Phish Spawns Its Own Loyal Phans

For readers unaware of its music or its history, the gist of Phish is this: It is the relatively young band that picked up where the Grateful Dead left off.

There are many obvious parallels. Still, it isn’t fair simply to write Phish off as the most convenient sanctuary for neo-hippies disenfranchised when the 1995 death of Jerry Garcia did in the Dead after a 30-year run.

Yes, Phish, which headlines Sunday at Irvine Meadows, is the leading torch-holder for a jam-band tradition and a subcultural niche that needed to be filled after the Dead’s demise.

But Phish has been on a long, strange, interesting trip that’s very much its own. Launched 16 years ago in Vermont, where its four members were college students, Phish has generated its own quirky, communal customs and lore--including occasional nude performances by drummer Jon Fishman; onstage, one-move-per-gig chess matches between the band and its audience that take entire tours to complete; and, one night at Boston Garden, a performance atop a gigantic, flying frankfurter that carried the entire band from the stage to the back of the arena.

The journey has been musically interesting as well--a stylistically multifaceted approach that has taken Phish from the clever but uninvolving sophistication of its 1992 major label debut to the warm, direct emotion of peak ballads from its two most recent studio albums, “Billy Breathes” and “The Story of the Ghost.”

Phish has yet to paint its masterpiece, but the band seems capable of producing one. It aims to try again in October and November, when it is scheduled to record an album during a layoff between its current tour and a December trek that will culminate in Phish’s huge annual overnight camp-out festival. Phish’s tradition of self-contained festivals in which it is the sole musical entertainment goes back to 1996. This year’s edition is a three-day, millennium-eve bash at Big Cypress Seminole Indian reservation in the Florida Everglades. Like precursors held in the Northeast, it is expected to draw more than 60,000 people.

And like the Dead, Phish has become the focal point for a loyal caravan of fans, most in their teens and early 20s who trek from show to show, taping concerts with the band’s encouragement, then examining, categorizing, rating and trading each performance with a connoisseur’s loving obsessiveness.

One of Phish’s trademarks is the long instrumental jam, wherein the band can turn a single song into a 30-minute sojourn into uncharted musical space. And, like the Dead, fan fanaticism has made Phish one of the nation’s leading concert draws without the multiple-platinum record sales usually required for a big-venue touring career.

Phish’s most successful album, according to the SoundScan monitoring service, is “A Live One,” a 1995 two-disc CD that has sold 539,000 copies. “Billy Breathes,” from 1996, has sold 466,000, and “The Story of the Ghost,” released last year, 258,000.

Although Southern California has not yet caught the fever, Phish is an automatic sellout in the Northeast, South and Midwest. Matt Curto, operations director at Irvine Meadows, expects Sunday’s show to be a bit short of the venue’s capacity of 15,400.

Touring Pull Hasn’t Diminished

Last year, Phish sold 830,000 tickets for 54 shows and grossed more than $23 million, according to the band’s figures. Phish took its first extended break from touring during the first half of 1999, but its pull hasn’t diminished. Gary Bongiovanni, editor of the concert industry trade magazine PollStar, says concert grosses reported to his publication by promoters over the summer found Phish averaging nearly 31,000 ticket sales in each city it played, bringing in an average of $912,000 in each market.

Only the Dave Matthews Band, which also has a jam-band reputation but lacks the improvisational acuity, harmony singing and solo-instrumental firepower of Phish, and the teen-idol group ‘N Sync, have been hotter draws during the same period, Bongiovanni said. Both are multiple-platinum acts that benefit from extensive radio play.

“It’s remarkable what Phish has been able to do with essentially no airplay at all,” Bongiovanni said. “It’s all word of mouth off their live show.”

The cult of Phish was established when the then-unsigned band first took to the national East Coast touring circuit in the early 1990s. “We thought there was some fraud going on, because the box office numbers were [too] good for an act we’d never heard of,” Bongiovanni said.

Walking in the footsteps of the Dead, Phish has been anointed with its own ice cream flavor, Phish Food, by Ben & Jerry’s, the Vermont company whose product line also includes Cherry Garcia. Last April, Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh recruited Phish’s guitarist and keyboard player, Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell, to accompany him for a special “Phil Lesh & Friends” three-night stand in San Francisco--devoted mainly to Grateful Dead music.

Anastasio, a cheerful, ready talker, disclaimed the new-Dead mantle this week by telephone from a hotel in Boise, Idaho. But he readily acknowledged the Dead as an influential source.

“They were one of the greatest American bands ever. There will never be another Grateful Dead,” he said. “To me, it’s like saying somebody is the next Jimi Hendrix or the next Beatles. Forget it.”

Anastasio first saw the Dead play in 1980 or 1981 and was hooked. But when Phish took shape, it was not a consortium of Deadheads.

“We all have very similar backgrounds, the classic suburban go-to-the-mall, listen to the Cars and Led Zeppelin” upbringing, he said. Members brought their musical passions to the band. Anastasio, a big fan of King Crimson and other progressive-rock bands, was studying classical composition. McConnell was a jazz lover smitten with Duke Ellington. Bassist Mike Gordon wanted to play country and bluegrass music. All those strains, along with a yen for funky rhythms, have emerged in Phish’s music.

The different tastes complement each other, but they also result in some head-butting over the band’s musical direction. “It’s always been a tug of war one way or another,” Anastasio said. “It’s always up for analysis.”

Life experience is behind Phish’s movement from prankish beginnings to the more reflective and simply elegant music that has evolved since 1996, said Anastasio, who turns 35 on Sept. 30. (The other members are in their mid- to late-30s.)

“I just don’t care about that kind of music anymore,” he said of the old, cleverness-for-its-own-sake approach. “I have a couple of kids (daughters ages 2 and 4). You get older, and things happen.”

Happenings, in something akin to the ‘60s sense of the word, have been a Phish trademark. Festivals dubbed the Clifford Ball, the Great Went and Lemonwheel (Phish is big on obscure nomenclature) were highlights of the band’s summer tours of the past three years. Each Halloween, Phish plays in “musical costume,” performing in its entirety a classic rock album. A fan vote led to the Beatles’ “The White Album” and the Who’s “Quadrophenia” in ’95 and ‘96, and Phish chose Talking Heads’ “Remain in Light” and the Velvet Underground’s “Loaded” in 1997 and 1998. With Phish in the studio, the custom gets a rest this Halloween.

Band members are heading into the next album with plenty of good material and a unified attitude, which Anastasio said wasn’t the case with “The Story of the Ghost,” when other members wanted more songwriting input. (Anastasio was the dominant writer, along with Tom Marshall, a boyhood friend from New Jersey who contributes lyrics in much the same way that Robert Hunter did for Grateful Dead songs by Jerry Garcia.)

“I think we stayed a healthy unit because we addressed people’s needs over the years,” Anastasio said. “ ‘Ghost’ is our experiment with a wholly democratic album, and I think it suffered for it. You end up democratizing yourself into mediocrity.”

It is an oddly constructed album in which funk, progressive rock and jazz-fusion kick off the set. Then it veers toward the wistful, lovely pop-rock the Anastasio/Marshall team had emphasized on “Billy Breathes.”

Seeking a Core Repertoire of Songs

The band’s unprecedented six-month layoff has given all the members time to pursue outside interests and satisfy needs that weren’t being met within Phish, said Anastasio, who played his first solo tour, part solo-acoustic, and part power-trio rock.

“Now it feels completely different. People were saying, ‘If this doesn’t happen (a greater share in the songwriting input) I don’t know if I can continue in this band.’ Now everybody just wants to make a great album and nobody cares who wrote the songs.”

Phish isn’t concerned with an album sales breakthrough. But Anastasio said he is motivated to achieve something the Grateful Dead did: a core repertoire of songs that every rock fan, even non-Deadheads, can recognize as enduring works.

“I think every band wants to make their “Abbey Road” at some point,” he said. “Los Lobos is a perfect example of a great live band that made lots and lots of albums, then came “Kiko,” which I thought was a watershed album . . . To put out one really classic album--that’s how people are going to remember them. Right now, that’s becoming much more of a focus [for Phish].

“We were playing addicts from the beginning,” Anastasio said. “We really haven’t put the effort and focus on albums in the past. But in the end it’s what people are going to remember you by.”

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Phish plays Sunday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8808 Irvine Center Drive. 7 p.m. $29. (949) 855-6111 (taped information) or (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).

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Law enforcement prepares for possible trouble from concert-goers in Irvine. F26