Trey Anastasio Interview:

[MarcO]

In a New Light

Trey Anastasio speaks of his new album, 'Shine,' and how drugs drove Phish apart

By BOB MARGOLIS

Ernest Joseph Anastasio III talks in bursts. On stage and off, he can't stand still. Despite his former life as the frontman of Phish -- a band that became almost synonymous with a certain laid-back aesthetic -- Trey Anastasio has a bear of a time taking a vacation.

His peripatetic style can lead him to get ahead of himself. Anastasio admits he unveiled his new band, dubbed 70 Volt Parade, a bit too early; he likens their first gig, on April Fools' Day in Phish's hometown of Burlington, Vt., to Chad Pennington returning to the Jets too quickly.

"I made so many changes simultaneously. ... I had gotten together with a lot of new people, and the feeling of those folks was 'Just go out and play.' But I didn't have it together yet," Anastasio said in a wide-ranging phone interview last week. "(The Burlington show) was the only time that I went on stage feeling like what I was doing had not developed into something unique yet. I mean, Phish was still dismantling -- so playing with new people was too early for certain people who were bent out of shape."

By "certain people" he includes the legions of die-hard Phish fans still reeling more than a year after the band's farewell blowout in Coventry, Vt. Anastasio still feels their disappointment, and the heft of the questions that still linger about the reasons behind the band's breakup after more than a decade as one of the nation's most popular live acts.

"I ... care about those people; I've got myself in a situation where I want them to be happy," Anastasio said. "That's so much of what Phish was. It was our job from the stage with the music, with the thinking of all the ideas and crazy things -- 'Hey, let's do "Dark Side of the Moon" the night after Halloween!' -- all of that was nurturing a community."

As if in response to the weight of expectations, the cover of Anastasio's new record, "Shine," shows him looking up to the sky jubilantly, Languedoc guitar held high.

The disc is very much a one-man affair, presenting Anastasio as solo songwriter for the first time in his career. As opposed to Phish's free-form, almost jazz-based rock, the tunes on "Shine" are heavier in nature -- Jerry G. meets Ozzie O.

On Friday, Anastasio brings 70 Volt Parade -- featuring guitarist-keyboardist Les Hall, bassist Tony Hall, drummer Skeeter Valdez, keyboardist Ray Paczkowski and vocalists Jennifer Hartswick and Christina Durfee -- to Albany's Palace Theatre for a gig that will showcase new material and more than a few cherished older tunes.

Phish fans will have a field day combing through the lyric sheet of "Shine" looking for lines like "This time, what are you waiting for? Is it your time to walk away?" (from "Invisible"). The songwriter cautions them not to be too literal.

"Sure, in some parts those tunes are about leaving Phish, but it goes deeper," Anastasio said. "I didn't even know until a few gigs ago what some of these lines were really about." He points to another new song, "Comes a Melody," a tune that Anastasio says is about "leaving my ragged-ass self and becoming a human being again."

But what was it that made Anastasio feel un-human? It's at this point that he sees fit to address what's become the elephant in the middle of any discussion of Phish's breakup: the role that drugs played in the band's final years, and in Anastasio's decision to call for its end.

It's a subject that was conspicuous by its absence in the period immediately after the band's breakup announcement in May 2004. While fatigue was generally seen as the culprit, few fans were willing to chalk it up to anything more than artistic torpor or mundane road-weariness.

"I thought it went without saying how deep into our scene hard drugs had gone," said Anastasio. (Despite his new frankness on the subject, he still resists getting into the specifics of who was doing what, and how much.)

"That's why I was surprised at people saying, 'How could you do this?' How could I not do this? What's the alternative here? I always thought our scene was so transparent, that everybody knew everything. That's why it was hard to hear the anger and frustration from Phish fans."

"I just want to say to them: I love Phish, too. But because of what was happening to Phish and happening to me, the decisions came from a place of love and respect for the same thing that you all loved and respected. That same light was going out pretty damned fast."

"We got through the '80s and '90s without encountering hard drugs -- which is pretty miraculous considering what those eras were like -- and it is a testament to the guys in the band, in how intent we were from keeping those type of drugs away.

"Once we let our guard down around 1998, the scene started to eat itself and there was a massive loss of perspective. ... The whole thing was being crushed under its own weight. The germ of the thing -- that feeling between the four of us -- is still there, but we were getting unhealthy and tired," he said.

The band went on hiatus in the fall of 2000, and didn't return to the road until the end of 2002. "We came back and it was even worse," Anastasio said.

After the breakup announcement, the summer 2004 tour seemed to encapsulate everything that was right and wrong with Phish; both tendencies came to a head in the hideous weather, epic traffic snarls and often frenzied music of the band's weekend-long August farewell on farmland outside of Coventry, Vt.

"For Coventry, our guest list was between 2,500 and 3,000 people," Anastasio said. "It was like a nightmare backstage -- very dark. But still, it was great to be onstage with my friends," Anastasio said.

When it was all over, "I went to Bermuda and slept for a week," he said. "I needed to get healthy, which I am now."

After a few attempts at putting together a new post-Phish touring unit, Anastasio enlisted the help of producer Brendan O'Brien, best known for his work with Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam and, more recently, Bruce Springsteen.

I need to do this alone," Anastasio said of the recording of "Shine" this spring. "That's why I didn't bring my band. I needed to get on a plane with just a backpack and sit in a hotel room with my guitar. The first thing Brendan said was to sit down and play the songs on the guitar straight."

No break

On this tour, Anastasio doesn't take a set break. Instead, his bandmates depart and leave him on stage to play a number of tunes without accompaniment. It's during this segment that Anastasio has been playing a wide variety of Phish songs and Phish-associated cover tunes.

"Each night, I go out and think of a few songs I haven't played in a while and play them on the acoustic without the whole arrangement -- like 'AC/DC Bag,' 'Sample in a Jar' and so on," he said.

Anastasio seems keenly aware of his new status as a member of a famously defunct band. It's a big club, though not always a happy one.

He recently participated in a tribute to Jerry Garcia at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, Calif., where he chatted backstage with Garcia's ex-wife, the legendary Mountain Girl, and Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzman. As they were talking about Garcia, "Kreutzman just blurted out, 'I love that guy,' Anastasio recalled. "I loved that."

But he noticed as well that Dead bassist Phil Lesh wasn't there, because of a long-standing feud with guitarist Bob Weir. Anastasio also recently did a tour with former Police drummer Stewart Copeland, "and he was not on the phone with Sting."

In comparison, Anastasio's relationships with his former bandmates -- Jon Fishman, Page McConnell and Mike Gordon -- are downright collegial. All of them have joined Anastasio on stage during this tour -- though not all at the same time.

"I was on the phone with Mike, Page and Fish this morning," said Anastasio, who lives outside Burlington with his wife and two daughters. "They are healthy and wonderful. Everybody has had our run-ins with the dark side, but we muddled through. And the option is still there."

"Those stories can have different endings pretty quickly," Anastasio said. "Everybody just needs to get their feet back on the ground. ... My dream would be that everybody gets to a place where their own lives outside of this, that all four of us are standing on our own two feet.

"And then who knows? Maybe we could all play together again. I'd love it."

TREY ANASTASIO with Grace Potter & The Nocturnals

When: 7 p.m. Friday

Where: Palace Theatre, 19 Clinton Ave., Albany

Tickets: $38

Info: 476-1000

[Basher]

"I was on the phone with Mike, Page and Fish this morning," said Anastasio, who lives outside Burlington with his wife and two daughters. "They are healthy and wonderful. Everybody has had our run-ins with the dark side, but we muddled through. And the option is still there."

My dream would be that everybody gets to a place where their own lives outside of this, that all four of us are standing on our own two feet.

"And then who knows? Maybe we could all play together again. I'd love it."

Keep hope alive!

[YearsAlongTheSea]

they better practice if they're gonna try coming back AGAIN...

[MarcO]

and although few people seem to care (lol) hears another new interview with the Red Rooster:

Trey Anastasio Begins Anew After Phish

By BRET GLADSTONE, For The Associated Press

In an elevator at the Sony Music offices, two suited men breezily assess a fledgling artist's demo.

"How did you feel?" one asks.

"I found it to be, well, rather irrelevant," the other replies.

"I'm sure she will find a response somewhere." Both evaluations are delivered in clipped British accents.

"I love the smell of commerce in the morning," Jason Lee sighed in "Mallrats." Yes, fall has arrived at Sony Records. Decisions are being made, careers and images shaped, marketing strategies assembled, numbers crunched — all the things that the red-haired hipster aberration bopping coolly down the Sony corridors has spent the better part of his career skillfully avoiding.

It seems strange that Trey Anastasio should feel so relaxed in a place like this. Still, the happiness that Anastasio exudes during an interview today — and that anchors his new album, "Shine" — is largely painted atop a year of turbulence.

This is Anastasio's first year without Phish, the band he led to an astounding 20 years of grassroots success, a group consisting of three other college friends with whom he remains "inconceivably close." There's also Anastasio's newfound sobriety and a caustic backlash from a once adoring fanbase. Anastasio, 41, is finally getting around to what most of his musical heroes have spent careers doing: demolishing a lucrative conception of himself, and discarding all the rules that went along with that identity.

"The guy who was just taking my photograph told me, 'My brother's a big fan,'" Anastasio says. "I said, 'Oh yeah? Cool!'"

Anastasio's smile changes from humor to a wan, slightly wounded bemusement. "'Yeah,' he goes, 'he just wants to have your head.'"

___

AP: Did you find yourself writing a lot just after Phish stopped playing?

Trey: Yeah. It was not without its darkness, and its difficult period, but it was creative nonetheless. I have an easier time emoting — if that's the right word — but I have an easier time expressing myself through music than I do verbally. I've kind of built my life around having an outlet with the audience, and what's particularly interesting is this, the audience that I'm so used to having as my emotional outlet was, you know, not so thrilled about all this. So that made it hard for everybody. But hard can be good.

AP: Did your new song 'Invisible' have anything to do with that?

Trey: Oh yeah. 'Invisible' is about Coventry (Phish's final shows). There was mud all over the place and everywhere that the four of us walked they laid down sheets of plywood so we didn't have to walk on the mud. That's the 'walking on wood, sinking in water' part. We were walking on water for 20 years. To some degree. In some people's eyes. And that's an oddity, cause nobody does that, so that's why strangely enough the outbeat of this song has this sort of joyous release quality to it. It's about how sometimes sinking is the best thing that can happen.

AP: Is there something appealing to you about the concept of vanishing?

Trey: Yes! Absolutely! It's amazing to me that this can sometimes be hard to explain but the artists that I most admire maintain their relationship with their audience through all their changes. John Lennon being the number one example. Bruce Springsteen, anyone who had a long career. Lou Reed, you know he was in the Velvet Underground, and then, wow. ... I just saw Bruce's acoustic show and I was just so impressed. I got to meet him backstage and talk to him for a while. He knew what was going on and he said, 'Man I'm so happy for you. Because it's tough when you're the guy who writes about cars and girls, and then all of a sudden you're not interested in cars and girls anymore.'

___

"Here he is," Ronnie Gilbert once introduced Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival. "You know him, he's yours."

___

By the time Phish played its final show at Coventry, they had, like The Grateful Dead, become something more than a band — they were a lifestyle. And for thousands of disillusioned, pseudo-bohemian youths, they were a traveling home, as well as a bottomless vehicle for interpretation. The latter — propagated by fans armed with minute statistics about Phish's musical habits — sharpened as the band's live performances dulled and their albums veered from the majestic intricacy, atonality and extensive jamming of Anastasio's early compositions.

"Groups," Greil Marcus wrote in "Mystery Train," are "reflections of community, and the problem with community is that you have to live in it." Phish made their early music at a literal distance, walled up in the backwoods, only to find their world unexpectedly close in upon itself. The fans' problems became their own, particularly Anastasio's.

By 2004, Anastasio was physically and emotionally drained. Gigs in Las Vegas found him looking washed-out and haggard, frustrated by Phish's inability to reproduce the easy moments of the late '90s, and more so by their relative apathy.

In mid-May, the band met to discuss his feeling that Phish had run its course. Keyboardist Page McConnell and drummer Jon Fishman conceded relatively quickly. Bassist Mike Gordon was more reluctant, and the polarity helped create the popular opinion that Anastasio closed the book on Phish himself. This was furthered when the breakup notice on Phish's web site was signed by Anastasio alone.

The backlash was of Lennon/Ono proportions, yet in many ways more visceral and personal because Phish was first and foremost a live act, with an extraordinarily intimate relationship with its fanbase. As all human beings seek blame in the face of tragedy, Anastasio became the man who had taken it away from them.

Anastasio began the summer with a triumphant solo performance at Bonnaroo. Coventry, however, was a disaster. With much of the audience turned away due to flooding-related parking and safety problems, many shouldered their camping gear and hiked up to 12 miles, leaving their cars on the side of the highway. Hampered by emotion and spectacle, the band's play suffered. "The Curtain With," the final song Phish ever performed, was played mostly in the wrong key.

___

In the waning minutes of Martin Scorsese's documentary "No Direction Home," Bob Dylan sits placidly smoking in a backstage dressing room of a European theater, wondering how long he's been on the road.

"I don't really remember anymore," Dylan sighs. He ashes the cigarette and again begins to strap on his electric guitar. "I gotta get me a new Bob Dylan. I gotta get me a new Bob Dylan and USE him. We'll see how long he lasts."

___

AP: Have you been made to feel like a pariah?

Trey: Oh sure. I've felt that. They didn't see when we talked about it. The first thing out of Fish's mouth was that he was done anyway. He had been playing with (mandolinist) Jamie Masefield for a year and telling us that he was ... I don't want to talk for other people. I don't want to speak for Fish. It's a lot more complicated than anyone could ever imagine. A lot of it had to do with the framework much more than the musicians. And the most important thing is that these are three of my brothers. Closest friends on earth. We're inconceivably close, and I love them more than anything. That's all that matters.

AP: How has sobriety affected you as a musician?

Trey: You gotta understand that we never did drugs, for years. We smoked pot occasionally, but pretty much it wasn't around. And I'm talking about the first time that I ever even saw drugs was ... in the late 90s, and we started in 1983. And they still hadn't hit the Phish scene. I didn't even know that people were still doing this stuff. And then it did get very crazy ... It completely infiltrated the scene. Everybody I knew — it was pretty much what people were doing the last four years. Since Coventry I haven't even seen drugs. That was it, done, over. It was that easy. At the same time, it was hard. We tried to take the hiatus — didn't do anything. And how has sobriety affected me? Sobriety is a f------ relief is what it is. It affects you positively in every possible way that you can imagine, 'cause it's YOU. This is coming from the relentless communicator, somebody else might have a different opinion about this, but I saw it and now I'm here to tell you that hey, any feeling you're trying to achieve using hard drugs you're gonna achieve through sobriety. Everybody I know that got off that s---, they all say the same thing. Me being one of them, and that's that this is what I wanted to feel like anyway. It's not you anymore, it's like putting a filter, or a thick piece of foam in front of the person, so it just doesn't work. It's no good. No damn good. And also very sad. Very sad. We had 3,000 people on the guest list at Coventry, that's how big the backstage was. At least three, it might have been five. We had oceans of hangers-on, and it was completely out of control, meanwhile the music was getting worse and worse as far as I'm concerned. The funny things about Coventry itself was that it was just like, All right, you want to see why this is ending? This is it, sort of.

___

For "Undermind," Phish's final album, Anastasio had approached producer Brendan O'Brien, known for the needle-pushing guitar and thumping drums and bass he employed on everything from Rage Against the Machine's "Evil Empire" to Springsteen's "The Rising." O'Brien declined Anastasio's invitation.

In early 2005, Anastasio had begun recording what would become "Shine" when he received a call from O'Brien insisting that he produce it. Anastasio, however, had a tiny 10-day window to record before embarking on a tour. Anastasio suggested that he work with O'Brien on a subsequent project.

"He said, 'Nope. I don't want to do the second record,'" Anastasio recounts, grinning. "'I want to do this record with you now, right after leaving Phish, when you're all hung out on a wire by yourself.'"

Anastasio packed a bag and flew to Atlanta, where he and O'Brien holed up in the producer's 20-by-20-foot home studio (much the same way, Anastasio points out, that he isolated himself in a cabin to write the tunes for Phish's 1988 debut, "Junta").

In some respects, "Shine" is the music Phish had been meaning to make with "Undermind." It may as well be said: Trey Anastasio has made a pop record.

Fittingly, though, the album is most meaningful when it isn't trying so hard to conceal the murkiness that lurks underneath those glossy surfaces. The song "Wherever You Find It" is, in that sense, its crown achievement, a marriage of despondency and perseverance that manages to speak beyond Anastasio's personal soap opera to grander realities which render it utterly meaningless, its chilling piano cadences and whispering intonations shattered to pieces by towering, tormented guitar solos.

Having written with lyricist Tom Marshall over the past 20 years, Anastasio is still coming to terms with being his own lyricist. In Phish's universe, most verses floated in a dreamlike, partially congealed flux, hanging imagery between states of consciousness to complete the music and be completed by it.

On "Shine," however, the lyrics are utterly, sometimes bravely transparent, and as a result, some of the writing slips into potholes of cliche. But like Anastasio, there's a charm to the fact that the album strives to tell the truth at all costs. It's not the best work Anastasio has ever done, but it's a good, sturdy rock album, provocative in its own way, which is mostly in the sense of brash optimism it exudes despite knowing that it's never been cool to be optimistic. Ultimately, only a music geek could pull off a sentiment like that.

___

AP: Did the writing come easily for this album?

Trey: Yeah, it felt very journal-like, or it was kind of a combination of journal entries, and letters that I was writing to people, so I really had something that I wanted to say. ... A couple times I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and I'd have a pen and just (write). That story I'm telling you is 'Wherever You Find It.' Cause that was all down there. Just kinda nudging it. Kind of, without pushing too hard, nudging the song closer to ... it's almost like sculpting or something. You're chipping away you're nudging until you feel like it's all there ... Fish came down — he was going to play drums a couple of tracks on the album, but it didn't work out. But he said, 'How come we couldn't make an album like this?' How come it was so hard to get that lighter-than-air kind of quality, that energy? We were having a hard time with Phish doing that.

As soon as the whole (Phish) thing ends, I hop on a plane with a backpack, alone, just me, and I go down to Brendan's and I make this album in his house, for a lot of it, then we get down to seven tracks, and it felt a lot like what me and Tom (Marshall) used to do. Tom and I, when we wrote we would go off and we would hide. We would go to these farmhouses and stuff, and we would lock ourselves alone with a bag of Doritos and listen to early Ween albums or something like that.

It's so funny because when I think about making our first album that had 'You Enjoy Myself' and 'Divided Sky' and all that, how much that stuff was the essence of what continued to be the material despite the fact that it was 20 years old. When we made that album it was $5,000 and nobody was listening. I had that same feeling again to make this album all of a sudden. It's the struggle itself that is my favorite part of the process. I can't worry about all this too much. It's right for me to be in this situation, where I'm struggling. I got a band now that's on its tenth gig. Honestly if you heard the tenth Phish gig it probably wasn't that good. You know what I mean? It takes a long time so you have to be patient. But the other thing that's funny about it — this is the beginning of a new band, right? Well everyone always said, "Oh, if only I could have been there in the beginning." Well, I'm letting the people in on a little secret: This IS the beginning.

[Tenenbaum]

Well, I'm letting the people in on a little secret: This IS the beginning.

more like the end, kudos!