Photo Credit: Bahram Foroughi

On Sunday, Sept. 1, Phish finished its summer tour with the fourth performance of its annual residency at Commerce City, Colo.’s Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. After a Dick’s series that added some unbelievable highlights to its 2024 tour, the band’s final staging wrapped the run on a high note, funneling every last drop of its road-running momentum into some top-tier treatments of beloved classics and some jaw-dropping surprises. Hearing the crowd’s burning desire for some setlist switch-ups, Phish distinguished its dog days grand finale with long time bust-outs to open and close the show.

Following three nights of relentlessly innovative improvisation on classics–including record-setting runs of “Pillow Jets” on Thursday and “Kill Devil Falls” on Saturday, plus bust-outs of “Guelah Papyrus” and “Strange Design” on Friday–Phish managed to hike the bar even higher with its explosive night four opener. No setlist nerd among the legions of fans at Dick’s could have foreseen “Dog Log,” which reared its head like the plague-ridden prairie dogs of 2019 for the first time since June 20, 2012; 464 shows after that staging, Sunday’s set one opener was only the fourth formal appearance of that early oddity since the millennium.

Phish returned to its classic summer tour selections with “Runaway Jim,” which sent the fervent energy of the intro into the first far-reaching jam of the evening. This upbeat toe-tapper set the quartet up for a strikingly steady and uptempo “The Moma Dance,” fitting that track’s languid funk to a punchy backbeat. The band segued from here into “My Friend, My Friend,” which got hotter and hotter until the band blazed into the unstructured jam section, shouting throughout, “He’s got a knife!”

Calls continued through the ensuing “Tube,” which slid into a space-age funk with some campy sci-fi “She Blinded Me with Science” teases from Mike Gordon, and the requisite “Science!” chorus shouted out by Trey Anastasio. The band brought the sound down again for the start of “Fluffhead,” then shot up to electrifying tension again as it took the fans on that track’s wild ride. After a straight-ahead “Stash,” Phish finished the first frame with the recent Evolve favorite “Life Saving Gun,” proving its latest studio set’s capacity for live meddling yet again.

The band returned to the stage with “Prince Caspian,” yet another relative stranger to its finely-honed 2024 tour setlist, then rode that Billy Breathes highlight into a relentlessly ripping run of “Set Your Soul Free.” The 2017 Trey Anastasio Band original reached out to other worlds as the band built from a standard, steady opening out into a dark, densely-layered mid-section and transcendent conclusion over 24 minutes. From the longest track of the evening and the centerpiece of the second-set continuous jam, Phish found their way through a pristine run of “Tweezer” and a meditative mid-set moment of “Light” en route to transcendence with “A Life Beyond The Dream.”

With a slight pause, the quartet kicked up some dust again with the Sci-Fi Soldier standout “The Howling.” Phish continued to stoke the energy higher and higher through the set’s close is at kept the crowd on their toes through a trio of classics, bridging “More” into the hard-rocking “Character Zero,” then finally punctuating the frame with the stop-start fan favorite “Slave To The Traffic Light.”

After the lights went down, the band returned for the final encore of its 2024 summer tour and made every second count: the group jumped out of the gate with a scathing reprisal of Beastie Boys’ bad-cop-drama banger “Sabotage,” issuing the cover for the sixth time ever 453 shows after its last staging on July 7, 2012. From this staggering highlight, the band emptied the tank with a show-closing sprint of “Tweezer Reprise.”

Phish’s final Sunday show of the summer was a fitting end to an incredible tour which, alongside feats like its Sphere series and 11th signature music festival Mondegreen, stands as a testament to the band’s indomitable spirit in its 41st year of performance. The year so far has given fans plenty to review via LivePhish as they wait through the fall for the band’s next stagings, including its yet-unannounced annual New Year’s residency at New York’s Madison Square Garden and its 2025 Riviera Maya concert getaway. For more information on the band and its plans, visit phish.com/tours.

Watch fan-recorded videos of the bust-outs of “Dog Log” and “Sabotage” below, and read on for the evening’s complete setlist.

Phish
Dick’s Sporting Goods Park – Commerce City, Colo.
9/1/24

Set I: Dog Log+, Runaway Jim, The Moma Dance > My Friend, My Friend*, Tube > Fluffhead, Stash, Life Saving Gun
Set II: Prince Caspian > Set Your Soul Free > Tweezer > Light > A Life Beyond The Dream, The Howling > More > Character Zero, Slave to the Traffic Light
Encore: Sabotage^ > Tweezer Reprise

Notes:
+ LTP June 20, 2012 (464 shows)
* No “Myfe” ending.
^ LTP July 7, 2012 (453 shows)

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