8,000 Phishheads Like Concert June 16, 1995 - St. Louis Post-Dispatch By David Surkamp BEN and Jerry's ice cream isn't the only good thing to come out of Vermont these days. Just ask the 8,000 or so fans that caught the rock quartet Phish Tuesday night at Riverport Amphitheatre. The two-part program, plus intermission, gave the foursome and the audience plenty of room to stretch. The band's eclectic brew of pop, jazz, country and free-form jamming has established a strong fan base across the country, referred loosely to as Phishheads. For my part, I got hooked on Phish when I caught the act on the bottom of the bill at an appearance by Santana in 1992 at Riverport. While admitting the comparison is getting pretty old, fans of the Grateful Dead and Phishheads have a lot in common. You only get part of the picture listening to Phish recordings like "Rift" or "Hoist," because, as is the case with the Grateful Dead or Col. Bruce Hampton & the Aquarium Rescue Unit, the band and their freewheeling arrangements come alive on the concert stage. Consequently, bootleg concert tapes of all three acts abound. Following about a 30-minute delay getting the show started, guitarist Trey Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, drummer Jon Fishman and keyboardist Page McConnel swept the crowd on a musical roller-coaster ride that had fans dancing from the front of the Riverport stage to the top of the hill overlooking the stage. The band's dense, mercurial chord progressions are ripe with harmonic clusters, and polyrhythms that teeter on the edge of abandon. These elements provided a springboard for Anastasio's impassioned fretboard displays that brought order in the exhilarating chaos that is the band's forte on material including "Picture of Nektar." In any case, the unexpected often reared its head during the extended jamming throughout the program. In fact, songs such as "Axilla (Part II)," from "Hoist," will seem a trifle brief after hearing them pushed to the limit at Riverport.