Phish
Phish is an American rock band formed in Burlington, Vermont, in 1983. The band consists of guitarist Trey Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, drummer Jon Fishman, and keyboardist Page McConnell, all of whom perform vocals, with Anastasio being the lead vocalist. The band is known for their musical improvisation and jams during their concert performances and for their devoted fan following.
This article is about the band. For deceptive internet practices, see Phishing.
Phish
The band was formed by Anastasio, Gordon, Fishman and guitarist Jeff Holdsworth, who were joined by McConnell in 1985. Holdsworth departed the band in 1986, and the lineup has remained stable since. Most of the band's songs are co-written by Anastasio and lyricist Tom Marshall. Phish began to perform outside of New England in the late 1980s and experienced a rise in popularity in the mid 1990s. In October 2000, the band began a two-year hiatus that ended in December 2002, but they disbanded again in August 2004. Phish reunited officially in October 2008 for subsequent reunion shows in March 2009 and since then have resumed performing regularly. All four members pursued solo careers or performed with side-projects and these projects have continued even after the band has reunited.[3]
Phish's music blends elements of a wide variety of genres[4] including funk, reggae, progressive rock, psychedelic rock, folk, country, jazz, blues, bluegrass, electronic music, and pop.[2][5] The band is part of a movement of improvisational rock groups, inspired by the format of the Grateful Dead's live performances and colloquially known as "jam bands", that gained considerable popularity as touring concert acts in the 1990s.[6][7] Phish has developed a large and dedicated following by word of mouth, the exchange of live recordings, and selling over 8 million albums and DVDs in the United States.[8]
Phish were signed to major label Elektra Records from 1991 to 2005, when the band formed their own independent label, JEMP Records, to release archival CD and DVD sets.[9]
History[edit]
Formation, The White Tape and The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday: 1983–1988[edit]
Phish was formed at the University of Vermont (UVM) in 1983 by guitarists Trey Anastasio and Jeff Holdsworth, bassist Mike Gordon, and drummer Jon Fishman. Anastasio and Fishman had met that October, after Anastasio overheard Fishman playing drums in his dormitory room, and asked if he and Holdsworth could jam with him.[10] Gordon met the trio shortly thereafter, having answered a want-ad for a bass guitarist that Anastasio had posted around the university.[11]
The new group performed their first concert at Harris Millis Cafeteria at the University of Vermont on December 2, 1983, where they played a set of classic rock covers, including two songs by the Grateful Dead.[12][13] The band performed one more concert in 1983, and then did not perform again for nearly a year, stemming from Anastasio's suspension from the university following a prank he had pulled with a friend.[14]
Anastasio returned to his hometown of Princeton, New Jersey following the prank, and reconnected with his childhood friend Tom Marshall; The duo began a songwriting collaboration and recorded material that would appear on the Bivouac Jaun demo tape.[15][16] Marshall and Anastasio have subsequently composed the majority of Phish's original songs throughout their career.[17] Anastasio returned to Burlington in late 1984, and resumed performing with Gordon, Holdsworth and Fishman.[18] The quartet named themselves Phish in October 1984, shortly before they performed their first concert together following Anastasio's return to UVM.[19] Anastasio designed the band's logo, which featured the group's name inside a stylized fish.[19] The band's members have given several different origins for the name Phish. In Parke Puterbaugh's 2009 book Phish: The Biography, the origin is given as a variation on phshhhh, an onomatopoeia of the sound of a brush on a snare drum.[19] In the 2004 official documentary Specimens of Beauty, Anastasio said the band was also named after Fishman, whose nickname is "Fish."[19] In a 1996 interview, Fishman denied that the band was named after him, and said the onomatopoeic inspiration behind the name was the sound of an airplane taking off.[20]
In late 1984, Phish began to play regularly at Nectar's bar and restaurant in downtown Burlington, and performed dozens of concerts across multiple residencies through March 1989.[21][22] The band's 1992 album A Picture of Nectar was named in honor of the bar's owner, Nectar Rorris, and its cover features his face superimposed onto an orange.[23]
The band would collaborate with percussionist Marc Daubert, a friend of Anastasio's, in the fall of 1984.[24] Daubert ceased performing with the band in early 1985.[25] Keyboardist Page McConnell met Phish in early 1985, when he arranged for them to play a spring concert at Goddard College, the small university he attended in Plainfield, Vermont.[26] He began performing with the band as a guest shortly thereafter, and made his live debut during the third set of their May 3, 1985 concert at UVM's Redstone Campus.[27] In the summer of 1985, Phish went on a short hiatus while Anastasio and Fishman vacationed in Europe; during this time, McConnell offered to join the band permanently, and moved to Burlington to learn their repertoire from Gordon.[28] McConnell officially joined Phish as a full-time band member in September 1985.[28][29]
Phish performed with a five-piece lineup for about six months after McConnell joined, a period which ended when Holdsworth quit the group in March 1986 following a religious conversion.[30] Anastasio and Fishman relocated in mid-1986 to Goddard College after a recommendation from McConnell.[31] Phish distributed at least six experimental self-titled cassettes during this era, including The White Tape.[32]
While based at Goddard College, Phish began to collaborate with fellow students Richard "Nancy" Wright and Jim Pollock.[33] Pollock and Wright were musical collaborators who made experimental recordings on multi-track cassettes, and had been introduced to Phish through McConnell, who co-hosted a radio program on WGDR with Pollock.[34] Phish adopted a number of Nancy's songs into their own set, including "Halley's Comet", "I Didn't Know", and "Dear Mrs. Reagan", the latter song being written by Nancy and Pollock. In his book Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, music journalist Jesse Jarnow observed that Wright and his music were highly influential to Phish's early style and experimental sound.[33] Wright amicably ended his association with Phish in 1989, but Pollock has continued to collaborate with Phish over the years, designing some of their album covers and concert posters.[33][34]
By 1985, the group had encountered Burlington luthier Paul Languedoc, who would eventually design custom instruments for Anastasio and Gordon.[35] In October 1986, he began working as their sound engineer.[36] Since then, Languedoc has built exclusively for the two, and his designs and traditional wood choices have given Phish a unique instrumental identity.[37]
As his senior project for Goddard College, Anastasio penned The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday, a nine-song progressive rock concept album that would become Phish's second studio experiment.[38] Recorded between 1987 and 1988, it was submitted in July of that year, accompanied by a written thesis. The song cycle that developed from the project – known as Gamehendge – grew to include an additional eight songs. The band performed the suite in concert on six occasions: in 1988, 1991, 1993, twice in 1994, and in 2023, without replicating the song list.[39] The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday has never received an official release, but a bootleg tape has circulated for decades, and songs such as "Wilson" and "The Lizards" remain concert staples for the band.[40][41]
Beginning in the spring of 1988, members of the band began practicing in earnest, sometimes locking themselves in a room and jamming for hours on end. One such jam took place at Anastasio's apartment, with a second at Paul Languedoc's house in August 1989.[42] They called these jam sessions "Oh Kee Pa Ceremonies", a reference to the film A Man Called Horse.[43] In July 1988, the band performed their first concerts outside of the northeastern United States, when they embarked on a seven-date tour in Colorado.[44] These shows are excerpted on their 2006 live compilation Colorado '88.[44]
Junta, Lawn Boy, and A Picture of Nectar: 1989–1992[edit]
On January 26, 1989, Phish played the Paradise Rock Club in Boston; the owners of the club had never heard of Phish and refused to book them, so the band rented the club for the night.[45] The show sold out due to the caravan of fans that had traveled to see the band.[22] The concert was Phish's breakthrough on the northeastern regional music circuit, and the band began to book concerts at other large rock clubs, theaters, and small auditoriums throughout the area, such as the Somerville Theatre, Worcester Memorial Auditorium and Wetlands Preserve.[46] That spring, the band self-released their debut full-length studio album, Junta, and sold copies on cassette tape at their concerts.[47] The album includes a studio recording of the epic "You Enjoy Myself", which is considered to be the band's signature song.[48][49] Later in 1989, the band hired Chris Kuroda as their lighting director. Kuroda subsequently became well known for his artistic light shows at the group's concerts.[50] A profile on Phish appeared in the October 1989 issue of the Deadhead magazine Relix, which marked the first time the band had been covered in a major national music periodical.[51]
By late 1990, Phish's concerts were becoming more and more intricate, often making a consistent effort to involve the audience in the performance. In a special "secret language",[52] the audience would react in a certain manner based on a particular musical cue from the band. For instance, if Anastasio "teased" a motif from The Simpsons theme song, the audience would yell, "D'oh!" in imitation of ⓘ.[52] In 1992, Phish introduced a collaboration between audience and band called the "Big Ball Jam" in which each band member would throw a large beach ball into the audience and play a note each time his ball was hit. In so doing, the audience was helping to create an original composition.[53] On occasion, performances of "You Enjoy Myself" and "Mike's Song" involved Gordon and Anastasio performing synchronized maneuvers and jumping on mini-trampolines while simultaneously playing their instruments.[54] Fishman would also regularly step out from behind his drum kit during concerts to sing cover songs, which were often punctuated by him playing an Electrolux vacuum cleaner like an instrument.[55][56] The band released their second album, Lawn Boy, in September 1990 on Absolute A Go Go, a small independent label that had a distribution deal with the larger Rough Trade Records.[57] The album had been recorded the previous year, after the band had won studio time at engineer Dan Archer's Archer Studios when they came in first place at an April 1989 battle of the bands competition in Burlington.[58]
Phish, along with Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and the Beatles, was one of the first bands to have a Usenet newsgroup, rec.music.phish, which launched in 1991.[59] Aware of the band's growing popularity, Elektra Records signed them that year after they were recommended to the record label by A&R representative Sue Drew.[60] In the summer of 1991, the band embarked on a 14-date tour of the eastern United States accompanied by a three-piece horn section dubbed the Giant Country Horns.[61] In August of that year, Phish played an outdoor concert at their friend Amy Skelton's horse farm in Auburn, Maine that acted as a prototype for their later all-day festival events.[62]
In 1992, the band released their third studio album, A Picture of Nectar, their first release for the major label Elektra. Subsequently, the label also reissued the band's first two albums. Later in 1992, Phish participated in the first annual H.O.R.D.E. festival, which provided them with their first national tour of major amphitheaters. The lineup, among others, included Phish, Blues Traveler, the Spin Doctors, and Widespread Panic.[63] That summer, the band toured Europe with the Violent Femmes and later toured Europe and the U.S. with Santana.[64] Throughout the latter tour, Carlos Santana regularly invited some or all of the members of Phish to jam with his band during their headlining performances.[64][65] The band ended 1992 with a New Year's Eve performance at the Matthews Arena in Boston, Massachusetts, a performance that was simulcast throughout the Boston area by radio station WBCN.[66] The concert was filled with several new "secret language" cues they had taught their audience in order to deliberately confuse radio listeners.[66]
Rift, Hoist, and A Live One: 1993–1995[edit]
Phish began headlining major amphitheaters in the summer of 1993.[67] That year, the group released their fourth album, Rift, a concept album which featured a cover painted by David Welker that referenced almost all of the songs on the record.[68] The album was the band's first to appear on the Billboard 200 album chart, debuting at #51 in February 1993.[69][70]
In March 1994, the band released their fifth studio album Hoist. The album featured an array of guest performers, including country singer Alison Krauss, banjoist Béla Fleck, former Sly & The Family Stone member Rose Stone, actor and trombonist Jonathan Frakes, and the horn section of R&B group Tower of Power.[71] To promote the album, Gordon directed the band's only official music video, for its first single "Down with Disease".[72] "Down with Disease" became a minor hit on rock radio in the United States, and was the band's first song to appear on a Billboard music chart when it peaked at #33 on the magazine's Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart that summer.[73] To further promote Hoist, the band released an experimental short-subject documentary called Tracking, also directed by Gordon, which depicted the recording sessions for the album.[72]
Foreshadowing their future tradition of festivals, Phish coupled camping with their 1994 summer tour finale at Sugarbush North in Warren, Vermont, that show eventually being released as Live Phish Volume 2.[74] On Halloween of that year, the group promised to don a fan-selected "musical costume" by playing an entire album from another band. After an extensive mail-based poll, Phish performed the Beatles' White Album as the second of their three sets at the Glens Falls Civic Center in upstate New York.[75] The "musical costume" concept subsequently became a recurring part of Phish's fall tours, with the band playing a different album whenever they had a concert scheduled for Halloween night.[75]
In October 1994, Crimes of the Mind, the debut album by Anastasio's friend and collaborator Steve "The Dude of Life" Pollak, was released by Elektra Records; The album, which had been recorded in 1991, was billed to "The Dude of Life and Phish" and features all four members of Phish acting as Pollak's backing band.[76][77]
Reception and legacy[edit]
Phish's popularity grew in the 1990s due to fans sharing concert recordings that had been taped by audience members and distributed online for free.[243] Phish were among the first musical acts to utilize the internet to grow their fanbase, with fans using file-sharing websites such as etree and BitTorrent to share concerts.[244]
In 1998, Rolling Stone described Phish as "the most important band of the '90s".[245] Phish have been named as an influence by other acts in the jam band scene, including Umphrey's McGee and the Disco Biscuits[246][247] Other musicians have also counted Phish as an influence, including Adam Levine and James Valentine of Maroon 5, Ed O'Brien of Radiohead, Brandon Boyd of Incubus, and reggae musician Matisyahu.[248][249][250][251]
Phish's festival events in the 1990s inspired the foundation of the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Tennessee, which was first held in 2002.[252] Co-founder Rick Farman, a Phish fan, consulted Phish managers Richard Glasgow and John Paluska about festival infrastructure during the early stages of planning.[252] The festivals also inspired other jam band-oriented concert events, such as the Disco Biscuits' Camp Bisco, Electric Forest Festival, and the Big Ears Festival.[243]
Phish are well known to their loyal fans, called Phishheads, but the group's music and fan culture are otherwise polarizing to general audiences.[243] The tribal nature of Phish supporters has encouraged comparisons of Phishheads to the Juggalos, followers of the hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse.[253] Phish heavily contributes to music-based tourism with their "traveling communities" of fans, and they have been simultaneously hailed and criticized for their near-constant tour dates, which bring with them the capital value of tourism and necessitates the increased security and community planning that come with any music festival.[254] Jordan Hoffman of Thrillist explains "the solace many find in attending religious services is somewhat mirrored for me in seeing Phish,"[255] and even though Phish fans are generally considered welcoming and friendly, the reception of the group from the outside is often one of unease and confusion.[256][257] The BBC listed Phish as one of "Eight smash US acts that Britain never understood" along with fellow jam bands Dave Matthews Band and Blues Traveler.[258] In describing the band to a British audience, BBC journalist Stephen Dowling wrote "Attending a Phish gig has become a rite of summer passage for American teens in the same way that attending Glastonbury has for British teenagers."[258]
The band has a number of celebrity fans, including: Sean Avery,[259] Rocco Baldelli,[260] Tucker Carlson,[261] Joseph Gordon-Levitt,[262] Abbi Jacobson,[263] Katy Tur,[264] Aron Ralston,[265] and Bill Walton.[266] Bernie Sanders, who was the mayor of Burlington when Phish formed, described them as "One of the great bands in this country" in 2016.[267]
Phish has performed 83 concerts at Madison Square Garden since their debut performance there in 1994.[268][269] In August 2023, Phish surpassed Elton John as the musical act with the second most concerts performed at Madison Square Garden, behind only record-holder Billy Joel.[270]
In 2019, Billboard ranked Phish as the 33rd highest-grossing concert touring act of the 2010s.[271] In 2022, Pollstar listed Phish as the 33rd highest grossing touring act from 1980 to 2022, with a cumulative gross of $595.8 million.[272] Pollstar also listed Phish as the act with the ninth most tickets sold in that same time frame, with 13.3 million tickets sold.[272][273]
Musical style and influences[edit]
According to The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, the music of Phish is "oriented around group improvisation and super-extended grooves".[274] Their songs draw on a range of rock-oriented influences, including funk, jazz fusion, progressive rock, bluegrass, and psychedelic rock.[275][276] Some Phish songs use different vocal approaches, such as a cappella (unaccompanied) sections of barbershop quartet-style vocal harmonies.[277] The band began to include barbershop segments in their concerts in 1993, when the four members began taking lessons from McConnell's landlord, who was a judge at barbershop competitions.[277] In the 1997 official biography, The Phish Book, Anastasio coined the term "cow-funk" to describe the band's late 1990s funk and jazz-funk-influenced playing style, observing that "What we're doing now is really more about groove than funk. Good funk, real funk, is not played by four white guys from Vermont."[278]
Phish were often compared to the Grateful Dead during the 1990s, a comparison that the band members often resisted or distanced themselves from.[279][280] The two bands were compared due to their emphasis on live performances, improvisational jamming style, musical similarities, and traveling fanbase.[279][281] In November 1995, Anastasio told The Baltimore Sun, "When we first came into the awareness of the media, it would always be the Dead or Zappa they'd compare us to. All of these bands I love, you know? But I got very sensitive about it."[280] Early in their career, Phish would occasionally cover Grateful Dead songs in concert, but the band stopped doing so by the late 1980s.[282][283] In Phish: The Biography, Parke Puterbaugh observed "The bottom line is while it's impossible to imagine Phish without the Grateful Dead as forebears, many other musicians figured as influences upon them. Some of them - such as Carlos Santana and Frank Zappa - were arguably at least as significant as the Grateful Dead. In reality, the media certainly overplayed the Grateful Dead connection and Phish probably underplayed it, at least in their first decade."[284] Anastasio has also cited progressive rock artists such as King Crimson and Genesis as significant influences on Phish's early material. In a 2019 New York Times interview, he observed, "If you listen to the first couple of Phish albums, they don't sound anything like the Grateful Dead. I was more interested in Yes."[285]
In his 2018 book Twilight of the Gods, music critic Steven Hyden wrote that he found the Grateful Dead and Phish to have "significantly different reference points" in terms of influence and style.[286] The Grateful Dead, Hyden explained, were "informed by the totality of American music from the first sixty years of the twentieth century: Blues, country, folk, jazz, and early rock 'n' roll," while Phish's music contains elements of "hopped-up bluegrass, jazzy disco, porno-movie funk, Broadway theatricality, and shockingly sincere barbershop harmonies. But it all stems from classic rock."[286] Hyden observed that "If the Dead encompasses American music from roughly 1900 to 1967, Phish picks up the story right through the AOR era, from '68 to around the time Stop Making Sense debuted in theaters in the mid-eighties."[286]
Books and podcasts[edit]
Several books on Phish have been published, including two official publications: The Phish Book, a 1998 coffee table book credited to the band members and journalist Richard Gehr which focused on the band's activities during 1996 and 1997,[304] and Phish: The Biography, a semi-official biographical book written by music journalist and Phish fan Parke Puterbaugh, was published in 2009 and was based on interviews with the four band members, their friends and crew.[305] An installment of the 33⅓ book series on A Live One, written by Walter Holland, was published in 2015.[306] The 2013 book You Don't Know Me but You Don't Like Me: Phish, Insane Clown Posse, and My Misadventures with Two of Music's Most Maligned Tribes, written by music critic Nathan Rabin, compares and contrasts the fanbases of Phish and Insane Clown Posse.[253][307]
In addition to books, there have been multiple podcasts which have focused on Phish, its music and fanbase as their central topics of discussion. Among the first was Analyze Phish, which was hosted by comedians Harris Wittels and Scott Aukerman for the Earwolf podcast network, and ran for ten episodes posted between 2011 and 2014.[308][309] The podcast followed Wittels, a devoted fan of the band, in his humorous attempts to get Aukerman to enjoy their music.[310] Despite its truncated run, Analyze Phish inspired Phish lyricist Tom Marshall to start his own Phish podcast, Under the Scales, in 2016.[311] In 2018, Marshall co-founded the Osiris Podcasting Network, which hosts Under the Scales and other music podcasts, many of which are devoted to Phish or other jam bands.[311] In September 2019, C13Originals debuted Long May They Run, a music documentary podcast series; The first season, consisting of 10 episodes, focused on Phish's history and influence on the live music scene.[312] In November 2019, the Osiris Podcasting Network premiered After Midnight, a five-episode documentary series exploring the creation, execution, and aftermath of Phish's 1999 Big Cypress festival.[313]
Other appearances[edit]
Seattle Seahawks fans began mimicking Phish's song "Wilson" by chanting the song's opening line when quarterback Russell Wilson took the field during games. The new tradition started after Anastasio made the suggestion at shows in Seattle.[314] The story behind the "Wilson" chant was featured in a 2014 documentary short by NFL Films.[315]
