Ourland

I don’t have access to cutting-edge Bluetooth technology in my 2010 Hyundai Accent, which means I’ve turned to alternative means of consuming music while driving around the valley, the most reliable and rewarding, I’ve found, being XM radio, which is (surprisingly) available in my 16-year-old sedan for the modest promotional cost of five bucks per month. I have assigned the following stations to the six presets, from left to right: Grateful Dead, Phish, the Beatles, Siriusly Sinatra, MLB Network, and NPR – yes, this is objectively the most middle-age white guy combination of stations known to man. I’ve found myself lingering longer on the Phish station in recent weeks, because I do this thing in the summer and fall where I disproportionately listen to jam bands: the freewheeling music on my speakers coupled with the pleasant weather reminds me of crusty festivals of yore. I’m not by any means a Phan, the Phish version of a Deadhead, but there was a year or two during my college and immediate post-college days when I became more or less obsessed with them, back when I had nothing better to do but sit around and listen to music and neglect my body and life. Listening to them now, in my late 30s, I’ve found their music has aged better than expected, though there are certain times while listening to, I don’t know, a 33-minute version of “Tweezer,”that I wonder: is this band, which could reasonably be considered the most successful band to come out of the ‘90s, actually any good?

One of my core memories associated with Phish, my introduction to them, really, took place in high school journalism class, when a guy named Matt turned me on to their music. He was, and as far as I know still is, one of the biggest Phans this side of Telluride, and curiously, one of the most unabashed Republicans I’ve ever met…curious, I say, because one does not generally associate a freewheeling jam band that has a drummer who wears dresses with Right Wing ideology. Which just goes to show you that we’re all complex people who contain multitudes, or maybe that I’m just a judgmental asshole. Anyway, the teacher of the class was a left-leaning white-bearded hippie named Mr. Noechel, who, if memory serves, loved the Grateful Dead but despised Phish, and enjoyed ribbing Matt about how much they sucked. The culmination of their sort-of friendly, mostly prickly feud occurred in May of 2004, when Phish broke up due to frontman Trey Anastasio’s serious drug addiction (note: Trey has since gotten sober, and the band reunited in 2009). Matt was devastated, naturally, but Mr. Noechel didn’t hesitate to twist the knife, and I remember a shouting match ensuing, and Matt storming out of the room; though, of course, memory is fallible, and this shouting match very well could’ve taken place at a different time, over a different subject entirely, or maybe not at all. But I recall it being over the Phish break up, so we’re going to stick with that to maintain a sense of cohesiveness.

I haven’t seen Matt in over a decade, but I remember liking him. He’ll forever be the first person I think of whenever Phish randomly crops up in my life, as they tend to do every couple years with the regularity of locusts. They are periodically but enduringly appealing first and foremost because of Anastasio, who is a phenomenal guitarist. His range and stamina are nearly ultrahuman: he can play virtually any style well, and he never seems to lose steam or focus. Even when he’s in the deepest depths of a 30-minute jam that seems devoid of an escape hatch, he wriggles free and emerges triumphantly on the other side. One of the biggest critiques I’ve heard about Phish, other than “they need to end this song that they’ve been playing for 25 minutes,” is that they’re too guitar heavy. I couldn’t disagree more: while all four members of the band are solid musicians, Phish is first and foremost defined by the jubilant guitar work, and creative prowess, of Anastasio. The image that pops into my head whenever I think of Phish will always be Anastasio, red-headed and bespectacled, squinting in awkward concentration while immersed in the middle of another endless solo somewhere around Mars.

The image that pops into my head whenever I think of Phish will always be Anastasio, red-headed and bespectacled, squinting in awkward concentration while immersed in the middle of another endless solo somewhere around Mars.

Another critique that I’ve often heard about Phish, and Anastasio in particular, is that they don’t take their music seriously. These words were spoken to me by a bartender who moonlights in a band with his brother. This critique goes hand-in-hand with a separate critique, which is that Phish makes noodly festival music that can only be enjoyed under the influence of psychedelic substances. I understand the basis for this lack-of-seriousness theory: listen to an album like Colorado ‘88, which features Anastasio and Co. playing small bars in Telluride before they got famous, and the band seems goofy and stoned as hell: singing a song about a cat named Poster Nuttbag, riffing on how their drummer is lost in the mountains of Telluride, calling drummer Jonathan Fishman the “second best trombone player in Vermont” then having him perform a truly awful trombone solo, and lastly, doing whatever the hell it is they’re doing on this version of “Icculus.” It is, in short, an erratic and undisciplined relic from a bygone era. It’s quite a heady thing, indeed, to hear only a smattering of people in the crowd half-heartedly clapping at the end of a song, knowing that, in just a few years, this band would be selling out Madison Square Garden and have a legitimate claim to the most successful band of their era. Listening to Colorado ‘88, I can’t think of a band that sounds less poised to take over the world: it’s the sound of a group of potheads who noodle around for a few years in their 20s and collect some local, maybe regional acclaim before petering out in their 30s due to lack of sustainable income, then enter into the workforce like every other square who couldn’t hack it making a living off of their youthful dreams.

This is, of course, the exact opposite of Phish’s career trajectory: the band, as an entity, had amassed a net worth of $200ish million. I think where my bartender friend is getting hemmed up is in the distinction between humor and seriousness, in the sense that something can be humorous while also being serious – in fact, most humor is really just seriousness in disguise: think the writings of Mark Twain, or the stylings of virtually any stand-up comic. And sure, while Colorado ‘88 could be classified as both humorous and unserious, my bartender friend’s critique of Phish as a fundamentally frivolous band completely disintegrates when you listen to an album like A Live One, specifically the 12-minute version of “Stash,” which features some mind-melding guitar work from Anastasio, who burrows into a seemingly inescapable atonal hole then explodes, orgasmically, out of the other end; it’s the sound of a rat crawling through a labyrinth of pipes to find sunshine at its terminus. Any musician capable of pulling off what Anastasio pulled off in that song can’t be denigrated as someone who lacks pride in their craft. Anastasio physically inhabits his instrument as well, if not better, than any other guitarist, he just lubricates his essential sincerity with silly songs about fluffheads and lizard people and fictional prophets named Icculus to make it all go down a little smoother.

I’ve been to one Phish show in my life, back in 2012, at Bonnaroo, and I have two specific memories from their set that night. The first is Anastasio inviting Kenny Rogers (RIP) onto the stage to perform, of course, “The Gambler,” which given my state of mind, seemed hilariously incongruent and also a little too much to handle, mentally speaking. My second memory from that show is the guy in front of me – a boy, really – who was skinny and pale and wearing a white t-shirt. He, like the rest of us, probably hadn’t showered since we’d descended on the sun-baked fields of Middle Tennessee. This boy had in his possession a red balloon that he seemed to have a child-like attachment to: he’d bat it in the air a few times and smile, then hold it close to his chest like a beloved son. The boy and his balloon were inseparable until around the one hour mark, when it landed on what must’ve been a particularly sharp blade of grass and went POP.

Anastasio physically inhabits his instrument as well, if not better, than any other guitarist, he just lubricates his essential sincerity with silly songs about fluffheads and lizard people and fictional prophets named Icculus to make it all go down a little smoother.

That poor boy wasn’t the same after the abrupt annihilation of his latex friend: he sunk into what can only be described as a severe depression, and spent the next hour or so seated in the grass with his arms wrapped around his knees, rocking back in forth, so deeply buried in grief that his sadness was, like, emanating off him and infecting me. His grief seemed to tunnel deeper with each 20-minute jam that passed, and nothing was pulling him out of it, not even Trey’s immaculate guitarwork, until it all became so intense that I was forced to wander back to my hot little tent jammed into that dried-out field with all of the other hot little tents and have a deep think about the red balloon equivalent in my own life. This does seem, in retrospect, like the most Phish-like thing that could’ve possibly happened during my only Phish show: watching a psychedelically-influenced 20-something forge an emotional bond with a party decoration, I mean.

The third critique, probably the one that I’m most sympathetic towards, is that Phish simply doesn’t have good songs. It’s true that they’ve never had a Top 40 hit (not that this is really a good way to judge the quality of a band’s songs), but even the Grateful Dead, the band that Phish is most often compared to, has two tunes that receive regular radio play and would be recognizable to the average person: “Truckin’” and “Touch of Grey.” Phish’s most famous pop-adjacent song, which never charted and probably isn’t known by the greater population, is “Farmhouse.” So there’s definitely a reasonable argument to be made that Phish doesn’t have the catalogue of quality songs necessary to be considered a great band. Yet in some ways this feels similar to complaining about, I don’t know, a first baseman being a bad pitcher: a jam band shouldn’t be judged on its ability to write pop songs in the same way that a position player shouldn’t be judged on his ability to throw a curveball. Phish’s wheelhouse is live, fan-centric, improvisational music that’s slightly, sometimes vastly, different each time they play a show, and they do this very well. So to casually degrade them for not being able to write the next “Let it Be” is to ignore their fundamental strengths: musicianship, stamina, community-building, collaboration, and mood-setting, characteristics that have cohered into some truly legendary live shows. All I’m saying is that anyone who’d leave Lou Gehrig out of the Hall of Fame because he never struck out a batter is an idiot.

Furthermore, I’d argue that Anastasio, the creative force of the band, is actually a pretty good composer in the sense that he’s able to construct tunes that have certain ear-wormy qualities, whether it be through catchy melodies (re: “Gumbo” or “Farmhouse”), oddball lyrics (re: “Wash uffize drive me to firenze”), or some truly next-level guitar compositions (“Tweezer” or “Stash”). Anastasio’s lyrics might not always make logical sense, or any sense at all – again, “wash uffize drive me to firenze” – but they tend to get stuck in your head because the sound of the words click perfectly into the jigsaw piece of a given song. Anastasio’s mother was a successful children’s book author, a biographical nugget that explains a lot, because he clearly inherited her knack for guileless whimsy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Gamehendge Epic that anchored the majority of those early-era Phish shows in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s (Note: Feel free to skip the next paragraph if you have no interest in diving into some of the more nuanced aspects of Phishian lore. God knows I would understand.)

For the uninitiated, the Gamehendge Epic is formally known as The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday and was Anatastio’s senior thesis at Goddard College, where he was, unsurprisingly, a philosophy major. TMWSIY is a suite of songs that plays like a fantasy fiction novel and – stay with me here – follows the mythical Colonel Forbin as he tries to reclaim the Helping Friendly Book (which was written by the “great and knowledgeable Icculus”) from the Evil King Wilson. There’s more to it than that, but I won’t bore you with the minutiae. I’m not usually a fan of fantasy fiction or overly-conceptualized music, because a lot of it comes across as self-serious drivel, yet there’s a certain Trey-like playfulness about TMWSIY that makes it curiously appealing. Like most things with Phish, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, or at the very least lubricates its seriousness with silliness. It also helps that a lot of the songs that comprise it are actually quite good, particularly “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent,” “Fly Famous Mockingbird,” and “Wilson,” the latter of which became Russell Wilson’s theme song back in the mid-2010s when he played for the Seahawks, which is just odd, considering Phish and Russell Wilson are two cultural entities that one would never, in a billion years, expect to be associated with one another.

Anastasio’s mother was a successful children’s book author, a biographical nugget that explains a lot, because he clearly inherited her knack for guileless whimsy.

But I digress from the overarching point, which is that while Anastasio might not be great at writing Top 40 hits, or even recording studio albums, he clearly has an infectious internal creativity that has attracted millions of people to his music. And let’s not forget that he’s, basically objectively at this point, one of the greatest guitarists of his generation, if not the greatest. It’s true that he’ll probably never write a song as perfect as  “Let it Be,” but it’s also true that Paul McCartney could never play the guitar part in this version of “Tweezer.” Cut Trey a break: he can’t be a virtuoso at everything, and he doesn’t need to be.

I was going through a pretty ugly break-up when the red balloon thing happened at that Bonnaroo Phish show, but my ex-girlfriend and I had already bought the ticket so we decided to go together, which ended up being about as good of an idea as it sounds. We spent most of the weekend apart, and the time we did spend together was awkward and forced, because by this point she had already hooked up with another dude back in Virginia. I was just a complete mess in general, lost in the darkening sea of my immediate post-college years and trying to figure out what I was doing with my life. I guess you could say that my metaphorical red balloon had popped, and I, too, was as lost as that t-shirt clad boy rocking back and forth on the Middle Tennessee grass like some sadsack lunatic in an 18th-century asylum. I remember lying on the air mattress in my hot little tent, unshowered and clamp-jawed and out-of-my-head, my ex-girlfriend roaming around on the 700-acre grounds, probably sloppily making out with some hot acid dealer, when I heard Trey launch into the beginning notes of “Tweezer” in the distance; off he went as I laid my stinky little head on the pillow and let my warped mind followed them, once again, into a beautiful and unpredictable jam into the Heart of Nowhere.

That was 11 years ago – has it really been that long? – and listening to Phish now on XM radio as a middle-aged guy with a five-year-old son, I feel a sense of admiration for this weird little band from Vermont that’s still going strong after 40 years. They’re constantly touring, after all, and actually came to Richmond in early October (I  thought about splurging on a ticket, then thought better of it). The thing I like about listening to live Phish shows is the way each one feels animate: this is not a band that strolls on stage and methodically works through their past catalogue with no deviation or surprises. Their shows are constantly-evolving creatures that have a will and motivation all their own. I think of my high school buddy Matt when I listen to the band now now, and wonder if he’s still as big of a Phan considering he’s a father and approaching 40. I wonder if Mr. Noechel is up there in heaven, or wherever, shaking his wrinkled fist every time Trey walks on stage and noodles his way through another indulgent half-hour guitar odyssey. I see myself, turning on the radio in my Accent and teleporting: in one sense, XM radio seems like the perfect medium for listening to a band like Phish: every time I start the car, I’m hurled into the middle of another jam the contours of which I need not understand; for all I know, this jam might not have a beginning, and it might never end. For both XM radio and Phish, the music never stops: this is an abysmal thought for some, but for others, it’s exactly how things should be – even if I, too, sometimes wish they’d wrap up this 30-minute song and get on with the next one already.