Jazz Odyssey

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Brett Gladstone brings us a great article that contains a well-done interview with former Phish frontman Trey Anastasio. In discussing everything from the drug use that ultimately torpedoed the Phish juggernaut to the difficulties in dealing with the fan backlash the followed Trey’s announcement that Phish was no more, Trey has finally come clean.

By the time Phish played its final show at Coventry, they had, like The Grateful Dead, become something more than a band - they were a lifestyle. And for thousands of disillusioned, pseudo-bohemian youths, they were a traveling home, as well as a bottomless vehicle for interpretation. The latter - propagated by fans armed with minute statistics about Phish’s musical habits - sharpened as the band’s live performances dulled and their albums veered from the majestic intricacy, atonality and extensive jamming of Anastasio’s early compositions.

“Groups,” Greil Marcus wrote in “Mystery Train,” are “reflections of community, and the problem with community is that you have to live in it.” Phish made their early music at a literal distance, walled up in the backwoods, only to find their world unexpectedly close in upon itself. The fans’ problems became their own, particularly Anastasio’s.

It’s always been my personal musical opinion that *SOMETHING* happened after Phish’s killer 4-show run in April of 1998 (known as The Island Tour, comprised of two gigs on Long Island and two in Rhode Island). The reckless precision, instrumental highwire acts and a sensibility of “clever” that never took itself too seriously begain to dissolve in sloppy, unfocused playing and aimless jams that often degenerated into a formless goo (misnamed by many fans as “ambient jamming”). As the fan “drugs of choice” shifted from pot and psychedelics to nitrous and Ecstacy, the overall scene turned darker. Parasites descended onto the scene, and the Phish organization got bigger and bigger in an effort to retain some semblance of order while the band struggled to cope with the responsibility. Reading Anastasio’s recounting of that time, it seems that those pressures brought other personal demons to the band’s inner circle, and Phish became exactly what they never wanted to be–Phish, Inc. This was a scenario all too familiar in the waning days of the Grateful Dead….the organization became so bloated and filled with hangers-on that they band was forced to tour beyond their wishes in order to support the machine.

Something had to give, and it did.

Personally, I applaud Trey’s decision to break up the band….if he couldn’t bridge the gap between where Phish was and where he wanted them to go and the fallout from that struggle was harmful to band and fans alike, then his decision was the only right thing to do.

I’m grateful for the music and good times, lifetime friends made, a multitude of ideas that have catalysed my career, and for inspiring future generations of risk-taking bands who want to do it their own way. I hope the rich legacy of the live Phish vault continues to be mined for gems. And even though I’m personally not knocked out by the music Trey is making as a solo act, I hope he’s finding it rewarding and he certainly deserves as much…and he doesn’t owe anybody anything.