Watch: “The First Songs We Ever Played”: Phish Hands Joe Walsh a Love Letter at the Sphere

There are tribute covers, and then there are tribute covers where the guy who wrote the song is sitting ten rows back, trying to figure out how to keep his face composed. Saturday night at the Sphere in Las Vegas, April 18th, Phish pulled off the latter.

The band was closing out the first weekend of their 2026 Sphere residency, their second run at the big orb after the 2024 debut that more or less rewired what a Phish show could look like. Somewhere in the middle of the set, after tearing through the title track from 2020’s Sigma Oasis, Trey Anastasio paused the whole thing, took a breath, and decided the moment deserved a bit of ceremony.

Someone, he told the crowd, had pulled them aside just before showtime with a tip. All four of them were fans. A big one. And he was sitting right there in the room.

“So I just wanted to pause and send a message of love to Mr. Joe Walsh,” Anastasio said. And then the part that actually matters, the part that tells you what this was really about. “Joe, in case you don’t know this, your music, when we were in middle school and high school, they were probably the first songs we ever played in our whole life.”

That’s the quote. That’s the whole thing, right there. The first songs we ever played. Somewhere in Vermont in the late seventies, before Phish was Phish, before anyone had heard of a Gamehendge or an Icculus, four kids were sitting in bedrooms figuring out how to get their fingers around a Joe Walsh riff. Every band has a starter kit. Phish’s starter kit had James Gang in it.

So of course they played “Walk Away.” You couldn’t script it better. A 1971 James Gang rip with a riff built to be learned by every teenager who ever talked his parents into a secondhand Les Paul, delivered on the biggest screen in the world to the man who wrote it. Phish, being Phish, played the absolute daylights out of it. This is not a band that does reverent. They do ecstatic. The cover opened up the way Phish covers always open up, a little loose around the edges, Trey leaning into the bends, Fishman happy to be there, the whole thing a tribute not just to the song but to the idea of the song, the teenage reverence of it.

Walsh himself, parked in a choice seat facing the stage, took the whole thing in and then did the thing every fan wants their hero to do. He said something nice online.

“Phish played the hell out of my song. I wasn’t expecting that. A serious honor. What great jobs we have. What great guys.”

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That is such a Joe Walsh sentence. The deflection into gratitude, the small joke at the end, the refusal to make it about him even when it was obviously about him. What great jobs we have. That’s the line of a man who has been doing this for more than half a century and still cannot quite believe he gets to.

The setting piles on the poetry. Walsh is no stranger to the Sphere. He and the Eagles just wrapped a 58 show residency there, the longest run any act has done in the building. He knows the ceiling. He knows the seats. He knows what that room does to a guitar tone. Watching somebody else play your song in your second home, from a fan’s seat instead of the stage, with tens of thousands of wook hats bobbing around you, has to be one of the stranger gifts a rock career can hand you.

The residency rolls on. Phish returns to the Sphere April 23rd through 25th and again April 30th through May 2nd. Summer brings multi-night stands at Fenway Park and Madison Square Garden, because of course it does.

But for one night in Vegas, a jam band that has always worn its classic rock heart on its tie-dyed sleeve got to hand a thank-you note to one of the guys who taught them how to plug in. “Walk Away” was the first song. And somehow, fifty-odd years after it was written, it was also exactly the right song.

What great jobs we have. Yeah, Joe. You said it.