I'm not a typical Phish fan. I didn't discover them until I was almost 30, married, and a homeowner. More to the point, I spent a year listening happily to their recorded music before I finally got a chance to go to a live show. Fans, mass media, everyone says how good they are live -- they're good enough that people follow them across the country. They're this generation's Grateful Dead. They're the best live act in America. And so on, one accolade after another. How could I miss it?
But ten years of rock concerts have made me cynical. As good as some of these other acts have been, they have tended to be formulaic and predictable. Familiar songs show up where you expect them; the sound stays basically the same from the first note to the last encore; the musicians sometimes look detached, like they've played the same setlist for twenty nights running. More often than not, the live version of a song sounds little different from the studio recording -- just louder and with a poorer mix.
So I was skeptical. What makes these Phish shows so good? Why do people sit entranced through rambling fifteen-minute jams? Why do the fans collect so many hours of amateur concert tapes? What keeps them coming back for more, show after show? When we went to this Phish concert, I decided, I wanted to go in with a "beginner's mind" and try to understand the phenomenon from the outside. I'd only get this one chance, especially if I got hooked -- from then on, I'd be seeing it from the inside.
In anticipation of the show, I did my homework. I read the Web sites, listened to the live recordings I could get (not many), learned the song catalog, scanned the newsgroup conversations, and read the reviews of the shows just before ours.
It helped, but the real thing was about as much like my expectations as real life is like a simple line drawing.
July 13, 1999 was a beautiful sunny afternoon. We drove to Mansfield, Massachusetts with hundreds of other Phish-stickered pilgrims' cars. The parking lot and amphitheater lawn were full of young neo-hippies in sandals, dreadlocks, hand-sewn dresses, and T-shirts with Phish jokes on them. (Antelope highway signs. Kuroda Lights. Makisupa Police Academy. Possum Xing. Skyballs and Saxscrapers.) People played hacky-sack in the sun and sold veggie burritos and begged for tickets and hugged long-lost friends. The Hood blimp made a cameo appearance and was roundly cheered. Pot abounded, but everyone was relaxed and enjoying themselves. It was so relaxed, in fact, that the place was only half full by the nominal start time; but that wasn't a problem because the band didn't come on stage until forty minutes afterwards. No rush, apparently.
Then Phish walked on stage, the lights came up, and the relaxation was over for the next two and a half hours!
The first song was... well, I had expected to be blown away by a roof-raising opener (based on reviews of the previous night's concert), and that's not quite what we got. Still, it was good stuff. I didn't know that song, nor the next one, nor the next -- in fact, during the whole show, they were going to play exactly three songs that I knew, and one of those was a cover. (More on that later.) A couple of songs into the first set, though, the energy really picked up, and kept increasing throughout the set. The bouncing, screaming crowd fed off of it, the band fed off the crowd, and around it went!
One thing I learned: with a band this good, you don't need to know the songs to thoroughly enjoy them. The songs are all well-crafted, with good hooks and excellent playing (though Phish's lyrics run the gamut from profound to silly to downright baffling). Even the songs you do know are likely to be different from any recording you've ever heard. The tension of not knowing what's coming up seems to be part of the fun, anyway; you can't tell when they're going to do a song straight, change its style, alter its lyrics, cut it short, or turn it into a long jam. Phish did all of these that night.
Another thing I learned: how to enjoy a jam. I'd listened to recordings at home, but live really is different. Maybe it's because the music is being created at the same instant you're listening to it, making it a fresh and tense; maybe because you're theoretically part of it, to the extent that the band takes cues from the audience. Either explanation works. Anyway, there were times when I had to just sit down and close my eyes, to listen to the music unfold. I'm a visual thinker, and to me, the jams were like watching a tapestry being woven before my eyes. Sometimes it was a delicate filigree of quick guitar notes and light percussion; another time it was a bright mixture of cheerful tonal color and catchy melodies; another time it was a dark, ominous pattern of grinding dissonance and chunky irregular rhythms; and during my favorite jams, like "Reba," it was a liquid river of sound, of slowly shifting chords and bell-like tones that blended so well I lost track of which instrument was playing what.
There's another way to enjoy a jam -- by intellectualizing it. I told my husband that if he got bored, he should listen closely enough to find out who was "driving" the jam (if anyone), and figure out when that switched from one band member to another. For instance, the bassist could almost always change the feel of a jam when he chose to, by making subtle changes in the bass line. The drummer could signal a change in direction with a roll or new rhythm, but the others didn't always follow. At one point, the liquid-sound "Reba" jam ended abruptly when the guitarist seemed to have had enough -- he killed it off with a harsh guitar line that yanked everyone else out of the jam and pulled them unceremoniously into "Carini". The crowd loved it.
And yet another way: dance your way through the jam, without bothering to think about it or visualize it! That's what everyone around me seemed to be doing. Hard-driving blues, Southern rock, and funk were all there in this concert; it was hard not to dance. And when they were singing and not jamming, it was hard not to scream out the refrains at the top of my lungs, especially when thousands of people around me were yelling in unison phrases like "Run like an antelope out of control!"
By the end of the concert, I was finally paying conscious attention to some of the other factors that made the concert so unlike others I had been to. For one thing, this band is kind of minimalist. It doesn't use vast numbers of instruments, and its setup looked kind of small on the big black Great Woods stage. And it's only four people. But that was all they needed to produce sounds unlike any I had ever heard before, even at powerhouse concerts like Pink Floyd and Yes. Clearly, these four guys work together so well that Phish ends up being far more than the sum of its parts.
Related to this point about minimalism is their whole demeanor on stage. I'd heard about onstage antics, especially by the drummer, but tonight there was none of it -- in fact, all four of them stayed pretty still through the whole concert. Trey Anastasio was oddly subdued for a guitarist, just walking a bit and bobbing his head to the rhythm, even while he ground out raging solos. Same for the bassist, Mike Gordon, though his bass-slapping was more dramatic. Page McConnell, the keyboardist, strutted around while he crooned "Lawnboy," but sat behind his keyboards the rest of the time. The drummer, Jon Fishman, did in fact wear a dress, but he didn't steal the show by acting up (as he's been known to do). Again, the whole focus was on the music, nothing else. Maybe they've outgrown the antics. Maybe that's just as well.
As for the music itself, it's hard to say anything bad about it. The playing is technically top-notch, the interplay among the four of them is fascinating, the sound balance was as good as I've ever heard it at Great Woods, the singing still needs work (though all of them can sing -- a rare and remarkable thing among '90s bands), and they're self-confident enough to play covers of other bands' songs at key points like openers and encores. (We were treated to their first performance of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Tuesday's Gone" for the encore.) They're also willing to be artistically adventurous, to work with new sounds and techniques right on stage, risking failure. I'm sure that this time next year, they'll be exploring different sounds, building on what they're doing now. That's such a welcome alternative to bands that don't change much, or change only in directions that aren't challenging to their audiences.
So maybe that's part of why the fans keep coming back -- the music is just plain good. On many different levels, across many genres. Added to that is the constant tension of not knowing what or how they'll play next (though many fans seem to make a game out of trying to predict it). And the band obviously respects the fans enough to give them something authentic for every performance.
Another big reason may be that each concert is a unique experience, unlike any that preceded it, and unlikely to ever be repeated. Each show arises from a combination of what the band members want to do, how the audience reacts, the history of the band in this particular place, the huge song corpus to draw from (their own and everyone else's), and whatever artistic inspiration hits them as the music takes on a life of its own. I can see how that could be addictive.
Finally, by the time we were all leaving the amphitheater humming "Tuesday's Gone" to ourselves, it occurred to me that cynicism had been entirely banished that evening. There was none of it in the song lyrics (at least the ones that were comprehensible, which was maybe half of them). The songs were almost all upbeat musically, and none of them were angry or nasty. There was a lot of humor, such as the bizarre "NO2" piece that had some of us frowning at each other in bewilderment, and the teases for other songs they threw in here and there just to tweak the crowd. The crowd itself was the mellowest I'd ever seen at a rock concert, with everyone being polite and helpful. We even got in and out of the parking lot with no trouble at all.
In a world like this, a few hours of first-rate music and no cynicism is a wonderful gift. For the price of a ticket and an hour's drive, I'll take it again, as often as Phish will offer it.
I'm hooked.