I used to hate Phish. Their music is inherently uncool, like the washed-up refuse of classic rock, prog, and whatever you want to call what Zappa did fused into hideous sound sculpture. It rejects whatever you think of as tasteful or intelligent or even humorous; none of these standards are meaningful within the realm of Phish. Lyrics are nonsensical, silly, and/or corny, with few exceptions. Arrangements can be perversely convoluted, moving more like Saturday morning cartoons than songs, a warehouse of various Acme explosives going off. The members of the band are aggressively unbeautiful singers, especially when they attempt to harmonize. And their relationship with their fans can register as an annoying in-joke, especially when the band sows its jams with strange signals and secret language only legible to the devoted. Everything I knew about Phish from afar made them look too involved, too obnoxious, too myopic. If I tried to enter their universe, I assumed I would bounce off an invisible wall.
Last year, a few months into the pandemic, I was just starting to retreat into the art that dominated my adolescence—’90s Paul Thomas Anderson movies, anime, Pink Floyd—when I noticed my friend Jess embarking on a similar project, ranking and writing down their impressions of every Phish studio album that came out before their first hiatus in 2000. Focussing on the group’s studio work was an unusual approach, as most seasoned fans are committed to feeling indifference or outright loathing toward their studio albums—they’ll swear that attending a show in-person is the only proper gateway into the band. (Phish fans are more judgmental than people who love a band like Phish have any right to be.) But as I read Jess’ posts, there was something about the energy of their writing—the effusive love they exhibited for Phish while acknowledging and embracing how many things are outright embarrassing about them—that made me want to see what they saw.
I started with 1998’s The Story of the Ghost, in part because I’d always found the cover art a little unsettling: a painting by George Condo of a giant gerbil-like apparition dressed in flowing white robes, the cartoon cuteness of the creature’s face growing very sinister whenever I realized its nose was actually a second face, just as cute as the first. I queued up the first track from it, “Ghost,” figuring it would give me a sense of whether I should dig further.
Out of a soup of ambient fog I heard… funk? A bassline that was on the verge of being… slapped? I hadn’t expected this, and I immediately lost my footing. Guitar lines were swaying like lightbulbs on chains. The vocal melody fell at an angle that didn’t match anything else happening in the song, like narration projected onto a screen after the final scene of a haunting. Only later did I discover that the song was written and road-tested as Phish were developing an improvisational style they dubbed “cow funk,” shorthand for funk music played by four white guys from Vermont. It was impossible to tell if I liked it at all. I only knew that it made me feel uneasy, like I was watching something dark and grim crawl out of it. I had to hear a live version immediately.
After a few minutes of research, I learned the most acclaimed “Ghost” jam is from a 1997 show in Denver, so singular it is referred to among fans simply as “The Denver Ghost.” This version, which expands the four-minute studio version into a 21-minute odyssey, sounds like it’s falling apart as it’s being played, giving it the draggy energy of a tangle of wires. When Phish inch past the song’s compositional limits into unknown space, Trey Anastasio, the band’s guitarist and primary songwriter, starts playing stuttery disco scratches over Mike Gordon’s bass notes, which sink so far behind the beat it’s like they’re stepping in quicksand. No one member appears to be leading. Instead, each contributes to a running dialogue shared by the four of them. You can hear a synth tone that resembles a choir of bees emitting from some tier of keyboardist Page McConnell’s expansive synth rig, while drummer Jon Fishman reduces his drumming to expressive, atmospheric triplets on his cymbals. All of this sails us so far beyond wherever the groove was before that we’re floating in space. Hearing the jam alone, not knowing who played it, I would’ve assumed I was listening to the krautrock band Neu!
Which is when I thought, Oh, I like this.
Which is when I thought, Oh no, I like this.
The thing is, I didn’t always hate Phish.
After reading about it on a Smashing Pumpkins message board, I convinced my parents to buy me a copy of Phish’s 2000 studio effort, Farmhouse, when I was 13 years old. I was charmed right away by the opener, the album’s title track. The melody, nicked from Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry,” a song I hadn’t heard yet, kept getting stuck in my head. I gravitated toward the song’s yearning melancholy, even though I couldn’t make heads or tails of the lyrics, which were quoted directly from a note Anastasio and his songwriting partner Tom Marshall found in, yes, a farmhouse. The song cracks open like a beer can and Anastasio sings, “Welcome, this is a farmhouse/We have cluster flies alas/And this time of year is bad,” and for some reason, at 13, I found this unbearably emotional.
Farmhouse gets meager on the second side, foreshadowing the hiatus Phish were about to take. When they reunited in 2002, I gave a cursory listen to their comeback album, Round Room, but found myself attached to only a few songs and none of the lyrics, which remained embarrassing but had now grown dense, contemplating cosmic insignificance in only the most forced rhyme schemes. They lost me, and I spent the next 18 years building up fortifications against Phish, insulating myself from the possibility of ever liking them again. “The Denver Ghost” ate through these defenses in 20 minutes.
Shortly thereafter I found myself listening to complete shows. I would even catch myself chuckling during set filler and in-jokes, like their barbershop quartet rendition of “Freebird.” There was no limit to the band’s silliness, and the degree to which I was willing to endure this silliness astonished me. How could this have happened? How could I have gotten obsessed with a band whose appeal so orbited around their live shows (which averaged two and a half hours in length and were rife with nonsense), when I couldn’t see them, let alone anyone else, live? Had I lost all standards of taste when the pandemic swept through, eliminating whatever life I knew before and replacing it with an eternally unstable present?
Soon I was taking Phish shows with me on my nightly walk in the park, which forced me to focus my attention on the tiny and major developments of each set. It helped my brain settle after a typical workday in July 2020, when every one of my thoughts exploded before it could form. I was too anxious to read—books often put me far too in touch with my brain’s running monologue of panic—and it helped that Phish sets flow like narratives, arranged so that songs from wildly different phases of their career can feel produced by the same mood. They reminded me of DJ mixes. Selection, sequencing, between-song transitions, pacing—Phish employ all of these techniques to tell a story. Sometimes that story is just about how the band felt that day: There’s an infamous show in Amsterdam from 1996 where, after sampling the local weed, the band could not get their jams off the ground at all. They wandered in place for many minutes, stranded in a stoned, thoughtless nowhere.
Sometimes the story is one of relief and gratitude, like the first few years of shows after Anastasio completed rehab and the band reformed in the late 2000s. Sometimes the story they tell is grim and terrifying, where you’re adrift between the stars because your tether to the space station snapped. The second set of their November 22, 1997 show at Virginia’s Hampton Coliseum belongs to that category, with a rendition of “Halley’s Comet” that immediately swerves from the insufferable silliness of the song itself, crashes through the guardrail, and plunges into murky waters. Even though it was impossible for me to see them amid the pandemic, this is the Phish I longed to see live, the Phish that made the increasingly small space that constituted my life loom as large as the cosmos. The Phish whose silliness was just an outgrowth of something terrifying beneath it. The Phish who could open up a black hole around their worst songs, swallowing them whole and spitting them back up turned inside-out. Whatever it was, I wanted it to be swallowed up by it too, and emerge from it changed.
Months later, as the live music industry tentatively started to reboot, I awoke to a text from Jess saying that Phish had announced their 2021 summer tour. They thought I should attend one of the Atlantic City shows. Dimly aware that Atlantic City Phish shows historically had a distinct and playful vibe, and thinking I could make a weekend of it, I bought a ticket. I soon felt the anticipation for my first in-person show in more than a year practically radiating from me.
At that same moment, though, I was starting to realize how much I’d limited the scope of my appreciation for the band. Whenever I investigated a new show, I kept strictly within the boundaries of 1997-1999, charting the initial development of their funk sound to its ultimate evolution as a vehicle for space travel, wary of going beyond it for fear of encountering mediocre or bad Phish, or the rumored druggy and sickly Phish of 2004.
So I set out to listen to at least one Phish show for every year they’ve been active, starting in 1989. I figured I’d get exhausted after sampling the first few years, but the project stretched out for more than two months and quickly became unwieldy. I ended up listening to and watching Phish concerts at the exclusion of all other music, except for the archival live Can record that came out earlier in the year (which I sometimes forgot wasn’t a Phish show).
Surprising even myself, my favorite Phish live era ended up being ’03-’04. For some fans this chapter of the band is radioactive material; Anastasio’s opiate habit affected his playing, scrambling his communication with the other members of the band, and there are shows where every onstage conversation between members seems clouded and directionless. When the shows during this period work, though, they harbor jams that envelope the crowd and the band in psionic waves, culminating in what’s known as the “Tower Jam” at the 2003 IT Festival, an entirely-improvised, hour-long set played from the top of a disused airport tower in the middle of the night, the lights from the tower glowing like a descended UFO.
The most instructive show I heard during the project, acting like a Rosetta Stone for their whole career, took place in 1996, when Phish were at an artistic crossroads. During the previous couple of years, their live interplay was the tightest it had ever been, their jams feeling like they could ascend through a portal in hell and exit the earth as flowers. But in October ’96 they were struggling to say anything new in their improvisations, and their ambitions scaled back as they contemplated where to go next. For their Halloween show, they decided to cover Remain in Light by the Talking Heads in full. A popular theory among fans is that, in the process of trying to replicate that album’s anxious funk fugues, Phish’s playing changed. Before, their jams slid in and out of movements of dissonance and beauty. Now they grooved, drifted, even floated around the hull of the ship if the occasion called for it. At its best, their improvisation could recall the dark and slanted jazz fusion of Miles Davis’ Agharta, or a Pink Floyd album being written in real time. Here was the Phish I fell in love with most, at the moment of its conception.
After wading underneath the boardwalk and across long stretches of sand, I reached the “venue” for the Atlantic City show, which was just another section of beach fenced off from the rest, crowned by a stage. When the band appeared, I immediately registered that Anastasio was wearing a hoodie with a picture of a cat on it—the intricate patterning of which reminded me of one of my cats—and I knew I had picked the right show.
The set that followed might as well have emanated from the concert I dreamed of attending among the eerie stillness of the grass and the trees in the park during one of my pandemic walks. The lighting rig above the band looked like the ever-unfolding legs of a Lite Brite spider. Anastasio made liberal use of his loop pedal so that his guitar always sounded lost in its own light trails. They played “Reba,” a pet favorite Phish song from my listening project, a fun and complex composition that always precedes a patient and lovely jam and tends to ordain a good show. “Split Open and Melt,” one of their most reliably-cracked jam vehicles, worked its way into a melted world where it felt impossible to organize what they were doing with a time signature, each instrument oozing into each other like four upturned drums of toxic slime.
By the time the second set started it became hard to register the music as improvisation, as being invented in the present, as everything that happened seemingly occurred with such a fated inevitability. In the distance a ferris wheel glowed. And when the music quieted I could hear nearby waves gather, collapse, and gather again, different yet the same every time, the ocean harboring in its depths the same sense of mystery and darkness that I heard in the music enfolding me.
