Head Phish Trey Anastasio rejects jam band label

In the interests of my ego and your entertainment, I'm working on repurposing some of the music journalism I did in the 1990s. Most of these articles were originally published in the Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, and none are otherwise available in electronic form, as far as I know. Seems like fans might like a glance back at what their musical heroes were thinking back when.

This interview with head Phish Trey Anastasio originally ran in Aug. 28, 1992, when the band was living a neo-hippie dream by opening for Santana.

A few years ago, it was the new folk-­rock revival. Last year, thrash-funk bands were supposed to take over the world.

Now, the pop-music press can't stop talking about the neo-Dead movement. Led by bands such as Blues Traveler, the Spin Doctors, and Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit, the scene is marked by free-wheeling, improvisational mixtures of rock, country and blues -- sim­ilar to the psychedelic stew the Grateful Dead has been pumping out for decades.

Trey Anastasio, lead singer and gui­tarist for Phish, finds all the talk of a tie­-dyed revolution a little silly.

"I always thought it was kind of weird that it was being perceived as a scene," he says of the Dead-redux movement his group is associated with. Phish opens for Santana tonight at the Concord Pavilion and Saturday at Shoreline Amphitheatre.

"There are some similarities between these bands - we're pretty improvisational, and there's not much pop-star pack­aging. But to my ears, we don't sound awfully alike. If you listen to the last Blues Traveler album, we're pretty much in a totally different area."

Dead comparisons

The Grateful Dead comparisons are even less rooted in reality, Anastasio adds.

"I've seen the Dead, but not as much as I've seen (jazz guitarist) Pat Metheny," he says. "I haven't listened to a Dead record in six years."

The guitarist shrugs off the mispercep­tions, however.

"I just think it's very easy for the media to create these trends," he says. "Rolling Stone needs something to write about."

If the media is trying to shove Phish and similar outfits into a corner, perhaps it's because none of the bands fits into a ready-made category.

Phish's sound is an absolutely one-of-a­-kind blend of jazz, rock, blues and country. Anastasio says it's the result of putting together four guys with different tastes and removing them from any outside influ­ences.

Phish was born 1983, while Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jon Fishman (the band's namesake) were all students at the University of Vermont, in sleepy Burlington. The group plodded along as a fairly standard rock outfit for several years -- until Anastasio's jazz leanings and the addition of avant­-garde keyboardist Page McConnell started to mix up its sound.

"All of us were raised on rock, and we definitely consider our­selves a rock band," Anastasio says. "But between the four of us, we listen to all kinds of music, and 'we want to jam it all into Phish."

The experimenters

With Vermont known more for maple syrup than setting pop music trends, the guys were free to experiment.

"We were really in the boonies, locked into doing three nights a week at the only club in town," Anastasio says. "We could get up on stage and take as many chances as we wanted. We did lots of things that bombed immediately.

"We went through a country phase, a bluegrass phase, but it was all up to us. We were a jazz band for a while, and we were pretty bad in the beginning, but we worked up to being mediocre."

As Phish perfected its musical mix, word began to spread outside Vermont. The group toured the East Coast regularly for several years, working up to its first cross-­country jaunt in 1989.

The band did amazingly well for an act unaffiliated with a major label. Within the space of a few years, the Vermont wonders went from playing dinky clubs to 2,000-seat halls.

"It just kind of happened," Anastasio says. "It was a lot of word-of­-mouth. It seemed like everywhere we went. each person in the audl­ence would tell two friends about us. So when we came back, the audience was three times as big."

Part of the buzz surrounding the group stemmed from its penchant for goofy stage antics. Anastasio and bassist Gordon enjoy bouncing around on trampolines during a song, and Fishman occasionally augments his drum set with the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

"A lot of bands come up with dumb ideas in the dressing room," Anastasio explains. "The difference with us is that we actually follow through with them."

The group's popularity as a stage act made a record deal inevi­table. Phish's Elektra Records debut, "A Picture of Nectar," gar­nered solid reviews and respectable sales when it was released early this year.

Anastasio says the highlight of 1992, however, has been per­forming with Carlos Santana, who usually invites Phish on stage for a lengthy jam session during his set.

"Carlos is one of the reasons I got into music in the first place," Anastasio says. "To stand there trading riffs with him is just incred­ible.

"And Fish has been playing the vacuum cleaner with Carlos. What a blast!"