Festivals
- The Big Cypress festival. Around 85,000 people attended what ended up being the largest New Year's concert going on, which was a big deal considering it was about to be the new millennium. On the second night, the band played for seven and a half hours, midnight-to-sunrise, without any breaks. Not only that, but the show is widely considered to be one of Phish's all-time best concerts, with the band bringing both quantity and quality. The band certainly thought it was, and were convinced when they walked off stage that morning that they would never top it. 12/31/99 has remained the highest rated Phish show of all time, as ranked by fans
on Phish.net, for well over a decade and by a considerable margin too.
Tours
- August 1993 is considered to be one of the first all-time great months in Phish's career, best loved for seven "Split Open and Melt" jams, most of which are considered among the best-ever performances of that song. The band had been tripped up on "Melt" and its tricky time signatures for years, but eventually cracked the song's jam potential open in 1993. Like many of the band's most popular and acclaimed concert stretches, August 1993 is well covered on official Live Phish releases, with six shows seeing release. The most popular of these shows are 8/14 in Tinley Park, IL, known for its top-quality "Divided Sky", "It's Ice", and "Run Like an Antelope" jams in addition to what is considered to be the single best "Melt" of the month, and 8/13 in Indianapolis, where the band didn't play "Melt", but did play a famous version of "Bathtub Gin" that marked one of the first extended versions of a song that became a reliable jam vehicle in later years.
- The Fall 1995 tour is generally considered to be one of Phish's best-ever tours, with the December concerts highlighted as one of the best stretches of shows they've ever performed. Nine of the Fall '95 shows were later released as live albums, including the 12/31/95 New Year's Eve show, which is particularly cited as one the band's best concerts (it was released in full on the New Year's Eve 1995: Live at Madison Square Garden box set). Brian Brinkman of Phish.net wrote a two-part retrospective that goes in depth on the quality of the December '95 concerts.
- The Bakers' Dozen shows in 2017, in which they played 13 concerts at Madison Square Garden, and never repeated a song the entire time. In total, they played 237 different songs over the course of the concert series. The highlight of the run for many was the "jam filled" night, filled with huge jams, even in otherwise shorter songs like "Sample in a Jar" and "Lawn Boy", which got stretched out to 30 minutes (it is ordinarily around three minutes long).
- Fall 1997's "Phish Destroy America" tour is considered to be a high point of the Phish's career, particularly by fans of their funk improvisations, and features several shows that come up in discussions of the band's all-time best and eight of its 21 concerts have been officially released as part of the Live Phish series. 11/17/97, released on Live Phish 11, is considered one of the tour's high points, and is best known for its show-opening "Tweezer" and one of the best "Ghost" jams the band ever played. Other major shows in this stretch include 11/22/97, known for its fan favorite jams in "Taste", "Stash", "AC/DC Bag" and "McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters", 11/29/97 featuring the 57-minute "Runaway Jim" that remains the band's longest jam, 12/6/97 which features another highly regarded "Tweezer", and 12/7/97 which features multiple segues and a fan-favorite "Tube" -> "Slave to the Traffic Light" combo. 12/30/97, their second highest rated concert on Phish.net, features several huge and well-regarded jams such as a funk and space-rock influenced "AC/DC Bag" and an all-timer version of "Taste".
- The band's four show Island Tour in 1998 - named because it comprised two shows in Long Island, New York and two more in Providence, Rhode Island - is widely considered to be one of the band's career highlights. The concerts are held in high regard for the band's energetic playing, the extended jams of nearly every song, and their focus on "cowfunk", a specific psychedelic-funk jamming style that is especially favored by the band's fans.
Individual concerts
- The DVD Phish: Walnut Creek features the band's performance at the Walnut Creek Amphitheatre in Raleigh, North Carolina on July 22, 1997. Aside from being a great show from one of Phish's best years, what makes the concert particularly noteworthy is that the band played it outdoors during a torrential thunderstorm. Lightning struck the stage three times during the first setnote , and the third one, midway through a much-loved version of "Taste," convinced the band to wrap up the set early. After an hour delay, the band came back and played a full second set, with a special treat for fans that braved the weather: a 20-minute "Down with Disease" that segued virtually seamlessly into a four-part "Mike's Groove" (the regular three songs plus "Simple"). To this day, it remains the only time those two classics have ever been played back-to-back at a Phish show.
- A favorite show of hardcore fans is the June 14, 2000 concert at the Drum Logos club in Fukuoka, Japan, captured on Live Phish 4. The show is part of Phish's Japanese tour, where they played in small clubs to audiences full of Japanese noise-rock fans and American fans so devoted to the band that they traveled halfway around the world to see them play, giving the show a very homey, relaxed vibe. According to lore, Phish partook in some particularly psychedelic magic mushrooms before the show, and that caused the band to take their music in spacey, unexpected directions that night. The first set is well loved for its offbeat psychedelic jazz feel, while the second set is one of the most exploratory sets the band ever played, featuring an 18 minute ambient version of "Twist" (which segues into a separate, unique jam that brings the total time up to 34 minutes) that is considered to be definitive version of that song. On Phish.net, Fukuoka is ranked as the best show the band ever played outside of the United States and is consistently rated as one of the 30 best shows of all time.
- Compared to the classic 1.0 era or 3.0's triumphant return, 2.0 doesn't get a lot of glowing praise, with some fans even putting the entire period as part of the band's Audience-Alienating Era. That said, there's one major exception from this era: 2/28/03 at Nassau Colosseum, which was officially released as Live Phish 2.28.03. The show is beloved for a multitude of reasons, but the two main ones are the revival of "Destiny Unbound," which hadn't been played since 1991, and for featuring a "Tweezer" jam that is frequently considered one of the band's best jams ever. Because of this, it is consistently the highest-ranking 2.0 show on Phish.net's top shows.
- A major highlight of the band's post-reunion career is their concert on Halloween 2014. Since the 90s, its been a tradition for the band to play three-set shows on Halloween with the second being a performance of an album in its entirety. For 2014, that album was the 1964 Walt Disney Records release Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House, a collection of spoken word monologues and sound effects that barely passes the 15-minute mark. The band used the album's contents as the basis of new instrumental compositions, which were accompanied by an elaborate stage show. The set was an instant hit with fans and its reputation has only grown in the years following. It is the seventh highest rated Phish concert of all time, and the fourth highest rated show post-2000, on the fan site Phish.net. Phish has continued to perform the songs live afterwards, particularly "Martian Monster", which has become a fan favorite: You can hear the crowd roar in delight when they hear the Disney spoken word intro before this performance in 2015.
- Phish one-upped the Chilling, Thrilling set on Halloween 2018, when they played a set of brand-new music that they claimed was a "cover" of the album í rokk by Kasvot Växt, a fictional 1980s Progressive Rock band from Scandinavia that they had created. Fans loved the intentionally ludicrous backstory and the clues Phish hid around the internet about the band, and the music itself was highly acclaimed by fans.
- On 12/29/2018, the second night of their annual four-show New Year's run at Madison Square Garden, the band played a show so great that it immediately jumped to second place all-time in the Phish.net rankings (its now much lower, but still in the Top 100 all-time list). The show wowed many fans for both the quality of musicianship and several big jams in songs like "Wolfman's Brother" and "Tweezer".
- The band's summer 2019 tour had a bit of a mixed reception with fans because of its perceived lack of long jams. That changed on 7/14 at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Wisconsin, when the band played a show that became an instant classic. The first set featured solid performances of several rarities, including "Olivia's Pool", "Spock's Brain" and "Strange Design", while the second set featured a 38-minute version of "Ruby Waves" that was the longest jam the band had played since they reunited in 2009.
- Their 2023 New Year's Eve concert has become an instant classic among fans, who for decades had hoped the band would play their Gamehendge rock opera suite in its entirety, something they had not done since 1994. They finally did so in 2024, their 40th anniversary as a band, and the version of Gamehendge they played was the most elaborate yet: It featured live actors playing the different parts, narration from actress Annie Golden, and an acclaimed 19-minute jam of "AC/DC Bag" smack dab in the middle of everything.
Jams
- This performance of "Bathtub Gin" at the Great Went festival in 1997 is regularly singled out as one of Phish's best jams. There's even a video essay that dissects every portion of the jam to explain why it sounds so good. The entire set is also highly regarded for the strong jams of "Down with Disease" and "Harry Hood" that bookend it.
- Anytime they play non-stop for more than 50 minutes is usually singled out as a highlight in their discography. Notable examples include the 5/7/1994 "Tweezer" medley (commonly nicknamed "Tweezerfest"), the 11/29/1997 "Runaway Jim" (commonly nicknamed the "Jim Symphony"), the 8/15/1998 Ambient Jam at Lemonwheel, the 8/2/2003 Tower Jam at the IT Festival, and the 7/2/2011 Storage Unit Jam at SuperBall IX.
Other
- Phish was on hand to induct Genesis into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They could have taken the easy way out and play them in with one of the Phil Collins-era pop hits (although they did eventually play "No Reply at All" too). Instead, they played a full-length "Watcher of the Skies", a song just progressive enough to be a subtle Take That! to all of those who've kept Genesis and other prog-rock bands out of the Hall of Fame for so long.
