3GM: Phish – Bursting Your Bubble

At my first show back in 2000, they played Taj Mahal’s Corrina. Granted Taj spent some time with the spotlight on him, but for a young guy like me it was a needed introduction. Again, I’m embarrassed to admit I wasn’t previously aware of him, but I have been obsessed with that song in its natch’l version for the past ten years, and I still put The Natch’l Blues on repeat for days at a time. Ween is another one I should have known, but after hearing Trey rip that Roses Are Free solo on the Bittersweet Motel DVD, I went out and bought every Ween CD that Caldor had on sale for less than $10 (Note: luckily, that covered most of them. I miss that beautiful store every day).

Robert Palmer, Los Lobos, The Mustangs, Edgar Winter, ZZ Top. How about every album on the list of possibilities from Festival 8? I made an Excel spreadsheet and listened to each and every one of those within a month of seeing that list. It was a dorky move, but I own my dorkiness. Sure, there were a bunch I’d heard before, and some I already loved, but the list also served as an excuse to brush up on the Tom Petty I hadn’t listened to since I was 14. But it was those bands on that list like Steely Dan that I should have been listening to since my uncles gave me their CD in 1992. And what about T. Rex, and Leo Kottke, and King Crimson, and Television? I’d be willing to bet a lot of you downloaded some Neutral Milk Hotel after they played In the Aeroplane over the Sea”this summer, and that song was recorded in 1998 – the year of Paula Jones, the Unabomber, and the FDA approval of Viagara.  I’m sure there’s a hundred other bands I could name, but I won’t. The list could go on forever.

Kevin Smallwood on Phish’s bluegrass influence:

I went to high school in Connecticut. Yes, Connecticut.  The taint of New England and home to *count it* zero sports teams (sans the current Hartford Whalers‘ Revival effort). Our state song is Yankee Doodle Dandy and our size is often referenced when articulating the square mileage of natural disasters in much larger states and territories.  Luckily for us, Rhode Island is far smaller and usually takes most of the heat for its general irrelevance on a national scale.

Growing up in New England, getting into Phish was pretty easy, but I’d always associated myself with the rock aspect of what Phish was doing.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved the calypso, the funk and the experimentation – that was all part of my chemical attraction to them.  But I went to shows to rock out, not bop and fiddle around.

That said, it wasn’t until I was living in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia that Phish actually changed my entire musical perspective.  One afternoon I was digging through my collegiate possessions when I came across a VHS tape I picked up on the lot at the Hartford Meadows.  The show was labeled “Woodbury Ski & Racquet Club (4/29/1990)” but I’d never actually sat down and watched the thing all the way through.  So I popped it in, the screen fizzled on and I continued with my business.

Now, I’d heard the boys throw down some bluegrass in the past but I’d never thought much of it until I traded New England’s perineum for the Blue Mountains of Virginia. No sooner had I pressed play than I was forced to slowly lower myself into the sitting position; I sat in awe as Trey ripped through the laser licks of Bill Monroe’s Uncle Pen.

It was in that moment that something inside me changed. I had been instantly liberated from the shackles of rock and immediately ached for the roll of bluegrass.  Subsequently, this transformation  absolutely wrecked my productivity for about a month.  The cumulative amount of time I spent in the University library was doubled when I found out there was an entire bluegrass archive in the basement.  I started with Bill Monroe and chased down Tony Rice, Earl Scruggs, Ricky Skaggs – hell, I found out the Stanley Brothers lived just a couple hours down the road.

Having spent my youth in the rabbit hole of classic rock, I’d been deaf and blind to the ways of the flat picker – so as you might imagine, everything came full circle when one of the locals handed me a copy of the Pizza Tapes (Garcia/Grisman/Rice).  I felt like an idiot having missed such an enormous staple. Luckily for me, all of this discovery occurred before the great bluegrass rebirth we have today, so I’m not chasing many ghosts out there… (See: Railroad Earth, Yonder Mountain, Keller & The Keels, etc, etc.)

But that’s what’s great about Phish – they’re like a buddy that is always introducing music you’d either dismiss completely or didn’t even know existed.  Sometimes they get you out of your musical bubble and sometimes they burst it completely.

Conor Kelley on Phish’s jazz influence:

My stepfather used to make sandwiches for Jimmy Smith in 1967. Jimmy would pull up in his Bentley outside Jules sandwich shop and order The Zep; a sandwich as original and native to Norristown, Pennsylvania as the ground-breaking organist himself. Forty years later Jimmy Smith is still heavily rotated in my stepfather’s record collection.

As a teenager, the music slowly seeped into my bloodstream after each listen, but I couldn’t tell you why I liked it, or even if I did like it. So it’s no surprise that, while listening to an audience recording of Phish’s 7/10/1999 Camden, NJ show, my ears perked up when they launched into Jimmy’s Back at the Chicken Shack after a lively Water in the Sky. As with all covers that Phish attempts, musical research was in order. My search for answers led me right back to my stepfather’s CD archives, where I discovered that jazz is the best music in the world. What I didn’t realize until later is that my years of listening to Phish had already trained my ear to fall in love with jazz.

The few overt similarities between what Phish does on-stage and jazz music are not enough to link the two in my mind. Still, they do exist. Phish has incorporated several jazz covers into their setlists. Among them are Dizzy Gillespe’s Manteca and Charles Mingus’ Jump Monk (Trey has admitted that he directly stole the Jump Monk chord progression when writing crowd favorite Stash). These are a pleasure to hear, but let’s not forget: Phish is a rock & roll band. Die hard jazz fans would write these covers off as novelties.

The most substantial similarities exist in the way fans actually listen to the music. Phish fans, like jazz fans, are patient people. While the typical listener may tune out at the first sign of dissonance, the Phish crowd will patiently wait and let the uneasy feeling build within them. They know that payoff will come soon, and when it does, it will be a truly unmatched moment in a rock concert. Trey will lead us straight into a dark place but lift us out with one note. While some of the crunchier and deodorant-ignoring concert goers will call this a “face melter,” it is really Phish’s implementation of the jazz concept of  “tension and release.” Opening my mind to accept musical dissonance was a huge step toward sinking my teeth into jazz.

The improvisational spirit that is the centerpiece of every Phish show is something that jazz fans can always relate to. The idea of “the now” is an exciting prospect and everyone who is privy to a poignant musical moment can hold their head higher knowing they are part of something special. A band that starts a song with no particular idea of how it may end is taking a risk, pushing limits, and most importantly, feeling alive. The channeling of this energy to a live audience is the magnetic draw to Phish shows and jazz clubs everywhere.

Before he went onstage, Trey once said, “Rock and roll – on a certain level – is a bunch of bullshit, but music is not. Music is the realest thing in the world to me, and anyone who’s been there can feel it.” Jazz is a genre of zero bullshit. It’s straight, no chaser. Phish employs jazz’s best ideas in a rock & roll forum very successfully. Forty years from now I hope Phish still resonates with young people that have an ear for experimental music. I won’t be able to tell them I’ve ever made Trey any sandwiches though. He’d probably prefer a Clif Bar and cold green tea anyway.