Some Small Pleasures, as Phish Dissolves

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Some Small Pleasures, as Phish Dissolves

By KELEFA SANNEH

Published: June 21, 2004

Phish is breaking up, and you probably don't care.

Unless you're a member of that band's large but limited cult, you've probably never seen Phish live. You've probably never listened to a Phish album. You probably don't bother reading articles about Phish. (There's a first time for everything.) And so when Phish disbands after a final concert in Vermont on Aug. 15, after two decades together, most people won't even notice. Never has a band touched so many so profoundly, while leaving so many more so profoundly untouched.

On Friday night Phish made its final New York City appearance when it played the second of two concerts at KeySpan Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn. And certainly everyone there cared. The Cyclones' baseball field was full of glassy-eyed obsessives happy to be among people who understood what they meant when they rattled off song titles and concert dates: You gotta hear 12/14/95.

Phish's guitarist and lead singer, Trey Anastasio, does not just accept this adulation; he shares it. He is obsessed with Phish, too, and he likes to acknowledge his fans by playing affectionate tricks on them. During the band's second set he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, Eric Clapton," and there was an expectant murmur before he added, "Nah, I'm only kidding."

But he hadn't been kidding a half-hour earlier, when he announced "a great friend and a great musician: please put your hands together for Jay-Z." Sure enough, that rapper strolled onstage and called out, "Brooklyn, make some noise!" (If Phish's retirement is anything like Jay-Z's, then the band's fans won't have to worry about withdrawal symptoms.) He stared out into a stadium full of ecstatic (if bleary) revelers, as amused to see them as they were to see him.

And so for a few preposterous, unforgettable minutes, Phish was Jay-Z's backup band. The band's habitually digressive musicians managed to lay down simple beats while Jay-Z rapped, and although it didn't make for great music (you can download the concert from www.livephish.com and decide for yourself), it was yet another brilliant stunt from an incorrigibly stunt-happy band. During "99 Problems," when Jay-Z rhymed about eluding an illegal search ("Well, my glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk in the back/And I know my rights, so you gon' need a warrant for that"), there was a sympathetic roar; who says Phish fans and hip-hop stars have nothing in common? When Jay-Z left, there was only a split-second pause before the band tumbled into "Chalk Dust Torture," with Mr. Anastasio skipping nimbly through the lyrics — a subtle nod, perhaps, to Jay-Z's rhyme style. After an extended jam the stage lights faded to a dim purple, and the music melted into murmurs, with the drummer Jon Fishman keeping a faint but steady pulse before the song slowly, inevitably galloped back to life.

Aside from the big thrill of Jay-Z's appearance, this was a night of small pleasures. The small satisfaction of hearing the keyboardist Page McConnell splash rainwater chords around Mr. Anastasio's puddle-stomping guitar solos. The small shock in the middle of "Tweezer," when Mr. Anastasio added a metallic, hollowed-out guitar line to Mike Gordon's low, grunting bass, leaving an eerie emptiness in the middle. The small but sublime moment during "Harry Hood," when fans near the stage tossed glow sticks and glow rings in the air, creating a neat visual echo of the neon circles that surround the stadium lights.

And although it's not polite to speak ill of the nearly dead, this is probably the right time to note that Phish has always been a small band, with small notions about what a band should be. Its four members are so intensely focused on musicianship that they contract out most of the lyric-writing to a nonmember, Tom Marshall. They are so committed to live performances that their albums have often been mere footnotes. They are not really interested in selling things or making statements or even singing, most of the time. They just want to play their instruments.

That is precisely the problem. To love Phish you have to give up on a lot. You have to give up on hit singles. (A fan was overheard complaining that a new composition, "Crowd Control," sounded like a "radio song.") You have to give up on the singer as a character: a prophet, a lover, a sign of the times, a wreck. You have to give up on politics and demographics. You have to give up on fashion and fads, controversy and choreography, hookups and haircuts. All that's left is four musicians.

Some fans might be glad to be rid of these distractions, but for most of us they are a big part of why we love music. These distractions are our pop culture: they help us attach meaning to songs; they help us connect all the fragments we hear every day, giving us reasons to swoon and rant and argue, years and decades later.

Phish never really seemed like part of our pop culture, which is why it was always so easy to ignore. The band will leave behind hundreds of thousand of rabid fans, some of them gravitating toward other Phish-like cults. But what about the rest of us? Will Phish leave a scar? Or will the band just disappear, as if it were never here at all?

If you had left KeySpan Park at the end of Phish's second set, you could have wandered through a parking lot full of hawkers and stoners and then headed for the boardwalk, not far from the stadium stage. A few ticketless fans were leaning on the chain-link fence, soaking up the encore, "Bug," but if you kept going, the soft strains of Phish were soon overwhelmed by the usual sights and sounds of Coney Island: piña coladas in plastic vases, barkers barking, cheap speakers blasting thug-love ballads. If you hadn't known, you would never have guessed that not far away, thousands of Phish fans were stumbling out into the New York night together, one last time.