I stayed up late the other night reading the long profile of Phish in the New Yorker by Amanda Petrusich. I’d been anticipating this piece. It had been mentioned in a podcast interview with the author and she had posted photographs of attending a couple of Phish concerts on her Instagram. I have been listening to Phish off and on with fluctuating levels of enthusiasm myself for 30 years, so I was primed.

But I went to bed disappointed. It was long, it was detailed, it was exhaustively researched, but there wasn’t enough matter there, not enough new information to warrant the length, not enough analysis of why the band and its fanbase has persisted so relentlessly through the decades. It wasn’t the definitive New Yorker analysis I craved. I am not a Phish super fan by any means, but even I knew about 95% of the information already: their scrappy beginnings in college towns in Vermont; their gradual creation of / flourishing in the “jam band” scene in the 90s; their succession in the travelling hippie consciousness and budget after the death of Jerry Garcia and the restructuring of the organization formerly known at The Grateful Dead; their leadership through the manic productivity and vision of their singer, guitar player, and boyish frontman, Trey Anastasio; their early millennial interruptions brought on by band exhaustion in general and Anastasio’s drug use in particular; their rebirth post-Anastasio sobriety and their flourishing as corporate fun machine in the two decades since.

What it told me I didn’t know: that they played an early show with fIREHOSE, Fishbone, and the Beastie Boys; that Ian MacKaye of Fugazi gives them props; that they have a full time archivist, though that last detail is not surprising; that “Fluffhead” is the quintessential Phish song. I didn’t know that Phans shushed one another for talking during the jams or “chomping.” You can’t make this stuff up.

I already knew that they never had a hit but stumbled upon something greater, the impassioned fans who not only support them with their repeated attendance, but actually attend to the band, somehow create the energy requisite for the full Phish experience. They don’t just enjoy Phish. They believe in Phish. There is a religious element to being a Phish fan, a parallel that Petrusich explicitly brings up several times but doesn’t (for my taste) do enough with. The title of her piece is “The Portal Opens,” and she writes about how band and audience alike enter a trance-like state of symbiotic consciousness during these long musical improvisations (i.e., jams). The band stumbles upon a kind of shared intuition that the audience partakes in. It’s a little woo woo, but I am here for it.

I myself have only been to one Phish concert (Mid-South Coliseum, Memphis, TN, November 18, 1996), a so-so show. I have watched lots of live clips and have several bootlegs, somehow. But I am not a Phan. I am not part of the cult. I find the attendance at multi-day outdoor concerts to be too much like camping. I don’t begrudge my fellow citizens their innocent pleasure, but I don’t understand the appeal. Plus, I don’t want my live musical entertainment attendance to be turned into an extreme sporting event. A lot of the fandom strikes me as like sports for music nerds. Kids who used to collect baseball cards now collect setlists. But also, I have never been to a multi-day Phish fest, so I am not completely sure on just what I am missing.

Just what am I missing? I kept think-screaming at the article. There are many details on all the various activities and installations and artifacts at a festival such as Mondegreen, which Petrusich attended, but again, How is it fun? Make me feel the fun. There is a curious lack of commitment in this piece of reportage. There is neither enough stench from the crowd nor is there enough chin stroking about what it all means. It doesn’t push hard enough on the subject.

There have been a raft of articles about the band as it has approached and now surpasses the forty year mark. Justin Taylor’s piece in The Baffler is to me the best thus far, getting close to the actual experience of attendance. There was also a good article in GQ. It’s becoming the music journalist version of the “cruise ship essay,” a totalizing experience that seemingly requires immersive reportage but about which basically everything has already been said. There was gold in them thar hills.

Did I imagine other, previous music critics harrumphing in the margins? I did. I envisioned a pre-sobriety Sasha Frere-Jones, dressed in all black, sweating terribly, and frowning. One wonders what that sensibility would have made of this subject. Or Geoff Dyer: someone send that man to a Phish fest.

Is it a cult? It sure seems like a cult. I understand the collaborative moment of musical transcendence idea, but what about all of the supportive paraphernalia, the way some people devote their lives to the band, the way they are analyzed and dissected. When she visits the archives and gets to see Anastasio’s undergraduate honors thesis, a sort of C.S. Lewis-ian tale that created several early and enduring Phish songs, she jokes that it feels like she’s looking at the Gutenberg Bible. And the archivist says, “You are.” She’s opening the Ark of the Covenant, but no one’s face gets melted off.

What happens when one of the members dies? What happens when Anastasio dies? Where does the energy go? Is the Phish cult sui generis or is it a manifestation of a larger American impulse to congregate but separate, dance around the maypole and grab a burrito? What would Hawthorne make of all this?

And what of Anastasio’s insane work ethic? I remember reading somewhere about Anastasio’s preternatural ability to tune out distraction and get his work done, and I wanted more insight into that, into the relentless efficiency of the fun machine. There is a fleeting glimpse of his personality when something is off at soundcheck and he is momentarily critical — “Whatever was just in my ears was not remotely the mix, and that is sad” — but this hyper-management of the band experience is left mostly unexplored. Am I wrong in thinking that Anastasio has a Steve Jobs-ian power to realize his vision? I already learned about his sobriety journey on the CBS Sunday Morning show years ago. Give me something new. But now I am yearning, a close cousin to whining, but such are the feelings of a fan, even one who sticks to the shallows.

Links:
– Petrusich’s article in the New Yorker. Interestingly, in the time it took me to write this post, it seems that the title of the piece has changed online to “After Forty Years, Phish Isn’t Seeking Resolution.” I guess they regularly change the names of the articles online?

– Justin Taylor in The Baffler

– The GQ Phish article

– The setlist for the Phish concert I saw back in college