phish.com


High Tide
 November 1, 1996 - Entertainment Weekly
 by Jeff Gordinier

Phish is one of the most successful rock groups in the music industry, but its popularity has not yet reached mainstream America. However, after the release of its latest album, 'Billy Breathes,' the band may reluctantly land in the media spotlight.

They've gone from big fish in a littlepond to the whale that swallowed rock's tie-dyed nation. But can Phish makes waves in the mainstream?

This is how one of the biggest rock stars in America tricks the paparazzi. He arranges a rendezvous at the Country Pantry, a cozy diner across the street from a cornfield in rural Vermont. Smart. Comes alone, without a Ziggy Stardust entourage of flacks and groupies. Very smart. Even eats like a regular American guy, opting for a thick cup of clam chowder and a plate of deep-fried chicken fingers. Brilliant! A couple of tourists pass through the Country Pantry dangling cameras, but they're on a quest for maple syrup, not celebrities. They don't even notice him.

Then again, your average shutterbug might miss Trey Anastasio even if he walked through Times Square wearing a sandwich board that proclaimed, "I am the lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter of Phish!" Anastasio is that rare creature in the celeb-drenched sea: a star who manages to duck the klieg lights of stardom. Phish put out a newsletter for 125,000 subscribers. They hawk hats, shirts, and stickers through Phish Dry Goods, a lucrative L.L. Bean-style merchandising company in Burlington, the band's home base. They grossed $16 million on their 1995 American tour. They command an army of tie-dyed nomads that rivals the Grateful Dead's in scale and devotion. Just like another Vermont institution with spiritual ties to Jerry Garcia--Ben & Jerry's ice cream empire--Phish have figured out how to fuse a nuts-and-grains sensibility with a nuts-and-bolts capitalist machine.

But judging from the indifference of the rock elite, Anastasio might as well be Howard Hughes. His bushy, bespectacled mug never appears on MTV; his songs only sporadically graze the airwaves. All summer the media heralded Kiss for selling out 15,000seat arenas, but just last August, Phish put together the Clifford Ball, a massive two-day jamboree on an abandoned Air Force base in Plattsburgh, N.Y. Somewhere between 70,000 and 135,000 people showed up. Tabitha Soren was not among them.

"The media just ignored it," Anastasio marvels. "It's just like we weren't even there! Which feels really good to me, to be the band that is ignored by the media, and meanwhile to be putting on the biggest concert in North America."

Of course, the media will let such a phenomenon swim undisturbed for only so long. If Phish are the Loch Ness monster of modern rock--a mysterious behemoth that manages to elude nets, bait, and conventional radar systems--there's a growing sense that the beast is about to surface. The source of such breathless anticipation is Billy Breathes, which flooded record stores last week. Until now, past Phish platters have failed to live up to the sensation; the last two, 1994's Hoist and 1995's A Live One, barely went gold. (Hey, who needs an album when the band lets you tape every show for free?)

But Billy, unlike the six collections of endless fugues and computer-geek limericks that preceded it, is a sweet, catchy, stripped-down song cycle in the spirit of Neil Young's Harvest and the Dead's American Beauty. In other words, it's ripe for commercial breakthrough. Indeed, Billy debuted at No. 7 on Billboard's album chart. As a hint of what's on the horizon, The New York Times even plopped Phish into a list of "new party faces," side by side with freshly minted glitterati like Beck, Ewan McGregor, and Jenny McCarthy. None of whom, it's safe to say, spend a whole lot of time at the Country Pantry.

And therein lies the conundrum. For a band that treats "buzz" the way you'd treat a pesky horsefly--a band that's spent the last 13 years in the hype-free hills of Vermont, where the sheep outnumber the supermodels and the hippest watering hole is Lake Champlain--all this blather about party faces and breakthroughs comes as a mixed blessing. "We're all expecting this to take things up a notch," concedes Phish manager John Paluska. "But I guess our feeling up here is, we take all this stuff with a grain of salt. Because if you buy into it, you can quickly get caught in the undertow and lose your bearings."

Bearings have always been a big topic in Phishville. Back in the early '80s, when Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, keyboardist Page McConnell, and drummer don Fishman--all now in their early 30s--formed the band as students at the University of Vermont and Goddard College, not one was a native Vermonter. (Anastasio and McConnell grew up in New Jersey, Fishman in New York, and Gordon in Massachusetts.) But they eventually eased into the state's slow, pastoral pace--and it paid off years later. Plenty of recent rock monsters have suffered the fate of the hare--blasting into the Billboard top 10 and flaming out faster than you can say "Green Day"--but Phish have gladly played the tortoise, inching from quad parties to Madison Square Garden over the course of 13 years. "We've spent more time avoiding growth than seeking it," says Gordon.

In the midst of mixing Billy Breathes, they even chucked the album's grand finale--a concert favorite called "Strange Design"--partially because it sounded too much like a smash. "Our original plan," cracks Gordon, "was to say `f---' every once in a while so that they wouldn't be able to play it on the radio."

Talk like that used to rankle the corporate benefactors at Elektra Records, but the suits have come to accept the strategy. "At this point, so many people have tried and failed to change their course that we're better off to let it happen," says Nancy Jeffries, senior vice president of A&R. "I'm sure there were stages at Elektra, in the past, where we looked at these growing audiences and said: `Why aren't we selling more? Let's try to get out there and bust this.' But Phish kind of dictated the pace."

So did the fans. Your average Pearl Jam diehard grumbles if Eddie Vedder fails to feed the flock "Jeremy" and "Alive," but Phish-heads have the opposite reaction. They don't want to hear a hit. They don't even want to hear the same song two nights in a row. Like the Deadheads, Phish phans--who tend to be more susceptible to dreadlocks and less susceptible to Summer of Love idealism than their Haight-Ashbury forebears--wander from town to town on a quest for the marathon jam, the ever-shifting set list, a nightly dose of karmic bliss.

And they're generous in return. They even get involved in family matters. Both Anastasio and McConnell are married; when Anastasio's wife, Sue, had a daughter last year, a group of fans heralded Eliza's arrival by sending the family a painted chest stuffed with toys--each one based on a word or image from a Phish song. "We're very thankful for the people that follow us around," says Gordon. "They listen to whatever we play--even if it's strange, even if we're taking risks."

Then again, if Phish succumb to anything that smells like a sellout, those same noodle-dancing, sandal-wearing, tie-dyed peaceniks will firebomb the Internet like a pack of peasants storming the Bastille. "God's honest truth is that they can be vicious," Anastasio admits. "We have created a situation where they expect a lot from us." Mostly, they expect an invitation to the party, which is just what Phish's rise from the underground could throw into jeopardy.

"I don't like to draw this comparison," explains veteran fan Doug Ryan, 31, "but when the Grateful Dead had their big hit `Touch of Grey' in '87, it really did screw up the touring scene. Suddenly a ticket that was usually pretty easy to get just couldn't be had. And when there aren't enough tickets to the show, it kind of tends to lead to hysteria."

That's already happened, actually. When Phish did four sold-out gigs at Denver's Red Rocks Amphitheatre in early August, hundreds of acolytes--many of whom couldn't score tickets--poured into the tiny town of Morrison. A truck accidentally hit and injured a 21-year-old Phish-head, and things fell apart. A mob formed; police brandished not gear; bottles flew; fights broke out. Despite months of planning--Phish have their own security expert, along with a roving "green crew" that cleans up after shows--the situation degenerated into a macho standoff.

Anastasio looks back at the Red Rocks melee with anger, sadness, and resignation. "Yes, a kid did get hit by a car, and I feel terrible about that," he sighs. "I always feel terrible if anybody gets hurt in any way at one of our concerts. But when you get that many people together, somebody is going to get hurt."

Indeed, despite their best efforts "to make it more safe and harmonious for the people who are actually there to see the music," as Gordon puts it, cults have a habit of noodle-dancing out of control. Last April, when Phish rolled into town for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, fans camped out all over the city; a few decided to relieve themselves alfresco. "Eventually," Gordon says, "you can't come back to a town."

Ironically, Anastasio began composing some of the material for Billy Breath's as a retreat from such hysteria--back in the fall of 1995, around the time Jerry Garcia died and the press started predicting that Phish would inherit his patchouli-scented baton. Anastasio, for his part, had never met Garcia. He just felt like Phish were hurtling down a mountain. "This big semi was rolling down the road, getting crammed with more gear, going faster and faster," he says. "On the last show of the fall tour, we literally hit the wall. There was no question about it. Exhaustion."

A few months later, Phish convened in a barn at Bearsville Studios, not far from the sacred soil of Woodstock. Anastasio wanted to start from scratch. The last album had overflowed with bloated jams, including an infamous 3-minute rendition of "Tweezer." This time, Phish would keep the wank factor under control by forcing each musician to play one note at a time. Literally. McConnell plunked a note. They taped it. Gordon complemented it with another note. They taped it. Fishman added a beat. As the notes amassed, Phish called it the Blob.

They eventually ditched that experiment--you can't keep a jam band from jamming--and flew in producer Steve Lillywhite, the peppy Brit behind the radio-friendly whomp of U2 and Dave Matthews Band. But the guiding principle stayed the same: Simplify. "I like the mind-set that we were in," Anastasio says. "We fulfilled this need to be completely alone, recording again and hanging out. Because things had gotten so big, we needed to get our feet back on the ground." Of course, the Clifford Ball knocked them back into the ether. But even at "the biggest concert in North America," Phish still had a knack for telling the true fans from the lemmings. "It just felt so homegrown," says Anastasio of the two-day affair. "It was way up there in the middle of nowhere, and just this sea of people." Early on the second morning, while thousands slept, the band sneaked through the tents on a flatbed truck and played a hushed set for a handful of campfire insomniacs. "It felt like I was going to fall off," Gordon says. "And I kind of liked that feeling."



© 1996 Time, Inc.