“Generally, you either loved Phish or you made fun of the people who did.”

I had a peak experience on July 27th of this year (pun not intended).

Anyone else who was in attendance at Merriweather Post Pavilion knows exactly what I’m talking about. If you weren’t there, well, you missed out.

You missed out on a Sunday show, which is an absolute no-no.

You missed out on seeing the most cohesive unit of rock musicians playing at one of their favorite venues.

But most importantly, you missed out on the best band in the world doing what they’ve been doing for over 30 years now.

I can’t explain this to you because if you don’t like Phish, hearing that the band played Tweezer five times in the second set (the third one was the best) means nothing to you.

And if you do like the band, I don’t need to explain it to you because you already know about the insane Tweezerfest that was similar to, if not better than, the Bomb Factory Tweezerfest on 5-7-94.

I recently asked a cousin why people are more into lyrical/rap freestyles than they are musical ones. Like, why does musical freestyle get the connotation of jam band and hippies, while lyrical freestyle gets ghetto black people? And why do we have to feel a certain way about either?

He responded that there aren’t many good freestylers out there for real.

It’s the same way with musical freestylers. It’s not that easy to take risks every night and actually show imperfection in front of hundreds/thousands of people, but that’s the fun of it. When it works, it really works. And it blows you away because you don’t know what to expect.

In both cases, the great ones have practiced so much that it’s second nature to them. The music/words are playing them.

Ever since the second night at Merriweather, I’ve been slowly collecting ideas on how to convince people that Phish is truly the best band in the world. (The simplest explanation is that it’s like being on the inside of a really good joke.) I’ve wanted to find a way to give back to the band that taught me about acceptance, practice and openness in proper communication and listening*.

*I don’t know if I was aware that I did this before, but now I find a joy in going into a conversation with a stumbling start, a deep middle, and an interesting end (or segue) into another topic. It’s cool to see how two people can play off one another and learn just by listening to each other (This is in another post on this blog, but Jeff Bridges and his Buddhist friend actually called their conversations “jamming”). Also, I’ll always try my best to entertain a joke no matter how dumb it is and run with it until it’s not really funny anymore. If it didn’t feel like the conversation or joke ended, then it always lingers until someone closes it. I’m super analytical about these things.

The easiest way to do that is to take people to a show, but most people are incredibly reluctant because:

They don’t like hippies (which to me is like discriminating against Muslims or black people). They come up with some reason not to go. They’re not into that kind of music.

With regards to c, I’ve had a lot of fun figuring out why this is the case. Especially because there’s a vast array of music that can be heard at one of their concerts. For god’s sake, they played 99 Problems and Big Pimpin’ with Jay-Z one time and finished a set with Kid Rock another time (I’m not linking the latter, but the Jay-Z one puts a smile on my face). Other sit-ins include Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Santana, Abe Vigoda dancing his as off, etc.

(Aside: one of the little tidbits about the band is how they performed on SNL the same night Al Gore was the host. I’ve always wondered how Jimmy Fallon felt/feels meeting all of these people. Jarret’s Room!)

Still not your thing? What are your favorite songs?

I love this quote from the biography: “Given the broad range of artists they covered and the wide range of material they wrote, it’s not hard to understand why Phish fans grew so loyal to them that they didn’t feel the need to venture far beyond their universe of music. Phish was essentially a one-stop shop for music of all kinds. By following Phish, you’d get well-rounded exposure to all sorts of genres. Their well went so deep that there almost wasn’t time to listen to anyone else, especially if attending or acquiring as many live Phish shows as possible rated as a high priority in one’s life.”

Still not your thing? Are you into classical music?

That’s alright. Trey Anastasio’s got you covered there too. Not only is he a guitar virtuoso, but also one of the hardest working people in music.

Phish’s early work was mostly written out as sheet music. Songs like You Enjoy Myself, The Divided Sky and Guyute naturally found their way into an orchestral setting.

But my personal favorite moment? It happened recently when Anastasio was playing his songs with the Seattle Symphony.

Before going into Water in the Sky, the fans started asking for it. Trey called the audible like he has quite a bit of experience doing onstage, and next thing you know, the symphony played that two-beat, low-E intro that the Seahawks blast when Russell Wilson runs onto the field for their first offensive drive (also something that Trey orchestrated, but in a different way). This chant can now be heard at Nationals games when Wilson Ramos walks up to bat.

Do me a favor. The next time you’re at a bar, maybe smoking a cigarette outside, ask the strangers if they’ve ever heard of Phish. Here are the responses you’ll get:

Yes. Yeah, I’ve heard a couple of songs by them. (No you haven’t.) Why? Are you a part of the band or something? That band sucks.

In the case of a, I always ask how many shows they’ve been to. I’ve found some great shows in the archive from like 1995 or 1998 just by doing this. It amazes me that people can remember the exact dates of when they saw… Phish.

It’s so strange how everyone knows about this band. If they’re as big of a deal as I’m making them out to be, why had we never heard a single one of their songs on the radio or remember seeing a video back in the 90s when MTV still actually lived up to its name? How did Phish have the biggest concert on New Year’s Eve 1999 but no one talked about it? Why don’t we hear about them more if they’re so culturally significant?

I just finished reading the band’s biography. I’ll let Phish: The Biography author, Parke Puterbaugh, explain all of that.

On the music industry and critics

During its brief window of opportunity, the original Lawn Boy sold well – To the consternation of rock critics. Morrison elaborated on this turn of events: “Phish, in particular, were hated by the music-biz establishment, who all took time out of their busy days to phone the label and tell them the record was ‘shit.’ As the fall leaves turned, it became obvious that the Phish record was destined to become the label’s first hit. Suddenly, music impresarios all called to say that they had changed their mind. Lawn Boy was not ‘shit,’ it was now a ‘fluke.’”

…

“It makes me laugh,” said Trey Anastasio. “The media’s just completely missed the boat. We were chuckling about it after the Clifford Ball [their August 1996 festival]. Nobody from MTV News was there, and it was the biggest North American concert of the year. It was definitely groundbreaking. And regardless of the music, there was a real story that in an age of corporate sponsorship, this completely homegrown thing happened that was different than any other concert.”

The group’s low profile created a kind of paradox. By that time, nearly everyone had heard of Phish, but outside of the growing base of fanatics who followed the tours, relatively few had actually heard Phish. They were big but they were still kind of a mystery to mainstream music fans.

On not having a radio single

The Grateful Dead’s surprise Top Ten hit, “Touch of Grey,” in 1987 might’ve been the worst thing that ever happened to them. Phish took that example under advisement and deliberately avoided handing radio an obvious hit, even though they had songs in their arsenal – “Chalk Dust Torture,” “Suzy Greenberg,” and “Strange Design” among them – that would’ve made strong contenders. Although serviced to radio, the studio version of “Chalk Dust Torture” had been slightly slowed down – ironically, to make for a more presentable tempo – rendering Anastasio’s vocal more weird than listenable. “Suzy Greenberg” went unrecorded, and “Strange Design” released only as a foreign B-side, was seemingly sabotaged by a bizarre arrangement.

There was, in fact, an intention on their part to subvert potential hits. This isn’t just a suspicion. In 1996, I asked Anastasio point-blank, ‘Are you guys ever going to get around to recording ‘Suzy Greenberg’? That sounds like your great lost Top 40 single.”

He answered, “It’s funny. I wouldn’t do it, for that reason. We’ve had ample opportunity to record it because it was a good single, and we’ve chosen not to.”

On the euphoria

“My experience of Phish at Nectar’s [a bar in Burlington, Vermont] was that I couldn’t leave and I couldn’t stay away. And that was a very common thing. Many times I said, ‘One set and I’m going home,’ and it never happened. It was addicting. Unbelievably addicting.” – Chris Kuroda, who eventually went on to work for the band as their lighting director. He’s also known as CK5, the 5th member of Phish.

On the Paradise show (where Phish had bought out the Boston venue because the manager wouldn’t book them)

“I was standing right next to this dude, and he turns to someone else and says, ‘You know, I wouldn’t give these guys a gig, and I don’t know how the hell they did it, but here they are. They sold out my club.’ He was just blown away.”

Beth Montuori Rowles recalled the reaction at Don Law’s office the next day: “Jody Goodman, who was the club booker at the time, was like, ‘Does anybody know who this band Phish is? They sold out The Paradise last night. How did that happen? I’ve never even heard of them before. They’re from Vermont. What is this? They sold the place out!’

All of a sudden it was like the radar’s on them. The next time Phish played in Boston, the Don Law Company promoted it. They wanted a piece of it. End of story.”

And what happened after…

The success they had renting the Paradise not only opened some doors but also gave them the notion to try the same strategy in places where the doors still weren’t opening very easily.

“They were having a hard time because they were so unconventional. People don’t realize these guys were not an easy band to pitch. They were complicated. This was the era of grunge. In 1989 and 1990, Pearl Jam and Nirvana were breaking on the scene. It was a very different sensibility in terms of what was considered cool music, especially on a nightclub level,” recalled manager John Paluska.

So in the early nineties they started renting venues around New England… they even rented Boston’s World Trade Center for one of their first big New Year’s Eve shows.

“It was kind of fun, and in a way it bred this entrepreneurial spirit that led to our festivals. You can see a real direct lineage there. We were doing our own thing early on and got a taste for it. We saw the difference in how it felt to do those shows. It felt a little more like an adventure. It was our thing. We weren’t playing at some club on somebody else’s schedule and under somebody else’s rules. We made our own rules.

Later on, when we did our festivals, we were already in the practice and saw the benefits of doing it ourselves. We could control all the parameters and put it out there the way we wanted. There was something very satisfying about creating something out of whole cloth instead of plugging it in to some existing paradigm.”

Phish began doing it themselves because many promoters weren’t interested in them. But the joke was on the promoters, because Phish were doing great business every night. Moreover, by cutting out the middleman, they were able to control costs and make more money, which they plowed back into their operation.

“That was a big thing for them. They had a lot more gear and production stuff early on than most bands. They were really clear that any money that came in, they wanted to use to make their show better. Everything was in service to the show.”

All this self-sufficiency emboldened Phish to continue to do things their way. In a sense, they were learning at this stage that they didn’t need the music industry – or, more specifically, they didn’t need to follow its rules just because it was “the way things are done.” Once they were able to quit their day jobs and fully support themselves as musicians, however modestly, they realized there was no imperative to compromise.

“Within the band, there was a sense of ‘Why would we want to compromise anything when we can make a good living doing exactly what we want to do?’ Of course, that was the best decision they ever could’ve made, because people are attracted to something pure. I’ve always been a big believer that intent is so fundamental in people’s visceral response to any art form – particularly music, since it’s just a direct experience. There’s no mistaking Phish’s intent. There was joy and purity in what they were doing. You might not like it, but you certainly couldn’t deny it.”

On the concert experience and Clifford Ball

“It felt like so much more than just a big concert with 70,000 people,” Anastasio reflected a few weeks later. “It felt like some kind of exciting new thing. We did as much of it as we could, but most of the feeling came from the way people were. That’s the part I couldn’t have anticipated and that just kept blowing me away.”

It was all about peaceful coexistence and phenomenal music, and it was Phish that imagined it into being. Those three days at the Clifford Ball were unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was as close to Edenic scene of peace, love, and musical bliss as I’ve ever experienced and many who were on hand echo that sentiment. The memory of that weekend remains as hopeful evidence that even in this politically muddied, corporately hog-tied, culturally degraded, and violence-wracked world, something approaching utopia still is possible.

No one who was there will ever forget it.

…

Indeed, though they never did return to Plattsburgh, the Clifford Ball would serve as the blueprint for a series of annual festival campouts in out-of-the-way places. What Phish did would inspire such multi-band rock festivals as Bonnaroo and Coachella. In fact, many of the staff and crew who worked on Phish’s festivals brought their expertise to those events and others like it. That the Clifford Ball exceeded beyond anyone’s expectations served as testimony to Phish’s visionary outlook and perseverance.

“I think there are solutions to all logistical problems – any kind of problem – if you sit down and think about it long enough,” said Anastasio. “So many people are just naysayers. Take Plattsburgh. As soon as we started saying, ‘We’re going to do this concert in Plattsburgh…” ‘Plattsburgh?! That’s nearly in Canada. Nobody’s gonna go there. There’s nothing there, it’s this tiny little town. What are you, crazy? Let’s do it at Randall’s Island, then we’ll rake in the big bucks.’ That’s the general attitude: Get the money. You have to get away from that.”

On the Dark Side of the Moon show

Two nights after the Halloween concert in Vegas, Phish played Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon for a smallish crowd in Salt Lake City.

The motivation was poor ticket sales. Following the Halloween show, Phish had a day off before playing Salt Lake City, which was followed by two nights in Denver. Most fans drove straight from Vegas to Denver, skipping the Salt Lake show. When the band and crew got to the E Center, they noticed there were few fans in the lot. Barely one-fourth of the tickets had been sold for the 12,000-seat venue. Road manager Brad Sands and crew member Eric Larson conspired to make absent Phish fans regret this oversight.

Larson recalled what happened: “Brad and I immediately ran to Trey and said, ‘There’s only 3,200 people here! You’ve gotta hurt ‘em! You’ve gotta get ‘em good!’ And he said, ‘Well, what can I do?’ And Brad and I looked at each other and said, ‘I think it’s time for Dark side of the Moon!’ And Trey said, ‘Okay, we’ll do Dark Side. Get the band.’”

The others were pulled away from dinner and, with only ninety minutes before the start of the show, they listened to the album and ran through it once. They played the first set and went over a couple of songs backstage during the set break. Then they did a full second set, concluding with “Harpua.” During the part where Anastasio riffs on what “little Jimmy” is listening to on his stereo, the band launched into “Speak to Me,” the first song on Dark Side of the Moon. Then came the second song from Dark Side… and the third… and so on, through the entire album.

For years, Phish fans had requested Dark Side of the Moon. Phish finally relented, but not on Halloween. That was a typical Phish move – ambitious, unexpected, exciting. That show quickly passed into Phish lore and helped guard against empty houses thereafter.

It was a throwback to their “you snooze, you lose” tour strategy where a small crowd meant a big concert surprise that would leave those who’d blown off the show cursing the decision.

“There were probably 3,200 cell-phone signals coming out of the arena when they struck that first note,” Larson said with a laugh. “And then, of course, the fans thought they were just getting one Pink Floyd song. And then when they went into the second song people said, ‘Oh, my God. They’re gonna give us the whole album?!’”

“Brad and I were climbing off the bus in Denver,” Larson recalled, “and some kids asked, ‘What’d they do last night?’ We just looked at them and went, ‘Ohhh… you didn’t go?’ ‘No, we came right from Vegas.’ We said, ‘Ooh, bad move. Not good.’ We wrote it down and handed them the list. They looked at it and then looked at this one kid and said, ‘It’s your fault we skipped that show!’ I’m sure there was a lot of that going on, a lot of finger-pointing at somebody who was trying to cut some miles off the road.”

Larson still marvels about that night: “To be able in about ninety minutes’ time to listen and learn a whole album and then come out and perform it? I mean, please.”

On embracing the internet’s potential for music

The intersection of the information superhighway and the burgeoning world of Phishheads generated a tremendous amount of traffic in the early 1990s. It wasn’t long before Phish.net was third in size among online music newsgroups, behind only Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead. In the 1990s, the Internet would further impact Phish and the music industry in an unforeseen way with the emergence of peer-to-peer sharing of music files via sites like Napster. The industry feared and fought the new technology and music fans’ use of it. Phish had a different attitude toward the taping and disseminating of their music by fans, whether via cassettes or over the ‘Net. They were solidly behind it. In the fall of 1993, Phish even began selling “taper tickets” by mail-order, allowing access to a special area set aside for them to erect their equipment at concerts.

“We recently premiered six songs that didn’t make our new album,” Anastasio told Paul A. Harris of the St. Louis Dispatch in 1992. “A bunch of people taped the show. That night, people put the titles and descriptions of those new songs on Phish.net and how you could get a copy of the tape.

“So within days, you’ve got tapes of these new songs all over the country, which is exactly what we’d want. That way, we go out on this national tour, people are going to have heard of the new songs, and even heard the new songs, before we get to the different towns.”

What would horrify most groups and record labels, Phish found acceptable and even desirable. The philosophy was that by encouraging taping and trading, they were building a committed fan base that would pay to come to shows, buy merchandise, and maybe even ante up for the occasional studio CD. The more they gave it away, the more they got back. They disapproved of for-profit bootlegging of their shows, however.

On live downloads and licensing for covers (one thing missing here is how concertgoers get a free show download code on their ticket stub)

After the hiatus, the group took LivePhish a step further, offering downloads of shows within forty-eight hours of each performance. They did this from their December 31, 2002, reunion concert at Madison Square Garden through their bow-out at Coventry in August 2004. Fans could purchase full-resolution digital downloads of individual shows or entire tours. An individual show cost $9.99 in the MP3 format – not bad for three hours and three discs, on average. They’ve continued the practice since reuniting in 2009.

“Phish broke all kinds of ground throughout their career, but the live download thing was a huge innovation,” said archivist Kevin Shapiro. “It was a generous step for them to agree that you’ll get it and you’ll get all of it, uncut, from the soundboard. Paul Languedoc had an incredible touch recording the live shows, but they’re still revealing and unforgiving, and a loud bad note in the room becomes a really loud bad note on a soundboard tape. I always thought we should reserve the right to say no on some given show. But I think it demonstrated great trust on their part of their own output.

The LivePhish downloads also brought change to the industry by streamlining the bureaucratic licensing process for songs by other artists. Because Phish typically performs at least a few covers per show – in whole or, during a jam, in part – they needed licenses for those songs before they could put them up for sale in the digital realm. Every song they covered required a license from its publisher, and any given song might have multiple publishers.

“I can’t tell you how difficult it was to license all of that stuff, because nobody else was doing it,” said Beth Montuori Rowles. “It was impossible to get a digital license because they hadn’t yet set rates for digital downloads. So when you went to these large publishers to get a license for a digital download, first of all, the federal copyright act mandates a thirty-day notice, and obviously we were violating that term since we were putting up shows within forty-eight hours.

“No one was saying no to us, but nobody was saying yes, either. It was like you couldn’t obtain the license because they didn’t know how to write it or how much to charge for it. And to get it through these big publishers’ business-affairs departments was ridiculous. So we couldn’t actually get physical licenses, but we were getting letters saying, basically, ‘Do this and we’ll figure it out after the fact.’ Of course, we wouldn’t be getting a letter like that from every single publisher, so we just had to move forward.”

The tide started to turn when Harry Fox, a company that handles licensing for multiple publishing companies, began offering instant live licenses for shows released within seventy-two hours.

“When they made that available,” Rowles continued, “I went to them and said, ‘Okay, now we’re starting to talk. Not all the terms meet our needs, but we’re actually going in the right direction.’ We were one of the first companies to get involved in this digital realm of licensing that excludes the thirty-day notice. Honestly, I think it took us two years to get the first licenses going. So the band’s always been on that innovative cusp.”

On Phish’s outlook

“We always have the attitude that each moment is the most important thing we’ve ever done. So we try to make it work and assume it can work, that there’s always potential.” – Mike Gordon

…

“Shut yourself off from the world, and just don’t listen to all the people who are going to tell you what you can’t do. Then just do it.”

…

In Anastasio’s words, Slip Stich and Pass reflected their self-acceptance:

“My realization is that you have to admit who you are. It’s like, ‘Be yourself, because nobody else can.’ We all grew up on a block in suburbia with twenty-five other kids, playing army and waiting for the Good Humor man. Going to the mall and hanging out at the pizza place. We’re these four suburban kids who grew up listening to classic rock stations. You can hear it ’cause we’re always throwing in these little quotes: the Doors, the Stones, Pink Floyd, ZZ Top, Talking Heads.

You wonder, how did we get so popular? But it seems kind of obvious when you look at it that way, because our experiences are similar to so many other people’s and our music speaks to them.”

…

“It was just some people from Burlington, but something started to happen that was really beautiful,” said Anastasio. “I loved to watch the expressions on people’s faces as they got really lit up. I saw there really is a connection to the light. It all sounds kinda New Agey or something, but I’ve experienced it enough times to believe that it’s actually true. Now as soon as you start thinking you can’t change because you’ve figured out a way to connect to that light, so you gotta keep doing that – that’s it, you’re dead.

What’s really hard to explain to people that once you find a connection to the light, clinging to it is not the answer and in a lifetime it’s exactly the opposite from the answer. There’s a poem by William Blake that I love, and it goes, ‘He who binds himself to a joy / Does the winged life destroy / But he who kisses it as it flies / Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

On what they learned

The emphasis on Nectar’s has to do with the fact it was Phish’s laboratory and playpen. There was no compulsion to be “professional,” just entertaining, and that came naturally. They treated the Nectar’s shows like open band rehearsals, with false starts, abandoned tangents, between-song chatter about what to do next, good-natured banter with the audience, gags and laughter, and ever more adventurous jams. This freedom gave Phish confidence to experiment and progress as they learned what did and didn’t work before a crowd. What they found was surprising: The more risks they took, the more people liked them. While honing their act at Nectar’s and other local venues, they discovered a sizable audience in Burlington with an appetite for musical adventure. What they couldn’t have imagined was how widespread that hunger would turn out to be.

…

Trey “The first thing I noticed at Hampton, and especially as the [2009] tour went on, was a little bit more an emotional weight based on life coming into the picture. Anybody our age, once you’ve had divorces and deaths and arrests… It’s funny, because it makes me appreciate young bands even more. I can’t stop listening to this record Oracular Spectacular by the band MGMT, because it’s so full of this attitude of, ‘I’m twenty-one and the world’s my oyster.” It’s part of rock and roll. But I like music by people who have lived a little. Hopefully you don’t have to live too much! [laughs] In any case, I hear an element of humility, an extra added element of humility, in our music now.

On the beginning

“They sort of sucked when we first started seeing them. They were getting it together. They were sort of sloppy, you know, but that was the fun of it. That was the magic of it. It was like there was a big joke going on and all the early Phish fans knew the punch line – which was that this was gonna be something big.” Tom Baggott, a Phish fan (“Phan” if you will) and acquaintance.

On their practicing

They worked hard and laughed often. Phish’s insistence on pushing themselves was evident at these sessions, where they spent considerable time on self-devised listening exercises. The best known was called “Including Your Own Hey.” These exercises, which formed a large part of their practice regimen from 1990 through 1995, are not so easy to explain but important for understanding how Phish could maintain a seemingly telepathic chemistry in concert. The whole idea was to improve the level of collective improvisation by learning to listen to one another while jamming. They’d do this by conjuring riffs and patterns out of thin air, varying and embellishing them until they were “locked in,” individually announcing their arrival with the word “hey.” When they’d each included their own “hey,” it was onto another round.

“’Hey’ means we’re locked in,” explained Anastasio. “The idea is don’t play anything complicated; just pick a hole and fill it.” They explored different elements of music – tempo, timbre, dynamics, harmonics – within the “hey” regimen. A variation on “Including Your Own Hey,” which they called “Get Out of My Hey Hole,” and the cardinal rule that one musician’s note could not sustain over anyone else’s.

“Mimicry is the lowest, most basic level of communication,” explained Anastasio. “These anti-mimicry exercises – listening to each other, hearing each other, staying out of each other’s way.”

Another exercise found them inversely varying tempo with volume. “The faster we go, the quieter we’ll play,” instructed McConnell. “The slower we go, the louder we’ll play.”

The group set up a monstrous wail on one loud, slow passage that would have frightened a Black Sabbath fan.

Yet another was “Two Plus Two,” in which one musician picked another person in the band to hook up with while still listening to the other two.

They went at it like this for hours.

“This is what we spend our time doing,” Anastasio said matter-of-factly. “This is our job.” Years later, after the breakup, he would admit that what he missed most about Phish was band practice. I could see why; there was a tangible sense of concentration mingled with camaraderie present in the room.

In terms of concert dividends, “It doesn’t always work 100 percent of the time,” Fishman noted. “But I still think those exercises really pay off, because it puts you in a state of mind where even if you are making a lot of noise and stepping on each other’s toes, you’re still aware of it. At least it’s not like you’re just blindly forging ahead.”

On musical differences by generations

It’s curious to realize, however, that Ernie Stires [Trey Anastasio’s mentor] never really grasped the extent of his achievement in helping to guide one of the great musical minds of modern times, largely because he had no use (or ear) for rock and roll. Stires was a product of the jazz age and also had a grounding in the classics. He saw rock and roll as endlessly repetitive and harmonically limited. As for the musical revolution he helped incite with his mentoring of Anastasio, he didn’t quite get it – culturally or musically.

“Trey wouldn’t be so enormously successful unless he was hitting some major vein in the psyche of his generation. What he’s hitting is a mystery to me.”

…

“The life that is put before you is so meaningless and boring: Just go to the mall for the weekend, get good grades in school, get a job at a corporation, and that’s your life. And you’re thinking to yourself, ‘This can’t be it!’ It’s like, c’mon. I can remember way back in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades always feeling like there was something better out there. Yet you still go to parties, you listen to the radio, you hear it. You can’t help but hear it. I grew up going to hundreds of parties where people put on Fly Like An Eagle, Pink Floyd, Meat Loaf, and stuff like that.

That was the soundtrack to my youth, regardless of how much I wanted to be like my idols, like Jimi Hendrix or something. But the experiences are different, and you just aren’t Jimi Hendrix. So all those different experiences add up to who you are. And all the while you’re striving for some kind of meaning, and we found that meaning in music.”- Trey Anastasio

On The Grateful Dead

Parke “Do associations with the Grateful Dead have any validity for you?”

Trey “Oh, definitely. The Grateful Dead paved the way for what we’re doing and what a lot of bands are doing now. I think even Pearl Jam wouldn’t be having the same career without the Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead as an American live touring act are, I think, the forebears. And it’s not musical style I’m talking about, because style is style, and style is directly related to the lives that the band members have led. So whatever experiences you’ve had in your life are going to come out in your music.

But conceptually, they put music first, they put the fans first. It was a noncommercial kind of approach.”

Trey on the death of Jerry Garcia

“It took me awhile, like a couple of weeks, to think about it. The thing I’ve been thinking is that I learned more about music from the way he walked onstage than anything else. It wasn’t necessarily what he played; it was who he was and what his intentions were.

Intention has so much to do with it. You can hear that in music so clearly. It’s not like, ‘I’m such a good guitar player.’ Music has nothing to do with that, you know? I read recent interviews with Sonic Youth and the Meat Puppets where they talked about how heavily they were influenced by Jerry, and they both have that same kind of thing. It’s like a purity of intention.”

On their career

Between December 2, 1983 (Phish’s debut), and August 15, 2004 (the final night at Coventry), the group performed 1,435 concerts. That is the most accurate figure to date, though it is always subject to revision as new information emerges about forgotten gigs played in the less well-documented early years. Given that the average Phish show runs for about three hours – two seventy-five-minute sets plus an encore – that’s a lot of hours spent onstage. Added up, it is the equivalent of 175 full days, or six entire months. In other words, Phish has spent at least half a year of their lives onstage – and that’s before they reunited in 2009.

They’ve spent more time than that rehearsing, too. This was the real secret to Phish’s success as a jam band: For years, they assiduously practiced four-way improvisation using self-devised exercises. They learned how to listen to one another and how to play as a unit. Phish is ideally a musical conversation, not a monologue.