Notes on Track 16: We were so high when we recorded this that we’re still playing it as we speak.
Starting in the early aughts, the term “guilty pleasure” was phased out of the pop-culture lexicon. This wasn’t a matter of jargon associated with a bygone era becoming dated; “guilty pleasure” didn’t go the way of “groovy” or “to the max” or “niiice” done in that stupid Borat voice. The change was strictly ideological. Critics and commentators mounted a coordinated strike against “guilty pleasure,” arguing that implanting shame onto cultural preferences was at best prudish and at worst prejudicial to various demographic groups. This anti–“guilty pleasure” campaign coincided with the Internet’s ascendance as the media’s central hub—on the web, you don’t have to look hard to find partisans for any cultural artifact, no matter how disreputable. Suddenly, classifying Carly Rae Jepsen or Gossip Girl or Mountain Dew as a guilty pleasure seemed not only passé but offensive. It was time for a bold new era in which people were allowed to simply like what they liked without consequences. Now there’s even cachet associated with appreciating joyously inane mainstream culture. Which means that if you’re a forty-five-year-old man who loves Carly Rae Jepsen, you probably don’t ever shut the hell up about it.
However, guilty pleasures haven’t completely gone away, the definition has just shifted. There are plenty of music opinions that you’re not allowed to share publicly without shame, it’s just that most of them have little to do with silly, frothy pop. Loving Carly Rae Jepsen is now acceptable, but loving, say, the jam-band stylings of Phish is not. I know this because I love Phish, and I can already feel you judging me about it.
Phish is a four-piece rock group from Vermont that formed in 1983. The group’s first album, Junta, was released in 1989, and three years later Phish signed with Elektra Records. The band subsequently enjoyed its period of greatest notoriety from 1993 (when it first started selling out arenas) to 1999 (when it played an epic eight-hour concert in front of eighty-five thousand people at an Indian reservation in Florida). The following year, Phish went on hiatus, then re-formed in 2002, then seemingly broke up for good in 2004, and then re-formed again in 2009, not long after the band’s singer and guitarist, Trey Anastasio, spent fourteen months in a county court drug program for possession of various illegal prescriptions. Since then, Phish has toured every year (though in a limited capacity compared to the nineties) and put out several more albums.
People who care about rock music have almost certainly heard of Phish. But I’d guess at least 90 percent of them aren’t aware of even the basic biographical information I just outlined. Phish proves that it’s possible to be well-known without being famous; for decades, they have existed in a bubble that has only slightly grazed the mainstream on a small handful of occasions.
The only thing most people know about Phish is that they hate Phish.
When I call Phish a guilty pleasure, I don’t mean that I feel bad about enjoying epic guitar solos or goofy lyrics about dogs, antelope, and watchful hosemasters. What I mean is that being a Phish fan makes me guilty. When you love Phish, you are instantly alienated from the vast majority of the population. Being into Phish is not merely a musical preference. “Phish fan”—or, ahem, “phan”—is a cultural archetype. And as far as most people are concerned, this archetype is annoying and probably doesn’t smell very good.
Let’s say you’re on a date, and it’s going really well. Your date is attractive, funny, kind, and not insane. You are 73 percent sure you want to sleep with this person. Then, over your third round of drinks, your date casually mentions that she is a serious collector of Precious Moments figurines. She has hundreds of them—so many that the figurines have their own room in her apartment.
Would this change your impression of your date? Perhaps not—but it’s pretty fucking strange, right? Collecting Precious Moments figurines surely doesn’t make a person more attractive.
That’s what being a Phish fan is like. It’s not something you can talk about with most people without its altering the molecular structure of the encounter. Depending on how early A Live One comes up in conversation, it might very well be a deal-breaker for a potential friendship or romantic relationship. So, you learn to keep your “What is the best-ever version of ‘Tweezer’?” takes to yourself. It’s a matter of social graces.
But even if the average music listener didn’t instantly recoil at the mere mention of the band’s name, Phish would still be a self-contained world. It’s that way by design. And as counterintuitive as it might seem, this very isolation is what got me into the band. Learning about them is the closest I’ve come as an adult to replicating my childhood experience of discovering the gods of classic rock. Because Phish is a classic-rock band that just happened to be mistakenly born about twenty years too late.
Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, Yes, Peter Gabriel–era Genesis, Quadrophenia, Remain in Light—these are all important touchstones referenced both explicitly and implicitly throughout Phish’s career. Classic rock is the music Phish most often covers in concert, and it’s the well from which they derive their own material. All of the proggy self-indulgence that the Ramones supposedly destroyed in the late seventies comprises the band’s roots. That’s the real reason why music critics and cool kids hate Phish so much—they operate as if punk never happened.
Phish interprets classic rock the way Zeppelin and the Stones interpreted the blues. The closer the Brits hewed to tradition, the phonier they sounded. The typical British blues musician was only going to sound gawky and prissy next to Muddy Waters. The only way out for British blues bands was to deconstruct, blow out, and aggressively exaggerate the blues to such a degree that it eventually became something else. This is what Phish does with classic rock: Just as Mick Jagger was a foreigner in the Mississippi Delta, the exceedingly geeky members of Phish were always going to be outsiders in the context of “cool” classic-rock mythology. They turned their geekiness into a positive by acknowledging their distance from the classic-rock gods, reimagining rock history as a fun house for a special breed of rock nerd who is simultaneously reverent and irreverent toward the genre’s conventions. In the process, Phish pushed classic-rock mythology into a postmodern realm.
Phish’s geeky interpretation of classic rock takes many forms. The band’s drummer, Jon Fishman, doesn’t play drum solos, but he does execute virtuosic feats on a vacuum cleaner. When Phish covers Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” or David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” they perform them strictly a cappella. When Phish writes a lighters-hoisting arena-rock ballad, they give it a non sequitur title like “The Squirming Coil.”
For this reason, they offer the most authentic classic-rock experience you can get from a band that didn’t originate in the classic-rock era, drawing on the mythology without slavishly replicating the past. The uniqueness of this achievement is made clear when you compare Phish to other jam bands. The ones I like—Widespread Panic, Gov’t Mule, Chris Robinson Brotherhood—are obvious descendants of the Grateful Dead as well as the Allman Brothers Band, eternal godfathers of the jam-band scene’s Southern wing. (Gov’t Mule’s Warren Haynes actually made his name playing with the Allmans after their comeback in the late eighties.)
You can’t listen to most jam-band records or go to shows without thinking about their predecessors, and this seems intentional. Those bands dress and act like grizzled road dogs straight out of 1973. I’m not knocking it—clearly I’m a person who likes to celebrate classic-rock history—but the backward-looking aspects of those bands are undeniable.
In Phish world, many of the traditional accoutrements of rock mythology—the guitar god, the rock opera, the laser-light show, the drug-fueled hedonistic party, the once-in-a-lifetime “event” rock show—have been turned into opportunities for outcasts to create their own fantasy worlds. At a Phish show, anyone who adores supposedly outmoded rock traditions can come and revel in them in a way that feels organic and unique. It doesn’t matter if those traditions don’t translate beyond the arena walls. The requirement that a rock band must communicate with the masses in order to be relevant never meant anything to Phish. This band invented its own relevance and left it to the fans (rather than critics and journalists) to write the myths.
The result is a labyrinthian legend that enhances the experience of listening to a band that most people can’t stand. Loving Phish will always set you apart, and that’s a good thing. For me, it made caring about classic rock feel special again.
Before I loved Phish, I loathed them. And I think my reasoning was common: I despised hippies, and in my mind hippie culture and Phish were synonymous. For a long time this also kept me from appreciating the Grateful Dead. But even after I finally embraced the Dead, I continued to reject Phish because I assumed they were just ripping off what the Dead had created back in the sixties. Besides, the Grateful Dead played Altamont and hung out with the Hells Angels, and their songs were about death and transcendence and riding that train while high on cocaine. The Grateful Dead was sort of cool. Phish was never cool.
As my dabbling in Phish went from casual to obsessive, I discovered that pretty much all of my assumptions about Phish were wrong, starting with the belief that Phish was biting the Dead’s style. In fact, Phish and the Dead have significantly different reference points. The Grateful Dead was informed by the totality of American music from the first sixty years of the twentieth century: blues, country, folk, jazz, and early rock ’n’ roll. Also, the Dead did not exude energy. They were capable of rocking, but only until about 1982. After that, they rolled at decelerating speeds. In their final years in the nineties, they played like a laid-back jazz combo soundtracking Sunday brunch. Their fast songs were slow and their slow songs were like freeze-dried molasses.
Phish, meanwhile, is relatively supercharged. In their nineties prime, Phish would construct jams by storming out of the gate for several minutes. Then the four members would drift into a spacey midsection for several more minutes, and then build to a blazing finish via Anastasio’s wildly soloing guitar for an additional several minutes. Phish’s musical DNA was also more eclectic and eccentric than the Dead’s, indicative of a band that was formed at a time when there were a lot more records to hear. In Phish, you can hear hopped-up bluegrass, jazzy disco, porno-movie funk, Broadway theatricality, and shockingly sincere barbershop harmonies. But it all ultimately stems from classic rock. If the Dead encompasses American music from roughly 1900 to 1967, Phish picks up the story through the AOR era, from ’68 to around the time Stop Making Sense debuted in theaters in the mideighties.
The only significant links between Phish and the Grateful Dead are (1) a propensity for improvised music, and (2) a friendly attitude toward concert tapers, who preserved Phish’s performance history and added significantly to the band’s legacy. And yet it’s impossible to talk about Phish without also talking about the Grateful Dead, and this is related to our favorite mythologist, Joseph Campbell.
In 1986, Campbell hosted a symposium in San Francisco called “Ritual and Rapture, From Dionysus to the Grateful Dead,” inspired by a recent, unexpectedly positive experience at a Dead show. At the time, the Dead seemed consigned to the trash heap of history, an icon of a bygone age marked for obsolescence by the advent of punk, hip-hop, and MTV. As detailed by rock critic Jesse Jarnow in his trenchant book Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, the Deadhead scene of the early Reagan years was a bastion of marginalized outlaws: Hare Krishnas, bikers, mystics, and drug dealers with ties to the Mexican mafia. There’s even a legend about a group of bank robbers that followed the band in ’79—they’d hit up a show, knock over a bank, and then speed off to the next tour stop.
By the end of the decade, however, the Dead’s fortunes changed dramatically. The band scored its first and only Top 10 single, “Touch of Grey,” in 1987, which attracted a sea of wannabes and rubberneckers to Dead shows and transformed the band into one of the world’s top touring attractions. In that respect, Campbell was slightly ahead of the curve. While he was no fan of rock music, Campbell was fascinated by the Deadheads’ devotion, which he likened to ancient worshippers of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, fertility, ritual madness, and religious ecstasy. Campbell came away from his first Dead experience a convert, declaring that they were “the antidote to the atomic bomb” because of their power to bring diverse groups of people together.
What Campbell articulated had long been an unspoken understanding among the Deadheads—individuals were drawn to the Grateful Dead because they wanted to be part of something greater than themselves. The Dead became a stadium act in the final years of Jerry Garcia’s life because standing amid tens of thousands of sweaty, buzzed, and barefoot people felt meaningful in the classic Woodstock sense. Even as Garcia succumbed to heroin addiction, which hobbled his playing and added years of mileage to his vocals, the Dead’s audience continued to grow. By then, the music was beside the point. What neo-hippies shared with the OG hippies was a love for the crowd that matched, maybe even exceeded, their love of the band.
But what if you were born too late for the Grateful Dead? As much as I love collecting Dead concert bootlegs, I’m never going to see Jerry Garcia play live. But I still yearned to join a tribe set off from the mainstream of society, so I chose to make Trey Anastasio my guitar-soloing guru. Phish might not sound like the Dead, but they do provide the listener with a Dead-like experience.
When I watched Bittersweet Motel, a documentary filmed during various Phish tours in 1997 and ’98 and released in 2000, it was like witnessing an alternate version of the nineties, in which grunge and gangsta rap didn’t matter and Phish was the biggest band in the world. Bittersweet Motel culminates with the Great Went, a two-day concert held in 1997 at a former air force base in Maine that attracted seventy-five thousand people. The Great Went was an even more successful sequel to the Clifford Ball, Phish’s first big-time festival, which was held the previous summer in upstate New York. This was years before festivals like Coachella and Bonnaroo became the norm on the summer concert circuit. It’s not a stretch to suggest that Phish—a band that has relied far more on touring and staging massive destination concerts than revenue from albums—was inventing the future of the music business during the pre-Napster era, when most superstar acts were content to reap the benefits of $20 CDs like there was no tomorrow.
The Woodstock overtones of the Clifford Ball were obvious, and media outlets flocked to cover it, including MTV, which made a half-hour documentary starring scores of shirtless dudes and shirtless ladies and their shirtless dogs. But these multiday extravaganzas were ultimately designed for the inhabitants of Phish’s self-contained world.
As Anastasio later said of another weekend-long concert, 1998’s Lemonwheel, “We had built an alternate reality where the rules of reality didn’t apply.”
How does one exit regular reality and enter Phish world?
Becoming a fan of Phish is not easy or for the faint of heart. For my journey into the jam-band wilds, I knew I would need a Sherpa, a person who could guide me into unknown territory and point out the important landmarks and dangerous pitfalls. When I was a kid learning about Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, I relied on music magazines and rock books. But there’s not a lot of reliable literature about Phish. I read three band biographies, but I still sensed that I wasn’t getting the whole picture: The writing about Phish tends to be either reactionary and dismissive, or overly worshipful and inscrutable. You’re either on the outside mocking this weird, enigmatic hippie band, or you’re an insider speaking in the Esperanto of set-list statistics and “tour” stories. I needed someone who was fluent in Phish but also had enough perspective on the band to offer sound advice to a neophyte.
Fortunately, I was already acquainted with Rob Mitchum, a rock critic who had seen Phish more than fifty times, dating back to his first show in 1996. When I emailed Rob to ask for a primer on the band, he was beyond excited. Two things were immediately apparent: (1) Phish was a topic that he really enjoyed talking about, and (2) very few people ever wanted to talk to him about it. Rob seized this opportunity by writing me a lengthy email.
In retrospect, I could have just as easily consulted Phish.net, a popular resource for set lists and song information. For practically every show they have ever played, there is a post with a comments section in which attendees review the show and recount tall tales about their concert experiences, which often have more to do with the drugs they ingested during the gig than the gig itself. Taken together, these reviews add up to a people’s history, doing the work of documenting the band’s story that professional critics and journalists have largely avoided.
Before Phish.net there were several editions of The Pharmer’s Almanac, which collected show information and statistics in hard-copy form, as well as the comprehensive, nearly thousand-page tome The Phish Companion. Here you’ll find obsessively compiled statistics about all of the hundreds of songs they have played live since the early eighties. You can find “song gap” information on the time that elapsed between particular songs’ occurring in a set list. You can see which albums the songs from a particular night’s concert were culled from. You can discover how many times they played “Fast Enough for You” in 1993. (Seventeen.) You can learn how many vacuum solos were played in 1997. (Three.) The statistics are needlessly, stupidly, fascinatingly thorough.
No doubt, a lot of hippie dolts enjoy Phish. But the partisans that I’ve encountered are more akin to nerdy baseball fans who care way too much about Sabermetrics. They’re like Mike Hamad, a music writer for the Hartford Courant who started diagramming live Phish jams in 2013, drawing a graph of all the shifts in rhythm, tone, and vibe that take place during the long instrumental passages in the songs. Similar to the hundreds of contributors to Phish.net and The Phish Companion, Hamad seems to approach them as part science and part religion.
In the early days, the stats were helpful for traders who were looking for concert tapes that featured a rarely performed song or an especially exploratory and exciting jam. Back then, you were forced to be choosy about which tapes you accumulated. By the time I became a fan, however, it was infinitely easier to sample Phish’s live work. Right away, Rob emailed me a link to “The Spreadsheet,” a massive online treasure trove in which virtually every Phish show is available for download. The Phish On Demand (or PhishOD) app would eventually make all of those shows available in streamable form, along with the official LivePhish app, which posts pristine recordings of new concerts within minutes of the final encore.
Normally, when you’re getting into a new band, you investigate the discography of studio albums. If the band is popular enough, it’s easy to figure out what the entry points are. Even when I was a teenager who knew almost nothing about music, I was aware that Led Zeppelin IV and The Dark Side of the Moon were like a set of double doors leading to that magical palace of classic-rock glory. With Phish, however, it’s more complicated. Rob, for one, actively discouraged me from listening to their albums.
“Don’t even bother,” he told me. “They’re all pretty bad.”
Now, opinions vary on the quality of their studio work. (I eventually did peruse Phish’s albums, and came to love exactly four of them: A Picture of Nectar, Rift, Billy Breathes, and Farmhouse.) But hardly anybody who likes them defines the band’s various eras by the albums. This is the most profound example of Phish deconstructing classic-rock orthodoxy and reassembling it into something entirely different. They invert the recorded music–vs.–live music hierarchy even more than the Dead did—for Phish there is no equivalent to American Beauty (the one Dead album even non-Dead-fans know) or “Touch of Grey” (a Top 10 pop hit that became a cultural phenomenon). Instead, they go all in on the transcendent power of the rock show. So, Rob suggested that I focus solely on bootlegs.
Here’s how Rob broke down the live eras of Phish’s career in his original “primer” email, which more or less squares with the consensus of the band’s amateur chroniclers:
One of the Phish shows that Rob recommended was 3/22/93, an iconic gig played at the Crest Theatre in Sacramento. This show is celebrated for its second set—Phish almost always plays two sets, and Phish fans almost always care more about the second set, which is typically jammier and more experimental. That wasn’t the case for 3/22/93, though—the second set was unique because it was one of the rare instances where Phish played its rock opera The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday—also known as Gamehendge—in its entirety.
A loopy amalgam of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, C. S. Lewis, and whatever stoned whimsy is conjured by goofballs trying to kill the boredom of living in Vermont, The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday is Phish’s very own rock opera, because all classic-rock groups need a rock opera. It’s about a retired colonel from Long Island named Forbin who seeks to recover a mythic tome called The Helping Friendly Book from the clutches of an evil tyrant named Wilson. Originally Trey Anastasio’s senior thesis while a student at Goddard College, The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday has never been released as a proper album. But various songs have appeared on Phish LPs, including live staples such as “Wilson,” “AC/DC Bag” (named after Wilson’s robot henchman), and “The Lizards” (the race of people who inhabit Gamehendge).
As I drifted deeper into Phish, I learned about other obscure but no less essential bits of lore. There was the 3/6/92 gig in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, also known as the “secret language show,” in which they initiated no fewer than four signals to generate band-audience interaction in the middle of songs, including “All Fall Down” (a series of four descending notes that cues the audience to fall down), “Aw, Fuck!” (a scraping noise on the guitar that tells the audience to extend a middle finger), “Random Note” (a carnivalesque ten-note sequence signaling fans to sing “Ahhh!”), and “Turn, Turn, Turn” (a quote from the Byrds song that tells the audience to turn around and applaud for an invisible band). I couldn’t believe it; Phish literally had its own language!
I studied Phish shows in my thirties like I once studied classic-rock radio in my teens. At first, I couldn’t discern the differences between all of the different live versions of “Tweezer,” a lightly funky workout from 1992’s A Picture of Nectar that became one of Phish’s most reliable jam vehicles. But my immersion was paying off—my ears had grown stronger and more attentive. I could now absorb thirty-minute excursions into the musical ether without getting lost or bored. At the same time, I’m still not fully confident that I know what “good” Phish is. I am keenly aware that many of my opinions are “wrong” in the eyes of true-blue Phish scholars.
For instance, after I had been listening to Phish for a few years and started going to shows, I felt confident enough to tell Rob that I really liked “Backwards Down the Number Line,” a gently melodic midtempo tune from 2009’s Joy. Rob, with infinite patience, explained to me that “Backwards Down the Number Line” was presently the most hated song among Phish fans, because the band always seemed to play it in the second set, where it always interrupted promising jams. (The die-hards referred to this phenomenon as a jam being “lined.”) Sure, “Backwards Down the Number Line” was pleasant enough, but it didn’t have the elasticity of Phish’s most beloved material, Rob insisted. For people like Rob who had hung in for twenty years and scoured every show for magic moments, a nice song with minimum jam potential was basically a nonstarter.
It was all about the jams. He didn’t want to hear predictable songs. He didn’t want Phish shows to get “too classic-rocky.” (Whereas I love it when Phish gets too classic-rocky.) The allure of a band whose body of work grows a little bigger with each concert is that you’ll probably never run out of music. For longtime followers like Rob, it wasn’t about hearing songs you already liked—it was finding something you didn’t know existed.
I don’t mind Rob or anybody else telling me that my Phish opinions are wrong. I like being wrong about Phish, because it means I have a lot more to learn. I can once again reap the benefits of ignorance, when all that’s worth hearing is still unheard, like it was back in my bedroom when I was in middle school. And with Phish, the amount of unheard music grows with every show. I’ll probably never reach the end of it.
Is it possible that my interest in Phish stems from a deep-seated midlife crisis that I don’t want to acknowledge? Maybe. But at least it’s cheaper than a sports car.