! Our annual “No Quarter”! This being the 26^th anniversary of the “Moby Dick” show and all, nothing could’ve tied the room together quite as perfectly as this. And a simple raging “Carini” closed the set, another dangling participle left over from Madison haha. (According to this trend, I expect I could have my “Chalk Dust Torture Reprise” wish fulfilled in Savannah…dang it!) I never heard the people all scream quite this loudly when they saw the lump before; bravo, Creekers!

We went into Sunday with a not-unpleasant feeling: having had a sublime Saturday, all pressure was off. If Sunday “church” didn’t stack up to Saturday, it wouldn’t matter; Phish already made the journey worthwhile. I was bracing for “Petrichor” I tell you. Instead, we got…yet another fantastic Phish show. Three in a row at the same venue? Arguably, five shows into tour and not a stinker yet? Jamming the opening tune every single night? Sunday’s first set consisted of only seven songs, including the first-ever type-II rendition of “Evolve” in the two slot! I strongly dislike the lyrics of this song and had sat down with my back to the sun for a bit of relief, but not for long; when Trey eventually barged into this sublime jam with “Rift” I admit I was momentarily dismayed. That was it, two seconds-long moments of dismay the whole weekend; it was the RIFT album that originally got me into Phish, after all, and they pulled out “Maze” as well from their greatest studio collection, following an invigorating 20-minute “Bathtub Gin” for a trifecta that would’ve had my dear wife in bliss mode if she’d been there.

They wrapped up the set with “Mountains In The Mist” and “Stash”, another of those pesky former behemoths that’s lucky to get a few minutes of incongruous happyrock in its jam these days, yet we are always thankful to hear it. We were still bathed in fairly broad daylight when set II began, ready for anything. Oh hey, it’s that song I chased through the four Buffalo Bills! The other weird thing about Simple is that ever since Phish finally GAVE me one, they’ve gone out of their way not to skimp. The song did almost nothing from 2009-15, and it has positively dominated since then. Add this to the pile of Simples on my list of greatest Phish jams I’ve ever witnessed. I mean, it’s probably my fourth-favorite; between Northerly ’17, Creek ’21 and Alpine ’24 I can hardly take any more monster Simples. But this version kept on giving for nearly 38 minutes and I spent most of that time in a state of incredulity. It was actually very similar to how I was feeling during the Creek ’22 “Sand”; they’d played an utterly transcendent version in ’21 and were determined to simultaneously recall it and then carry that emotion onward as long as possible into completely different territory. Now we were all recalling the ’21 masterpiece Simple and letting its echo infuse the nowness of yet another epic unfolding.

I had to tell my friend Larry, who has attended one (1) Phish show, that they tried to match that Alpine ’24 version but came up two minutes short. Again, they did play more songs; “Pillow Jets”, another of my favorite new-ish tunes, for the conjuring of thunder; “Light”, for the sake of continuing to have a song to break up the jamming; and from this, the biggest surprise of the weekend: “Cream”!!?!? I assumed they just learned this song to aid in the milk-themed New Year’s Eve gag! However, after being subjected to the Spin Doctors doing “Purple Rain” a couple weeks ago, maybe I desperately needed to hear someone do a competent Prince cover. And maybe Trey intended to do this one in the dairy state but forgot? In any case, I found this rendition to be way better than the MSG version, but that might be because I was THERE.

After all that, it’s funny reading reviews that nitpick the last ten minutes of the set. That would’ve been me, 10 or 20 years ago maybe. I might’ve bitched that they didn’t do anything INTERESTING with “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, or that it’s soooo overplayed, or that “More” is a dumb song. I just hope none of these reviewers were feeling these things in real time. Or at least, that the encore made up for it. We knew “Wilson” wouldn’t be the extent of it, right? But as this song wrapped up, it came screaming into my head, the only possible conclusion: “Fluffhead”! Like “Waste”, it’s a song that brings all my buddies to mind who couldn’t join me for the trek this time; most of us were at Alpine in ’99 and the beloved song became OURS in a unique way that night. Those are the moments that can never be fucked with, the ones I’ve been doggedly chasing ever since. A lot of these shows are going to blur together some day; even now, there are nights I think back on and can barely recall any details about, whereas pre-pandemic I’d say I could recall every Phish show I’d seen in fairly explicit detail. But I’m damn near 50. The memory goes along with the eyes. I don’t need to hold onto every detail any more. Still, from Buff to Fluff, this weekend at Deer Creek will be a hard one to forget.