Phish Conjures Up the Dead March 29, 1993 - The San Francisco Chronicle By Michael Snyder Band's improv-rock reminiscent of Garcia and company If you were hungry for Phish on Friday, you needed a ticket. And tickets were hard to find for both weekend concerts at the Warfield theater by Phish, the improvisational rock quartet from Vermont, because the Friday and Saturday shows were sold out affairs, thanks to a school of young Phish phanatics. Their tie-dyed garb, scraggly hair, form-free arm-waving dance moves and their devotion to Phish parallel the adoration of the Grateful Dead, another improv-oriented act, by the Deadheads. At times, Phish -- Trey Anastasio on guitar and lead vocals, Mike Gordon on bass and vocals, Page McConnell on piano, organ and vocals and Jon Fishman on drums -- even sounds like the Grateful Dead. Anastasio whips out loopy, ringing guitar solos that recall Jerry Garcia, while the band plays oddly arranged rock numbers with country and jazz inflections. One song on Friday was extremely close in melody and rhythm to the Dead's ''China Cat Sunflower.'' Like the Dead, Phish has a non-performing lyricist, Tom Marshall, contributing on the composing end. But Marshall's lyrics are more elliptical and fragmented than Robert Hunter's words for the Dead. FORCEFUL PASSAGES Phish has less of the warmth and easy fluidity of the Dead's material. Despite amazing instrumental skills that enable them to play long and forceful passages, difficult tempos, and stop-on-a-dime- bag changes, the musicians in Phish are more show than tell. There's too much technique on display for its own sake. Plus, Phish incorporates far more jazz fusion, funk and tropical world beat than you'll hear from the Dead. In their weird eclecticism, agility and little bursts of bizarre humor, they are less Jerry's kids than Frank's, as in Zappa. The difference is that Zappa is more likely to be cohesive in his writing of any individual composition, while the Phishermen will sometimes throw their jazz, rock, country, blues and bluegrass tendencies into a single piece. Perhaps this onetime party band from Goddard College -- the experimental backwoods school in Vermont -- is still suffering from the effects of too much maple syrup: terminal Log Cabin fever. Friday, their smug, grinning hippie- boy vibe was sticky-sweet-tempered. The need to endlessly noodle on their instruments enabled them to stretch the concert to a 3 1/2-hour length. They performed tracks from their current Elektra album, ''Rift,'' including the vibrant zig- zagging title song which opened the show and ''Silence in the Morning,'' a strange minimalist pop song with Philip Glass-type guitar triplets and a lead vocal from McConnell. They dipped into older stuff from their three earlier albums including their first independently-produced recording, ''Junta.'' There was a country hoedown as it might sound if played by the house band at Quark's casino on ''Deep Space Nine.'' A drunken blues suddenly lurched into a double-time polka that was reminiscent of ''Riders in the Sky.'' ''Split Open and Melt'' was a riot of crazy time signatures. Roadies brought four giant beach balls to the musicians who tossed them into the audience. Then, each musician followed an individual ball as it bounced through the crowd, creating an interactive jam according to the movement of the beach balls. GARCIA TO SANTANA Depending on the number or his mood, Anastasio conjured Garcia, Carlos Santana and Mahavishnu John McLaughlin in his playing. During a sort of suite that went from an ambient Windham Hill-style passage to Vince Guaraldi jazz vamps, McConnell did an organ improv on Lalo Schifrin's theme from ''Mission: Impossible.'' Then, Anastasio and Gordon bounced up and down on little one- man trampolines as they picked up the tempo. With the exception of the concise and direct rock of ''A Picture of Nectar,'' the pop sense of ''Silence in the Morning,'' and the covers, the band's melodies were generally tuneless or too busy. But a Phish performance flies or stumbles on improvisation and twists. The unexpected changes and complexities may strike some as profound. After two hours of Phish, I could have used a rendition of ''I Love You'' by Barney the dinosaur to clear my head.