When the members of Phish plotted out their plan of attack for their six sets at Coventry back in 2004 they decided to avoid any bustouts, setlist trickery and gimmicks in lieu of playing great versions of the material that made them kings of the live music world. It didn’t quite work out the way they planned and the band butchered most of the songs they played that weekend.

[Photos by Dave Vann for Glide/HT]

For last night’s reunion concert, once again the band decided to focus on well-played versions of their best material and this time the planned worked to perfection. Now, of course, they did open with a statement song, the busting out of longtime fan-favorite Fluffhead. And they also debuted a new version of the Anastasio/Marshall gem Grind, but outside of that they played it safe with strong versions of some of their most complex songs.

READ ON for more from the Phish reunion concert…

What surprised me most about last night’s show was the length. It was a fucking marathon. About ten songs into the first set my friends and I started asking if they decided to forego a setbreak, but no… they played two monster sets filled with the classics we all grew up on. As each song started, my mind wandered to the first time I had heard that song or special versions I had seen the band perform over the years. The whole experience was quite surreal and fairly emotional.

The crowd went absolutely ballistic when the band busted out the first Fluffhead in nearly nine years. The post-hiatus version of Phish couldn’t handle Fluffhead, so it was a great sign they made it through the song’s complex changes with only a few flubbed notes. I thought the band was tight throughout the night with a few major exceptions including the brief “Coventry version” of YEM before they started it up again and a few miscues in Taste, but for the most part the Flubber Langs – as I like to call them – were few.

After the Fluffhead, Divided Sky, Chalk Dust trifecta the audience seemed absolutely beat. Most had waited in line for hours to get in and everyone spent so much energy celebrating the return of Fluffhead that the energy seemed a bit down for the middle of the monster first set, but luckily the band didn’t seem winded at all. It appears we all have to recalibrate our plans if the band plans to rock the fuck out for four hours each night. We’ll see what happens tonight when Phish returns for night two of this three night run. We’ll have a full photo gallery from the incredibly talented Dave Vann tomorrow if all goes according to plan, but he was nice enough to let us use some of his photos from last night in this piece.

Set 1: Fluffhead, Divided Sky, Chalk Dust Torture, Sample in a Jar, Stash, I Didn’t Know, Oh Kee Pah Ceremony > Suzy Greenberg, Farmhouse, NICU, Horn, Rift, Train Song, Water in the Sky, The Squirming Coil, David Bowie

Set 2: Backwards Down the Number Line, Tweezer, Taste, Possum, Theme From the Bottom, First Tube, Harry Hood, Waste, You Enjoy Myself
Encore: Grind, Bouncing Around the Room, Loving Cup