Grateful Fans Embrace the Ever Eclectic Phish

A cult band is by definition one that is fervently admired by a few and virtually ignored by everyone else. The Vermont quartet Phish is a strange anomaly: a cult band that’s beloved by millions--America’s biggest cult band, according to a recent Entertainment Weekly cover story.

Although it sells out huge arenas all over the country (it fell just short of the 16,000 capacity at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater on Thursday) and has a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream named for it, Phish has managed to fly under the radar of mainstream music fans who don’t want to bother with a band that carries any taint of pie-eyed fatuousness.

More than a few critics have also derided the band, which has “trademarked” itself with merchandise that drips with ‘60s pop-cultural iconography, for riding the coattails of the Grateful Dead’s huge following after that band dissolved in 1995.

Though it’s true that Phish has benefited from capturing the Dead’s huge, fervent fan base, that association has also been a millstone for a band that bears little formal resemblance to the Dead. Phish does share certain philosophical tenets with the Grateful Dead, particularly a generosity of spirit that embraces just about every strain of vernacular music, as well as a willingness to give its fans exactly what they crave (Phish, like the Dead, allows audience members to tape its concerts).

In many ways, Phish is the quintessential band of the current cultural moment. It’s one of the most popular bands in the Internet universe, with its fans tapping into the communal power of the Web to exchange critiques and set lists of recent shows, trade sanctioned bootlegs and keep abreast of Phish activity. By combining marketing prowess with utopian idealism, Phish treads a fine line between underground phenomenon and corporate behemoth.

Thus, the four musicians have been criticized as opportunists, redundancies and the new old thing. But this is hardly a Grateful Dead facsimile. The members of Phish are cultural scavengers seeking transcendence in all kinds of music--pop trash, metal thrash and pastoral, folksy ruminations.

Children of the ‘70s, guitarist Trey Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, keyboardist Page McConnell and drummer Jon Fishman were weaned on the Dead, but also on Frank Zappa, such prog-rock bands as Yes and King Crimson, free-jazz architect Ornette Coleman and jazz fusion standard-bearer Pat Metheny.

The result is a roiling, Technicolor swirl of Phish’s collective influences that gives a nod to these musical touchstones without slavishly emulating them.

At Verizon on Thursday, live perennials such as “Guyute” and “Halley’s Comet” were thrilling genre pile-ons, extended suites that accommodated disparate moods within their big tents. Anastasio, the band’s most accomplished instrumentalist, flashed deranged, jagged melody lines that brought to mind avant-garde pioneer Sonny Sharrock more than they did Jerry Garcia.

Before a typically teeming crowd of true believers, Phish was a bar band, an improvising collective and a four-square rock band. Their non-originals--the James Gang’s “Walk Away,” the Who’s “Drowned,” the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” among others--betrayed their Classic Rock roots; “Piper” burrowed deep into free-form jamming while “Character Zero” and “Chalkdust Torture” gave the crowd their requisite sing-along opportunities.

Phish leaves more to chance than most bands of its stature. At Verizon, its many open-ended jams often threatened to spill beyond critical mass, with Anastasio producing furious whorls of sound behind a rhythm section that stirred up heated, syncopated crosscurrents. It didn’t always neatly cohere, but that hardly mattered. Phish’s protean power keeps it immune from pop trends and will likely allow it to endure well beyond its current crest of popularity.