20+ years later and I'm ready to review my first show. Spoiler: This band is so incendiary that being straight-edge sober at one of the worst shows at a breathtakingly bad venue mottled with the stanky variety of neo-hippies on an overlooked tour they still affirmed I was seeing the best in the biz that day.
......

Backstory:
Phish from Vermont wasn't anything that infiltrated my suburban Kansas City high school (shout out Class of '98) in any capacity and I guess I missed the three days MTV played Down With Disease so it took music major nerds in college to introduce me to my favorite band on a KC to South Carolina road trip in spring 2000. "Hey Walsh, here's something you'll dig dude," they said as the opening jangle of the Rift CD hit my maroon Ford Taurus to start that trip and I was hooked.

I actually went to class in college so couldn't make the fall stop at Sandstone ("Verizon Wireless" can piss off) and had to wait through a whole-ass hiatus to finally catch them in that golden, liminal summer post-graduation and pre-Peace Corps where I cleaned swimming pools all across the metro area with my brother and friends, including the one responsible for the Phish intro three years prior. So while I climbed aboard in the waning moments of 1.0 I'm the rare 2.0 show baby.
.....

The Show:
Hotter than boiling piss, Sandstone is a scratchy-grass hill that tends to host bad iterations of Van Halen* and [insert Sexy Tractor country act here]. No natural shade in sight, no pavilion roof, just old-school pile 'em in and turn on the sound, Chester. No seasoned vets in our crew of ten or so, virtually everyone was a first-timer but we still got a decent spot center stage if not a bit farther back than I'd like.

You could do far, far worse than having your first chords of live Phish being a mid-summer Chalk Dust Torture. Eight minutes of rock and I was sold. For some reason I was annoyed at Wolfman's generally but got right back in it for the cookin' Maze. Dirt hit me in the feels, as it does, and we were sweaty as the first set wound down.

S2 launched with a robust (22:32!) but not totally zany Tweezer and I felt like I'd seen all the secrets that music had to offer. Maybe I had? Maikisupa is forever etched in my brain as with the callout of the head of security arrest. Bless this site for years after the fact solving the riddle of what the tease was. Was thrilled to get a personal favorite Limb By Limb (and had to wait twenty whole years to get another). At the time I thought him forgetting Cavern lyrics was hilarious the way a person wholly ignorant of the addiction unraveling the man and the band might. My early twenties body was fluid with delight to get an Antelope closer.

Contact was the encore fun that it is and everyone leaves smiling from their first show with a Tweeprise. It's funny. I don't have many memories of what happened after the show. None of us were connected to the taper community to secure the show for relisten but I know that was the best complete night of music I'd seen and wanted more.

Little did I know this would be the last shot I'd get until fifteen years later but that's another story.
.....

*Fun side story:
The only other Sandstone show I saw was in 1998. Van Halen with Gary Charone on the mic was so incredibly undersold that when I ordered a Cheese Lover's from Pizza Hut, the driver handed me two promo tickets that came with every delivery that night.

My eighteen-year-old eyes had hardly seen any live music at that point but I went on a lark and it was awful. Kenny Wayne Shephard opening was when I first realized - independent of any blog or fancy music critic - that white dudes stole the blues sound but not its soul.

To date the worst thing I've ever endured.