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How Phish Mastered Sphere With Its Weird, Wonderful Four-Show Residency

Phish mastered Sphere during its four-show residency at the cutting-edge Las Vegas venue.

An intricately composed instrumental passage builds to an all-out scream (which audiences usually join in on) before the tension gives way to famously inscrutable lyrics (a consensus best guess for the song’s repeated line: “Wash Uffizi drive me to Firenze”) and a jam section. And while Anastasio remarked to the Washington Post prior to the Sphere shows that we was skeptical about his own image being “800 feet high on the wall,” like Bono and The Edge during U2’s concerts at the venue, several Phish visuals were framed around the band – they just eschewed straight-ahead imagery in favor of designs that obscured, warped or refracted the musicians. After forgoing the interstitial “I Am Hydrogen” (and replacing it with “Lifeboy”) that typically sits between “Mike’s Song” and “Weekapaug Groove” on Thursday, the band played it Saturday – the first time that’s happened without its usual bookends since 1987 and, freed from its normal structure, a worthy lead-in to that show’s late highlight, “Chalk Dust Torture.”

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