10/21 Phish Santa Barbara recap.

After a beautiful drive up the coast featuring stellar views of the pacific we rolled into the picturesque town of Santa Barbara. Featuring one of my favorite wine regions to the East (home of the film Sideways) and the longest stretch of coastline to the west, Santa Barbara is a super cute Southern Californian town promoted as the American Riviera. Our crew is gathering in numbers as the tour rolls on. With an early start time we walked a mile from the main town to the show. It is a surreal walk to the venue through the streets of SB. A few turns and all of the sudden in the most residential of neighborhoods we came upon the Santa Barbara Bowl. It has a red rocks like climb to the venue (granted at sea level) to a beautiful, old school amphitheater carved into the hills...right next to million dollar mansions. We lingered and took in some beautiful views of the pacific from the top of the venue and then settled into our seats for the show...
The first set starts with a relatively well played bit standard stash. An unusual opener considering the last was 2003. Possum followed by a really pleasant personally enjoyable ocelot. And then the wheels came off. NICU was the start of a bad set. Song selection, band interplay, tempo all felt really off. Waiting all night first repeat of tour, Yarmouth road (always a set killer...these first set mikes songs have not been enjoyable thus far). It was almost like the set was played in reverse - rather than build to the stash, we went down tempo as the set went on. Trey told a funny story about not remembering playing the bowl despite playing there 3 times in the past. Seemed to send trey into a weird place and some strange song selections to close the set. A fun time as always but honestly a rough first set. 
The band came out with the go to jam vehicle of the year in CDT. It was a solid effort. Had some moments and fun changes of tempos. Really enjoyed the patient build into ghost....and then the drop. They typically don't hit the drop anymore but this was even worse than normal. They couldn't seem to recover and moved into an average birds that had a difficult ending - so much so the band even commented on it, attempted to rectify it but should've left it alone. Wombat was fun and trey called for the tweezer to try and save the set. For me this was easily the highlight of the show. I dug this tweezer and finally felt the band somewhat connected. But then like the first set questionable calls to close the set with Julius, piper and Suzy. The boogie tweeprise was fun but overall an uneven effort from the boys. However I did love the tweezebat / womber combo. More funk please. See you tonight.

Location: Santa Barbara, CA, USA

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