For nineteen of thirty songs, Mr. Anastasio was alone on stage, a man with several guitars, a songbook that would be the envy of many other artists, a spotlight, a screen behind him that projected supporting imagery at times, and a voice that has only gotten better with age, becoming richer and more soulful.
I grew to love Phish later than most in my generation. By the time I was in college, Phish was transitioning from a niche band that primarily appealed to middle and upper middle class students into the world’s most famous and successful jam band, but I wasn’t personally interested. I remember being at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in a close friend’s apartment where we would gather to drink beer, smoke marijuana, listen to music, and argue over just about anything as college boys are prone to. The consensus among the gathering one of these nights was that I simply had to listen to “Bouncing Around the Room,” a track recorded in 1990, to “get it.” If I gave that lilting, whimsical, at times confusing number filled with backbeats and acapella a chance, I would understand the Phish-phenomenon. Perhaps needless to say, I didn’t, at least not then, being far too focused on classic rock, hard rock, heavy metal, and 80s metal to have room in my repertoire for new things, but a year after college, in the summer of 1999, I saw Phish live for the first time at the Garden State Arts Center (now PNC Bank) in Holmdel, NJ and immediately proclaimed them in my top bands of time, having become a devoted fan ever since. Last Sunday, in the final third of Phish guitarist and front man, Trey Anastasio’s acoustic, mostly solo, near three hour concert at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, also in NJ, my wife had to use the restroom as “Bouncing Around the Room” came on. As Mr. Anastasio belted out the opening lyrics and the intimate crowd roared in approval, “The woman was a dream I had Though rather hard to keep, For when my eyes were watching hers, they closed, and I was still asleep,” I told her to wait until the next song, because she wasn’t going to want to miss this one. This particular throwback was the twenty first selection of the evening on the way to a borderline incredible-for-a-mostly-solo-show thirty, covering Phish and Mr. Anastasio’s entire career, spanning almost three hours. For nineteen of the thirty songs, Mr. Anastasio was alone on stage, a man with several guitars, a songbook that would be the envy of many other artists even though Phish has never been broadly popular, a spotlight, a screen behind him that projected supporting imagery at times, and a voice that has only gotten better with age, becoming richer and more soulful. The remaining third showcased newcomer piano player, Jeff Tanski, a Broadway musician Mr. Anastasio met while collaborating on a project, but his excellent playing aside, the show remained Mr. Anastasio’s creation in its entirety, representing his own thoughts, feelings, and artistic goals.
If you are unfamiliar with Phish in general or Mr. Anastasio in particular, you are not alone. They might well be the most successful band ever that no one has ever heard of. Over the course of an almost four decade career, the four piece ensemble featuring Mike Gordon on bass, Page McConnell on keyboards, and Jon Fishman on drums in addition to Mr. Anastasio himself, has recorded 16 studio albums and amassed a devoted following of fans large enough to hold the record for the second most sold out shows in Madison Square Garden with 87, behind only Billy Joel, without having any radio hits or even much radio air play. Mr. Anastasio himself, who turned sixty this year, has a personal fortune of some $85 million rising for a college act in New England where they had to rent their own venues into a nationwide phenomena that dominated the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame public vote this year. They had done this based on a unique combination of whimsy, soul, and an unceasing ability to innovative live on stage, choosing a unique set list every night and playing unique versions of their vast library of songs that sometimes run up to forty minutes to an adoring crowd that refuses to sit down and instead prefers a wild, improv hippie-dance, frequently while smoking large amounts of marijuana, so much that even modern venues become filled with smoke despite various anti-smoking laws. At the same time, discerning any overarching meaning in Phish’s large collection of at times wildly disparate tracks isn’t an easy task. Their songbook ranges from the fantastical, even nonsensical, to the personal and even moving, effortlessly switching between the two modes. The dichotomy was evident from Mr. Anastasio’s first two choices, and continued throughout the entire evening. “More” is something of a eulogy for a living man who simply can’t get out of his own way. He lives a life “in slow motion,” his “feet are in the clay,” he’s “going nowhere, has “been standing here all day.” Still, this man has a “notion There was something more to do, As [he] watched the water From the banks of the river it swelled and grew.” Instead of growing, however, the speaker has bent with the times, “tilting to the left, leaning to the right” as he has “walked on coal and slept on glass,” but his heart remains screaming because “half” of what he says are lies, and “it takes so much to keep up this disguise, It takes so much to keep up this disguise.” We get the sense that something nondescript in the past haunts him, a memory that’s “still so real” it prompts him to conclude “nothing is ever over, even when it is.” Inside, he’s “vibrating with love and light, pulsating with love and light, In a world gone mad,” clinging to their hope that there “must be something more than this,” a hope he repeats over and over again as the song comes to a close, “There must be something more than this, There’s got to be something more than this.” The second track, however, “Wolfman’s Brother,” a more classic Phish tune, has an altogether different approach, a combination of scattershot images and whimsical lyrics, beginning with a verse that sets the stage for next to nothing at all except some fun:
Well it was many years ago now
But I really can’t be sure
That’s when it all began then
I heard that knock upon my door
And the wolfman’s brother
The wolfman’s brother
Came down on me
The second verse picks up where the first left off, when the speaker receives a telephone call, hands the receiver to someone named Liz, who tells him “This isn’t who it would be If it wasn’t who it is” before the wolfman’s brother comes down on him again. In the final two verses, we might attempt to find some meaning, when the speaker reveals that he sees or hears the wolfman’s brother everywhere, “on a side street,” “a stairway to the stars,” in the “high pitched cavitation of propellers from afar,” suggesting that he might well be paranoid and making the whole thing up, but does it matter? If nothing else, this pattern defines much of the show, as Mr. Anastasio slips between mournful numbers, bemoaning how “There’s a little cave out back where I can go to hide, And when I’m there I always phone you up to say goodbye, Somehow I can never seem to find the words I seek, Or maybe it’s just that the signal is too weak” as he does in “Lost in the Pack,” and fun ones, joking that “Brett is in the bathtub Making soup for the ambassadors, And I am in the hallway Singing to the troubadours” as he does in “Bathroom Gin.” Occasionally, the two worlds collide. In “Theme From the Bottom,” the metaphor of an ocean is used to characterize a relationship, where a man pines for a woman he’s never likely to have because “I feed from the bottom, you feed from the top, I live upon morsels you happen to drop.” Still, he wonders, “So I ask you why if I’m swimming by, Don’t you see anything you’d like to try?” Similarly, “Pebbles and Marbles,” which came later in the show, notes that:
She’s short and I’m tall
I’m big and she’s small
She’s young and I’m old
The thoughts unfold
As the setlist proceeds we can begin to identify at least two common themes. First, Mr. Anastasio frequently sings about people wanting to be more than they are, not in the defiant manner of a Bruce Springsteen, who as a boy from Jersey himself he cites as an inspiration, having seen him the Darkness of the Edge of Town tour at the tender age of fourteen, but in a more quiet, mournful mode. Second, Mr. Anastasio is perhaps most frequently obsessed with the passage of time, both in terms of things that might have been and in how they will be in the future, plus the differences that develop between people over time. Midway through the show, “Backwards Down the Number Line” encapsulates this idea. The song centers around the birthday of the speaker’s friend, who he asks to “Leave the presents all inside, Take my hand and let’s take a ride Backwards down the number line.” As he recalls:
You were eight and I was nine
Do you know what happened then
Do you know why we’re still friends
After recounting the past, the speaker urges everyone to carry through in the future, “Every time a birthday comes, Call your friend and sing a song.” Given Phish’s generally laid back nature, this can take any form you like according to the speaker. While you can sing, whisper or write it down, “You decide what it contains, How long it goes, But this remains, The only rule is it begins.” Even at his most fantastical, some of the same themes shine through. “The Squirming Coil,” for example, imagines a man who imagines he can keep a sunset within reach, though it tried to get away “yesterday,” for some reason prompting him to hitch hike to the beach. There, he finds Satan himself “Trying to catch a ray,” but he wasn’t “quite the speed of light” and the sunset got away from him as well. The speaker then encounters Jimmy, who is a child, but one day wants to catch the sun as well, even at the cost of his own life, “I’d like to lick the coil some day Like Icarus, who had to pay With melting wax and feathers brown, He tasted it on his way down.” From there, the song shifts gears and ends with the fancies, presumably of this young man, who wants to “Stun the puppy! Burn the whale! Bark a scruff and go to jail! Forge the coin and lick the stamp!” Fortunately or unfortunately, “Little Jimmy’s off to camp” instead. Perhaps no song captures Mr. Anastasio’s infatuation with both time and the absurd than “You Enjoy Myself,” played before the encore. This mostly instrumental track concludes with these few words culminating in gibberish:
Boy
Man
God
Shit
Boy man
Boy man
Wash uffitze drive me to firenze
To some extent, we might equate Phish’s jam band format directly with these themes. As Mr. Anastasio does when he’s performing with his regular bandmates, he rarely, if ever, played the same song two nights in a row on even this mini-tour, frequently choosing the set list and how he will play it on the spot. If performances are moments in time that are inherently unique, this is even more so with a jam band that improvises much of what they’re performing on the spot. Likewise, we can see live music itself as a collective celebration of life lived in time, and whether it makes sense or is pure gibberish is irrelevant to whether it moves an audience. Herein lies Mr. Anastasio’s final trick: Being well aware of his talent, I had expected an acoustic show to be a musical tour de force, but how much can anyone do with a solo act? The audience answers that question, serving as almost another instrument. While Phish has never gone mainstream, their fans have been devoted to the cause for decades. They know almost every word, what songs require what little accents here and there, and Mr. Anastasio encouraged them to participate, turning what could have been a more staid affair into a full on party, and becoming a one man jam band in the process. Also in college, I once said that the most fun you can have sitting down with your clothes on was at the dueling piano bar at Pat O’Brien’s in New Orleans. Mr. Anastasio has proved me wrong for at least the second time.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 