Show #84: 2/18/89 The Stone Church Newmarket, NH

Saturday, 02/18/1989
Old Stone Church, Newmarket, NH

Set 1: The Sloth,  Divided Sky,  The Curtain >  I Didn’t Know,  Colonel Forbin’s Ascent >  Fly Famous Mockingbird >  The Lizards,  Walk Away >  Possum,  Good Times Bad Times

Set 2: Golgi Apparatus,  Wilson >  Peaches en Regalia,  You Enjoy Myself >  La Grange,  Slave to the Traffic Light,  Contact,  David Bowie^[1]

Set 3: Whipping Post,  Corinna,  AC/DC Bag

Encore: Fire

[1] “Fish’s Birthday” lyrics.

I’ll probably say this a lot more but in over 1600 shows, you’re bound to get a few where that’s just not a lot going on. This is one of those shows. The tape quality is not very good and the playing just isn’t as hot as you’d expect. This is the second of 2 nights at the Stone Church. It’s more notable for what we don’t get here. The first night Phish debuted a new song called “Split Open and Melt”, a song that would quickly become a fan favorite. But we’ll never know what that first version was like. Even Phish.com says 2/17/89 is not in their archives at all. Aside form that, it is exciting to hear a larger crowd in the Stone Church. Clearly, Phish was brining a good audience in on a Saturday night. The lone highlight here is the band doing a birthday version of “David Bowie” for Jon Fishman. The following day was Fish’s 24th birthday and the band replaced UB40 with Fish’s Birthday as the lyric and then yelled for him to do 100 pushups. Fish apparently did do some push-ups after “Bowie” but with the tape cut, we’ll never know. Still an interesting snippet since we just celebrated Fish’s 50th.