Editorial: Phish – Getting a Little Respect
We’d like to welcome our longtime friend and HT commenter Andy Kahn to the site with an editorial he wrote about the overwhelming acceptance of Phish by the mainstream media over the last few months. You can read more from Andy over at Loudlooppress. Welcome to the team, Andy…
From the mid ’90s until their breakup in 2004, Phish was often mocked by the mainstream press for a variety of reasons, namely their lack of radio and commercial success, relatively weak album sales, their obsessively devoted fan base of neo-hippies who follow them around to show after show (on drugs, always on drugs). With the band’s return at Hampton this past March the common perception of the group is not so common anymore, with Phish now getting treated like any other major act in the industry.
Phish has finally stepped out of the shadow of the Grateful Dead and are getting the respect they deserve. Every article written about them does not need to include a reference to their Dead-like fanbase or similar jamcentric style. Instead, music journos from a wide spectrum of publications are acknowledging the quartet as a band that broke the mold and created their own business model that never relied on album sales and mainstream commercial success but rather focused on the live performance and free sharing of their music amongst its fans.
Showing how far ahead of the curve they were, drummer Jon Fishman – in an interview with Rolling Stone in February 2003 stated, “I could fucking care less if everybody downloads our album off the Internet. We’re not in a position to be screwed by that at all. We have the one thing the Internet can’t touch – live music. If you can actually go out and play your fucking instruments, you won’t be replaced by the Internet. If you’re a good live act and you put on a good show, people will buy a ticket to see your show.”
READ ON for more from Andy on Phish and the mainstream…
