After more than a decade of absorbing other music, I'm through evangelizing for Phish, my first musical crush. Either the band's technically adept blend of art music, jazz and rock, glued together with bits of funk, bluegrass and a taste for absurd humor akin to Zappa and The Muppets strikes a chord with you — or it doesn't. Either you're thrilled by the prospect of following Trey & Co. way into the wilderness of one of their heady jams, maybe to get lost and trudge in circles, maybe to stumble onto some majestic never-before-heard aural vista — or you couldn't care less, and perhaps even recoil at the thought.
Unlike most longtime fans, I've never been to a Phish show in person, but I had an important epiphany during a simulcast. Before you ask: Yes, I was puffing the ol' magic dragon. For the record, this was the only time I've ever listened to Phish under the influence (and really, being stoned out of my gourd had nothing to do with my moment). If anything, I wish I had been sober, because it would have given me a little more clarity on the situation. It was the first time I wrapped my head around other people's feelings about music, and that's something I've carried with me to hundreds of other concerts since.
On a stifling weekend in August 2004, more than 65,000 fans slogged through acres of muck left by torrential rains in Coventry, Vt. — a mecca for Phish faithful — to see the band's "final" marathon shows before a self-prescribed indefinite hiatus. The break lasted only five years, but an air of finality hung heavy over the proceedings. The crowd at the Opry Mills Cinema, where I watched the simulcast in air-conditioned comfort, was as charged as the one on screen, cheering wildly, tossing fistfuls of glowsticks, passing joints (until an usher noticed). Before the end, band and audience alike cried with the pain of putting the family pet to sleep — except for me. Seeing the love these heads shared for something that felt so deeply personal to me was new and strange, and I wasn't quite sure how to handle it.
In the six years leading up to Coventry, my Phish fandom boiled down to being in the right place at the right time: Intrigued by lore passed down from college students at my summer job, aided and abetted by an Internet rife with band-sanctioned bootlegs, I was n00b reveling in a sound that melded the music I knew and loved with the zanier sensibilities of my favorite storytellers. The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday, the band's widely circulated but never released rock opera, struck me as something Roald Dahl and Douglas Adams might have cooked up if they had a band.
But I wasn't old enough to go to concerts alone, and as far as I knew, none of my buddies cared one whit for Phish. My parents tolerated me idolizing four goofy dudes from New England with the strained politeness of a sad dad at a One Direction concert. End result: The band was all mine. And to an adolescent, what's better than having something you can claim as your own? Any hardcore fan of any band well knows the fantasy world that opens up when he or she pushes play. And any fan who's ever followed a band knows the reality of chasing a concert memory from city to city, and I hadn't experienced that part of it yet.
But when the lights came up in the theater, it dawned on me that Phish most certainly was not mine alone — everyone shuffling toward the exit also had a stake, as big as or bigger than mine. They shared a familial connection that I was missing by enjoying the music in isolation. People get attached to songs for all kinds of reasons, but something special happens when you're in the same place at the same time with thousands who share a relationship to the music. You get to see the forest through the trees — a stunning 32,000-foot vista of music's power to move ... even the music of Phish, transcendent at its best, obscure and frivolous at its worst.
Phish reunited in 2009, and circumstances have continued to prevent me from attending a proper show. That changes Tuesday, when the band plays Nashville's newly christened Ascend Amphitheater — their first non-Bonnaroo Middle Tennessee show since 2000.
As it turns out, it's a good time to dig back in. The first show of the band's current tour, July 21 in Bend, Ore., was its first performance together since New Year's Eve, as well as the first since Trey Anastasio's five-show run subbing for the late Jerry Garcia in The Grateful Dead's Fare Thee Well series. Debuts of several brand-new songs aside, the first set of the Bend show was devoted to scraping off some rust: "Rift," a catalog staple for close to 25 years, suffered from cartoonishly bad vocal harmonies, and Anastasio lost his way among the zig-zagging scale runs that make up the song's midsection.
But like any pro team coming off a weak first half, they rallied hard in the second, remaining in fluid motion from the brooding opener "Ghost" through another eight songs to the closing "Chalkdust Torture," arguably the best honest-to-God rock song in their repertoire. Focused, concise playing meant there was minimal floundering in the jams — almost a "greatest hits" of jam styles, blending the clarity of '92-'93 jams with the syrupy funk of '97-'98. The lines of communication were wide open as these four guys made their way into the great unknown. That's what I and 6,800 others will be eagerly listening for on Tuesday.
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