Two musical entrees: Phish or School of Fish

Two musical entrees: Phish or School of Fish
March 5, 1993 - The Dallas Morning News
By Lisa Broadwater

Here's a fish story for you. Actually, it's a Phish chool of Fish story, the tale of two bands circling the same territory (Deep Ellum) chasing the same bait on the same night. Not that the two lend themselves to easy comparisons; aside from the name, they have little in common. In fact, it's a bit like trying to compare a walleye to a humuhumunukunukuapuaa: One is so familiar, the other so peculiar that there's little point.
So let's start with the humuhumunukunukuapuaa. If I could explain in three words what Phish does, I would. But it isn't very feasible (or fair) to pigeonhole the band's sound. Imagine Schroeder on speed visiting Nashville with Santana, the Osmonds, Dizzy Gillespie and Spike Jones. The result is extremely odd, yet somehow familiar -- a roller coaster of free-form jazz, rock-based musical ups and downs, twists and turns that inevitably moves much faster than most of us can keep up with.
To the uninitiated, Nectar might easily be mistaken for a compilation, the result of a half-dozen different groups -- all a little strange but each with its own entity. Rift, the band's latest release, is decidedly less schizophrenic but no less idiosyncratic. The critical difference, Mr. Anastasio says, is that it carries more emotional weight.
"With Rift, we were trying to tie it together with a thread,' he says. "It just kind of took on a life of its own. For us, A Picture of Nectar had been off in like 13 different directions, and we wanted Rift to be cohesive....When we started choosing which songs were going to go on the album, we realized we had this theme going through a good number of the new songs, so the ones that worked with the theme we picked for the album and the other ones -- though there may have been some popular live songs -- didn't make it.'
You know something's up when a band like Phish throws away good live songs. Since forming about nine years ago, the band -- four rather goofy-looking guys from Vermont (Mr. Anastasio was born in Fort Worth) -- has cultivated its devoted cult following by religiously putting on the kind of live show that spawns legends.
"The relationship with our audience is everything,' Mr. Anastasio says. "It's the whole crux of the biscuit. The joy of it to me is the interplay between the audience and the band. There's a lot of improv and a lot of spontaneity.'
To put it mildly. If you're familiar with Phish, you know all about the beach balls, the vacuum cleaner and the trampolines. That such items are pivotal ingredients in a Phish show says a lot about the band's approach to music.
"We were doing this Earth Day show once,' Mr. Anastasio explains, "and people started bouncing these earth balls out in the audience. So two of us, myself and the keyboard player (Page McConnell), started improvising to the rhythm of the bouncing beach balls. And it worked really well.
"It was like the audience was controlling the music, so we got these beach balls, and sometimes we throw them out into the audience and each band member corresponds to one ball and the audience controls the music.
"Then there's the trampoline (which Mr. Anastasio and bassist Mike Gordon often use on stage). When we do it in places where people have seen us before, everybody does it. So sometimes you have 5,000 people all pogo-ing to the same beat, which gets a little scary when there's a balcony going up and down.'
For the first time, the band's audience may have spread into the mainstream. Rift debuted last month at No. 51 on the Billboard charts and sold more than 100,000 copies in its first two weeks. That's more than Nectar sold in its entirety.
And now on to the walleye. For those who like their rock hard, School of Fish is fine. Especially if noise is your idea of a good time. On the just-released Human Cannonball, the band's sophomore effort, guitars scream, they wail, they pound, they shriek with all the subtlety of a sonic boom. They reign, at times engulfing singer uitarist Josh Clayton-Felt's occasionally whiny vocals with little effort.
This all-out quitar assault is a slight shift for School of Fish, whose eponymous 1991 debut album generated quite the buzz -- both critical and popular-- with one especially groovy single, 3 Strange Days, a psychedelic ode that owed much to the '60s scene. If only more of School of Fish's trippy, less straightforward rock influences had showed up on Cannonball.

Article � 1993 The Dallas Morning News