New Phish article - interviews w/ Page & Fishman

[MarcO]

All Things Reconsidered

Jon Fishman and Page McConnell reflect on Phish - the band that made them famous

By Sally Pollak and Brent Hallenbeck | Free Press Staff Writers

Published August 1, 2004

JON FISHMAN

'We can leave it in an ideal state'

By Sally Pollak | Free Press Staff Writer

Jon Fishman played a fabulous drum solo last week in front of a lucky few. He hit a Zen-like groove.

Economy of motion is a crucial element of playing, Fishman said. He achieved it in all of his limbs, at varying tempos. It was lots of fun, he said.

"You just relax," Fishman said, "and let your brain unravel."

The drum kit was a basic Pearl set, nothing fancy. The sticks were borrowed. To bring his own set would've meant walking into the room where his 10-month-old son, Jack, was settling down for a nap. Fishman wasn't about to disrupt his baby, or Jack's mother.

"Phish used to be the center of all our lives, and now my family is," Fishman said last week at 242 Main. "And that changes everything."

This intersection of family and music is at the crux of the decision by Phish to break up. For 20 years, Fishman and his four friends and band mates -- Trey Anastasio, Mike Gordon and Page McConnell -- have been traveling around the country, and beyond, playing their brand of rock 'n' roll. It is a jam band that has spent countless hours in the rehearsal studio, learning how to listen and play and exchange musical ideas, seeking always a kind of musical integrity.

In recent years, returning home to Vermont after a road trip, the players found themselves wrapped up in their increasingly complex lives outside the band. For most of its existence, Phish would come off the road and regroup to write and practice, Fishman said. These days, Phish simply isn't practicing enough to grow and evolve as a group, or to meet its own standards for live performances, Fishman said.

"We had great concerts in June, but it didn't make us all eager to get in the practice room and write more songs," Fishman said. "We got home, and everyone went back to their own corners."

Fishman's corner is a house on Lake Champlain, where he recently moved with his partner and their two children, Ella, 2 1/2, and Jack. With time off after the June road trip and before the band's final gigs, he's had a chance to reflect on 20 years with Phish. His two decades on the road with Phish, playing drums in the band that came together his freshman year at the University of Vermont, form more than half of the 39-year-old drummer's life. He was thoughtful, deliberative and forthcoming in talking about the end of the road.

"For a while, I was thrilled," he said of the band's decision to end. "I thought that it all made sense. Lately, I've been going through some sadness about it."

But when he sits down to think about the finality, or to find a way around it, he understands again that it makes sense.

"We don't have to suffer through watching everything we've accomplished start to erode and degrade from the lack of practicing," he said. "We can leave it in an ideal state."

Fishman had come last week to a rock 'n' roll camp in Burlington, where he led an improvisation workshop for about 40 teens. He also soloed on drums, and answered questions from the kids. He was open and funny, and happy to sign autographs on everything from flip-flops to guitar effects-boxes.

"Thank you, guys," he said to the kids. "This is one of the best times I've had in a long time."

He said later that talking to the kids brought him back to his own teenage years. "If you're sincere, they respond to it," said Fishman, who was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Syracuse, N.Y. "Whatever impression you leave on these kids is gonna stick."

"I've been on the road 20 years, and it's been an amazing experience, an incredible thing," he told the young rockers. If you want to play in a band, he said, plan on working hard. "Think of it like you were going to go medical school, and then work twice as hard."

The work is winding down now for Phish, and the emotions are bittersweet. Fishman said the more he thinks about the band's dilemmas -- from competing obligations to "the nature of bigness" -- the more he realizes that breaking up represents the natural course of events.

"Its ending, though filled with lots of different emotions, seems as natural as the way it started," Fishman said. "Life is saying: 'Now it's time for you to go here.'"

Still, it's not easy to let it go: a half a lifetime of art, adventure, creativity, friendship, fun.

"I have a secret fantasy of making a Phish album with nobody looking," he said. "I really think it's impossible: Some buzz would get out."

He said he felt extremely fortunate that quitting was an option: "We can afford to make these changes," he said. "I know a lot of bands that have to play to eat.

"I feel so grateful and blessed that that's an opportunity that I have, and I'm sure as hell going to take advantage of that."

In Fishman's view, the circumstances surrounding the end of Phish represent nothing less than rock 'n' roll history. He reeled off the reasons:

-- The players are friends;

-- No one has died;

-- No is fighting;

-- Phish is playing well, at the top of its game;

-- The band has not become "the Budweiser of rock 'n' roll."

As Phish was practicing less, it was supporting a large organization. It became tiresome to think and worry about all that entails, Fishman said.

"You kind of want to break it all down and start over," he said.

"It becomes the ship that's too big to turn around in the harbor," Fishman said. "The only way to get the ship out of the harbor is to dismantle it."

After the final gig in Coventry, Fishman wants to get back to "drumming for the sake of drumming."

He wants to play bass and guitar, and dreams of a practice schedule like the one he said the classical guitarist Andres Segovia maintained: two hours in the morning, two in the afternoon. "I can't let my chops go to waste," Fishman said.

Not long ago, Fishman went to the Barn, Anastasio's recording studio, to play on a kid's record Anastasio is making. Playing with two other musicians, they had a great time, Fishman said.

"The relationships individually are all healthy enough that any of us would gladly help the other," Fishman said.

Healthy and strong enough, Fishman said, that the players in Phish can say to each other: "If you have an idea, call me up."

Ultimately, Fishman concludes, ending is Phish's last attempt at being a band -- a final alternative for a band that has tried to be inventive, to evolve and grow, for 21 years.

"We had a no-analyzing rule and finally we got to the no-play rule," Fishman said. "It was the last new thing we could do. We've tried being a band in every way we could. The only new way we could be a band is by not being a band."

PAGE McCONNELL

'It's been so much better than anyone could have imagined'

By Brent Hallenbeck | Free Press Staff Writer

Page McConnell has come to accept that Phish -- the band that made him famous, made him financially set and gave him so much creative satisfaction over the past two decades -- is two weeks from the end.

The band's leader, guitarist Trey Anastasio, sat his three band mates down in May and told them it was time to quit. McConnell, the keyboardist, said it was a shock. Then he thought about it. The band had been together since college, through long stretches on the road, through families made and families broken, through years that took the four men into or near their 40s. Phish had run its course.

"It felt like for years and years we were pushing new genres for us to dabble in and new ways of improvising and communicating, hopefully writing more mature lyrics as time went on and more complex compositions," McConnell, 41, said by phone Thursday. "But for whatever reason, the desire for us to keep pushing forward at the same rate we did before isn't there, and I'm not sure why. I'm OK with that.

"I try to describe it to people and say, 'You probably liked high school, right?'" he said. "'Would you like to be doing it 22 years later?'"

One of the most successful touring bands in rock history, and the most successful group Vermont has ever produced, will play its final shows Aug. 14 and 15 before 70,000 fans at the Newport State Airport in Coventry. That will be the latest dramatic change in a life of big changes for McConnell.

The New Jersey native came to Goddard College in Plainfield in 1984, then met and joined the group of University of Vermont students who started Phish. The Burlington-born band toured constantly, attracted devoted fans drawn to the band's congenial attitude, quirky songs and free-flowing, improvisational musicianship. By the mid-'90s Phish was playing to tens of thousands of fans at outdoor amphitheaters and summer festivals.

"It's been so much better than anyone could have imagined," he said.

"It was just the chemistry of four people, laughing in the band practice room by ourselves or in an arena full of people," McConnell said. "It was about the real experience for people. It was not something they saw on TV. It was not a pre-packaged piece of crap they got at the store. It was a real experience."

McConnell's personal life has changed, too. He married in 1995, had a daughter, then divorced. He referred to his family in a letter posted to fans on Phish's official Web site days after the band announced its split. He wrote that, as someone who has recently been through a divorce, he understands how traumatic change can be.

"I have a 4-year-old daughter, and there is nothing more important to me than being with her," McConnell wrote in May. "Come August, I'm not going to have to tell her how many days 'til daddy comes back from tour."

The band played about 150 shows a year in the early '90s, and while it has scaled back to about 40 shows a year, it still wore on McConnell. He found himself in a hotel room flicking through channels on television and saying he could be at home, or playing on stage thinking it wasn't as much fun as it used to be.

"The road takes its toll," he said Thursday. "It's not a lot of fun, and it's very, very hard on you in lots of ways."

The band's hard work climaxed at its New Year's Eve show at the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation in Florida in 1999. That show became legendary for an energetic set that lasted until sunrise on New Year's Day in the new millennium.

"It felt like a pinnacle," McConnell said of the show before tens of thousands of fans. "In retrospect, it felt like it led up to that Big Cypress thing."

Less than a year later, Phish went on hiatus. All four band members explored other projects; McConnell played with his trio Vida Blue. The group reformed for a show at Madison Square Garden in New York City on New Year's Eve 2002.

"We really did everything we could to try to keep the band rejuvenated," McConnell said. The hiatus was part of that. Once the band came back together, the four decided that they couldn't talk about music when not playing. None of that worked for good. The band long ago made a pact that if one member wanted to leave, Phish was done.

"Ending the band brings out this rejuvenation that I didn't really expect at all," McConnell said.

He said Phish's latest tour was a blast. "We had a really good time on those last eight shows we played, nine if you include Letterman at the end of June," McConnell said, referring to the band's performance atop the marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theater on "The Late Show With David Letterman." "It felt fresh. You throw into the mix that it may be the last time we play some of these songs, and it adds to the vitality.

"So heading into this last run I'm hoping I can have as much fun as I did on this last June run," he said. "I have a feeling it will be really emotional."

This last run, which includes tour stops in Virginia, Massachusetts and New Jersey before the Coventry shows, is also scary for McConnell.

"There are things I get from these guys that I don't anticipate I'm necessarily going to reproduce anywhere," he said. He expects to take time off to "write and reflect" after Coventry. "My future didn't necessarily make much sense to me, but Phish not being part of it wasn't something I had conceived of."

Now he's looking at a Phish-less future, and has no real idea what it will hold.

"It is scary," McConnell said. "I would say some of the personal changes I've had in my life have opened me to change, so maybe it's a little less scary

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