E-Mail This Article to a Friend The main events Two nights of Phish and one of Rush at the Tweeter Center BY BRETT MILANO
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Damn, I wish I liked Phish. There’d be all those triple live CDs to explore, all that lyrical mythology to sort out, all those million versions of "Tweezer" to compare and contrast. Maybe I’d even feel more at home among the neo-hippies who’ve turned the band’s concerts into something akin to a religious experience.

That audience was out in force when Phish hit the Tweeter Center last a week ago last Tuesday, the first of two sold-out Tweeter Center dates taking place just days before the Coventry Festival, a weekend blowout near the band’s Vermont home base that was to serve as their official swan song. Getting into the Tweeter show was an adventure in and of itself. And I’m not talking about getting tickets, which people were paying ridiculous scalper prices for. I mean, it was a real challenge to get through the gate, or even anywhere near it. A Phish show typically attracts about three times the number of ticket holders, so massive traffic jams are to be expected. Some of the ticketless may have been hoping to find a scalper, but the majority seemed happy enough to hang out in the parking lot and bask in the band’s aura.

That’s one of the few things Phish have in common with Rush, who headlined the Tweeter Center on Thursday night. Both groups are as close as one can get to being cult artists while still releasing Top 10 albums on a regular basis. And both attract an audience that comes primarily to gawk at the musicianship. In Rush’s case, the response is a little more literal: instead of circle-dancing or staring wide-eyed at the band, fans play air drums along with Neil Peart (whose amazing dexterity and stone-faced Vulcan look make Rush the only power trio whose undisputed star is the drummer). And in an era where obvious backing tapes and flat-out lip-synching have spread well beyond the Britney circuit to rock bands like Creed and Korn, it’s telling that two bands who are all about live playing, warts and all, drew some of the summer’s biggest crowds.

It’s always encouraging to see this kind of adulation for a geeky band like Phish, whose popularity is based on an ability to play instead of good looks. There’s simply nothing like watching the pleading expression on guitarist Trey Anastasio’s face whenever he takes a big solo: he stares straight into the audience as if to say, "You’re all getting this, aren’t you?" The swirling masses at a Phish show may not be great dancers, but they are really good listeners: the cheers of recognition don’t necessarily happen when the band begin a familiar song, they happen whenever a piece of group interplay peaks. The band likewise deserve credit for sticking to their improvisational guns when it’s made scoring hit singles that much more difficult — even the Grateful Dead had an MTV hit with "Touch of Grey" at around their two-decade mark. Instead, Phish have veered closer to jazz and prog-rock (the Frank Zappa variety of both). And they consider it a mark of honor to never play the same show twice. Their recent decision to break up — not because their popularity was waning but because they felt they were running dry — was an integrity move of the first order.

So what’s not to love? Depends on your reference points. To these ears, it’s near-impossible for a rock band to jam unless they have some grasp of blues or funk. That’s what separates masters like the Allman Brothers, the Funky Meters, the Radiators, and (maybe) Robert Randolph from the dribblers like moe and String Cheese Incident. And though they’ve tried many times to get into the groove, Phish are still severely funk-impaired. Anastasio just can’t manage a proper power chord, and though drummer Jon Fishman is a master of finesse, there’s hardly any muscle in his playing. And for a band who supposedly outgrew their Grateful Dead fixation years ago, Phish still have a Dead-tribute default mode that they slip into whenever the jams aren’t happening — during the lags, you can just about guess when Mike Gordon’s going to key into a walking Phil Lesh bass line and Anastasio will start with the Garcia curlicues.

Unfortunately, Phish have never really grasped the visionary psychedelia of the pre-1975 Dead. In its place is a certain giggly pothead humor that they also haven’t outgrown. (In Mansfield, they indulged it by putting down their instruments and forming a conga line during "Punch You in the Eye.") Their best and worst tendencies were on display during Tuesday night’s second-set opener, the "Mike’s Song"/"Weekapaug Groove" sequence, which they’ve played, in varying medley guises, since the late ’80s. "Mike’s Song" had a lovely ensemble section that teased a big climax without breaking into one, taking intricate left turns instead. But the disco-esque "Weekapaug" found Anastasio doing chunka-chunka rhythms, keyboardist Page McConnell aping the blaxploitation Clavinet sound, and Gordon thumb-popping his bass — in short, every white-funk cliché wrapped into one tidy package without a trace of irony.

Still, no band jam together for 20 years without learning to access a few shimmering moments. Tuesday’s payoff came during "A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing," one of the new numbers Phish have broken out for this tour. The structure is unusual for them: the song starts out as relatively hard-edged arena rock before veering into abstraction. Wednesday’s long instrumental evoked the poetry of the open sea, with suitably unpredictable shifts from fast motion to unsettling calm. "A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing" has apparently been a highlight of many dates on this tour, and last week, it segued into the sunny, tropical "Makisupa Policeman." That segue gave a hint of what Phish may be up to: if they’re really ending a 20-year love affair with their audience, perhaps the band are just trying to ease fans into a new relationship with Jimmy Buffett.

RUSH’S 30TH ANNIVERSARY tour was preceded by the release of the oddest disc in the band’s extensive catalogue, the all-covers mini-album Feedback (Atlantic). The eight songs on the disc — late-’60s chestnuts by the Who, Cream, and the Yardbirds, plus a version of Love’s "Seven & Seven Is" that probably just made Arthur Lee a rich man — are played with surprising fidelity, and they’re all emblematic of piledriving, power-trio rock. They make it evident that Rush are above all a piledriving power trio who’ve simply been smart enough to adopt different styles over the years. So they had their proggy, Yes-like period (with the ’70s concept albums 2112 and Hemispheres on PolyGram), their Police-inspired ’80s period, their turn to sophisticated pop in the ’90s, and more recently the high-volume post-grunge of last year’s Vapor Trails (Atlantic). Even the hardest-core fans don’t profess to love every album. But the changes have kept Rush from hitting either the where-are-they-now file or Tsongas Arena. And the payoff is that after 30 years, they get to encore for a sold-out audience with the heavy Blue Cheer version of "Summertime Blues."

The covers, which on Thursday included an acoustic take on the Yardbirds’ "Heart Full of Soul," also proved an antidote to the deep-thinking image that Rush have cultivated over the years. That image was borne out by "Anthem" and "Xanadu" — both mid-’70s numbers, played toward the start and end, respectively, of the show, with lyrics pinched, respectively, from Ayn Rand and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Peart’s quasi-philosophical lyrics and Geddy Lee’s ultra-high voice have always been the elements that have made Rush a love-or-hate band, though both have come down to earth since the ’80s.

What doesn’t often get mentioned is the high degree of cheap thrills the band can generate, and that side of Rush was emphasized at the Tweeter Center. The anniversary set list drew from 16 of the 17 studio albums they’ve released over the past three decades — only 1989’s Presto (Atlantic) wasn’t represented. That made for more than three hours of music. They sustained this length the same way they’ve sustained 30 years: by throwing in some melody and variation, taking a few stylistic detours, parsing the big solos and the radio hits through the night, and using that piledriving, power-trio rock as their ace in the hole.

This last was packed into a massive 45-minute medley that closed the night, bringing together highlights of their ’70s catalogue (bits of "2112" and "Xanadu," all of the guitar extravaganza "La Villa Strangiato"), but played with a precision they couldn’t have managed when the songs were written. (Unlike Phish and their jamming peers, Rush seldom play a note that isn’t pre-scripted.) Epic time changes, weighty themes, showoff guitar solos, and the momentary return of Lee’s old falsetto all stood as proof that a power trio in full piledriving mode can be a thing of beauty.