Phish fandom — and for many, the specific experience of attending Phish concerts — filled a spiritual void that began to open up in that younger Jewish generation. That was certainly the case for Aimee Weiss, a year-old who works for a private grantmaking organization in New York City. Like many of her peers, she first heard Phish at Jewish summer camp.
When the setting and your headspace are just right, a show fulfills what I used to go to shul for. Rabbi Josh Ladon, the West Coast education director for the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, who was part of the conference panel with Kroll-Zeldin, conducted a study of Jewish clergy who say Phish has influenced their sense of Jewish spirituality or community.
Improvisation takes agency and creativity, Ladon said — concepts that respondents brought back to their Jewish religious lives. Phish has even helped Jews feel and become more Jewish, as documented in articles Ladon came across in his research and his own study.
The most well-known example is the reggae rapper Matisyahu, who went through an intense Phish phase before becoming Orthodox, seeing around 50 of their concerts. One even became Haredi. I hear this all the time because, alas, I am that friend.
I've already seen Phish twice this summer and have tickets for at least one more show. I remain undeterred from making the case for Phish. I'd like nothing more than to get other people to recognize what's going on at these gigs -- or, at the very least, pump the brakes on the hatemobile.
To that end, here's the about Phish, the greatest artistic enterprise in this or any other galaxy. Phish is four over dudes: frontman Trey Anastasio whose mother used to work on Sesame Street , pianist Page McConnell whose father helped create Tylenol!
The gang met in college in Vermont, officially formed the band in though really only became a quit-your-day-job enterprise in , and despite a four-year hiatus in the aughts, is still going strong. All four sing, and none particularly well. You read that right: I am a gigantic Phish fan trying to convince you that they rule, and I'm well aware that the vocals only occasionally merit "hey, that's not bad" status.
Yeah, the name is kind of dumb, but so is "The Beatles. As recounted in Parke Puterbaugh's Phish: The Biography , band members were spitballing names when one of them made the sound "of air coming out of a balloon. At times, Phish's music features some moments of unpredictable, Grateful Dead-esque psychedelia thus the comparisons. The band can also tap moments of deep groove like Parliament-Funkadelic, Talking Heads-like sonic density, the byzantine orchestration of Genesis, Beastie Boys goofiness, and highs of tripping-on-psilocybin-as-some-amazing-DJ-spinsth-dimensional-mind-journey electronica.
I don't go to sporting events, so Phish concerts are the only place wherein I'd ever consider high-fiving a total stranger. It happens when they bust out one of your favorite tunes.
And, eventually, they all become your favorite tunes. Plenty of genre-bending bands came of age in the s, but you don't see Spin Doctors or Rusted Root selling out four-night shows at Madison Square Garden every single year.
Morbid, but undeniable: Phish benefited from the death of Jerry Garcia in At that time, the band was coming into its own and gathering steam with a healthy following, and when Deadheads had nowhere to turn, many turned to Phish. That said, the link between The Dead and Phish is generally overstated. Phish will occasionally dabble in faux-bluegrass, but Jerry Garcia was an accomplished banjo player.
There were a few years of "disco Dead," but funk grooves are core to Phish's appeal. Also, you are more prone to find computer programmers, Web 1. But this dynastic shift, coupled with Phish's lenient attitude toward concert recordings and tape-trading another similarity with the Dead , led to a ubiquity amongst a certain set. Put bluntly, if you hung out in a dorm room with a bong and a tape deck in the s, you likely giggled over the lyrics to Phish songs. If all you listen to is commercial radio, you've never heard a Phish song.
The band's enduring cult status begins with its jam-band musical style, ideal for live performances. A three-minute pop song can transform into a free-form exploration of a never-ending groove, or it can go down a rabbit hole of complex, proggy instrumentation.
The lyrics can be nonsense, fraught with puns, or a burst of earnest words about hippie peace and love. There are no rules at a Phish show. Most of Phish's songs, in recorded form, are a typical four minutes. They have a melody, they have a chorus, just like any other rock song. On stage, any one of these tunes can get cracked open and transformed into an minute composition. That can mean stretching out a long guitar solo, a quiet build that inspires a call and response from the audience "wooo!
It isn't that different from what classic jazz artists started doing in the bebop years, but with a unique mix of deep rhythmic funk and a swirl of psychedelic ax-manship. Since giving up on that Keyspan bootleg, I've tried listening to Phish a number of times, driven by the notion that if I'm going to hate on a band, I should at least know enough about them to argue my point.
And out of all of that, it's the Jay-Z stuff that still sums up exactly what I think is wrong with them. Listen to their "Big Pimpin," with all of its soft edges, jazzy guitar licks, and total lack of punch.
It's true to its source material on a technical level, but never comes close to either replicating the original's swagger or offering a compelling alternative reading. The band knows all the right notes, but they don't know what they mean. United States. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Every 'Bond' Film Ever, Ranked. Whenever I investigated a new show, I kept strictly within the boundaries of , charting the initial development of their funk sound to its ultimate evolution as a vehicle for space travel, wary of going beyond it for fear of encountering mediocre or bad Phish, or the rumored druggy and sickly Phish of The most instructive show I heard during the project, acting like a Rosetta Stone for their whole career, took place in , when Phish were at an artistic crossroads.
During the previous couple of years, their live interplay was the tightest it had ever been, their jams feeling like they could ascend through a portal in hell and exit the earth as flowers. Before, their jams slid in and out of movements of dissonance and beauty.
Now they grooved, drifted, even floated around the hull of the ship if the occasion called for it. Here was the Phish I fell in love with most, at the moment of its conception. When the band appeared, I immediately registered that Anastasio was wearing a hoodie with a picture of a cat on it—the intricate patterning of which reminded me of one of my cats—and I knew I had picked the right show.
The set that followed might as well have emanated from the concert I dreamed of attending among the eerie stillness of the grass and the trees in the park during one of my pandemic walks. The lighting rig above the band looked like the ever-unfolding legs of a Lite Brite spider. Anastasio made liberal use of his loop pedal so that his guitar always sounded lost in its own light trails.
By the time the second set started it became hard to register the music as improvisation, as being invented in the present, as everything that happened seemingly occurred with such a fated inevitability. In the distance a ferris wheel glowed. And when the music quieted I could hear nearby waves gather, collapse, and gather again, different yet the same every time, the ocean harboring in its depths the same sense of mystery and darkness that I heard in the music enfolding me.
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