:)
Whenever they were on tour, we used to have a little pool between my wife, my brother, my best friend and myself to try and call the 1st set opener, 2nd set opener and encore every night. That was a fun game and kept us all following the setlists from each night as they were posted on the internet. I got to the point where if you'd name a date I could run down the entire setlist for you to a high degree of accuracy. What's scary is that a lot of that info is still in my memory. I met someone a few months ago who had no idea about my past obsession with Phish and we eventually got to talking about them. She said I saw them a couple of times in 1999 in Cincinnati. Before I knew what was happening, I wound up reciting for her the setlists of both shows she saw. It was like a magic trick.
I remember the reactions we'd get talking about this stuff in front of people who weren't into Phish and couldn't figure out what we were talking about because they were used to bands who played essentially the same set every night of any given tour. Sure, maybe they'd play a few in a different order or add a different cover here and there, but nothing like Phish where you could see four or five shows in a row without hearing a song repeated, or where the band has twice as many songs that have never been on any albums as they have officially released songs and yet the fans know every single one of them because we listen obsessively to tapes/cd's/downloads of shows.
I used to compulsively collect all shows with certain songs analyzing them to find the "best _______ ever". "Divided Sky" was by far the one I was the most obsessed with, but there were others as well.
I love that with Phish there are so many different levels of participation fans can choose for themselves ranging from just listening to full blown obsession.
