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Music Preview: After hiatus, Phish is hooked again on touring and experimenting
Sunday, July 18, 1999 By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic
It's the final day of June, and a man known only as Dino Panino to the desk clerk at the Kansas City Ritz Carlton is an hour away from leaving for his first night of playing guitar on stage with Phish since New Year's Eve.
For Phish, that's a pretty long break.
The longest ever, as it turns out.
But Panino, or Trey Anastasio as he's known to the millions of fans who helped make Phish the biggest name in '90s jam-rock, isn't worried.
"Not worried," he says. "Not worried. As a matter of fact, we had a couple of tech days yesterday where we set up the gear and everything and it was almost the opposite. ... And it's funny because the New Year's shows, the last shows we played, were a real high point for us. So we took a break at what we thought was a high."
And now that they've been on a break, he says, the guys are so eager to get back and play that "we've kind of been counting down the months."
It's not as though they haven't touched their instruments since ringing in the new year.
Keyboard player Paige McConnell and bassist Mike Gordon did some playing with the Meters in New Orleans, recording a track with the legendary band and a few of the guys from the Neville Brothers. Gordon recorded a soundtrack for the film he's been
putting together. Fish (Jon Fishman) toured for a bit with his side band, Pork Tornado, described by Anastasio as the drummer's "tequila-drinkin' bar band."
Meanwhile, Anastasio did a 12-date solo tour, sat in with a jazz band in Vermont (where Phish was founded 16 years ago), joined Carlos Santana on stage (with McConnell) and played some dates in San Francisco with Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh (and McConnell).
The solo tour gave Anastasio an opportunity to try out new material he'd written for Phish on acoustic guitar.
"A lot of the songs I've written in the past have been kind of orchestral in their arrangements, where you kind of can't go backwards and bring them back to song form," he says. "So I wanted to write some songs that started off as solo acoustic things that we could then take to the band and arrange in a Phish sort of way."
He recorded the solo shows, which also featured a second, electric set performed with a power-trio, and may release an album.
Or so I'd heard.
"I'm amazed that you heard that," he says, with a good-natured laugh. "How did you hear that? God, people hear everything, don't they? I don't even know if I'm doing that yet. It ended up being a great tour. It was really just a good time and I have been listening to the tapes and thinking that I might release a live album, but there's a lot of stuff going on now so I'll just have to see."
There is a new Phish album, though, an instrumental effort called "The Siket Disc" (a nod to engineer John Siket) that fans can purchase through the band's newsletter, The Pharmer's Almanac, which now has 150,000 subscribers.
As the guitarist explains, "We have a very cool situation with Elektra now where we can release sort of esoteric or live releases through our newsletter. And we're gearing up to start doing it, hopefully via the Internet."
It's the band's first instrumental album.
"It's pretty different," he says, "all improvised, all instrumental. When we recorded 'The Story of the Ghost,' our last album, we took a couple of weekends and just played in the studio, jammed, and then kind of culled that down and took bits and pieces of jams and used them as the basis for songs. And there was a lot of material left over from that, so Paige actually listened to it all and kind of picked the best moments and we turned that into an album. It's something we've always wanted to do. We feel like we're kind of at our best when we're just playing, improvising."
Which isn't to say he can't appreciate the more structured approach to recording that yielded what many, this critic included, believe to be their shining hour, "Billy Breathes."
"It's kind of my favorite album, too, I think," he says. "And I just heard it again the other day because we were about to go on tour again and I had to sit down and relearn some songs."
The title cut, he says, is still "the one that the four of us are the most excited about on that album. I mean, we really spent some time on that track, which is new for us. We usually just zip into the studio and play and leave. And when I think back on all that went on on that track, it's the closest we've ever come, I think, to really embracing what the studio has to offer. And now that I listen back to it, I'm pretty happy with it, so maybe we'll go more in that direction next time."
And the next time is?
"We're starting to talk about it now," he says. "We've got some ideas."
The soonest they're likely to make it to the studio is spring, what with their tour dates stretching all the way to New Year's Eve.
There will be a New Year's Eve show in Florida, but it hasn't been announced.
"I'm gonna get myself in trouble," Anastasio says. "But as far as I know, it's confirmed. You can be the first to print this. All I can say is we're looking at a spot in Florida so we can play outside in the middle of the night. And I think we found just a really, really wonderful plot of land."
For now, Anastasio is itching to show the other guys in Phish all the interesting thing he learned on his solo adventures.
"Anytime you get out and do a whole tour with a different group of people, you're gonna change," he says. "And that was the idea. I always wanted to be able to musically surprise the other three guys in the band, and that gets harder and harder when you're on a grueling schedule. They've heard your stuff before. So you develop in a direction as a group. But I think if everybody goes off and has experiences and then comes back, it's like a kick in the butt. And suddenly, you're playing something that you've never played before."
That's good news for the Phish-heads, as loyal a cult as anything east of the Dead. They follow their heroes from concert to concert for weeks at a time, swap tapes of the concerts and send the band's new albums soaring up the charts despite the lack of airplay.
Still, Anastasio wouldn't mind a hit.
"I've never been consciously trying to avoid radio," he says. "It's driven by money. It's driven by advertising dollars, so that's a big problem right there, just in terms of the whole vibe. But I still like a good pop song on the radio, as rarely as they come along. So if I wrote that song and I felt good about it, I wouldn't mind it being on the radio. But I don't really give it much thought, 'cause it doesn't really effect us. It's got no bearing on us."
The last good pop song Anastasio remembers liking on the radio was "Cannonball" by the Breeders.
"They don't play the pop songs that I really like on the radio," he says. "I like Pavement. And they don't play Pavement on the radio."
Or My Bloody Valentine, his other favorite rock band of the '90s.
"I really can't think of too many other bands, in the rock vein, other than those two, that mean anything to me," he says. "Those are the only two that 50 years from now, or 30 years from now, people are going to care about."
I can think of a few million fans who would argue another band onto that list.
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When: Wednesday at 7 p.m.