Guitar group Phish nets scads of new fans November 19, 1992 - Unknown By Jon Hunt The music of Phish can be difficult to understand. The Burlington, Vermont-based group spins complex and convoluted webs of music in wild, tangled patterns. It's hard to play, and hard to get into. And -- like a spider's web -- it's incomprehensibly beautiful. ``On the new record, there's a really complex fugue (a musical form based on repetition of a single theme) based on the All Things Considered theme,'' explains guitarist Trey Anastasio from a hotel in Nashville, where the band has just completed their newest LP, Rift. ``If I was successful -- and I think I was -- listeners should be able to follow the theme in infinite variety and infinite sameness. It should be very glorious.'' Rift follows Phish's extremely successful and diverse major-label debut, A Picture of Nectar. Anastasio promises even greater heights and innovation on their latest LP. ``The new one is better than Nectar, by a long shot,'' Anastasio says. ``In terms of how high you can go, if you thought Nectar pushed the boundaries, this new one will go even higher. Because now,'' he pauses for dramatic effect, ``we have a concept.'' The central idea of Rift, said Anastasio, is more firmly grounded in real life than the cornucopia of surrealism in Nectar. ``It takes place in one night's worth of dreaming of one guy,'' he explains. ``It's just a chart of this guy's dreams. Each song is one dream. It's quite unlike anything we've ever done before. It's a real departure.'' Phish will have a hard time topping the success of Nectar. Following the release of that album, the band (which also counts as members bassist Mike Gordon, keyboardist Page McConnell, and drummer Jon Fishman) suddenly found itself a huge touring organization, spawning a following as intense -- and almost as large -- as the Grateful Dead's. ``We'd just been touring around,'' Anastasio says. ``We'd built up quite a fan base close to home. It just grew from there.'' Not bad for a group who, ten years ago, were music-school students ``sleeping on floors'' and trying to pay the bills in a ``cover band'' that played everybody else's hits. ``Oh, we were way more college rock back in the old days,'' Anastasio laughs. ``We used to play mostly covers. We did everything from (The Hollies') 'Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress' to (AC-DC's)'Highway to Hell.''' But Anastasio, a Goddard graduate in composition, was writing his complex compositions from the very beginning. ``From the start, we were doing original stuff,'' he says. ``It just takes a long time to build up enough stuff to where you're playing all originals. We started out with, I think, about two original pieces. Now, Mike (Gordon) just made a list of all the pieces we play, and there's more than a hundred. Most of them are original.'' The cover tunes still get played at the group's incendiary live gigs, however -- and some even stranger ones have been added, including a version of Nirvana's Top-40 hit ``Smells Like Teen Spirit.'' ``Well, it's a good song, isn't it? Isn't it?'' Anastasio jokes. Besides the cover versions, their bizarre live sets also include performing flat on their backs (with legs kicking in the air), brief choreography, a solo played on an Electrolux vacuum, and a song played with the entire band bouncing up and down on trampolines. ``That jokey stuff just worms its way into the set,'' Anastasio explains. ``I spend every waking hour of every day of the year with the band. When you spend that much time with people, you start doing stuff to crack each other up. That stuff suddenly appears on stage for that very reason -- to make the other band members laugh.'' Anastasio says the band takes a total of two days off per year -- every other day is spent in the studio, on tour, or in intense rehearsal. But he says he wouldn't want it any other way. ``On the two days I do take off, all I can think about is the band,'' he said. ``I can't get away. I don't want to get away. I just love it -- playing live, working on music, the whole creative process. I love writing music.'' ``If you love music as I do, it's all-consuming. There's nothing else to do. And, frankly, nothing else you want to do.''