Trey Anastasio - Life After Phish July 19th, 2001 (Issue 873)- Rolling Stone Magazine by Will Dana (..click on thumbnail for larger image..) There is no precedent in rock and roll for the decision made last fall by the four members of Phish. After 17 years and 1300 concerts together, they announced they were stopping. Not exactly breaking up, but also not promising that they would ever be back. There were no fights, meltdowns, or Yokos. They didn't burn out, and they didn't fade away. They just quietly decided to pack it in while they were still on top. As their final show ended, at the Shoreline Ampitheater near San Francisco last October, the band sang the last notes of "You Enjoy Myself," "which was always, we felt, the song," says Trey Anastasio, the band's guitarist and principal songwriter. "It was so emotional. I felt such a huge wave, just to think that for 17 years we were focused on this thing." Then they walked off the stage, found an empty room and sat there for hours; just Trey Anastasio, Jon Fishman, Mike Gordon, and Page McConnell. Beyond that, there were no plans. The only thing they knew bout their future was that they didn't want to turn into the Grateful Dead. "They were obviously these big role models for us," says Anastasio, " and I felt like a tour was happening because I needed money to support all these people". Eight months later, Anastasio is deep into a new musical life. The day after Phish ended, he says, he went home to Vermont and began the months-long process of turning the Phish song, "Guyute" into an orchestral work that the Vermont Youth Orchestra performed in February. That same night, he played and excruciatingly difficult guitar piece written for him by Vermont-based composer Ernie Stires, an infuential figure in Anastasio's life whom he has referred to as his guru. This spring, he spent a month recording an album with Oysterhead, a power trio in which he's joined by Primus' Les Claypool and Police drummer, Stewart Copeland. For the past few weeks, he has been working with his own band, an eight-piece horn-driven ensemble whose sound recalls the Nigerian juju music of King Sunny Ade. He has written and rehearsed 14 songs with them and will take the band on a 19-date tour this summer, in which they will play almost all new material. "When I think about the amount of music I've made in the last 6 months," Anastasio says, "it kind of shows why Phish stopped". "The guy is insane," says Phish drummer Jon Fishman. "He's a crazed musical output machine". On a Thursday afternoon in late May, I meet Anastasio at the Barn, his recording studio not far from his home. For much of the afternoon, he has been holding a "horn boot camp." The musicians have left, and Pete Carini, a longtime member of the Phish crew, is playing back some music they've just recorded. Thought the music occupies the bright grooves familiar to Phish fans, it has a very different feel. Raucously orchestrated horns – tubas, flutes, saxaphones, trumpets – march through a teeming beehive beat, Anastasio's sleek guitar darting in and out. Anastasio listens to the music with his whole body - kicking, shaking his fist, bobbing his head, laughing, grooving. At thirty-six, Anastasio presents an appearance of constant laid-back motion and a relaxed, attentive bearing. He's dressed in a flannel shirt, jeans, scuffed work boots and a black wool-knit cap. A filigree of wrinkles around his eyes suggests an inner core of wear. "I think it would be great if I just had a day and sat around," he says. "But that doesn't seem to happen. I can't seem to do it. I'm always a few steps behind. Or ahead. Or something." On a coffee table, a well-thumbed copy of one of Henry James' difficult later novels lays open. "My wife's a big Henry James fan and an avid reader," he says. "We go through 12 books a week." Baseball highlights flash on a big screen tv. A motley array of CDs is sprawled on a table: the new Tool and REM records, King Sunny Ade, Buckethead, and a Tower of Power Anthology. The Barn is situated deep in the woods just north of Burlington. It's about a 25 minute walk from the Barn to the house Anastasio shares with his wife and two young daughters, "just far enough away," he says "that it's clear Dad's gone to work". The Barn combines a logistical and aesthetic complexity with a simpleness of intent and purpose. From the outside, what you see is a fairly unprepossessing 100-year-old barn set into a steep, rocky chunk of Vermont hillside. It's not prettied up - no fancy landscaping, none of moneyed touches of a leisure-class hideaway. With a degree of Yankee pride, Anastasio mentions that the building cost him only $1,000, but that's quickly followed by a faraway glance and a throaty, rest-of-the-story giggle. "But it wasn't so cheap after that," he says. The Barn's most striking feature is an elegant, arching catwalk that stretches over its vaulting interior and leads to a small elevator platform, which is powered by the motor from an electric garage-door opener. You stand there, flip the switch and slowly rise up into a cupola with a dramatic view of Mount Mansfield, Vermont's tallest peak. It's up here that Anastasio starts to open up about how his band went into its remarkably cordial abeyance. "I was starting to feel in the last couple of yeas that I was spending more time dealing with the personnel crises of the enormous organization we had made than writing music," he says. "There are 40 people working in the office, and people want their salary, or someone asks 'How come I'm not involved in this decision-making process like I was when you were a smaller band?' I always feel, because of my role in this thing, a kind of responsibility. I want everyone to be happy." The band had been on a downward creative spiral for a couple of years, Anastasio says evenly. Phish were not developing enough new material. Anastasio mentions that on their last album, Farmhouse, a number of the songs had been lying around, and others were ones that Anastasio had written for his own band. He says, "Everyone was too damn busy to even come. I didn't want to do another album like that, because at that point it's not even Phish anymore." "Whatever it was, in some ways it was over," says Fishman. "That single-minded vision set out by four guys in college. Really simply, we grew up." Fishman says he knew the end was in sight when Phish played before 80,000 people on New Year's Eve 2000 at Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation in Florida. "For the first time, we had something we knew we couldn't out-do," he says. "Our whole career, we had been pushing this big, cool ball steadily uphill; after Big Cypress, it started to feel like it was starting to roll downhill." Fishman says he also started to become spooked by the size of the enterprise. "This is when the planes start to crash and the buses start rolling over." In the ridiculously well-adjusted world that Anastasio seems to inhabit – Fishman refers to the band as a "sickingly functional family" – the current separation seems like just another step in Phish's evolution. Anastasio mentions some "sticky areas", but he insists that the decision to call things off was mutual. "I mean, nobody got mad or anything," he says. His mother talks about "tensions happening in a variety of ways." Stires says that after 17 years, Trey had become comfortably worn out with Phish. It was time to move on." The quality that made Phish survive for so long - and that has driven Anastasio in the months since - is his astonishing capacity for work and his ability to exhort his band mates to keep up with him. "At his best", Fishman says, "Trey was writing music beyond the level of what we could play, and we all became better players trying to learn it" After a while, though, Anastasio got frustrated because the other members could not keep up with his output. "I started feeling awkward about having all this material," he says. "So I started holding it back, and it got a little - well, let's put it this way: I feel really good about it now." "Band practice was, like, the greatest legacy of Phish in my mind." Anastasio says. He begins to speak more slowly, as if explaining a strange custom to a foreigner. "We would get in the practice room and play one song, and then just start talking and talking and talking. It was a safe haven, being around people who completely understood you, of guys going from washing dishes and driving cabs - I was working in a pet food warehouse - and the next thing you know, being basically rich". He pauses, thinks a little more and says, "I don't think we even had band practice in the last year and a half at all."The barn is a culmination of Anastasio's musical journey, a comfortable hideaway where band practice never has to end. "Trey is much more than an entertainment guitarist," says Stires, who believes that Anastasio has the talent and drive to become an important composer. "He is going to do better than other rock stars who have tried to write serious music." The future of Phish hangs before Anastasio, at once a question mark and a security blanket. Speaking for himself, Fishman suggests that if the band does get back together, he'd like it be on a much smaller scale – sporadic tours, occasional albums. What's clear is that Phish will never be the hungry beast that they once were. In a paradoxical way, Trey Anastasio is too driven for that, too consumed with pursuing all his different musical visions. "It's not enough to be floating around out there just because we can," he says. "This why I can't say for sure that Phish will come back. I won't come back unless it's as good as it was." Photograph by Hugh Stewart