May 27, 2004
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
True to Form, Phish Disbands On Its Own Maverick Terms
By JON PARELES
The New York Times This time Phish is really breaking up.
On Tuesday the group announced on its Web site,
www.phish.com, that it was disbanding after a final tour this summer. The decision was made four days earlier at a band meeting, it said.
"We all love and respect Phish and the Phish audience far too much to stand by and allow it to drag on beyond the point of vibrancy and health," the band's guitarist, singer and main songwriter, Trey Anastasio, wrote online. "We don't want to become caricatures of ourselves, or worse yet, a nostalgia act." Its final studio album, "Undermind" (Atlantic), is due on June 15. The tour begins on June 17 at KeySpan Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn, and concludes in Coventry, Vt., on Aug. 14 and 15.
If it all sounds a little familiar, that is because the four members of Phish went separate ways in 2000 for an open-ended hiatus and reunited two years later. "This is not like the hiatus, which was our last attempt to revitalize ourselves," Mr. Anastasio wrote. "We're done."
Splitting up in its 21st year of existence, when Phish could easily coast along the arena circuit for as long as it wanted, may be the last unorthodox move in a career full of them. Many of those moves came from the playbook of the Grateful Dead, which figured out how to be a band of arena troubadours, making a career on the road while selling enough albums to satisfy a record company.
The whole Phish template â?? making every performance different, allowing audiences to make and trade concert recordings, archiving and tabulating its collective works, letting every fan feel like an initiate rather than a consumer, never acting like rock stars â?? came from the Dead, as did a significant part of its musical approach.
Like the Dead, Phish stays light-fingered, steering free of any style that contains bombast. The band would rather have fans "bouncing around the room," as one concert staple put it, then feeling aggrieved; as with the Dead, Phish's lyricist, Tom Marshall, is not in the band. And like the Dead, Phish encourages its fans to prize all sorts of music, to fight the niche listening that radio stations and recording companies promote. When band members turned to solo projects, they embraced big-band arrangements (the Trey Anastasio Band), folky guitar (the bassist Mike Gordon's duets with Leo Kottke), Frank Zappa-like humor (the drummer Jon Fishman's Pork Tornado) and Latin music (the keyboardist Page McConnell's band Vida Blue).
In disbanding, Phish may also have been glancing at the Grateful Dead, whose final years on the road with a failing Jerry Garcia were far from their best. But just as likely, Phish was exercising the persnicketyness that always separated it from most of the jam bands on the circuit that Phish helped establish.
Countless jam bands live for the opportunity to vamp and sprawl, spinning long stretches of music out of the most basic structures. Phish can stretch out a song with the best of them, but it has been determined not to sprawl; it always had an ear for structure. Phish comes from the generation after the Dead. Where the Dead looked back to blues, folk and country roots, Phish is also steeped in latter-day styles like progressive rock. In its catalog, it was as likely to come up with suitelike songs as with verse-chorus-verse, and it was as fond of odd time signatures as it was of country-rock lilts.
Phish was always a paradox. A band that lived for improvisation, Phish always had plans: performing other band's albums end to end at its Halloween shows and concocting goofy stage spectacles for arenas. It kept trying different recording strategies, from meticulously overdubbed studio productions to its reunion album, "Round Room," made from rehearsal tapes. And it has played nearly every place imaginable, from the club Wetlands Preserve to gigantic, sold-out, multiset marathon concerts in the middle of nowhere. Phish has nothing left to prove. After August Phish's members are likely to turn up with any number of collaborators. That's what happens in the recombinant universe of jam bands. What disappears is two decades of accumulated reflexes: the subtleties of knowing just when another member is going to start shifting keys in a jam, or when to pause for another member's rhythmic fill.
Reflexes can become formulas, and Phish was always too perfectionistic to want to hear that happen. There are songs on the band's Web site from "Undermind," and they are as varied and breezy as ever. Whether or not Phish knew what was coming, the lyrics hint at valedictory: "Run away, run away, run away," Mr. Anastasio sings in "A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing," and in "The Connection," he sings, "I change my direction/One foot follows the other, one foot follows something new." For two decades, that was Phish's strategy all along.
