After Forty Years, Phish Isn’t Seeking Resolution

Since 1992, Gordon has kept a list in his journal titled “Bass Playing Thoughts.” Many entries read like koans: “A high note can be felt as low, repeated.” It has been a useful repository for his own self-reflection. “Acceptance has been a big theme for Phish over the years,” he said. “In the nineties, we had a thing where we would get backstage between sets and talk about the set. And then we decided that wasn’t allowed anymore. For me, the shows got twice as good at that point, because I knew that I wasn’t going to be judged.”

Fishman paraphrased Charlie Parker: “ ‘Study and study and learn everything you can, and then forget that shit and play.’ That ambient jam is the safest, most comfortable place I know in life.”

“It’s like hang gliding, in the sense that you do all kinds of preparation to make sure you’re safe—you check your gear, you tighten the knots,” Anastasio said. “But you still have to jump off a cliff.” He added, “You’re never gonna find four people who are happier diving off a cliff than the four guys in Phish.”

There’s a particular moment that Phish fans wait for. It doesn’t happen at every show, and it’s difficult to describe without sounding as though you’ve been a whiff too cavalier with your dosing, but here goes: there is sometimes a brief yet transcendent stretch, occurring maybe ten or twelve or even twenty minutes into a jam, in which the band achieves a kind of otherworldly synchronicity, both internally and with its audience. This kind of moment, though mysterious, has been an essential and meaningful part of the band’s gestalt since the beginning. I felt it during the Mondegreen jam—a short but delightful vacation from my corporeal self.

Musically, Phish braids three major elements: formal composition, improvisation, and—despite what you may have heard—pop hooks. (Fervent fans tend to favor the more sprawling songs, but the band’s most streamed tracks—“Farmhouse,” “Sample in a Jar,” “Bouncing Around the Room”—are bona-fide earworms.) These elements might appear to be in opposition to one another, but the band’s capacity to hold them in balance is arguably its defining achievement; all three are crucial, in different ways, to whatever trapdoor occasionally opens up mid-set. Anastasio and I spent dozens of hours parsing the physics of it. “Last night got so deep,” he texted me one morning, after Phish had played its second of four shows at Moon Palace, a resort in the Riviera Maya, in Mexico. “Gratitude, emotions, heavy heavy hurt anger explosion, safe space to let feelings go. Fear, confusion. Sometimes the guitar is the only place it’s safe to let that out.” He pointed me toward a particular jam, during “Twenty Years Later,” the track that closes “Joy,” the band’s twelfth album, from 2009. It’s hard not to understand the lyrics, which Anastasio wrote with Tom Marshall, as a rejoinder to excess:

I can hold my breath for a minute or so
Five days without food is as long as I’ll go
I didn’t sleep once for four days and three nights
I once didn’t stop for seven red lights

Around five minutes in, you can hear the band members find one another and begin to coalesce. Phish is generally oriented toward euphoria, but there are instances in which it gets dark, brooding, nearly carnal. Fans refer to this as Evil Phish. (The most consistently beloved example of Evil Phish is “Carini,” a creepy, taunting song that has never appeared on an album. It opens with a vicious riff and an ominous lyric: “I saw you with Carini and that naked dude!”) “Twenty Years Later” is a hopeful song, but the jam got heavy. “Often there is a moment when it feels like the safety rails fall off,” Anastasio wrote to me. “We lose any sense of time passing. Then I feel safe letting people see how I actually feel, which is terrified a lot of the time. Around eight minutes, it starts to feel like my heart is wide open. It feels like pure emotion when the music gets like that. No sense of notes/scales. Just energy.” He added, “It’s why people come.”

Achieving this sort of dissociative bliss is not uncommon when listening to Hindu bhajans or Gregorian chants or other forms of religious music; I last felt it in the Pindus Mountains of northern Greece, when a Roma clarinettist played a mirologi, or ancient Epirotic lament, directly into my ear, at two o’clock in the morning, in a dark forest. I bring this up simply to say that it’s extraordinary that this sort of thing—a fleeting doorway to nirvana—is regularly occurring for Phish fans in minor-league-hockey arenas.

“When that portal opens, I don’t remember a single thing,” Fishman said. “I know which gigs are really good by how little I can remember. I do things on the drums that I never practiced and had no idea I was capable of. I have to go back and learn shit that happened in jams that I don’t actually know how to do.”

One night, I asked Anastasio to walk me through what it felt like onstage when the band passed through the portal. “I’ll pick a jam and try to describe what’s going on,” he said. “Camden, New Jersey, 1999, ‘Chalk Dust Torture.’ The song is what it is. It’s fast, it’s ridiculous, and still, in some weird way, it’s my fucking all-time favorite Phish song.” About five minutes in, after a spontaneous key change, the band starts communicating musically, changing keys and rhythms. “I throw out a melodic phrase, something we can all jump on. That leads to another spontaneous key change, which can only happen if we’re all fully listening. And then the universe opens up, and I feel like I don’t exist,” he continued. “I’m not locked in my mind anymore. I feel entirely connected to the people way back on the lawn. I can sense the scale, how insignificant the venue looks from above, how minuscule we are in the grand scheme. I don’t understand any of it—it feels like being pulled by the music like a water-skier. It’s a miracle, this moment. But it’s ephemeral—it can’t last. And slowly, around twelve or thirteen minutes, it goes back down to earth. But I’ve gotten to peek behind the curtain for just a moment. The set continues, and when I step off the stage someone walks up and says something like ‘The bus is leaving’ or ‘What time do you want to eat?’ And—ugh. Fuck. I’m back in this shit.”

Phish invited me to visit Anastasio’s recording studio, in a barn in the Green Mountains just outside Burlington. When I arrived, in February, the city was buried in more than a foot of snow, and I white-knuckled my rental car up a long switchbacked driveway. Anastasio and McConnell were sitting at a wooden table, eating sandwiches. Anastasio jumped up and offered to show me around. “I love giving the tour!” he said. “I get very excited.” We walked onto a deck overlooking the mountains. In the mid-nineties, after acquiring the land—seventy acres—Anastasio bought the two-hundred-year-old barn for a thousand dollars. “That’s Mt. Mansfield,” Anastasio said, pointing. “See that white patch? The barn was down there.” A team of woodworkers eventually transferred the building, beam by beam, to its current spot. Once the barn was reassembled, a second structure was built around it, mostly for insulation. Anastasio got out a photo album and showed me some grainy snapshots from its construction. “That’s me, working the saw,” he said, proudly. “They let me help out. There’s me hammering while they drink beer.”

The interior is warm, rustic, and inviting. “There isn’t a single chain or screw that was bought new at a hardware store. Anything that got worse when it got old, we didn’t use,” Anastasio said, as he led me around. The light fixtures were salvaged from a local school; a blackboard had been used to make tiles for the shower. There are several large stained-glass windows. Everything there is meaningful to Anastasio, from his grandmother’s davenport (“I used to eat nuts on that,” he said, laughing) to a mosaic tabletop his mother made and two seats from the Spectrum arena, in Philadelphia. “When my dad took me to see the Flyers the year they won the Stanley Cup, we sat in those two seats,” he said. The floorboards were culled from trees cut down to make the driveway. “This is one of my favorite details,” Anastasio said, pointing at them. “We’ve done at least fifteen albums here. Long projects, where everybody’s staying up till two o’clock in the morning, running around, skateboarding, whatever. These are random sizes, rough-planed on one side. We wanted people to be able to spill beer and feel good. I didn’t want anything fancy.”