Phish's Line: Hooked on '70s Funk December 26, 1997 - The Washington Post By Geoffrey Himes PAGE McCONNELL doesn't want to talk about the Grateful Dead. The keyboardist for Phish is nice about it; he understands why people make the comparisons between the two bands. After all, they're both improvisational-rock outfits known for the free-flowing spontaneity of their long songs and longer concerts. Moreover, both groups have attracted a loyal horde of tie-dyed fans who follow the tours from state to state. It's just that he's tired of talking about it. If it were all the same to him, he'd rather talk about James Brown. Or the Talking Heads. Or Sun Ra. For all their superficial similarities, McConnell insists, Phish and the Grateful Dead are not all that alike. For one thing, the younger band is more likely to make sudden shifts in key and tempo whereas the older group prefers gradual, incremental expansions of harmony. Phish, which appears Sunday at US Airways Arena, also favors playful, free-association verse as opposed to the Dead's campfire stories and Bohemian aphorisms. Perhaps the most important distinction is that Phish uses the funk rhythms of '70s R&B in a way the Dead never have. "Now more so than ever," McConnell agrees, "the groove is more pronounced in our music. If it's not there, what is there? We're listening to a lot more James Brown on the bus these days. We've always loved funk music, and it's something that's coming out in our music more and more. Mike and Fish have stepped up and taken charge more." That's Mike Gordon and Jon Fishman, the bassist and drummer respectively for Phish. Along with McConnell and guitarist Trey Anastasio, they have turned the Vermont-based quartet into one of the biggest live attractions in pop music. In 1996, the band hosted its first annual two-day Phish Phest, dubbed "The Clifford Ball," at a decommissioned Air Force base in Plattsburgh, N.Y., and drew 60,000 people. This past August, they did another one, this time called "The Great Went," in Maine and drew 135,000 people. On the other hand, the band's latest album, "Slip Stitch and Pass" (Elektra), was recorded this past March at a 500-seat club in Hamburg. "I love both kinds of shows," McConnell insists. "At the Hamburg show I could reach out and touch the people, because it was a tiny club and people were pushed up right next to me in my keyboard space. In a club I feel we're right there, we're part of the room. There's no substitute for intimacy. "There's also no substitute for a really big crowd at an outdoor festival. You don't necessarily have the touching intimacy of a small club, but it's a different kind of energy. At Clifford Ball or the Great Went, it's so big and everyone's having such a great time that you realize you're just a small part of it. You don't worry about what you're playing, because you know everyone's having a great time, so you should, too." "Slip Stitch and Pass" opens with a remake of "Cities" from the Talking Heads' 1979 album, "Fear of Music." Anastasio captures the choppy staccato of David Byrne's guitar and the nasal irony of Byrne's vocals while the rest of the band falls into the loping funk groove. It's not the first time Phish has acknowledged its debt to the New York new wave band. At its 1996 Halloween show, Phish played the Talking Heads' 1980 album, "Remain in Light," in its entirety as a special surprise for the costumed crowd in Atlanta. "The Talking Heads are not necessarily a band that people connect to us," McConnell points out, "but that's the kind of music we grew up with. When they were doing their really good stuff, in the late '70s and early '80s, that was when we were finding out about bands for the first time. So it stuck with us. When we're really playing at our best, things we love just come flowing out. The other night, we started playing 'Psycho Killer' in the middle of a jam and that's a song that's not even in our repertoire." An even stronger influence on Phish has been the free-jazz pioneer Sun Ra. The Phish touring bus is kept well stocked with Sun Ra videos, McConnell says, and drummer Fishman spent many hours in hotel rooms after gigs, listening to the composer-bandleader discourse on music and life while he was still alive. Last year Fishman and Anastasio joined two Sun Ra alumni -- Marshall Allen and Michael Ray -- plus assorted friends to make the one-off album, "Surrender to the Air" (Elektra). "Sun Ra said two things that we try to keep in mind," McConnell explains. "Expect the unexpected, and play with a sense of urgency. What I like about music is attitude. You take the old blues guitarists; maybe they only played a handful of notes in a solo, but they played it with an attitude. It was the same with the Sun Ra guys, except they were monster jazz players who could play anything." Phish has been known to cover Duke Ellington as well as Sun Ra compositions in concert. The quartet can swing when it wants to, and it improvises freely on its themes. So is it a jazz band or a rock band or both? "I feel we're a rock band," McConnell replies, "because we have a rock band's energy, with screaming fans, a big light show and all the trimmings that go with them. At the same time, our interaction is not so different from jazz guys when they're playing a modal tune like 'So What.' We touch on jazz, but it's an art form; we have a lot of respect for it and for the people who have spent so many years working on it. You have to have that history to do it right. Plus we like those big power chords and everyone landing on the one. "What we do when we're up there improvising is unlike other bands because of the listening we do. We're really connected to each other. We can be playing in one key and if one person makes just a little move, we'll all hear it, and we'll all move with him, and pretty soon we're all in a different key. Or someone might turn around the tempo. The music keeps changing and morphing all the time, as if it were this tightly wound ball of energy we were passing around among us. "A free-jazz band might not be such a tight ball of sound; they might be playing different things against each other so the music becomes more of a wash, whereas we're always right there with each other. A rock band like the Allman Brothers, on the other hand, gets lots of polyrhythms and harmonies going, but you never get the feeling that the key is going to suddenly shift, or the rhythm will stop and change. We just like to communicate with each other, and when it works it's very conversational." Article © 1997 The Washington Post