Music, mirth to live by: Phish will be missed May 28, 2004 - Seattle Times By J. Patrick Coolican Trey Anastasio, left, of Phish announced on the band's Web site this week that the group was disbanding after its summer tour. There's good music, and there's great music, and then there's the music of your life. That's the music impervious to your own objective judgment, insulated from the sneering jeers of critics, friends and relatives. It's the music with emotional access codes to your tear ducts, memory holes and adrenaline glands. Phish is that for me, and they are no more, having announced this week they'll be done after a two-day festival in August. Not a hiatus this time. I saw my first show in 1995 at age 20 at the University of Illinois, Champaign. The scene had the feel of an atavistic tribal gathering: a carnival parade of freaks, obvious and explicit drug use and a band that seemed determined to abandon time, space and many of the conventions of American pop music. Songs could go on for 20 minutes, building to orgiastic crescendos, or just slowly evaporating like water in a desert riverbed. The Champaign show, as opposed to the studio and live albums I'd been listening to, had an otherworldly quality that was frightening, the sound huge, the lights extraterrestrial. It was like the difference between reading about the reckoning and actually seeing it. I felt a tightening in my chest as they worked their way into a 20-minute "Tweezer." I felt uncomfortable. In perfect concert with the ridiculous sounding lyrics, the music has a bouncy, sing-along quality, and I felt myself really exhale for the first time all night. My friend leaned over and said, "You've really got to take care of your shoes, man." I laughed hard. I was always losing them. We were hooked. We would trade recorded shows on cassettes, then CDs and finally digital files. I would travel south to Austin, Texas, north to Minneapolis, east to Plattsburgh, N.Y., and west to the Gorge to see them. And there were hundreds of thousands like me. Phish was fully formed in 1985, when Goddard College keyboardist Page McConnell joined three University of Vermont students, guitarist Trey Anastasio, drummer Jon Fishman and bassist Mike Gordon. They were earthy and geeky, and classically trained, which would show itself in their ability to play across genres, from complex jazz to bluegrass to 1970s album-oriented rock. During a time when music was being intensely commodified, they rejected what might be called the Geffen method, eschewing pop radio and MTV. Even the breakup was unconventional: a simple statement on the band's Web site right on the heels of an album release; creative inertia and not drugs, sex, death or arrest was given as the cause. "We don't want to become caricatures of ourselves, or, worse yet, a nostalgia act," Anastasio said. When together, they built an audience in the most ancient way imaginable: one performance at a time, carried along by the radical notions that the crowd should be part of the band community and the music just one sensory phenomenon of a performance piece. They hopped on trampolines while playing. They played chess with the crowd, one move per show, throughout a tour. They used a vacuum cleaner as an instrument. They created villages for their multiple-day festivals. We jokingly called it "Phish Nation." The band laughed at us; we laughed at the band; we all laughed at the whole ridiculous spectacle. "Laughing laughing, fall apart," one lyric went. During a time when people mistook cynicism for irony and vice versa, Phish was both truly authentic and ironic. Life is a joke, they seemed to say, but a meaningful one, to be sure. All the while, they played incredible three-hour shows, a 20-minute psychedelic maelstrom like "David Bowie" (its only lyrics "David Bowie/UB40") followed by an aching love song like "Waste." The band was never explicitly political in any banal partisan way. They were philosophical, however, using music and fable — much like Dr. Seuss — to evoke mirth and love in the face of the ever-present human temptation to fascism and control. At every show after Champaign, I was dealt the same sense of discomfort that I had that warm night in October 1995, followed by the same sense of release and insight. Phish inspired me to ask who I was and why, while proving that music can more than compensate for the impoverishment of words, and life itself. Thanks guys. Will miss you much. Article Copyright © 2004 Seattle Times