As if anyone really believed Phish was going out like that.
It’s been nearly five years since the Vermont-based jamband dug into its vast library of songs — “For the last time ... EVER!” guitarist Trey Anastasio taunted then — at a weekend festival that was meant as a grand finale, but turned into a sloppy mess of raw nerves, mixed emotions and churned mud.
May they never say “EVER!” again.
The foursome returns Friday for a reunion long awaited by its fiercely loyal fans. Like the un-retirement of any great act, this one stands to settle its own set of burning questions: Will Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, keyboardist Page McConnell and drummer Jon Fishman still have the chops and cohesion to pull off their hairpin, musical high-wire act? Will their obsessive-yet-finicky followers, now five years older, still possess the energy and devotion to sustain it?
And could the stale air of burnout — from the weariness that comes with 20 years on the road and mounting personal struggles that caused them to quit in the first place — have really cleared?
We’re about to find out.
“Sometimes, no matter what the issue is, the only way to address it is time,” said Peter Shapiro, owner of the now-closed Wetlands, a Phish-favorite club in New York, and executive producer of the improvisational Jammy Awards. The Jammys last year brought Phish back together publicly for the first time since 2004, albeit for a lifetime achievement award, no performance.
“These guys took five years,” said Shapiro. “I think it shows that they were serious about the issues that each wanted to address; and I think they’re serious about coming back.”
Like many a hard-core Phish-head, Shapiro planned to attend all three shows this weekend at the Hampton Coliseum, the site of some of their most consistently explosive performances. And if Phish’s sold-out summer tour is any indication, a few mortgages, marriages and offspring picked up along the way haven’t slowed down Phish fans’ rabid, drop-whatever-you’re-doing-and-go ethos.
“The fan base has aged,” Shapiro said. “A lot of the people who did this in their 20s are now in their 30s. It’ll be a little different crowd, but ... for them, this was always more than just a show. It’s a part of their life.”
Will new fans embrace Phish?It was 26 years ago that Phish formed at the University of Vermont. They are known for their amorphous blend of rock, jazz, bluegrass and other styles, along with intense improvisations. No two shows are ever the same.
Though the band didn’t achieve mainstream success in the pop realm, they released seminal albums and were a hugely popular and lucrative touring act, often likened to the Grateful Dead, and had an incredibly devoted fan base.
Whether Phish retain that kind of influence — and pick up a new generation of fans, as The Grateful Dead did in the mid ’80s — will in part depend on the quality of the music (the group is already working on a new album). While Phish always could conjure moments of sheer greatness that their fans came to expect, the taut, nimble playing demanded by their challenging songbook began to slowly erode following a universally acknowledged peak performance on New Year’s Eve 1999.
At their “farewell” performance, a two-day affair at Newport State Airport in Coventry, Vt., tears flowed onstage, lyrics were forgotten or abandoned and much of the jamming was downright sloppy. Adding to the ecstacy/misery dynamic were the frayed nerves of thousands of fans who, just days after a week of freakish downpours in the area, had to abandon their cars on the highway when the washed-out parking areas closed, hike in with what little camping gear they could carry and survive 48 hours in a knee-buckling mud bog that soiled everything in sight.
As grand encores go, it was a weird one.
But when the curtain comes back up on Friday, and the band reclaims their past glory, that will likely be forgotten.