Phishheads Get Word From PhishNe March 25, 1992 - St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Pg. 3F) by Paul A. Harris PHISHHEADS GET WORD FROM PHISHNET VERMONT BAND PHISH BENEFITS FROM NATIONWIDE; COMPUTER NETWORK WITH A LITTLE HELP from their high-tech friends, the word on Phish, a versatile quartet from Burlington, Vt., has been spreading through some unusual channels. Phish, which will appear Monday at Mississippi Nights, draws both its influences and its fans from across the spectrum. ''A Picture of Nectar, '' the band's first major-label (Elektra) release, includes ideas from rock, country, jazz and beyond. Partly owing to that diversity, Phish has gotten a piggyback ride from one of pop music's best-known cults - the Grateful Dead's Deadheads. For some time, a high-tech cadre of Deadheads has been communicating through electronic mail - computer to computer - around the country. Matt Laurence, a computer graphics designer and Phish fan, frequently monitored the Grateful Dead messages from his computer terminal in Hamilton, Mass. Laurence discovered, among other things, a common ground between Deadheads and Phishheads. ''I had been a Phish fan for quite a while,'' Laurence recalled. ''I noticed that nobody had really heard of Phish in the computer news groups that I watched - except, that is, for a very few people on the Grateful Dead network. Eventually, I noticed that the number of people writing about Phish on the Grateful Dead network was growing, and I thought, 'Why not a Phish network?' I decided to call it Phishnet.'' Although they're not a particularly technology-oriented group, the members of Phish recognized a good thing when they saw it. When correspondents along the Phishnet began communicating with Trey Anastasio, Phish's lead guitarist, singer and songwriter, he had little trouble imagining the possibilities. ''It's the in formation age, these days,'' Anastasio points out. ''And the Phishnet has really changed the face of the band, because anytime anything happens that's out of the ordinary - which is practically every Phish concert - everybody on the network knows about it the next night. ''We recently premiered six songs - songs that didn't make our new album - in the first gig of this tour. A bunch of people taped the show. That night, people put the titles and descriptions of those new songs on the Phishnet - and (information on) 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, when we go out on this national tour, people are going to have heard of the new songs, and even heard tapes of the new songs, before we get to the different towns. ''For instance, a woman called me from Arcata, Calif. She had heard about these new songs on the Phishnet, and she set up a tape tree, which is basically a way to get about 500 cassettes using only three generations of tape. Each person makes three tapes, and each of the people who get those tapes makes three tapes, and after three generations, you've got 500 tapes, or something.'' On paper at least, Phish shares the Grateful Dead's diversity of influences. Their free, stream-of-consciousness songs are set to a compelling array of instrumental styles, from the rootsy, bluegrass/country sound of ''Poor Heart'' to the Kenny Burrell/small combo jazz guitar sound of ''Magilla.'' The new album even contains a cover of Dizzy Gillespie's ''Manteca.'' For Phish, the key to the blend is jazz. ''The band has been going for about eight years,'' said Anastasio. ''After our first two years, our keyboard player, Page McConnell, joined the band. He was pretty excited about jazz from the beginning, and he started to push us to do these jazz gigs. ''At the same time, I started studying big-band jazz, and learning jazz arrangements. We found a club in Burlington that would have us, and we played as a rhythm section for different horn players. Slowly, over time, we started picking up on the jazz thing. ''It's really an important thing to learn, on a lot of different levels. First of all, it's the American art form. Second, harmonically and musically you learn so much from learning jazz, even if you're not going to be a straight-ahead jazz player. Any kind of musician can learn from jazz. ''There's a real cross starting to happen between jazz, bluegrass and country,'' he said, alluding to players like Bela Fleck and Chet Atkins. ''I know a lot of country fans think they can't stand jazz, and there are a lot of jazz fans who would say that country music is just awful. But in terms of musical substance, there's a real big crossover.'' Phish Place: Mississippi Nights Address: 914 N. First St., Laclede's Landing Time: 8:30 p.m., Monday Tickets: $7 in advance, $9 on day of show (421-3853)