"You've got to love your work. If you wake up in the morning and you like going to work, that's as good as it gets."

Jon Fishman, drummer for rock band Phish, will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Syracuse Area Music Hall of Fame.

That's the advice Jon Fishman's father, Dr. Leonard Fishman, hammered home while his kids were growing up. Love what you do. And for three decades, Jon -- drummer for the band Phish -- has heeded his father's words.

Thursday night, the Syracuse Area Music Awards will bestow upon Jon Fishman its highest honor, the Lifetime Achievement Award, for spending his life doing what he loves. It's an accolade earned by just 18 artists, including Ronnie James Dio, Dick Clark and Jimmy Van Heusen.

During an hourlong interview from his home in Vermont, Fishman -- a 1983 graduate of Jamesville-DeWitt High School -- was initially at a loss for words regarding the award.

"I guess I'm a little embarrassed," he said after some hesitation. "Let's put it this way: My dad, who has donated tons of of his time, is way more deserving of a lifetime achievement award. My friend Roger is...at the forefront of figuring out ALS. My wife has raised five kids...Everybody else in that room deserves a lifetime achievement award for what they've done...Do I deserve a lifetime achievement award for being the luckiest kid in the world?"

As far as Syracuse-bred musicians go, however, Fishman ranks among the most accomplished. He has spent 33 years as the drummer of Phish, the Vermont hippie staple that took the world by storm in the 1990s and remains one of the most popular touring acts in the country due to its highly devoted counterculture fan base.

With his signature band, Fishman is known for his trademark frock -- a blue "dress" adorned with pink doughnuts -- and for his solos on the vacuum cleaner. He's been shot out of a cannon onstage (sort of) and once sang Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl." He's known among fans as simply "Fish" or sometimes "Henrietta."

Aside from Phish, he has played with groups like Pork Tornado and Jazz Mandolin Project. He wrote a senior study at Goddard College called "A Self-Teaching Guide to Drumming Written in Retrospect."

But long before forming one of jam-rock's biggest bands, Fishman was just a kid from Syracuse who liked Led Zeppelin and loved Frank Zappa.

The worst kid in the band

When Fishman first started drumming in middle school he was, by his own admission, no good.

From left to right, members of the band Phish, Page McConnell, Jon Fishman, Trey Anastasio and Mike Gordon appear in the press room after performing at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Monday, March 15, 2010 in New York. Fishman is being honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Syracuse Area Music Hall of Fame.

"I was the worst drummer in my school band," he says. "There were five kids in the percussion section and I was the bottom of the barrel. Three kids would get to play the drum set and the other two were relegated to tambourine and bass drum. I was the tambourine kid."

Most of his experience at the time came from trying to mimic his favorite bands: Queen, Led Zeppelin, Genesis and the like. When he discovered "Visions of the Emerald Beyond" by Mahavishnu Orchestra, he decided to take some lessons so he could learn jazz.

His father, Leonard, hooked him up with SAMMYs Hall of Famer Dave Hanlon who, at the time, played with a band called C.R.A.C. The father-son duo would go see the band during sound check at bars and Fishman got to meet the players.

"I was getting to see a real live rock band here," Fishman said. "I got turned on by that. I'm a little kid and there's these fancy instruments. I felt really cool."

Fishman's took just a handful of lesson from Hanlon, which proved his "lightbulb" moment. After high school, he would leave Syracuse for college in Vermont. He would eventually join guitarist Trey Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon and keyboardist Page McConnell to form Phish, which allegedly took its moniker from the drummer's last name.

Dr. Dad

Phish drummer Jon Fishman plays during the band's performance at Vernon Downs in 1998. Fishman is being honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Syracuse Area Music Hall of Fame.

Phish started off like any band in the 1980s -- playing college halls and house parties. But while most of America was listening to Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper, these four kids from Vermont were playing psychedelic funk. Needless to say, it took a while to catch on.

Those early days, Fishman said, were a point of concern for his father, an orthodontist. His parents were both supportive of his decision to play the drums for a living, but his father always encouraged him to have a backup plan.

It wasn't until the end of 1994 that both his parents began to grasp the scope and success of this weird little band from Vermont. Phish had been booked at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 30 that year, and sold out the storied arena.

"There's the marquee that says 'Madison Square Garden welcomes Phish'" Fishman said. "It's a big moment. After the concert he comes to me and goes, 'I'm really glad you stuck to your guns.'"

Crash and burn

By 2004, Phish had established itself as a musical force. Critics dubbed the band torchbearers of the Grateful Dead, thanks to a ravenous horde of dedicated followers.

But after a decade of massive tours, festivals that shut down interstates and nearly a dozen studio albums, Phish decided to call it quits. The "hiatus" capped off a series of rocky years and would last half a decade. Over 60,000 people attended a series of farewell shows in Coventry, Vt.

The break, Fishman said, was a low-point. Looking back on it, he said he would have told his 1994 self to "make sure this doesn't go to your head."

"That was the real crash and burn," he said. "I thought we were never coming back. How many bands have we seen come and go in a heartbeat?"

The band reunited in March, 2009, with three shows at the Hampton Coliseum in Virginia. At the final Hampton show, Anastasio led an impromptu "Happy Birthday" for Fishman's father, who was celebrating his 76th birthday.

Today, the band is back at it, touring and putting out new music, like last year's "Fuego." Plans for this year's summer tour are expected any day.

For Fishman, his father's words of encouragement after that Madison Square Garden show still resonate more than 20 years later.

"No one expected that Phish would last 33 years and that this band would still be going now," Fishman said. "But that moment with my dad [at Madison Square Garden]...I'm going to remember that as a father with my kids. It's good to hear that."

Correction: An earlier version of this story said Phish played at Madison Square Garden on New Year's Eve, 1994. The band played on Dec. 30.

Jon Fishman will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Syracuse Area Music Awards during a ceremony upstairs at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que on Thursday, March 5. The event is sold out.

Chris Baker is the music writer for Syracuse.com/The Post-Standard. Contact him: Email | Twitter | Google +