I'm a late-to-the-party phan, who didn't discover and begin to enjoy the band until around the beginning of 3.0, in 2009 or '10 *swiftly maneuvers to dodge a flurry of rotted produce from 1.0 stans* and, having caught the bug, have gone back and spent hundreds of hours going back and listening to content from the annals of earlier, illustrious epochs of Phishtory. At this point, I've been to a few shows, but being in school, have mostly experienced Phish through recordings, both video and audio. Discretionary income is not a constant, so buying a set (like Hampton/Winton-Salem '97) is a major expenditure. But, having read about the Fall '97 tour, when the set was released - around the end of 2011, prior to the ubiquity of streaming platforms and the existence of LivePhish+ - I knew that I had to get it.

The set of CDs arrived in the mail shortly before a stretch of time that would see me driving thousands of miles over the course of a handful of roadtrips executed over the course of winter break at my university, and with hours and hours of time alone on the road, I decided to listen to these shows properly. I listened, and re-listened, to each of the three concerts, the 11/21-22 stand at the Hampton Coliseum and 11/23 on Wake Forest's basketball arena. I marinated in the fruits of this long weekend, drank them in and savored them.

If you've listened to any real volume of shows from Phish 1.0, it's easy to understand why there are so many clashes over the demarcation of the high water mark, the zenith of the era - do you go with the Summer '94 tour? Winter '95? Fall '97? The Clifford Ball in '96? It's obviously a rich area, and while I won't be weighing in on the matter of the best here, I will say that, for me, that Fall '97 tour produced my favorite stretch of shows. Of the three highlighted in the H/W-S '97 release, this show - the opener, on a cool Friday night along the Virginia coastline, inside a venerable venue packed to the rafters to experience something.

This show is rated, on this here site, as one of the top thirty Phish shows all-time, across all eras (no. 26 at the time of this writing, to be precise.) And yet, I wonder if it's possible for the show to be rated so highly and still be under-rated? With all due respect to the following evening's show, which is ranked no. 2 all-time, after the all-night NYE set at Big Cypress, this is my favorite of the two. Let me make my case, and you, O esteemed reader, decide its merits.

It starts out with a Phish debut, a raging cover of the Stones' "Emotional Rescue" that is funky and exploratory in its jams, yet (in the best possible sense) raw and unrefined, putting a premium on transmuting the visceral energy present in the Coliseum into kinetic form. While one could argue this rawness was the result of a new entry into the repertoire, I like to think that the choice was made to maintain the ethos of the original artists - something that could fill the air of a dive or a honky-tonk and not feel invasive or out of place. This Stones cover segues straight into a robust "Split Open and Melt" - delivered, one notes, almost like a command (to which those present fully complied.)

This rollicking one-two opening salvo was cooled slightly, in my humble opinion, by the selections "Beauty of My Dreams" and "Dogs Stole Things." Nothing wrong with the pieces, or with their performances here, but I think there is a reason these numbers have been largely set aside in post-1.0 setlists. Things quickly heated back up with an absolutely nasty PYitE > Lawn Boy > Chalk Dust stream, hitting all the right notes (literally and figuratively) before ending on a top-ten Prince Caspian to close the set.

Now, if the second set merely matched the tone and energy of the first, this would be an incredible show, and a gem of an example of what makes Phish special in live contexts. That's all they had to do - just match the energy of the first set, play it reasonably safe, and call it a job well done.

Instead, they told us The Story of the Ghost™.

This - this moment - kicked this show up into the exosphere for me. A 16-minute "Ghost" that is still, for my money, the definitive version: spooky, funky, and creative, with its sophisticated, dark chocolate ethos flowing over into a raucous 26-minute "AC/DC Bag" adventure. These funky, jammy specimens have Mike unconscious, outside of his own body, injecting bass lines so bouncy it felt like the whole building would sway, foundations and all. Heck, it felt like my truck should be swaying (which is not, one must admit, desirable whilst traveling 75 mph down the interstate.) Fish, too, was maxing out - as per usual, his contributions were arguably the subtlest of the four, but his gentle nudges here and there to push the jams forward in whatever direction necessary are absolutely breathtaking when you isolate them, and utterly indispensable to the integrity of the whole.

From "Bag" they progressed to a top-rate SttTL that was nevertheless a bit overshadowed by the previous 42 minutes of madness, yet which more than holds its own as one of the best iterations of a classic that has become standard fare. They ended, finally, right back where they began - covering the Rolling Stones, this time with a "Loving Cup" that epitomizes the era and the show, with funkiness that you could cut with a knife. By the time the last chords of the second set ceased their reverberation, it was time for a break - perhaps a cigarette, or a cold shower.

The encore - a "Guyute" that, again, has come to be, for me, the definitive version - was just the cherry on top of a delicious, multifaceted sundae. The chronicle of the old, ugly pig has long been one of my favorites, and to have it chosen to cap the night... well, let's just say I could not have asked for more.

I can respect any number of opinions, differences of taste and preference, etc., and maybe the Fall '97 iteration of 1.0 just isn't your bag (pun intended.) But, if you haven't listened to this show, you are missing a spectacle that is simultaneously one of the highest-rated performances ever put together by Messrs. Trey, Page, Cactus, and Fish, and, somehow, criminally under-rated. Don't breeze past this show for its more famous 11/22/97 companion. I've got nothing bad to say about 11/22, obviously - and even on those rare occasions when Phish is bad, they're still better than 97% of all bands out there playing live material - but this show will always hold a special place in my heart. I'm truly envious of the folks who were able to be present, to experience in realtime the magic that must have been so readily apparent.