Reba 5/16/95

Phans who post to Phish message boards often discuss which of the band's performances are "the best" within a given category (best year? best tour? best second set? best jam? best fall 1998 Melt?), though participants often acknowledge that Phish has performed many "bests" during their long career, and that one's personal top picks are unavoidably subjective, based on which shows one might have been to (in my case, I love the Reba from 7/3/94 (Old Orchard Beach) in part because I was there, and although that Reba is especially musical and loose and free (imagine coarse cotton skirts twirling, a picnic field wildflower dance) and though it was probably one of the most transcendent moments shared by humans that particular night on Earth, it is not a musical standout when you consider the whole record of their music), or which recordings one might have borrowed from a friend during a flight of mania, etc. Most fans have a favorite Reba, and there seems to be about 40% consensus (the biggest wedge of the pie chart) that 5/16/95 is the best (see the comments posted to Best Reba Ever? (& they've got a great video of 10/31/94; about four minutes in, the lights get very Doctor Who-esque and video concrète) and I want to hear the best Reba). Here's a link to an mp3 in case you'd like to hear for yourself. While it might not be as grungy and intuitive as 12/7/97, as mellow and kind as 4/3/98, as swinging and rhythmically multidimensional and modernist as 10/15/98, or as psychedelic and spacey as 7/6/00, 5/16/94 might be the most awesome rock version of Reba, the most friendly, and the most magically hypnotic. There's a cool part where Trey loops a chord and it causes the music to take on a sort of spatial dimensionality (it is like an infinitely unfurling banner marking the perimeter of the space). According to the formal rules of the song, the jam ends when Fishman plays a certain long drum fill that goes down all the tom toms, placed so as to break the ecstatic trance of the music at the moment when Trey is most deeply into it, and on this night he plays the fill as patiently and deliberately as a lazy cartoon John Bonham sitting at the center of a rainbow of white pipes or hollow tubes