Live Phish 03: 9.14.00 Darien Lake Performing Arts Center, Darien Center, New York

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Having seen Phish 20+ times live since the early 90s and having listened to 100s of hours of shows, I feel I have a pretty good handle on their stuff.

The 9/14/00 show from Darien Lakes Performing Arts Center is pretty good stuff. For me, its what I expect from a Phish show: to be really solid.

Disc one is quite strong despite a few flubbed notes in "Punch You In The Eye." "Reba" is really good, but not just mind-blowing like it can be. "Albequerque" is a really cool inclusion in that it provides a nice breather, and its a solid tune. The highlight song of disc one is "Carini." What a monster of a song that is, and this version particularly slams. The other main highlight of this disc is the so-called "Darien Jam #1"

Disc two treats us to 2 covers, 2 unnamed jams and "Dog Faced Boy." In my opinion its the three unnamed jams that really make this show stand out (of course getting The Who's "Drowned" and the Talking Heads' "Crosseyed and Painless" thrown in the mix helps too.) The 25+ minute "Darien Jam #2" is why I go to Phish shows...total improv. This one is sweet too, it runs the gamut of emotions and basically rocks. There's lots of cool sparse stuff and some funky noisy stuff too. This disc is a must have.

Disc three is where the whole show goes "so-so." "Caspian" is always a pleasure to hear and this particular version "goes off" nicely. "Loving Cup," "Driver," "Inlaw Josie Wales," and "Sample" are all great, but this is pretty standard stuff the rest of the way.

In my book, disc three makes this is a four star show and not a five star show. Its definately worth the 25 bucks you'll pay for it, but know (and be pleased) that there are much better Phish shows out there (there are even better discs in the first six of this series.)

I would actually like to give this disk 3.5 stars due to the great tunes we get on disk one and the Prince caspian to start off an otherwise weak third disk. I love that Phish released a show with both albuquerque and loving cup because those are two of my favorite covers they do.

Disk 2

However, the second disk is where this show hits the complete deep-end. I am a fan of intence jaming, but I tell you what, the Darien Lake Jam 2 ia a piece of junk. And that is a big piece of 25 minute junk full of sloppy unfocused jams that never really click in gear. That means you get about 30 minutes of listenable music on disk 2 and that is a lucky 30 because the drowned is very sloppy and the jam out of cross-eyed and painless is hard to enjoy too. The only highlight of this disk is the cross-eyed and painless which is very cool and the very toned down dog faced boy.

Encore

The encore(s)(three actually) you get on this release just flat-out [bad]. Why would they play both driver and the inlaw josie whales. And after that we get a typical Sample in a Jar. How boring. There is literally no excitment hear at all.

I would recommend all the other Live phish over this one actually. Vol. 4, 15, 20, 10, 9, and 7 are especially good.