Phish Draws Own Map to Success November 18, 1992 - Times-Union (Albany) by Greg Haymes click on thumbnail for larger image Three years ago, an unsigned, largely unheraleded band named Phish from Burlington, Vt., made a big splash in its Capital Region debut at Pauly's Hotel. Things are going swimmingly for Phish these days. The extraordinarily eclectic quartet has performed in the area twice this year (at Union College in May and at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in July, opening for Santana), and on Friday night Phish is coming back for its first show at the Palace Theatre, which sold out in near-record time. "We're about to go out for a monthlong road trip, " said Phish bassist Mike Gordon at his Burlington home last week, "and this whole tour in pretty much sold out, which really surprised us." Is this success? "Yeah, it seems like it," Gordon admits somewhat sheepishly. "We're very happy. The only problem is that there are some fans who wanted to go to certain shows, and they can't because they missed the first day of ticket sales." Most young bands jump at the first chance for a big record deal that comes their way, but since forming while college students eight years ago, Phish has always run against the current, maintaining a staunchly hands-on, do-it-yourself approach to the business end of the music industry that sees to be paying off handsome divideds these days. "We've always been reluctant to make rapid growth, take a giant leap," explains Gordon. "We've always grown very gradually, and I think it's been much healthier for us that way. "Our manager and everyone in our crew are all people who started out knowing nothing about what they're doing and learned from the bottom up. We like that Philosophy. "It's amazing how often people in the music business have told us, 'Oh, you can't do that' or 'Now, you have to do this.' Every step of the way, we've maintained that, no, we don't have to do something that way just because everyone else does it like that. And it's worked out fine for us because we've managed to keep playing music as our main goal, rather than trying to get on the charts of that sort of thing." Phish did sign a major-label deal with Elektra Records, which resulted in the band's third album, the dizzyingly diverse "A Picture of Nectar," earlier this year, and their new-found mainstream success poses a number of key, career-making-or-breaking questions that they bandmembers -- guitarist Trey Anastasio, keyboardist Page McConnell and drummer Jon Fishman in addition to Gordon -- find themselves pondering quite a bit. "Now that this tour has sold out so quickly, what does that mean for the future of Phish? What's out next step? Will be play bigger places? Will the intimacy be lost? Will we make a video? We don't know the answers to those questions yet." Meanwhile, Phish's progressive-groove music - which has been known to veer dramatically from jazz to barbershop quartet, bluegrass to funk - is simultaneously moving forward and backward in time. Last week, a new Phish album, "Junta," hit the record stores, but as Gordon explains, it's not exactly new. "Well, excluding one very early cassette that we only released about 100 copies of, 'Junta' was out first album," Gordon admits. "We recorded it back in '88, and it was only available on cassette at our gigs. "The tapes was originally 90 minutes long, and rather than eliminate a song or two for the re-issue on compact disc, we decided to add some more stuff and release it as a double-CD set. We included about 45 minutes of some pretty strange live jamming from that same period," he continued. "About half of the previously unreleased stuff is one long jam that we did at a band practice, and the other half is some silly - very silly - songs recorded live at Nectar's, a club in Burlington where we used to play all the time." Phish fans won't have long to wait for the next album of all-new Phish music, either. "We've just finished recording our fourth album, 'Rift,' which will probably be released at the end of January," Gordon said. "It's our first album with an outside producer, and we worked with Barry Beckett, who was the piano player in the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. "The biggest difference for us was that we had someone there in the studio to tell us when we were really emoting and when we were just going through the motions. So I guess you could say that Barry's main job was to gauge the soul in our performances. The other difference between this new album and our last one (A Picture of Nectar) is that our songwriting is getting to be more focused. The last album was kind of tour-of-the-world album with each song taking on a different musical style, although we didn't plan it that way. "On almost all of the songs on the new album, the various musical styles are more integrated, so you can't really say, 'Oh, this is the jazz tune' or 'This is the bluegrass song.' It's more interesting that way, I think." Phish's free-form approach to genre-busting music, and the band's spontaneous, often sprawlingly long live performances have led to constant comparisons with the Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa over the years, and Gordon admits to some ambivalance over the repeated associations. "In terms of the Dead, there's the fact that our songs aren't typical pop songs. The lyrics are more fantasy-oriented in a lot of cases. The jams are long-winded. Out set lists vary considerably from night to night. "In terms of Frank Zappa, there's out eclectism and maybe sometimes the satire that's involved and the orchestral aspect, where certain sections of the music are written out. "But the fact of the matter is that they are two of our influences, and there are a whole bunch of other influences in all different styles of music. "Sometimes, if does get frustrating. I understand that most people have a need to categorize music into different labels, but it can become an exclusionary kind of thing. When someone says, 'Oh, Phish is a Grateful Dead band,' then people who aren't interested in the Dead but might be interested in us are steered away from the idea of coming out to see us." But Gordon and the other members of the band needn't worry too much about that with the kind of runaway success that Phish is experiencing these days. With their concerts selling out almost as fast as they're announced, it seems as though everyone wants to soak up the Phish experience.