Bouncing Around the Room: Scenes From a 4/20 Phish Sesh at Sphere

The first thing I noticed, as I joined the line to see Phish in Las Vegas one night this past weekend, was a trio of white-and-red-suited Elvises who were passing a vape around. An objectively absurd sight, to be sure, but one that also felt soothing in its regional specificity—like eating mushy peas in England, or overhearing someone holler, “Eyyy, I’m walkin’ here!” on the streets of Manhattan. And speaking of walking, the second thing I noticed was all the Hokas. So many Hokas, bulky and bright and mega-cushioned and present in a quantity that easily outnumbered the Tevas and Birks and Stan Smiths combined. “Whatever you do,” goes one cherished Phish lyric from the early ’90s, “take care of your shoes.” But for the phans who have been following the band since the early ’90s (or earlier!), the bigger priority these days appears to be taking care of your arch support. That’s just veteran savvy.

The Elvii, the Hokai, and I were all milling around outside Sphere (there’s no “the,” it’s cleaner), the newest and rotundest event center in all of Sin City. And for many of the affable fellow travelers around me—people who dig half-hour-plus exploratory jams and who gush about the band’s lighting rig as if it’s an instrument, which it is, and who geek out with a straight face about motifs like dancing lizards and donuts and drummer dresses—it was a particularly great day to have a great day: good old 4/20, that merry, mellow, annual head nod to those who choose to partake. The sun was out, Sphere’s walls were lit, the Ben and Jerry’s truck was serving, and the stoke was high.

Around the venue, ticketless hopefuls loitered with determined expressions on their faces and a finger in the air in the pursuit of being “miracled” into the building. A swirl of factors had combined to make this an especially difficult ticket to get: There was the Saturday of it all, for one thing. There was the FOMO/YOLO that had intensified over the previous two nights as folks at home watched streams or social media snippets of the far-out visuals (welcome, this is a farmhouse, indeed!), righteous licks (I’m freeeee), and trusty lighting rig (obvi) from the first shows of Phish’s four-night Sphere residency.

And then there was that auspicious date, with all the cheesy whimsy and curiosity it inspires: What might those silly savants from Vermont do this time?

The real fun was that there was no clear answer, because Phish, a band that prides itself on marching to its own drumbeat, has always had a knack for both the abstract and the zag. Sure, there was the band’s Amsterdam show in 1996, or the time in 1997 when they came onstage at exactly 4:20 and played “Makisupa Policeman,” a reggae-inflected song with ever-changing lyrics related to the devil’s lettuce. (In 2011, those lyrics included “Dank Sinatra” and “Herbie Hancock.”) But by and large, despite being a musical act that has long been heavily associated with a kind of happy-druggie-hippie-I-love-you-man-puff-puff-give culture—or actually, almost certainly because of that—Phish has pretty rarely leaned into 4/20 over the years.

Before a COVID-rescheduled set of shows brought the band to Madison Square Garden on that date in 2022, Phish hadn’t played on 4/20 since 1994, when Dave Matthews Band opened for it at a venue called Virginia Horse Center, which featured a dirt floor and cost $16.50 to enter. (As if that weren’t animalistic enough, an earlier performance on April 20, 1989—which involved onstage banter about disabling a fire alarm—took place at an Amherst party house known as “The Zoo.”) And now, on the same day decades later—and halfway through a sold-out four-straight-night run unlike anything it had done before—Phish was here to blast off and blow minds, this time in just a slightly different kind of space.

A glimmering globe, a monocultural marvel, Sphere looks like a crystal ball on the outside and feels like a virtual reality visit to a combination Guggenheim-IMAX planetarium on the inside. Sphere opened in September after five years of construction and cost a reported $2.3 billion to build, which is probably why a humble pint of beer inside the arena will run you, like, $20. Hotel rooms all around Las Vegas overlook the big ol’ orb, which can be (and has been) made to look like a basketball, a skeptical emoji, a jack-o’-lantern, and—ohgodpleaseno—an eye. This month, when A24 put out a bunch of promotional posters for its new Civil War movie that show beloved landmarks across the country being destroyed in battle, Sphere was one of them.

Sphere has 1.2 million LED lights. It has a 160,000-square-foot screen. It has seats that feel like subwoofers. It has audio technology I’m not qualified to understand that precision snipes you one minute and warm hugs you the next and somehow doesn’t leave your ears ringing either way. It is an idea that was born when entertainment titan James Dolan sketched a circle with a stick figure inside. (Other discarded design concepts included “a muffin, a box and even a pyramid.”) It is a big-ass blank canvas with seemingly boundless creative potential. Which is why it was such a perfect match for the innovative eccentricity of Phish.

A four-person musical collective that was formed in the ’80s by a bunch of shaggy teenaged buddies in Vermont, Phish is at once an American cultural institution and a clichéd punch line, a religious experience and a niche act. Frontman Trey Anastasio, drummer Jon Fishman, pianist Page McConnell, and bassist Mike Gordon have played more shows at Madison Square Garden than anyone besides Billy Joel, having passed Elton John on the leaderboard last year. They routinely show up on annual lists of the year’s highest-grossing tours. They have hundreds of songs in their live catalog—though only a small handful ever made it to mainstream radio. The band has appeared on Beavis & Butthead—the fellas approved!—and The Simpsons, where cartoon Phish plays “Run Like an Antelope” at a medicinal marijuana rally.

For some, Phish can feel like an impenetrable and ancient inside joke, what with the vacuum cleaners and the a cappella interludes and the whale drones and all. Last September, a Twitter account called @VitalVegas shared some local scuttlebutt about Phish’s plan for Sphere and expressed bafflement at the idea that the band wouldn’t be repeating any tracks from one concert to the next. U2, the first band to christen Sphere with a 40-show residency, had stuck to a mostly static set list night after night that featured an assortment of their most enduring and iconic singles. But Phish? Not so much. “100% different playlist for each,” read the confused VitalVegas tweet. “We aren’t familiar with Phish, but not sure how any band gets away with not playing its hit/hits at every show.”

But Phish has never been some anyband that just plays the hits—partly because, and I say this with reverence, Phish doesn’t really have hits, at least not in the conventional, played-constantly-on-FM-radio sense. Instead, what Phish has is the goods. Ask 10 different phans to recommend a starter song and you’ll get about seven different answers, and all of them will be right. It’s a party of abundance where everyone present leaves with a gift.

To see Phish perform is to witness a collaboration among artistic geniuses who can thread any needle—between the silly and the profound, between the nerdy and the devilish, between the cow funk and the arena rock—and sit and embroider away for a while. All that work makes for a rich, trippy tapestry indeed. And—especially when paired with, say, some Phish Food ice cream—it also establishes the optimal headspace to light one up or burn one down and/or simply surrender, as a wise man once sang, to the flow.

As a warm-up exercise before Saturday’s show, I hit up a bustling PhanArt festival not far from Sphere where vendors peddled Phish posters and tie-dyed overalls and punny basketball jerseys. Former HQ Trivia host Scott Rogowsky was there selling vintage tees; Phish-adjacent songwriter and lyricist Tom Marshall relaxed on a sofa. A guy in a T-shirt with what looked like the High Noon logo on it but that actually said “Harry Hood” chatted with a guy wearing a T-shirt with what looked like the New York Islanders logo on it but that actually said “YEM Island Tour,” a reference to this one particular version of the song “You Enjoy Myself” that was played during a 1998 show. (A few hours later, a Sphere usher would say to me, “SO many dudes here!” and report that when U2 was at Sphere, the attendees “were a lot more dressed up.”)

One booth provided info about an upcoming “Phish studies conference” at Oregon State. (Sample presentations included “‘What Does It Mean to Be ‘Completely Free?’ Environmental Constraints as Musical Inspiration During a Phish Show” and “‘Strut out of Stride’: A Guided Listening Session Through Three Eras of ‘Birds of a Feather’ Jams.”) At another stop, a nice gal gave me a tarot reading via some Grateful Dead–themed cards that featured the dancing bears and a Steal Your Face. But I didn’t really grasp her conclusions, and my life carried on unmoved and unchanged.

Conversely, the experience of watching Phish play Sphere a few hours later made me feel like a new woman, and also like a kid again, and also like an old head, and also like a tiny speck that’s still got some gravitational pull. There’s no real way to describe any of it without sounding like I just stepped off the set of Half Baked, but that’s fine. I loved when the big, beautiful, soapy bubbles filled Sphere during “Tube” and made me feel like I was in the fun portion of the fizzy-lifting-drink scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (right before they almost fly too high and die). And it was an honor and a privilege to be escorted, during “Pillow Jets,” on what a pal of mine described as “a hot girl walk” through a lovely, grassy Breath of the Wild–scape that led into an electro-Technicolor copse of trees exploding into fireworks. (They really ought to turn that one into a scenic ride on the Peloton.)

Then there were the clouds shaped like turtles and seahorses. And the golden tribute to longtime Phish artiste Jim Pollock’s towering body of work, one that the man himself was as delighted to see as anyone else in the building. And the skies full of stars, and the mountains in the mist. From my seat I could see show director Abigail Rosen Holmes make dynamic adjustments to the visuals to better allow the band to noodle.

And yes, there were even a few brief and elegant reminders of the day’s date: like the performances of songs called “Stash” and “Fuego,” or the time when, during “Steam,” the stage was illuminated by an orange glow and the giant screen behind it was filled with silvery plumes and it all looked like the smoldering end of a lit something or other. Every so often, much tinier-in-comparison wisps of IRL smoke drifted up from the 18,000-plus-capacity peanut gallery.

Late in the show, as Phish was melting faces with a rock-’n’-rollin’ rendition of “Chalk Dust Torture,” I found myself thinking about the origins of the whole “420” thing. As the lore goes, a buncha high schoolers from Northern California first coined the phrase in the early ’70s. They were a group of buddies who referred to themselves as “The Waldos” and who would often meet after class at 4:20, armed with laughter and a lighter. One of those guys had a brother who was pals with guys like the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh, and over time, their funny little friendo slang achieved exit velocity. All of this felt of a piece with “Chalk Dust Torture,” an anthem that evokes that same all-too-familiar feeling of being bored in a classroom and just wanting to go hang out with the homies.

“So who can unlearn all the facts that I’ve learned?” ask the lyrics. “I sat in their chairs and my synapses burned / The torture of chalk dust collects on my tongue / Thoughts follow my vision and dance in the sun.” (It’s a sentiment to which Waldos and 420-fixated tech bros alike can relate.) On the Sphere screen, clouds of white chalky powder billowed to and fro while the band and their Hoka’d-up phans bounced around, shouting the song’s gleeful, exasperated chorus again and again: “Can’t I live while I’m young?!” I closed my eyes and made a wish that I’d remember the catharsis of the moment forever.

Almost exactly 20 years ago, in April of 2004, Phish played a run of shows, also in Las Vegas, that just about everyone would rather forget. The performances were sloppy, the mood unpleasant. When the band played “You Enjoy Myself,” a song that traditionally involves jumping on mini trampolines, Anastasio struggled to bunny hop in place. One night, the stage lights were distractingly out of sync. (A guy from Dave Matthews Band was subbing in for Chris Kuroda, Phish’s maestro of illumination.) Music critic Jesse Jarnow wrote a zesty review of the show in which he described Phish as going through the motions with old stuff and concluded: “If I’m going to continue to see them, I want to do it because they are still making interesting new music, and aren’t simply a nostalgia trip.” The band had already gone on a two-year hiatus a couple of years earlier; now, tensions were at an untenable high. In May of 2004, Anastasio wrote a letter announcing the band’s permanent breakup. “We don’t want to become caricatures of ourselves, or worse yet, a nostalgia act,” it said.

A month after that, in The New York Times, music critic Kelefa Sanneh wrote about the end of an era in an article that began, “Phish is breaking up, and you probably don’t care” and asked, “Will Phish leave a scar? Or will the band just disappear, as if it were never here at all?” That August, Phish scheduled a final festival in Coventry, Vermont, that went off with every possible hitch. A tropical storm had left so much ankle-deep, squelchy mud behind that most cars weren’t able to drive onto the grounds. Many fans abandoned hope, but others walked for, like, 10 miles on the side of the road with their coolers and their tents to get into the venue for one last goodbye. As the band began the contemplative ballad “Wading in the Velvet Sea,” McConnell broke down in tears and could barely continue. Anastasio cried too. It was about as dismal a send-off as it gets.

But improbably, blessedly, Phish reunited five years later. By then, Anastasio had chosen sobriety; nowadays, he uses his experiences and his visibility to help others who are living with addiction. “I love playing music sober, and I also love people out there having a good time,” Anastasio told The New York Times in 2019 when he was asked whether it bothered him to see people partying a little too hard out in the crowd. “I don’t have any judgment. It’s none of my business.”

The business is the music, and like all businesses worth their salt, Phish is doing constant R&D to scope out new experiences and innovations. The band operates from a place of relentless restlessness, of ever-forward momentum. All the members’ ages round to 60, but they perform with that good old spirit of wanting to live while they’re young. “This nostalgia thing going on in the whole music scene, it’s killing me,” Anastasio said in that 2019 Times interview. “I have this twinge of, Hey, man, make another album.” Which is why Phish and its members, despite their prolific history, are constantly working on new things: like their own new album, Evolve, which is due July 12, or their four-day camping phestival this August, Mondegreen, or, oh yeah, Sphere.

As Saturday night’s show ended and everyone headed to the exits—ready to float away to their hotel rooms on a happy cloud or to hit up some late-late-night affair like “Blaze On: A 420 Phish Afterparty” at some place called “the Nuwu Cannabis Consumption Complex”—Sphere’s speakers played the Rolling Stones song “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” featuring its chorus of “It’s a gas, gas, gas.”

It was a reminder, and I’ll explain why in a moment, that ultimately the Sphere run was about a lot more than some novelty one-day stoner soiree. (Or two-day, if you squint and dilate your pupils: April 19 is known by some as “Bicycle Day,” the hipster fixie version of 4/20 that commemorates the proud history of psychedelia.) (NOTICE TO MY EMPLOYERS: Please don’t punish me for googling “dilated pupils LSD sign?” just now, or for all of the other things I have searched while writing this; I was simply trying to responsibly fact-check.)

Over the course of their four Sphere shows, Phish not only played 68 unique songs—the band also organized them into four guessable nightly themes that eventually coalesced, by the end of the run, into a whole overarching thing. And that thing was, in a sense, everything.

The Sphere über-shtick, it turned out, was States of Matter, with each evening representing one of the four fundamental classifications of all that surrounds us. On Thursday night, the first performance, for example, revolved around the high concept of solid, featuring songs like “Sand” and “Leaves” and “Dirt” and lo-fi animated graphics of chunky neon vehicles whose shifting movements gave me scarred flashbacks to “Pink Elephants on Parade.”

And then the Friday night show, with its theme of liquid, blew all that out of the water. It had jellyfish! It had seaweed! It had flooded ruins! It had an underwater Narnia whose combination of I-want-to-live-in-there beauty and next-level tech could be compared only to the time I went over to a neighbor’s house as a child and learned that she had just obtained Ecco the Dolphin for Sega! The show featured little cartooned chillaxers floating on food-shaped inner tubes (including donuts, natch) during the playing of “Bathtub Gin.” And it also ran over with Phish’s most elemental characteristic: a goofy and joyous sense of humor. As the band started playing “You Enjoy Myself,” the whole inside of Sphere suddenly slow rolled into a giant drive-through car wash, with the band situated right where the car stereo would be.

This was followed by slo-mo footage of a Godzilla-sized puppy dog who was licking Sphere clean as if it were the inside of a dog bowl. I could just hear the band planning this one: You want a liquid? Slobber is a liquid! A few minutes later, Phish slowed things down with a photo montage of the four band members over the years set to “Wading in the Velvet Sea”—the same song they’d suffered through back at Coventry, when it seemed as though they might never play again—and now I was the one crying. Tears are a liquid, too.

The 4/20 show was gas, and it was indeed a gas, gas, gas, a performance that expanded to fill the space around it and uplifted the minds and spirits of everyone in the room. (Look, I already told you that I can’t talk about any of this without sounding mind-altered!) And the weekend’s final performance, on Sunday night, represented the fourth state of matter, plasma, which is found in the stars and the sun and the great beyond (oh, and in the neon lights of Las Vegas, too). The show was filled with menacing robots in primary colors and wailing guitar riffs and just, like, so much gratitude, man. (Particularly from, ah, satisfied audience member Drew Carey.)

The first set opened, aptly, with the existential “Plasma,” a song whose lyrics question whether everything winds up right back where it began or spirals far, far away. And during a customary pause in the song “The Divided Sky,” as the band received a standing ovation, it seemed like the answer was “both”: There Phish was, exactly where it’s always been, and also someplace new altogether. Shortly after midnight, the four band members bowed, thanked their production crew (and Dolan—which caused the funniest and most indescribable “I instinctively want to boo right now but I also don’t want things to be awkward for Trey, so instead I’ll just kinda snort” collective crowd reaction), posed for photos, and said good night. As they had sung earlier that night in a killer 33-minute rendition of “Down with Disease”: “This has all been wonderful/ but now I’m on my way.”

The lights went up, and this time the walkout song of choice was the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star”—once upon a time the very first music video to air on MTV. This outro was, as ever, a bop. It was a nice wink to the 160,000-square-foot Sphere screen, which had just spent several days dominating phans’ fields of sight and senses of scale and depths of imagination. And in the end, it was a clever reminder that Phish really doesn’t slot neatly into common industry trends and tropes and aphorisms and stereotypes. Phish was never really much of a “radio star.” Which is maybe why, all these years later, the band is as alive as ever, still discovering—and providing—new highs.