Trey Anastasio Follows His Heart May 30, 2003 - Guitar World Magazine By Alan Paul The Audience Is Listening When it comes to performing live with Phish, guitarist Trey Anastasio gives his fans what they want by following his own heart. Last February, I went on the road with Phish for a couple nights of their 12-night winter tour. It was the band’s first extended run since they began a hiatus two and a half years ago. If you’re interested in the group, you need to run – don’t walk – to a store and get the magazine because the story in there is the real deal. The band gave me great access. I went to soundchecks, hung out in the production office, cruised the parking lots and nether corners of the Philadelphia Spectrum, and New Jersey’s Continental Airlines Arena and interviewed many of the band’s crew members. I even met Trey Anastasio’s parents as well as those of road manager Brad Sands. Nice people, all. Trey didn’t want to sit down for a formal interview at the shows, because he likes to stay focused on the job at hand – playing guitar and putting on a great show. So we spoke the day after the Spectrum show by phone while he was on the bus to the next gig, in Worcester, Mass. Much of the interview is featured in the magazine story, but there was a lot of great stuff left over, because there was so much to cover and because Trey is one of the most verbose, best interview subjects I have come across in 15 years as a journalist. A little background to help what follows make sense in case you don’t know: Phish took a break, starting in October 2000. They returned with a New Year’s show December 31, 2002 at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Before that, they surprised everyone by releasing a CD, Round Room, comprising some of their first playing together since the hiatus began. Click here to buy it or learn more. During the break, Anastasio released a self-titled solo album [click here to buy], then toured with his horn heavy group. Now he’s released a double live CD chronicling that venture. It is called Plasma and you can buy it or find out more here. On July 7 the band will be back on the road, with a 21-date summer tour culminating in "It," a 2-day festival in Limestone, Maine. Check out phish.com for dates. Lastly, the group recently released Volumes 17-20 of their Live Phish archival releases, continuing to handpick the best shows of their career. Gordon picked this entire batch. If you have any questions or comments about this interview or anything else, feel free to drop me a line at editor@guitarworld.com. GW: Your new songs have really taken flight on this tour. Since that is normal with your material, why did you decide to record and release an album after not playing together for so long? ANASTASIO: Round Room is a very strange thing. It’s virtually the first time we ever made our way through those songs so we kind of recorded ourselves learning them and then we just put that out. Some people are going to like that, and some aren’t and I definitely understand that. Our initial plan was to just learn the songs, then it was to play the entire album as the second set of our New Year’s Eve concert and have it available for download almost immediately. But we all took the tapes and drove around to better learn the songs and we unanimously agreed that there was something magical there in the spontaneity and in the energy that resulted from us being in a room making music together for the first time in two and half years and we just decided to put it out. GW: When you played with B.B. King the other night, I thought you began by being a little overly reverential and playing it very straight and it seemed like he pulled you out of that by playing these cool chordal licks and forcing you to converse with him. ANASTASIO: Exactly! That’s very cool that you heard that. I definitely started out by playing it very straight. In that situation, I want to be as respectful as possible. It’s definitely overwhelming to be sharing a stage with B.B. King, so I was kind of testing the waters but I thought by the middle, when we really started playing together, it was just incredible. I was just soaking up every fiber of music learning that I could. GW: I thought it was very cool that even when you started playing more assertively and interacting with B.B. you never fell into the trap that so many rock players fall into when playing blues, which is to play 12 bars then be unable to resist the temptation to show off and play all these fast licks that are totally inappropriate. ANASTASIO: You can’t show off. I got to play with Carlos Santana a bunch of times and I felt the same way. He too is one of the great guitarists and musicians and my feeling is when you have a chance to play with someone like that, you should come in open, listening as much as possible and ready to react to them, not with your own agenda. And that goes completely against that showing off vibe. Things really seemed to work with Carlos and I thought he was happy and I was honored about that. Then one night I went out and… Well, maybe I had a couple of beers fist and I was feeling loose and extra confident and I crossed that boundary a little bit. I started doing some hot riff or something and I remember how wrong it felt. Carlos never said anything, but I knew it was all wrong. I felt it in every fiber of my body and I’ve referenced back to it any time I’m in a similar situation. For a second I thought, “I’ve played with Carlos before. This is no big deal” and it took me to the wrong place. I read an interview with Ringo Starr recently where he said, “As soon as you start listening to yourself, you are shit” and I think this falls into that category. GW: How much discussion and planning went on with B.B. before you played? ANASTASIO: Not very much. He said, “As long as it’s 12 bars we’ll be fine. Just play whatever you want.” We went into our practice room to run through a few things and he came walking in there and asked for a guitar and we jammed for 10 or 15 minutes, just playing straight up 12 bar blues to get used to one another – really for him to get used to us. He said, “You guys have the groove. Just keep that going. I don’t care what the feel is as long as it’s honest and from the heart. Play whatever you want. Just believe in it and keep it 12 bars so no one gets lost.” So that was it for rehearsing or working things out, but here he was just hanging out, which was great. He’s such a gentleman and we got to sit and talk with him for a while and he told a lot of great stories, which was incredible. I asked him something I’ve always want ed to I said that on any guitar player’s list of influences, he’d be right at the top, so I asked who he would put at the top of his own list and he said T-Bone Walker, Django Rheinhardt… GW: …and Lonnie Johnson, right? ANASTASIO: That’s it. I guess I’m not the first person to ask him. [laughs] He also said Count Basie. Which I thought was really cool, because I love big bands. A big part of the model for my Plasma [solo] band is the swing bands, which it clearly is not, despite the horns. What I like about that era of music is that you had all these swing bands going around playing places like Roseland and you’d go in on a Friday night and you’d take a date and go dancing and you’d see this band playing popular songs, great songs with great melodies, really, really deep arrangements, slamming grooves, great players. It was all there. The people in those bands were almost servants in a certain way. They were providing a service, putting up high-energy music for people to lose themselves in or dance to or whatever and I think that attitude disappeared a little bit. In that era, there was still plenty of room to create great art but first and foremost you had to get up there and make people dance. GW: Do you relate to that concept, of putting the fan’s enjoyment first? ANASTASIO: Well, I really get off on going around putting this music out there and trying to react to people in the audience just as they are reacting to us. And that all goes along with keeping the ticket prices down and having a big set list so there not a lot of repeats from night to night and taking risks. All that stuff is to the same end. We work for the audience in a sense and that’s okay. They are really the only people you should care about – yet I can’t allow myself to listen to what they’re saying in online chats or something because that can be destructive. With my solo band, before we’d go stage every night, I’d give them this little speech, saying, “Some kid waited in line to get tickets, his friend was late, he sat in traffic, he got to the parking lot and they locked their keys in the car and they had to wait in line, then they paid five bucks for a beer. Now that guy is standing in the audience it’s our job to light them up enough so that they forget about all that and never think about it again. That’s really what I’m trying to do out there, not prove that I learned some new hot licks since the last time I came to your town. It’s much more about making a personal situation and being able lift them up for even just a second. I feel like it’s a responsibility, like I’m a servant almost and I feel very lucky to have that job. GW: I can see why you can’t read online reviews of your shows. For one thing they cancel each other out. One person will say, “Philadelphia was the best Phish show since 96” and the next one will say, “If they keep up these awful performances I’m never going to another show.” The intensity and wide range of opinions is sort of mind boggling and I have a theory about it, which is that by releasing so many volumes of live shows and being gone so long, you have unwittingly codified the experience of going to a Phish show. A whole generation of kids got into you solely through these recorded performances and even old fans now have very specific notions of what a perfect Phish show is – what songs should be included, what kind of segues, what should be in the first set, what’s an appropriate encore. They claim they want spontaneity and unpredictability but they really want to hear a reprise of that perfect Phish show. ANASTASIO: Wow. There’s definitely something to that but, again, I can’t dwell on that because we can’t allow ourselves to become too self-conscious about every decision. I think you have to really, really work hard at being yourself. Sometimes I believe if every musician could just be honest, they would all be fascinating and incredible because everyone has their own story. But with Phish and expectations… just putting together the set lists is a strange thing. We have a lot of material now so the possibilities are virtually endless. It’s been amazing since we came back for the four of us. We really gave ourselves a fresh perspective on the material and we’re enjoying it all again. And there’s so much of it. Really, 12 nights does not feel like enough shows to get through all the material. GW: So will you tour all summer to rectify that? ANASTASIO: We’ll tour longer this summer. [Tour dates have long since been announced –check phish.com or pollstar.com for full details.] But we’re not doing the long runs we used to because the entire goal now is to keep everything a little smaller, to keep it so every show can be as explosive as possible and all of our thinking is to that end. That’s what the hiatus was about. GW: Hanging around backstage at a couple of your shows, I was really struck by the family vibe of your crew. That is definitely not always the case. Chris [Karoda, lighting director] and Paul [Languedoc] have both been with you since virtually the beginning. Did you miss that whole scene when Phish was on break? ANASTASIO: No, because that carried right over to my solo band. It was pretty much the same people, who are pretty much just our friends. Chris lives right down the road from me and Paul and I were roommates for years. Here’s how important they and our whole crew are to us: we had a tour planned for June, but Chris’s wife is pregnant and it turned out to be due in June so we moved it to July. That’s pretty much the level that’s at. GW: I spoke to Chris and he told me he was taking guitar lessons from you and you asked him to come carry cases at a gig if he felt like it and the next thing he knew he was your light man. ANASTASIO: That’s about it. [laughs]. We had another guy named Chris doing lights and he was good but had to take a leak and asked Chris to take over the lights for a song. After the show, I was so excited because the lights had been phenomenal and I went up and said, “Oh my god, that one song you got it! The lights were so tight. They were just what I’ve always envisioned!” And he went, “Uh, that was Chris Karoda. I was taking a leak.” So, you know, no hard feelings, but it was clear that Chris was our man. GW: And Paul also does a great job. I have heard so many mushy arena sounds, but you guys sound crisp and separated and very clean. And it astounds me that you are able to play just through a little Fender and sound so big. You have a nice, warm tube sound like you’re in a club. ANASTASIO: It’s like a 25-watt amp and it’s not even turned all the way up most of the night. I’m usually not playing through anything else. I have this big setup but it’s touted through a board that has a bypass switch and I know when that light is off that I’m going directly into the amp. As for playing arenas, it is a learned skill. I look toward the back a lot, toward the back row. I can hear the sound very clearly in the back of the room and I like to let that be the reverb. Oftentimes, you have a slapback in the arena. You’d be amazed how often we come off stage after a really good set and we all say the same thing, “The slapback was right in time.” That’s a sign of when we’re really hitting it in an arena. It was happening the other night with B.B when we did “The Thrill Is Gone.” When that happens, the arena is tight and you can let big washes of color roll off and hear them roll back and it’s amazing. A lot of times the jams will start to peak out and we bring them way down and that is often in reaction to a sound we hear or are striving for. I’ve found that in an arena I can play very lightly and quietly because the sound system is so big and amount of echoing the sound is doing. I can get a lot of power out of a small amount of sound. And it can really impact what I play. Lately I’ve been doing this staccato thing and it’s totally a reaction to the sound of an arena. It just sounds good reverberating around. GW: I remember talking to you after Billy Breathes and you had used all these small amps and said you wanted to that live but didn’t think it was possible. Now you finally have made the leap. ANASTASIO: That’s right! That’s cool that you remember me saying that because it’s true. It’s a fear thing; it’s hard to let go of all these security blankets up there. I used a brown Deluxe on Billy Breathes and it’s taken until now that I’ve had the confidence to go up onstage with a similarly bare bones setup. I am getting rid of my security blankets one at a time – I got rid of the compressor I used to use so much. I finally made the switch on my tour last summer with my solo band. Plasma is the first recording you can hear that on. GW: You’re not the only person who finds it hard to take that sound to a big stage. Derek Trucks uses a Fender with his own band but told me that he uses a Marshall with the Allmans because he feels he has to. ANASTASIO: Tell him to call me if he wants any help making the switch. I’d do anything to help Derek. He is amazing. The minute I heard him for the first time I thought his sound was incredible and I knew that he’s really, really gifted. The guy is unbelievably soulful. GW: You just released Plasma, a two-CD set of live shows from your solo band – and it is almost all new material. Where does all this music come from, and will you keep this band going? ANASTASIO: I am trying to keep it going. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, the idea of having band with two percussion, keyboard, guitar, bass and at least four or five horns. I like having it and having Phish at the same time. It’s like the two ends are meeting. I like having an outlet where I’m completely composing every note that is played. And the material… [laughs] Well, I just kept writing after we made the album and even after we went on the road. I wanted to have a band that didn’t do any Phish material. I wanted to have a way to get away from Phish and then I love it more when I return – and that’s what I’m doing. GW: In Phish’s absence, the rest of the jam band world really sort of blew up. ANASTASIO: Well, it’s no surprise really. It’s a reaction to so much other, plastic stuff going on. A lot of concerts now are these big staged plastic performances and there’s nothing there. It’s just big pretentious, overproduced bullshit. Now the jam band scene has caught on. As a musical style, it’s not something that a lot of people are going to like, really, but from a conceptual standpoint there’s no reason you couldn’t have the same perspective and approach with any style of music. I mean, Black Sabbath used to jam. Ricky Skaggs came back stage one night and within moments we were jamming away. So what’s a jam band? The central concept is the show is going to be real and different every night and there’s something cool about that and about the idea of a concert providing a service to the audience – serving them up something fresh and different. GW: People just want musicians to try something and take some risks. ANASTASIO: It has to be that way or it’s boring. I mean, I get very bored at concerts. I’m always overcome with this feeling, standing there thinking, “There are 20,000 people standing in a room: do something!” Wow. What an incredible thing to get all these people together, what a wasted opportunity to get all these people in a room and not at last have the possibility of something incredible happening. Being honest about who you are as a performer is the best thing you can be and you’re not the same person every day so how can you roll out the same show night in and night out? We always have tried to have overwhelming sense of possibility and that’s where all this hot dog riding and secret language spewing and hosting huge festivals and everything else we’ve done comes from. We try to do all that without getting self indulgent, with respect for the fact that the reason you’re doing it is so that kind of genuine excitement translates to an audience and creates excitement in a room. In that way, I really relate to extreme performers like Iggy Pop and GG Allin who mutilate themselves and challenge the audience with insane acts. It’s just that sense that life can be real boring so you might as well do something… come out naked and challenge the entire audience to a fight if that’s what it takes. But don’t be boring, for God’s sake! Copyright © 2003 Guitar World