Phish at Coachella, Day 2: For Halloween, The Band Covers Exile on Main Street (with Sharon Jones)

Categories: Last Night

Read Jeff Miller's overview of the first evening of Phish's three-night stint at the Coachella grounds, and read his recap of day three.

Halloween's a holiday that Phish built their reputation for unpredictability on - since 1994, when a show by the band's fallen on October 31st, they've celebrated by donning a "musical costume" covering a band's classic album in its entirety, and keeping its identity secret until the day of the show.

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Jeff Miller

That first year, it was The White Album; since then, they've tackled classics from the Talking Heads (Remain in Light), the Who (Quadrophenia) and the Velvet Underground (Loaded)

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Jeff Miller
Phish fans at the Empire Polo Fields

But yesterday, at Festival 8, their three-day fest at the Coachella field in Indio, the stakes were even higher: not only has the band not played on Halloween in over a decade, but, through an elaborate animation on their website, they build anticipation by whittling down a list of nearly 100 albums to eight possibilities, which ranged from the esoteric (Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway) to hipster-popular (MGMT's Oracular Spectacular) to the absolutely ridiculous (Larks Tounges in Aspic, King Crimson's dense, technical masterpiece of pretension).
   

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Jeff Miller

So when their choice for this year, the Rolling Stones' eclectic, 1972 Exile in Main Street  was made clear via a ridiculously in-joke filled "Phishbill" (which included faux ads for a David Bowie/UB40 double-bill in Florida for New Years, and Time Turns Elastic Waistband Sweat Pants), it wasn't so much a shock as the safest pick from the shortlist. What they did with it, however, was a different story altogether.


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