Pop Reviews : Phish Makes Splash at the Variety

A prediction: By 2000, every college town worth its salt will have its very own Grateful Dead surrogate, a latter-day hippie band complete with its own group of fans that follows it around from gig to gig. A number of such bands are already in place, including Burlington, Vt.’s Phish, which played at the Variety on Wednesday, jamming out the kicks for a boisterous bunch of tie-dye-clad kids who weren’t even born during the Haight-Ashbury heyday.

Though it’s been embraced by young Deadheads, Phish (whose fans, of course, are known as Phishheads) proved to be more noteworthy for its differences from the Dead than its similarities. This quartet has chops, imagination and a lot of humor that give its wittily surreal songs and intricate jams an idiosyncratic character that only occasionally resembles the Dead’s more free-form journeys.

Can you imagine the Dead engaging in the silly, deadpan choreography of Phish singer-guitarist Trey Anastasio and bassist Mike Gordon? Would one of the Dead’s drummers ever come out front to sing Neil Diamond’s “Cracklin’ Rosie,” as did Phish’s Jon Fishman? It’s hard to say how this tomfoolery would go down with the old-timers, but Wednesday it was abundantly clear that Phish has struck a chord with Deadheads: The Next Generation.