Catching some fresh Phish July 9, 2003 - Washington Post By David Segal Though shunned by both radio and MTV, Phish has become the most popular jam band since the Grateful Dead expired. In fact, the Vermont group also has subverted just about every rule in the industry's handbook to superstardom since forming in 1983. Three of the band members -- guitarist Trey Anastasio, keyboardist Page McConnell and bass player Mike Gordon -- dress like off-duty teachers at a Montessori school. In concert, the fourth, drummer Jon Fishman, wears a dress. They charge a pittance for tickets -- for years, it hovered around $20 -- and encourage fans to tape their concerts and trade them over the Internet. Through the '80s and '90s, while grunge and alt-metal bands raged against the machine, Phish -- which plays Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View on Wednesday and Thursday -- just ignored the machine and spread the love one three-hour concert at a time. In the process, it built what looks less like an audience than a tribe with its own language, customs and manners. It's an anti-club, low on irony, often high on drugs, arrayed against the mainstream, glorying in a collective secret and relishing a sense of community. Appearances to the contrary, these neo-hippies aren't all Woodstock-craving naifs. Many are professionals, and they're among the most 'Net-savvy fans in pop, designing hundreds of Web sites with the kind of dedication that usually leads to restraining orders. The Phish.net (www.phish.net) is an underground city of band history, set lists, reviews, chat boards, rumors and links to other sites, one of which is devoted to the band's lighting director. Another dices statistics about Phish's live performance history by days of the week (there have been 121 shows on Sundays), by years (133 shows in 2000) and states (29 shows in Texas). The Phish template was derived from the Dead: hundreds of improvised live shows and plenty of Ben & Jerry's-style capitalism. On the band's Web site (www.phish.com), you'll find not merely the standard logo T-shirts and baseball caps, but winter jackets; cooler bags; a wide variety of ``stash tins''; a navy fleece blanket; a 550-piece jigsaw puzzle of an album cover; a variety of hats, DVDs, stickers, patches; and a collection of all of Phish's live releases plus a ShowCase CD organizer, which at $339 represents ``a savings of $135 off the suggested retail price.'' To the Dead blueprint, Phish added a subversive sense of humor and an impish try-anything approach to concerts. In 1995 the band played a sort of slow-motion chess against its audience, allowing one move for each side at each show. At intermission, fans would gather at the Greenpeace tent and confer on what to do next, then elect someone to walk onstage and move a game piece on a giant eight-foot chessboard. Two games were played over the course of the tour. Phish won one, the audience the other. Every Halloween for a few years, the band would take a break from its own material and, in effect, put on a costume by performing live an entire album by another group. One year it was the Who's ``Quadrophenia,'' all 17 songs of it. Another year it was the Talking Heads' ``Remain in Light.'' Though the band has long resisted the comparison, Phish's sound owes plenty to the Dead, too: flowing hybrids and 15-minute jams of rock, bluegrass, funk, folk and country, though with a greater emphasis on jazz. It's about what you'd imagine if Jerry Garcia had listened to more Dizzy Gillespie and less Bill Monroe. The last two-plus years have been brutal for Phish-heads. In October 2000, the band decided to call a halt in order to pursue other projects, and there was little said about whether the four would ever play together again. They were getting stale, they explained, and now in their late 30s, were family men uninterested in months-long tours. But in 2002, they reunited and jammed with the idea that they'd record a concert album at Madison Square Garden on New Year's Eve. They were so tickled enough by their collaboration and new material that they decided to release a studio album, ``Round Room.'' Concert dates were set, and it nows looks as if Phish may do a series of concerts once each year. Article Copyright © 2003 Washington Post