Phish - Phish New Year's Eve 1993 / Live at Worcester Centrum

December 31, 1993 was the night Phish stopped being a club band. Their fifth annual New Year's Eve show was also their biggest headline gig to that point, a sold-out night at the 14,800-capacity Worcester Centrum with tickets going for $22.50. The band had spent the year touring relentlessly and playing at a level that made the jump to arenas feel less like a gamble than an inevitability. This is the full document of that night, all 30 tracks, uncut.

The playing is the thing. A "Llama" opener sets the pace, "Stash" runs hot, and a soaring "Reba" gives way to one of the tour's "Peaches en Regalia" appearances. Set two opens on "Tweezer" into "Halley's Comet" and keeps folding "Peaches" teases into "It's Ice," "Fee," and "Possum" until the joke becomes its own running motif. At midnight the band returns with "Auld Lang Syne" and drops straight into the first "Down With Disease" jam, months before the song surfaced on record, then tears into a ferocious "Split Open And Melt."

Then there is the set itself. The stage for the entire four-show 1993 holiday run was a full aquarium, seaweed and rocks and swimming fish and a giant clam, built by Chris McGregor and J.W. Nickel of Rocket Science. It remains one of the great pieces of Phish stagecraft.

Mixed from the original 2-inch 24-track reels recorded by Paul Languedoc, with a new mix by Jon Altschiller and lacquers cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering. Five LPs on 180-gram Seaweed + Water colored vinyl, housed in a deluxe lift-off box with a cut-out Phish Aquarium set included. A landmark night given the presentation it has always deserved.