Features

Celebrating the 3rd Anniversary of Phish’s Return

Today on the 3rd anniversary of Phish’s return, we take a look back at the song that most definitively held it’s homecoming party at Hampton in ’09, “Fluffhead.” One of the oldest songs in Phish’s repertoire, its debut is a matter of public record, appearing on the widely circulated tape from December 1, 1984 at Nectar’s in Burlington.

Like most early versions, this performance encompassed only the “Fluffhead” portion of the song, as most of “Fluff’s Travels” had yet to be composed and rehearsed. The ’84 version is also notable for being a 2-guitar-no-keyboards arrangement, allowing fans the opportunity to hear how Trey adjusted the orchestration of his tunes to accommodate Page and his keyboards later in their career. Other evolutions related to “Fluffhead” abound, for example the song “Lushington” which seemed to exist only long enough to be re-appropriated as “The Chase” from “Fluff’s Travels”.

The song finally evolved in to the version we all know and love around February of 1988, followed by an extended shelving of the tune for the last half of 1989. As of 1990, the tune was back in regular rotation and fully settled in to it’s complete composed form.

From this point on, “Fluffhead” became a regular, if somewhat infrequent, tour staple. While most versions of “Fluffhead” are differentiated by the accuracy and energy of the performance, one particularly stand-out version from July 24, 1999 demonstrates that even the most static and road-worn tune can still be ripe jamming material for the band.

Then the band took a little break, and in the process tucked “Fluffhead” away somewhere for safe keeping. Instead of being a point of mid-second-set bliss, the song instead became a cruel joke to play on the fans in the post-hiatus era, i.e. Trey responding to a “Fluffhead” chant at IT by saying “Mike says no” (Mike claims he said “yes”), or repeatedly teasing it during an outdoor soundcheck on June 17, 2004. The long and short of it was that when Phish “broke up” in August of ’04, we all thought that we’d seen our last version of “Fluffhead” sometime in ’00.

Then came Hampton, and the rest of the story is the 3.0 era we’re living in now.