Gone Phishing

Rock is in the throes of an authenticity crisis.

Slickness and phony sentiment are paying big dividends on the teeny-bopper circuit, and faux-macho angst continues to build market share among the post-adolescent crowd.

Given rock’s current intemperate climate, Phish seems positively reactionary. The Vermont quartet places a high premium on old-school musical values, such as song craft, musicianship and working hard to deliver a memorable concert for its fans, many of whom are Dead Head Nation refugees who have embraced Phish as their new icons.

Playing to a sold-out Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre full of converts Sunday, Phish flashed its stylistic muscle in two sets that demonstrated why it has become one of rock’s most successful touring entities.

Drawing parallels between Phish and the Grateful Dead isn’t a stretch, particularly for anyone who wandered Irvine Meadows’ parking lot and concession area.

Like the Dead, Phish has inspired hordes of nomads who follow the band on tour and sell things such as veggie burritos to concert-goers for gas money. There also was plenty of tie dye and, er, good vibes being passed around.

But Phish’s fans aren’t interested in re-creating some phony ‘60s idyll; they’re responding to the open-ended spirit of adventure that Phish projects through its music--the sense that anything goes, nothing’s forbidden.

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Phish has certainly learned its lessons from the Dead and other bands that have refracted strains of vernacular music through a psychedelic rock prism.

But Phish’s members are children of the ‘70s, not the ‘60s. That means that besides weaving elements of folk, blues and country through its set list, the band also charged through some songs with heavy-metal thunder and pulled off tricky, odd-metered passages that sounded like contemporary progressive rock.

At Irvine Meadows, Phish--which, like the Dead, changes its set list nightly--used the first half of its nearly three-hour show to hone in on groove-driven material.

And why not?

Improvisation is Phish’s raison d’e^tre, and it didn’t take long for the band’s whimsical narratives to dissolve into exploratory instrumentals.

With drummer Jon Fishman and bassist Mike Gordon laying down four-square vamps and guitarist Trey Anastasio churning up prickly, percussive riffs, the band at times sounded like a laid-back version of the J.B.’s, James Brown’s legendary band.

Anastasio, Phish’s most accomplished player, was a model of restraint, slowly teasing out chords, finger-picking simple lines or just riding a single melodic idea if it pleased him.

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The shaggy-haired guitarist is Phish’s unofficial front man, but the band members all improvise in sync with one another. When Anastasio wasn’t flashing beatific smiles at the crowd, he kept his head turned toward the band, as if waiting for musical cues.

Phish’s second set was devoted to material that let the band flex its chops. Such songs as “Guyute” and “Character Zero” have a prog-rock pedigree and were constructed as multi-part epics that sounded like gene-splicing experiments fusing Yes and Frank Zappa.

This was the peak of the crescendo the band had been carefully building all evening, and as its playing became brawnier and more dynamic, the crowd responded in kind, cheering on every knotty filigree with the fervor that only the true supplicant can summon.