Phish Finale June 17, 2004 - Times Union (Albany) By Danielle Furfaro The beloved band and its fans prepare for the last jam It's been three weeks since Trey Anastasio announced the breakup of one of the most beloved and influential bands of the past decade. He doesn't look depressed. Instead, Anastasio is his usual sunny self -- a combination of music geek and good buddy -- as he chats backstage on the first night of last weekend's Bonnaroo music festival in Manchester, Tenn. The guitarist, lead singer and main songwriter for Phish says there's no doubt in his mind that he's making the right decision. But first, there's the matter of the band's last tour. "Now we need to concentrate on these last 13 shows and making them progress," Anastasio said Friday, as the band Wilco wound up its set at Bonnaroo. "If we can do that, then we can say that we progressed the whole time." Last month, Anastasio announced on the band's Web site that after 21 years of touring together, one of the most influential and beloved acts of the past decade will be breaking up at the end of its summer tour. Phish's long goodbye begins tonight in Coney Island and concludes with a two-day blowout in Coventry, Vt., on Aug. 14 and 15. This weekend, the band makes a final stop at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs for two sold-out shows. The band's new studio album, "Undermind," arrived in stores Tuesday. In the weeks since the news broke, fans have been conducting their own preliminary post-mortem. Some agreed with Anastasio that the band -- which also includes keyboardist Page McConnell, bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jon Fishman -- was past its prime and in danger of becoming a nostalgia act. Others were miffed that the band would decide to pull out so soon after coming back from a previous hiatus of almost two years. This year's Bonnaroo festival, a three-day event that featured 80 bands on six stages, proved a clear example of why the band is splitting up. Three of Phish's four members appeared with their own side-project bands. Many fans hoped that Anastasio's festival- closing set with his band would turn into an impromptu Phish appearance, but it didn't happen. Something missing But whether or not they agreed with Anastasio's reasons for calling it quits, fans were shocked by the sudden announcement. "It took two days before it set in," said Albany's Jeffrey Tehan, the 26-year-old drummer for local jam band Jerkwater Ruckus. "I'm a huge fan of Phish, and I realized that something would be missing that is a big part of my life. I got plain sad." "It's hard for me to think that they can top anything they've done already," said Elisabeth Sylvan, a 31-year-old fan who lives in Boston. "They don't write good music anymore." For a generation of American music fans, Phish was more than a band. Like the Grateful Dead -- a band with whom Phish were often compared -- their shows could seem like a youth-cultural rite of passage. More than just the music, the shows could offer that sense of a provisional community -- with tailgaters, and nonstop dancing, and perhaps a few illegal substances. Paul Robicheau's first encounter with Phish was at the Paradise rock club in Boston back in 1989, when the band was little more than a strong buzz emanating from Vermont and the college towns of western Massachusetts. A year later, they were performing in theaters. "They had a diversity of influences from jazz to rock to fusion," said Robicheau, a music journalist who wrote about Phish for publications such as The Boston Globe and Rolling Stone. "There was a quirkiness and, at the same time, a lot of sophistication." Rich Lemire, the vocalist and percussionist for Jerkwater Ruckus, has his own favorite Phish story. "I remember seeing them one night at Colgate University in 1993, and Mike and Page were each playing a specific melody line. And then they switched them," said the 31- year-old. "They had intricate and complex musical ideas for their material." Quirky showmanship Their musicianship was matched by the band's quirky showmanship. Fishman would play lengthy solos on an old Electrlux vacuum cleaner; Anastasio and Gordon would play while performing careful choreographed routines on matching trampolines. The band's Capital Region shows -- which became close to hometown gigs in the mid-'90s, when the band outgrew Vermont's modest-sized concert stages -- were no exception. In December 1995, the band broke into a "silent jam" while performing "You Enjoy Myself" at the Pepsi Arena in Albany; at another Pepsi show in November 1998, the band encored with an a capella version of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird." Every Halloween in the mid-1990s, the band would put on a "musical costume," covering a classic rock album in its entirety. The first one was Halloween 1994, when the band performed "The Beatles" -- the Fab Four's "white album" -- at the Glens Falls Civic Center. Subsequent Halloween shows were devoted to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon," the Talking Heads' "Remain in Light" and the Velvet Underground's "Loaded." "That's what fuels the devotion," said Robicheau. "It's this level of minutiae that people find interesting and unique." Legendary shows A handful of Phish shows are sure to go down in rock's archives as among the form's greatest. People still talk about seeing Jimi Hendrix at Monterey or the Ramones at CBGB's; a similar status might await Phish's seven-hour set on New Year's Eve 1999. "It was incredible," Anastasio told Charlie Rose in a TV interview taped just after the breakup announcement. "For me it was the greatest, it was the pinnacle. And when we came offstage, I looked at our drummer, Fish, my best friend, and just a man I love dearly, and we looked at each other and we both had tears in our eyes. "Maybe we should stop," Anastasio recalled thinking. "It just felt like the wave had crashed into the shore. But we didn't." As the band's fan base grew during the 1990s, the scene started to change. The drug crowd -- buyers and sellers -- became more of a presence, and hard-core fans who spent months on the road following the band often outnumbered the more casual fans who would see the band when it came to their city. "Some people think you can't be a real Phish fan unless you have dreads and want to sleep in a parking lot," said Courtney Vickery, a 24-year-old fan from Wilmington, N.C. The hiatus, which began in 2000, was in many ways an effort by the band's members to downsize their iconic status. All four players worked on eclectic side projects: Anastasio toured with his own jazzy rock band; McConnell formed Vida Blue, a funk-jazz trio; Gordon recorded an album with jazz guitarist Leo Kottke, and directed a film; Fishman played with Pork Tornado and the Jazz Mandolin Project. The fans took their own time-out. "During the hiatus, I got into other stuff," said Charles Clark, 30, of Austin, Texas. "I need the live experience." Hard to do After this summer, the youth of America and older latecomers will have to settle for bootleg recordings -- and there are thousands of them out there -- and stories from fans who were there. "I just got into them, and now they broke up," said Ryan Dean, 16, of Jefferson, Ga. It's only been six months since his first experience with the band's concert disc, "A Live One." Even those fans who agree that the breakup was necessary feel wistful about leaving behind an almost constant presence in their lives. "From a critical standpoint, (the breakup) is a good thing," Vickery said. "From a fan standpoint, it's the end of a way of life." Article Copyright © 2004 Times Union