This is the next installment in my Top Shelf PJJ tracks series for a year, which you can stream every track directly from Phish Just Jams. As with the previous installments, this is meant to be a list focused solely on the Phish Just Jams tracks from the year in question.
This is my version of the list for 1995. With 205 total jam tracks from 1995 our list for the year of the top 25% gives us a Top 50 list. This is undoubtedly one of the best years of Phish's career and it was a lot of fun to put together a list that is representation of the best of that year. The band had transitioned pretty much exclusively to the big shed circuit for the first time and the change in the sound and the direction of the jamming was obvious. All throughout the summer the band dropped one psychedelic bomb after another in a series of Tweezers, Bowies and Mike's Songs that left a trail of blown minds in their wake. The band had fully arrived.
Jerry Garcia's death a month after both Phish and the Grateful Dead Summer Tours ended brought a new challenge to the band as the audience expanded while they continued their masterful playing through a sprawling 3 month Fall Tour and concluded a couple weeks later with the best New Years Run to date. The tour is littered with incredible highlights from the start to the end, culminating in an all-time great show to close out the New Years Run.
I'm not suggesting that it is the definitive list and there are a few choices that I could swap out with others depending on the day. I'm not ranking these 1 to 50 but just presenting the list as a whole because really what difference does it make which jam I think is 11th or 8th or 23rd or so on. The purpose of this list is just to provide a Phish Just Jams playlist of the best jams from the year. The list will be presented chronologically and can then be parsed and dissected from there. The list will also link to the full version of each song from the terrific resource that is www.phish.in for those want to take in the whole song instead.
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