Phish Meets the Mainstream November 21, 1996 - The Seattle Times By Tom Phalen After 13 years of esthetic but essentially estuarial existence, Phish may have finally found the mainstream. Or rather the mainstream has found Phish. Phish was spawned in 1983 from the University of Vermont by way of the tiny design-your-own-curriculum of Gossard College. The four-man band - guitarist Trey Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, keyboard player Page McConnell and drummer Jon Fishman - started out playing bars and frat parties, doing sets that consisted of rock covers, some of which they still do. They also included highly original rock- and jazz-influenced material, and long and frequent instrumental improvisations. The original material was mostly written by Anastasio and lyricist Tom Marshall, a boyhood friend. The jams, however, were total Phish. "Yeah, we always jammed but we planned out things, too," said Mike Gordon from a tour stop in Memphis earlier this week. "We may not have sounded as good as any other bar band around. We couldn't play a simple blues song and make it groove. But other times, I have a feeling that we sounded a lot bigger than the bar itself. We reached a point where we must have had some sense of musical vision that stretched wide. A sense of commitment and vision. I guess that's what attracted people." And people were attracted, mostly college age or younger. As the years passed and the band's touring schedule increased, the fan base expanded until, like the Grateful Dead's gypsy-like Deadheads, the band acquired camp followers now called Phishheads.. But although the band recorded six albums over the years, none ever made much impact on the charts. Phish was an underground commodity. But even the underground must sooner or later surface. Last April, Phish drew more than 60,000 fans to the prestigious New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. In August, some 135,000 true believers descended on the two-day "Clifford Ball Festival" held by the band at a former Air Force base in Plattsburgh, N.Y. - it was the biggest American concert audience of the year. (MTV will broadcast excerpts from the Clifford Ball concert Sunday and Wednesday.) In October, Phish's latest album, "Billy Breathes," its most cohesive, well defined and infectious recording to date, entered the charts at No. 7. Suddenly, mainstream publications like Entertainment Weekly discovered Phish. Rolling Stone, which had barely acknowledged the band in the past, gave the new album a four-star review, as well as major coverage of the Ball. Phish made the cover of the current Musician magazine. Gordon himself graces the cover of the latest Bass Player magazine, and he's obviously pleased, but not overwhelmed. "It really hasn't happened all of a sudden, in my opinion, but it has grown more quickly in the past couple of years. Yeah, it's been growing. I guess now it's time for the backlash." Not that the band would do things differently - although on stage it does things differently every night. Set lists are always in flux. Even some tried-and-true routines that helped make the band famous, like playing while bouncing on trampolines, now get left behind. "Well, sometimes we still use the trampolines," Gordon said, "but it's more often that we don't these days. We really haven't worked out any new maneuvers, so the trampolines are fading. And you never know what we'll play. Some nights we do a lot from the new album and sometimes not. "But we've taken a very gradual path to growing," he continued. "We've always done well pacing ourselves. And the more we get established and the more our organization runs smoothly, the more opportunity we have to do more stuff, like films and books." Gordon explained he was in the process of putting together a collection of the writings he does for the band's newsletter. He expects it to be published in April. "It's good to do those kind of things," he said, "but there's a problem if you get too wrapped up in them. It's important for a musician or group to reinvent itself, so sometimes you have to step away. Now we're having meetings in which were talking about how to take off more time. But it's hard because we love to tour." Currently the band is on an eight-week outing, but Gordon said the road time will be getting shorter as they do more recording. "We've always tried to take breaks, but we never took a break for more than a few months. Now we're out four days a week. Four and a third if you average it out." That's a lot of togetherness, and Gordon admits that when the band is home its members rarely see one another except at rehearsals and the occasional birthday party. "But we're getting along great. We have arguments from time to time and they can get heated, too, but the fact that we get it out rather than keeping it in really helps. The key is communication. You have to talk things out. "We also require hotels to have our rooms on separate floors," he added slyly, "that is, unless we can get whole separate wings." article © 1996 Seattle Times Company