Phish over Pops?

A cult band aim for mainstream success

by Mac Randall

I don't know how many of you listen regularly to The Connection, the talk show that Christopher Lydon hosts on WBUR, but if you do, then you probably caught an installment that aired within the last couple of weeks about the Boston Pops and its new white-bread conductor, Keith Lockhart. At the beginning of the segment, Lydon mentioned that the Pops' new CD was outselling even Phish's latest in Boston record emporia. I take this to mean that the Phish album is selling very well. That's not too surprising; the Burlington (Vermont) quartet have had a strong fan base along both sides of the Charles for several years. But there's selling well and there's selling well. Since when did this cult band sell enough records to be used as comparison to the Pops?

Since now. Actually, it began with the band's last album, A Live One. Enough phreaks attached to the Phish live experience bought the in-concert document that it went gold. So it wasn't exactly a shock that Phish's new Billy Breathes (Elektra), the studio follow-up, debuted at number seven in Billboard. (It also wasn't a shock that the next week it dropped to 32; the real fans all got it the first week, of course.) This band have been plugging away for nearly 15 years, gathering a rabid following along the way; it was only logical that they eventually might have some success in the stores. And even more fitting that the breakthrough should be Billy Breathes, which took longer to record than any of their previous studio efforts and which eclipses all of them in quality. Phish may not be exactly mainstream yet, but they're no longer underground. I think we can safely say they've transcended the cult.

What the cult will make of Billy Breathes is anyone's guess. The songs are short, predominantly acoustic and contemplative, with little hint of the lyrical goofiness and long improvisational sections that distinguished Phish's earlier work and concerts. They suggest a band trying to make a recording that stands on its own, separate from the live legend, a piece of plastic that might actually last a while. This theory's borne out by the circumstances behind the recording (which I think I'm in a decent position to comment on, having been privileged enough to witness at least a small part of Billy Breathes' creation at Bearsville Studios in upstate New York). The sessions started without a producer; the band did the dirty work themselves, wanting to maintain total control of the music. Eventually that resolve broke down, and they called in production veteran Steve Lillywhite. They realized they couldn't wear both the playing and the producing hats. It tired them out too much, and that compromised the music.

Lillywhite's energy brought life back to Trey Anastasio and the boys. It also brought two attitudes to the surface. Phish had never really allowed a producer to do his job before; the band were too controlling. And they'd always thought of albums as little more than adjuncts to the live show that had gotten them famous and made them money. The Billy Breathes sessions marked a change of attitude. And you can hear it in the grooves; this album sounds like liberation. It's the first truly good disc Phish have made.

Who knows, you might even hear a hook-filled tune like "Free" or "Character Zero" on the radio. Now that would be a stunner. I've never heard a single Phish song on the airwaves, and I've sure never seen the band on MTV. Like most folks who discovered them in the mid '80s, I heard about Phish through word of mouth -- some friends started telling me stories about these guys who played long jams and bounced around on trampolines on stage. The whole thing sounded more than a little silly, but they kept popping up in conversations. I met more and more people who'd seen them at shows and were at least amused, at most ecstatic. Eventually so many people went to the shows that even the major labels took notice. Recognizing the formidable size of Phish's audience, Elektra allowed them an unusual degree of creative control for a rookie band. And Elektra's where they've stayed for the last six years, as the festival crowds have continued to grow.

That's one of the most inspiring parts of the Phish story: they made their own name, with no outside help, and the majors finally came to them instead of vice versa. What's more, they did this while playing music that was often extremely complex, and they took chances on stage every night, plunging into group improv and hoping for the best. The number of rock bands who have done this and got rewarded for it is minuscule: the Dead, the Allmans, and few others. Of course, the crowds that flocked to see Phish (and sometimes followed them from gig to gig) didn't look all that different from a Dead or Allmans crowd (maybe they were a bit younger). Adorned with hair braids and tie-dye clothes and immersed in the special mythology of the Phish concert -- from Trey's unrecorded song cycle Gamehenge to drummer Jon Fishman's dresses and vacuum-cleaner solo -- they quickly created their own mini-culture.

All of this made it easy for a cynical rock-critic establishment to label Phish as the new Dead and their fans as the new Deadheads. Not only is that inaccurate, but it gives the fans too much credit. The Deadheads were part of a true counterculture, in fact one of its last remaining vestiges, with ties extending back not only to the Haight Ashbury of the mid '60s but to Ken Kesey and the Pranksters before that and Kerouac and Cassady earlier still. The rebelliousness, the defiance of those days, the desire not to blend into "straight" society, lingered on (if only slightly) in the culture of the Deadheads. It's hard to see anything remotely similar in the Phish culture. The kids (and they are kids) like to dress a certain way, listen to music, take drugs, and follow bands around. But sooner or later they'll end up where they belong: in the middle of the mainstream. There's no detectable commitment to anything in this bunch; they're blissed out, apathetic, totally suburban.

It pains me to say this, because I want to applaud any group of people creative enough to put a thriving scene together. But I've been to five Phish shows now, and I didn't feel comfortable at any one of them. In every case, the atmosphere was one of almost complete irrelevance. And as much as I respect the four musicians that make up Phish and the good work they've done in the name of rock-group improv, I can't gloss over their musical shortcomings. They are perhaps the most boring performers I have ever seen. Like the Dead, they lack a single halfway decent singer. The lyrics of their earlier songs are the worst sort of grade-school doggerel. When their music does threaten to become interesting -- when they latch onto a particularly knotty chord progression or challenging time signature -- they almost invariably slide back into a brand of pseudo-anthemic arena rock, all strummy major chords and generic sentiments. Maybe I'm too emotionally tied to the prog and fusion of the late '60s and early '70s to be objective, but I have the feeling that music is where Phish's hearts lie, too, and they just don't measure up.

Or at least they didn't. The music on Billy Breathes hints that they may finally be getting there. Phish's back catalogue does boast tunes with qualities similar to the sonic tapestry of "Taste," the gorgeous balladry of "Talk," and the stateliness of the title track. Yet never have these guys sounded so immediate, so unselfconscious. Some of the credit belongs to Lillywhite, certainly. But more should go to the band for realizing that the project they were working on was their most important, and that it needed an extra set of sympathetic ears. At its best, what they've come up with is brilliant: the chorus of "Free" is pure pleasure, the ultra-rural "Train Song" is quietly stirring, the free improv of "Swept Away" and "Steep" stands out a mile. The playing of Anastasio, Fishman, keyboardist Page McConnell, and bassist Mike Gordon is engrossing but never flashy. And just for laughs, the album closes with "Prince Caspian," a piece of pseudo-anthemic arena rock that works.

In the end, it doesn't matter what the critics say, or who the fans are, or whether this is an important cultural statement, or whether it means anything at all. In the end, all that matters is that the music sounds good. On Billy Breathes, Phish sound better than good. For that reason alone, they deserve all the success they get. I'm rooting for them to beat the Pops.