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(check out some Phish album reviews for more)
This isn’t quite a rant, but right now this is the only place I have designated for things of this nature. Naturally since I am talking about Phish, they are my soundtrack to this typing.
The first thought I had of writing this “essay on Phish” was on 5/25/04, the day that Trey Anastasio posted on Phish.com that the band was ending. My initial reaction to this news was anger; I was angry at Trey specifically, but also anyone or anything that caused one of my favorite bands to end. I chose not to write this then, as I wanted to wait until I bought the final Phish album, Undermind, and then see how I could sum it all up or whatever. In the time following the initial announcement I heard Trey’s full side of the story in an excellent 2-part interview with Charlie Rose. Page McConnell also made an announcement giving his reasons for wanting to break up the band. My anger dissipated pretty quickly and once I bought Undermind I decided to write this not as a ‘rant’ (the “I’m pissed Phish is ending” essay), but as thoughts on the band in general and what they mean to me as a person, a music listener and a fellow musician. Then this got derailed again after the announcement of the movie theater simulcast of the last two shows. Yeah, that’s finality enough; the last Phish shows. So, here we go.
I had no friends in high school that listened to Phish. If they did, they never told me. It turns out that my best friend Brian actually got a Picture of Nectar sticker and put it on his trash can (I vaguely remember this) and he was intrigued by the artwork to Rift, and almost bought it, but for some reason didn’t. Ah, I was that close. Thinking about that though, if he had bought Rift…would I have liked it? Who knows? That was mid-high school for me and I mostly listened to Iron Maiden and other heavy metal stuff, so I might or might not have liked it. As I said in my review of Picture of Nectar, the first experience I had with Phish was in spring of 1994 in my freshman year of college at the University of Texas in Austin. A friend of mine, Clay, received some mail one day that contained a Phish hat. He was quite excited to get it and I looked through the catalog a bit. The word ‘Phish’ had no meaning for me so I asked him about them. He didn’t give me much of an explanation other than I should borrow a CD.
Clay let me borrow A Picture of Nectar (and I let him borrow some King Crimson, which I don’t think he enjoyed too much) and I can’t understate how much hearing this music changed my life. It wasn’t so much that I had my musical landscape altered, as when I heard King Crimson’s Discipline, but it was more that my personal musical direction was not only validated, but was also proven that it could be successful. See, I don’t write “normal” music. I don’t have a desire to play “normal” music. If you crunch down my music collection, most of what’s there isn’t considered “normal”. I can’t write a 3-minute, 3-chord love song to save my life. It’s impossible. Well, I could, but it would either be awful or dishonest or both. My heart wouldn’t be in it. What I heard in Phish that day was a band that played insanely eclectic music (rock, funk, jazz, country, prog, reggae, musique concréte, calypso, plus a lot more), didn’t sing about “normal” topics, were excellent musicians, had a wonderful sense of humor, everyone wrote and sang and they could basically do anything they wanted to musically. They could go anywhere. Hearing this was wonderful! What excited me most was that the music I was making and wanted to make was more or less what they were doing. Of course there were differences, but the spirit of the music was the same, and Phish was doing it professionally and apparently making a good living off of it.
The first Phish album I actually purchased was A Live One, probably on the day it came out. It was again Clay who recommended that I get ALO as my first one, instead of getting Nectar or something else. I ended up getting Picture of Nectar about a month later anyway. I remembered a few songs from Nectar on A Live One (it was a few months in between the first listen to PON and the purchase of ALO), but for the most part the album was an entirely new experience. On the first listen I loved it. What I thought the band was capable of massively changed after I heard the live stuff. A Live One is still my all-time favorite Phish album.
With each new album I bought I learned more about the band and grew to love them more and more. After A Live One and Picture of Nectar came Junta, then Billy Breathes, Rift, Lawn Boy, Slip Stitch & Pass, Hoist, Story of the Ghost, Hampton Comes Alive, Farmhouse, The White Tape, the 6 Live Phish’s I have, Siket Disc, Round Room and finally Undermind. For the most part their studio albums are pretty solid. I’ve never understood why people say that the studio albums suck, because each one brings something different and each one ignites some different passion in me. Of the main studio albums the only one I don’t really like is Round Room. Maybe it’ll grow on me someday. I used to not like Story of the Ghost very much, but that has definitely grown on me and now it’s one of my favorites.
Looking back on the career of Phish, I always see their consistency. Always good, always a bit odd, always changing any conceptions of what they could be. For me, this is one of the most important qualities of a band. Even from album to album and within albums, you never really knew what the band was going to do, because once you think you’ve figured them out, they’ll throw a surprise out there that just gives you the biggest smile. Well, makes me smile at least.
I have seen Phish live 4 times, twice in ’95 and twice in ’97. Each show has special moments for me: opening with Ya Mar at my first show (I could listen to them play that all day long), hearing them play a spectacularly funkified 2001, watching them sing an old bluegrass song a capella without microphones, seeing them play the audience in chess during the course of a tour, watching them all improvise on keyboards, watching them switch instruments, seeing them perform a trampoline routine during a song, hearing songs I’ve never heard before even after owning all of the albums. That’s one thing I love about a Phish show, anything could happen. They’re not like 99% of bands that will play the same setlist every night and say the exact same things to different audiences every night. Every single night Phish played a different set. On any given night they could pull out an over-looked song off the new album, an old classic, an oldie you forgot about, some really old song that never made it to an album, an off-the-wall cover (how about Gettin’ Jiggy With It?), an entire album, or even (and often) the debut of a brand new song. And this doesn’t even get into the vacuum solos, the instrument switching, the guest stars (Wynona, Jay-Z, Carlos Santana to name a few), the silent jams, the Big Ball Jams, the audience drowning in a sea of balloons, the band flying around in a hot dog, the playing of a 1999/2000 New Year’s set for over 5 straight hours. You want to know why people followed the band around? This whole paragraph explains about 5% of the reasons why. The easiest answer is that anything could happen at a Phish concert. They had off nights like anyone else, but for the most part you could be guaranteed to have a great time at a Phish show. In the 4 shows I saw, only 2 songs were repeated (twice) in all those shows…and Phish always played 2 sets of music each show. For some special shows they’d do 3 sets. All of this is the definition of a Live Band.
After 17 something years of going at it 24/7, the band went on hiatus in the fall of 2000. They needed a rest, they said. They might come back in 6 months, they might come back in 5 years, or they might not come back at all. I was sad that they went on hiatus, but I understood it. I was annoyed that they didn’t play in Texas in ’99 or 2000 so there was always that possibility that I’d never get to see them again (unless I traveled to a far off show, which I certainly couldn’t afford to do). In the two years that they were on hiatus we listeners were thankfully treated to 16 new live albums (with 4 more arriving after they came back), the Live Phish series. Their live recordings evolved over the years from a compilation of great moments from many shows (A Live One) to bits from one show (Slip Stitch & Pass) to a box set documenting a two night stand in Virginia (Hampton Comes Alive) and finally to multiple shows released at the same time. Live Phish features minimal, but interesting, packaging, a full show often with bonus tracks, from shows all throughout their career all at around $20-$25 for 2, 3 and sometimes 4 disc sets. I’m a big nerd and I looked through the track lists from all 20 of the Live Phish albums, and even not including the full albums they covered on #’s 12-16 (the White Album, Quadrophenia, Remain in Light & Loaded) every Live Phish album had at least one song on there that had never been released up to that point on any album, live or studio. That means that even if you only just bought their CDs and never went to a live show or heard live tapes, you’d always get a song you never heard when buying a Live Phish set.
In addition to the Live Phish sets and a couple of DVDs, the guys in the band worked on solo stuff during the hiatus. To be truthful I don’t love every second of the solo albums they released. Trey Anastasio’s first album wasn’t too hot and only had two songs that I really liked, Alive Again and Push on ‘Til the Day. Page McConnell’s Vida Blue had some good moments, but suffered from kinda weak songwriting. Mike Gordon’s Inside In wasn’t enjoyable to me at all. Neither was Trey’s collaboration with Stuart Copeland & Les Claypool, Oysterhead. I always try to approach this stuff with an open mind, and I honestly want to love all of it, but it wasn’t solo careers I was interested in; I wanted Phish back.
Finally, after 2 years away from existing as a functioning band, the announcement came in late fall of 2002 that the band was coming back. A new album, a new tour…all was now right with the world. Round Room came out in December of 2002 and for the first time I was seriously disappointed with a Phish album. It was pretty sloppy in parts and overall it felt like they weren’t trying too hard on it. It sounded like they were just messing around and recording first takes of these songs they had just written a few minutes before. There are a noticeable amount of mistakes on this album and it gets distracting. To me, the album sounded incredibly unfocused and honestly lazy. I still have this opinion of it. It’s actually a chore to listen to it all the way through. I like most of the songs, but they direly needed to play them through a few more times before even thinking about recording. I was and still am so disappointed in the band for this album, especially coming after Farmhouse, which has a wonderful, laid back, but tight, vibe.
Of course the band didn’t include Texas on their 2003 or 2004 tours. Why play Texas when you can play multiple shows in Wisconsin or Las Vegas? Why play a place where you haven’t been since 1999 when you can play somewhere you’ve played every single tour since leaving Vermont? To say I was (yes, still am) frustrated is a slight understatement. I mean, the band had obvious doubts about continuing when they went on hiatus. In my view, after hearing how lazy and bored Round Room was, I feared that I’d never get to see them again. That’s where we get to The Announcement back in May. Yes, I was mad; I was really mad. They hadn’t played anywhere near me in 6 years and it wasn’t going to happen. The last album they put out was awful and uninspired and it was the first album they released that was outright BAD. Trey Anastasio, who was always the leader of the group, simply wasn’t leading anymore. Instead of being out front, he laid back to let the other guys come out more. Not a bad idea at all, but for this particular band it works best when Trey’s out in front. It was obvious in a way that the band hadn’t been practicing as heavily as they used to. On the more complex numbers there we numerous mistakes and it didn’t seem to bother them that sloppiness had taken over. Then Trey makes the announcement and it’s clear that he’s saying that Phish dies while his solo project, the Trey Anastasio Band, lives on. I thought he was an egotistical, uncaring, lazy oaf who couldn’t be bothered with keeping together the best live band out there. Once I did get his full side of the story, and stopped making assumptions about the motives, then everything became clearer and it actually made sense.
I heard the first single from Undermind, The Connection, and wasn’t impressed. The first couple of listens to the album proper didn’t impress me either. I thought, great, they should’ve just stayed on hiatus because they really did give it everything they had at that New Year’s show. My opinion changed though a week or so of listening to it. Once again, they decided to throw things out there that were different and challenging. It’s as if they specifically made the album to challenge me and my preconceived ideas of what the band was. They “could go anywhere”, remember? Seems like I forgot that one. I’ll give a full review of Undermind in due time, but where I’m at now I enjoy the heck out of it. Everyone contributes songs and everyone sings. It stands alone as a very good album and it’s a great album to end the band’s career with.
Before the final tour they announced that the first show would be simulcast via satellite and beamed to many movie theaters around the country. If you couldn’t make it to the opening show of the tour, all you had to do was go to a local theater and see the show live as it happened. I thought this was a fantastic idea and if I would’ve been in town, then I would have gone. Thankfully for the last stand, a 2-day festival in Coventry, Vermont, they decided once again to simulcast the entire thing.
The final two Phish shows took place on 8/14 & 8/15 in Phish’s home state of Vermont. Naturally, this was the most appropriate place to play. I really wanted to go, find a way to make it up to Vermont, and send the band off with thousands of other Phisheads. Of course, money being scarce and all, that didn’t happen. I am so thankful that their little experiment of simulcasting the show from a month before was successful and they went with the same setup for their farewell. I know I only saw it at a movie theater as it happened, but I felt that I was a part of it, and I’m sure the audiences all around the country felt a part of it too. Damn, I’m getting all nostalgic and sad now…more of that in a bit. Unfortunately it was not feasible to attend both Coventry shows, so my wife and I attended the final show together.
The theater was about ¾ full; I was hoping for a sellout, but I have to be realistic about these things. Not a ton of people listen to Phish anyway (they’re not U2 or anything) and I’m sure even a lot of Phisheads didn’t feel like shelling out $20 and sitting in a movie theater for 7 hours. Yes, that’s right…the thing lasted about 7 hours. The band played 3 full sets (at or over an hour each) along with the final encore, and with an hour break in between each set. Although it was a long day, it was nice to get the hour breaks during the show so we could go eat, or hang out, or go do “whatever” in the cars. Surprisingly, not a single person smoked anything in the movie theater. Also, the theater was pretty clean when we finished. You won’t see that after 7 hours of viewing ‘normal’ movies. Obviously, the songs they chose for the setlists both days were the final times they’d ever be played. Saturday’s show featured the band retiring some classics like You Enjoy Myself, Runaway Jim, Run Like an Antelope, Sample in a Jar, Stash, Free & Harry Hood. Sunday’s show, the last Phish show ever, started off with a great Mike’s Song and ended 7 or so hours later with the encore of The Curtain (With). Along the way we saw last performances of Reba, Chalkdust Torture, Wolfman’s Brother, Ghost, Piper, Wilson and a bunch more. Some specific highlights for me: during Down with Disease (opener of set 2) the audience of the movie theater unleashed a few hundred glow-sticks and we had our own little mini-glow-stick war right there…most of the songs featured serious jams and it showed what the band really to do and how they wanted to thank us…Wading in the Velvet Sea, the 2nd song of the 2nd set, suddenly gained new meaning in the lyrics and keyboardist Page McConnell just lost it while singing the first line; man, I think at that moment everyone in the theater broke down right with him, I mean, we got it, it hit us all at the same time…actually, all of the 2nd set was just a super emotional cry-fest, with the band needing to ‘let off some steam’ by playing the last Split Open and Melt ever…having the theater audience sing the appropriate lines in Wilson…actually, the whole experience of watching it in a movie theater with a ton of other Phisheads was really special, we clapped enthusiastically after every song, sang along, danced, threw glow-sticks, laughed, smiled and cried…I LOVE the fact that the band, on their last show ever, debuted a new song; it was called Bruno and was about their monitor guy named Bruno, this morphed into another “debut” called Dickie Scotland, about the tour accountant; maybe not necessarily completely written out before hand, but they were debuts nonetheless…I love how Phish’s last show didn’t feature any cover songs, and the only special guests who came onstage were Trey and Mike’s mothers to dance with their sons on Wolfman’s Brother (which Trey finally revealed the meaning of)…the last song of the weekend, the night, the band ever, was a song called The Curtain, naturally a perfect song to end on in name, but also (as was explained by Trey) it was the first song that truly signaled the beginning of the band and was one of the most important songs in band’s history. In a sense, it was the beginning and the end; nothing more appropriate.
Honestly, there were a million other things I’ll remember from the show. It was really special and amazing for me to witness their last show. I was hoping to hear some songs off Undermind, but that wasn’t to pass. They didn’t play anything off their debut album, Junta, either at the last show. All of the other studio albums were touched on, plus some fan favorites that were only released on live albums. It was truly a fantastic experience I won’t ever forget it.
So, I’m in the present, listening to Undermind (yet again…I love this album) and being overwhelmed by what this band has done for me as a musician, a music listener and as a person. They were absolutely one of the best and (for me and a lot of others) most important bands of the past 10-15 years. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, Phish.
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