Category Archives: Music

Forty years in the Phish cult

literary lint, Music,

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

Compared to What

Music, Publicity, ,

My instrumental group The Metrocenter has a new tune out, but this one is different: a cover with vocals, the classic soul jazz protest song “Compared to What.”

Here it is on Bandcamp. Here it is on Spotify. My staff tells me it’s on the other streamers, too.

Previously, I knew of three versions of this song. The one that came to me first was the weirdest, a cover by Col. Bruce Hampton (ret.) and his band the Aquarium Rescue Unit. I got big into Bruce during high school and college, and this is on their live album from 1992.1

The second version is the classic: Les McCann and Eddie Harris from the live album Swiss Movement, a veritable Maxell cassette experience if there ever were one. McCann’s vocals are unimprovable. The album also contains the great Harris tune “Cold Duck Time.”

The third version was one I didn’t even know about until we started discussing this song as a possible project — Roberta Flack, who recently passed away. This is the arrangement we mimic the closest in this Metrocenter recording. Here the rage is served chilled, bemused.

Credits:
Denny Burkes: drums, production, vision
Jakob Clark: bass and background vocals
Drew McKercher: guitar and mastering
Maya Kyles: vocals
Me: Wurlitzer electric piano2

  1. A ridiculous line-up of musicians, but whatever happened to the mandolin player, Matt Mundy? I remember that name because of the excellent mandolin playing but also because Bruce chants out the name at some point during the album. To this day, when I think mandolin, I think Matt Mundy. ↩︎
  2. Specifically the Wurlitzer 120 that belonged to my late father, a beige, paint-flaking, rectangle spinet-looking device that existed in only moderately playable condition for most of my childhood and then in a state of total malfunction for most of my adulthood. This is the Ray Charles model, for you true heads out there. I think the paint color name is technically Zolatone. What a great name for a band. The piano was something we always needed to get fixed. The keys rattled against each other like loose teeth and would not reliably strike the tines. At some point the tube amplifier contained inside the piano died. In 2023, I finally connected with Tony, local Wurlitzer repair wizard, who worked on the keys one afternoon while I shivered in his garage. And then after years of aimless googling, I found Jimmy, who must be able to fix anything electronic. He brought the amplifier back to life and made some upgrades, such as a three-pronged power cord and a line out. Finally in the fall of 2024 it was fully alive again. I mean, it’s still old and rickety. Tony: “Don’t gig that thing.” But it’s back home and it works. It makes sound, music even. I remember my father and I first hauling it down to Morrison Brothers to have them look at fixing it back in the late 80s, middle school days. The fact that this instrument is now preserved on this track, even with my meager playing, is quietly gratifying. I fully confess that I am a sentimental, middle-aged fool when it comes to musical instruments, but some mechanisms, with enough money, time, and expert help, can be brought back to life, if just briefly. I’ll take whatever resurrections I can get. ↩︎

The Persistence of the Organ Trio

Music, ,

Down here in the Land of Progress some friends of mine just released their debut soul jazz album. Check it: 

Soul City 3 on Bandcamp: https://thesoulcity3.bandcamp.com/album/the-bold-new

On Spotify: 

What is the organ trio? And why does the organ trio persist? You might think that an organ trio was a fusty, fleeting, postwar-jazz, R&B-adjacent fad, but you would be wrong. They are still out there, writing and performing new music. They typically occupy a liminal space between your harder-core jazz and your instrumental R&B, the elevator and the club. I love this music, for precisely this in-between status. One could argue that “Alligator Bogallo” by the Lou Donaldson Quintet is the first soul jazz organ trio type record, and I find this reptilian identity important. It lives in multiple realms and it absorbs the temperature of the environment surrounding it. 

It’s not so much a genre as a format, an arrangement of instrumentation, a severe limitation: Hammond organ with Leslie tone cabinet (with the organist holding down the roll of bass player), guitar, and drums.1

Like the string quartet, or the bluegrass quintet, or (its closest relative) the piano-upright bass-drums acoustic jazz trio, it’s a distinct format that probably developed through historical accident but has proved permanently plastic and pleasing, and thus can contain any manner of song or approach to melody, but by virtue of its limitations transforms the material. It absorbs the songs into its own tradition. 

I had the privilege of subbing on guitar in the SC3 a few weeks back, and one of the songs we played was the Daft Punk tune “Lose Yourself to Dance,” a song I don’t particularly like in its original form. The only thing I know about Daft Punk is that they wear those helmets, and I, normie that I am, prefer “Get Lucky.” But once we played “Lose Yourself to Dance,” it ceased being merely a Daft Punk tune and became a much more interesting version of itself. It was teleported from the spaceship dancefloor of Now and thrown into another tradition. I suppose you could make the argument that any instrumental group does this passionate repossessing when it covers a song, but the primitive restrictions of this format makes the altercation more drastic. Like a Mondrian painting, the limited palette helps you see. 

And I think that’s the reason why the organ trio has persisted, because of this alchemical just-right mixture of ingredients, this short door opening onto a larger room. It certainly doesn’t make sense technologically. A Hammond organ is a 400 pound machine that is no longer in production. It’s true that it can’t be exactly replicated with current digital technology, but it’s close. I can’t tell the difference. The harder technological hurdle remains the Leslie tone cabinet, which contains two speakers, a horn up top and a downfiring woofer, both of which spin and have an overall adjustable speed. This creates a Doppler effect and gives the organ its ululating, pentecostal fervor. It literally raises hair. The digital recreations of this effect aren’t quite satisfactory, though I will be the first to admit that my ears are too unsophisticated to pick apart why. Does the organist have to use the tube-powered, tone-wheel version of the instrument to qualify as a True Organist for our purposes here? No, I am not that puritanical. Besides, I don’t want to move that thing across town. 

Now here are some organ groups that I like: 

— Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, probably the best current example, particularly the extant albums which feature Jimmy James on guitar, true heir to Steve Cropper

— Parlor Greens, a kind of organ trio super group, featuring James, Scone, and Carman — all mentioned here

— Eric Scone down in Miami leads the Scone Cash Players among other organ projects

— The White Blinds, led by drummer Michael Duffy (L.A./Miami)

— The City Champs, out of Memphis. Their first two albums totally slay. A moment of reverent props for their guitar player, Joe Restivo. 

— Tim Carmon Trio, whose new album King Comfy is extremely good. Great tunes, perfectly recorded.

— The New Mastersounds (four piece). Their guitar player, Eddie Roberts, is the P.T. Barnum of current soul jazz music. 

— Ibrahim Electric (from Denmark, their live album is complete bananas) 

— Anything by Wil Blades, organist out of L.A. Special mention goes to his live album with Charlie Hunter and George Sluppick (of City Champs fame) and his duo project with drummer Scott Amendola. 

— Special mention to Fat Produce, an organ-less trio (guitar, drums, and upright bass) out of Miami that still produces the same excitement via limitation. Yes, I realize my boundaries are breaking down. What can I say? All categories are arbitrary and inevitably dissolve into a list of stuff I just consistently enjoy. 

  1. For the real heads: specifically, a four-piece drumset in Bop sizes, unmuffled and tuned high, no more than two non-hihat cymbals. Hammond organ of the A, B, or C models, with the footpedals, going into tube-powered Leslie tone cabinet, bass lines played with a combination of feet and left hand on the lower register (contra Gospel practice). Guitar: a full hollowbody with P90 pickups, flatwound strings, going through zero guitar pedals into a low wattage non-master volume tube amplifier. Sometimes that guitar role is covered by a horn, typically a tenor saxophone. Yes, I need a different hobby. Yes, this can turn into a costume drama very quickly. Yes, I am no fun at parties.  

And now for something different

Music, , ,

I’ve been playing music on the side, in a semi-professional, AAA-ball type manner for a while now, but I have never recorded original music and released it. I’ve recorded lots of little bits, back in my four-track days, and more recently via my beloved Voice Memos app. But I’ve never packaged it up and been part of any kind of release, any kind of music “publishing,” if we stretch that phrase to mean making that music publicly consumable. 

But now that’s changed. I’m 1/3 of a new band here in Jackson, MS named The Metrocenter, and we have released our first single, “Transcontinental Breakfast.” Here it is on Spotify. Here it is on Bandcamp. The robots tell me that it is available on many other online platforms, but I won’t do the tedious work of linking to all of those. 

I’d rather not classify or attempt to explain this music. I find most music criticism overdetermined, and I find almost all self-explanations by the artists themselves distracting at best, actively detrimental to the listening experience at worst. (They sell the same self-mythologies as the author profile.) I’ll only say these are instrumental songs. 

Okay, I’ll allow myself one attempt: “It’s like jazz, but without the annoying parts.” 

More to come (he said hopefully, optimistically, trying to will it into being). 

Credits: Denny Burkes on drums and engineering; Jakob Clark on bass and electric guitar. I’m playing Fender Rhodes and a Mellotron sample. 

Is it possible to hear the Mellotron and not think distantly of the Beatles? I think not. The way a Hammond organ always connotes the church, even if obliquely, I think the Beatles “own” that primary sound reference.

p.s. Of course you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram, too.