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Anastasio Gets Himself Into Another Jam
 October 27, 2001 - Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
By Mark Brown

OYSTERHEAD WASN'T INTENDED TO BE A THREE-PIECE. ANASTASIO HAD WANTED TO INVITE RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE GUITARIST TOM MORELLO TO JOIN UP. CLAYPOOL PUT IN A CALL, BUT MORELLO WAS BUSY WITH THE NEW RAGE RECORD. SO IT BECAME A POWER TRIO INSTEAD.

The first jam-band supergroup, Oysterhead, took the stage in New Orleans on May 4, 2000. Made up of Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio, Primus bassist Les Claypool and Police drummer Stewart Copeland, the show has become legendary among fans - the brilliant start of an incredible band.

In reality, Anastasio says, the show stank. And as far as he was concerned when he left the stage, Oysterhead was over. "It felt like a train wreck to me a little bit," Anastasio says. "The original jam in (my) barn was just incredible, just magic. Then we went out and did the show and it wasn't really magic. So we kinda left the stage and went 'Uh, nice seein' ya.' Everybody went their own way."

Oysterhead was for all intents and purposes dead, "but then Stewart took the tapes and he pulled out 45 minutes of the 2 1/2-hour show and edited it together and sent it back to us," Anastasio says. "And suddenly there was this feeling again, because there were moments when it was really tight and really heavy."

Looking back, it's no surprise that not every moment was a gem. The band had barely rehearsed and was writing songs up till a half-hour before show time.

"I always like to take the harder route. I didn't want to go out and play a bunch of covers. So we decided that in the space of three days, we'd write an entire (show) of original material," he says.

"So what we ended up doing was writing all these songs about being in Oysterhead." He laughs. "Songs like I Am Oysterhead Till the Day I Die and Mr. Oysterhead. Two or three songs actually made it to the album. But a lot of it was just a bunch of crap."

But the trio is back with The Grand Pecking Order, and the tour it's on is night-and-day from the first show. Oysterhead has two sold-out shows Tuesday and Wednesday at the Fillmore Auditorium.

The band had very casual beginnings. Claypool needed to put together a jam band for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival last year. He called Anastasio, who jumped at the chance.

"When Les asked me if there was any (drummer) I wanted to play with, I said Stewart. That was something I'd been carrying around for 20 years, this dream that I'd get to play with Stewart Copeland," Anastasio says. "He was my hero in high school, drummingwise. But I didn't know him."

Claypool had done some work with Copeland, however, and had him on the phone immediately. Primus was due in Anastasio's hometown of Burlington, Vt., three days later, "so Stewart just got on a plane and flew to my house," Anastasio says. "We're just sitting in my living room. We went out and jammed in my barn and it was instant chemistry."

Oysterhead wasn't intended to be a three-piece. Anastasio had wanted to invite Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello to join up. Claypool put in a call, but Morello was busy with the new Rage record. So it became a power trio instead.

"It strips (the music) down to its essence," Anastasio says. "With an eight-piece, three people can be floating. With a three-piece, everybody's got to be stepping up the whole time. It's more challenging. I like to see musicians at the edge of their capabilities. It doesn't really impress me to see somebody who's all rehearsed. (In a trio), you have to be listening all the time. If one of the three people drops the ball, it's painfully obvious. In a big group, you can hide."

Many Phish fans are still puzzled and worried about the band's hiatus, but they shouldn't be. The members aren't taking this time off to break up; they're taking this time off to avoid breaking up.

"Everybody's feeling really good," Anastasio says. "Phish was so vibrant and intense for so long that the four of us felt like we didn't ever want to see it diminish. There was some concern that if we didn't get out and live life for a while, we couldn't maintain that feeling. We could foresee that coming. And we didn't want to experience Phish in any way other than peak energy.

"We talk to each other all the time. We have no plans to do anything right now, but no plans not to, either."

The band left the hiatus open-ended to keep the pressure off. "If we said, 'OK, we'll be back in two years,' then that's just killing time," Anastasio says.

In the meantime, fans can console themselves with the huge live project Phish has undertaken: to release six full-length, unedited, unmixed, unpolished shows every six months. September saw the first installment, and it's an indefinite project.

"We did tape everything. Some of the early shows may have gotten lost, but we taped everything," Anastasio says. Fans voted on some of the releases, "and I like the ones the fans picked. I realized that they know the good Phish from the bad Phish much more than I do."

Thus fans will pick most of the next batch, including a 1987 party performance recorded only on cassette, and a month of good shows from '89.

And if that's not enough Anastasio music, he has yet another project in the works. His solo band just finished an album, tentatively titled Money, Love and Change, that'll be out in the spring, to be accompanied by a tour.

"I have this solo project that's the ever-growing band," he says. "It started off as a trio, then a five-piece, a six-piece, and this summer when we played at Red Rocks it was an eight-piece. Now we're about to be a nine-piece."