When a setlist is framed on Phish’s Hall of Fame, it’s often the wall’s didactic plaque next to it that got it there. Thus, while Phish’s latest archival box set, New Year’s Eve 1993 Live at Worcester Centrum, is a vibrant affair that’s crackling with energy from the jump, the night itself holds a seminal place in Phish history that extends beyond the musical delivery. It’s that added element that makes this release something more than just enjoyable. It makes it important.

For those who were inside the building, so many years ago, it’s a keepsake—a long-overdue professional recording from a time well before Live Phish offered every note for on-demand streaming. For everyone else, it’s a window into a storied night that bridged the band’s incubation decade with everything that followed.

Phish’s previous New Year’s Eve show, in Boston ‘92, signaled their theatrical ambitions and appetite for holiday spectacles. But it was here in Worcester, one year later, where they finally had the budget and the production ability to unleash their first true arena rock extravaganza. The stage appeared to be a giant aquarium, with make-believe fish swimming around above the band’s heads, and a giant clam in the middle. Shortly before midnight, the band members descended from the ceiling in wetsuits, pretending to dive down and swim to the clam, which they climbed inside just in time for the countdown. The clam ascended, and kind of exploded at midnight as the band reemerged on the stage for “Auld Lang Syne.” It remains one of Phish’s most-loved—and truest to form—gags of all time.  

It is also instructive to remember that this was their biggest headline performance to that point. There was an energy there, both on stage and in the house. You can hear it on your speakers all these years later.

By New Year’s Eve ‘93, Phish had already piled high countless nights of wildly experimental long-form jams, thematic excursions, and adventurous segues. This night was more from the Amy’s Farm or Arrowhead Ranch column—an exhibition of the best that Phish had to offer, spoonful samplings of all 31 flavors, delivered with punch after punch after punch, superhuman accuracy, and uncanny group-mind delivery—all performed from inside an absurdly fantastic arena-sized fish-tank fantasy.

Phish’s defining humor, in which you weren’t quite sure if they were making fun of arena rock tropes or living inside them, was happily pervasive as well, obviously with the gag itself but also interspersed throughout the musical program. Drummer Jon Fishman showboated his way through Neil Diamond’s “Cracklin’ Rosie,” the band transformed into a barbershop quartet for “I Didn’t Know,” and they paid tribute to the recently deceased Frank Zappa by weaving the melody to Zappa’s “Peaches En Regalia” into multiple songs throughout the night. (That’s in addition to a proper full rendition—their third in the four-night run.)

Performance-based highlights include an appropriately frenetic “Run Like an Antelope,” a firehose rendition of “Tweezer,” a characteristically caustic “Stash,” and soaring, inspirational takes on “Reba” and “Harry Hood.” And then there’s the extracted “Down with Disease Jam,” performed moments after midnight and four months before the song’s actual debut, as if the band used the first minutes of the new year to telescopically preview the future.

The timestamps are a betrayal of faith—there aren’t any 20-plus minute “Type II” expeditions and most of the night’s many moments of improvisational genius are hidden to the untrained Phish ear. But the four band members move as one through twists, through turns, around sideways glances, straight on to full-steam-ahead adorned with cascades that electrified the arena in such a way that remains tangible and perceptible, 32 years later. The unified ecstatic joy shared between band and audience transmits through this music into your headphones, car stereo, or living room, wherever you end up listening to it.

Now that this historic Phish all-timer has been taken out of the box and released for all to experience: Attn: Rock N Roll Hall of Fame voting body—presenting you with Exhibit A.