Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, August 18, 1995 TAG: 9508180073
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SCOTT SUTHERLAND THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
``I was listening to what I was playing and thinking, `God, this is totally awful,''' he said to Mike Gordon, Phish's bassist, over lunch in a Boston restaurant. ``Then I listened to how I was singing the lyrics, and I thought, `God, this is awful, too.''' He shook his head, appalled but grinning. ``I'm never doing that song like that again.''
During the last 12 years, Phish's devotion to what it calls its ``musical evolution'' - especially in its anything-goes live shows - has been instrumental in transforming a college-circuit cult band into one of rock's most popular grass-roots success stories.
In 1994, the band did $10.3 million in ticket sales, landing it among the industry's top 50 grossing acts. Phish's five-album catalog on Elektra sold more than 500,000 units, without the benefit of a Top 40 single and with only minimal exposure on MTV.
The band capped off its year with its debut on ``Late Night With David Letterman,'' followed by a Madison Square Garden show that sold out in four hours.
This year has been equally bountiful. The band's recent summer tour, which concluded July 3, played to packed houses from Colorado to Vermont.
Phish's new double album, ``A Live One,'' was released June 27 and entered the Billboard chart at No. 18, with sales of almost 50,000 its first week. The band paid a return visit to ``Letterman''; and rock culture's flagship magazines, Rolling Stone and Spin, are planning their first feature articles on the band. Add increased radio play and a growing pool of mainstream listeners, and Phish is suddenly one of the most talked-about bands of the summer.
If Gordon and Anastasio seem unfazed by it all, it is perhaps because Phish is anything but an overnight success. ``It might seem sudden, but we've been at this for 12 years,'' Anastasio said.
Gordon added that the band has made it a point to exercise caution when it comes to cultivating its popularity. ``We didn't want to grow too much or too quickly,'' he said.
The days when Phish could manage its growth on its own terms may be past, however. As late as 1991, says Phish's manager, John Paluska, the band grossed ``maybe $200,000'' in ticket sales. Now, he says, ``it's almost impossible to imagine the band's popularity plateauing anytime soon.''
What seems to buoy Phish through the band-on-the-verge hoopla is a genuine commitment to its music. ``When we first got together, we talked a lot about our vision of the band, and how we wanted to continue to grow musically,'' said Gordon. Anastasio nodded, and completed the thought: ``And we're still talking about our vision of the music. It's a constant thing. It never goes away.''
The music that Phish - Gordon, 29; Anastasio, 30; keyboardist Page McConnell, 32, and drummer Jon Fishman, 30 - continues to discuss is a particularly elastic strain of jazz-infused rock, with an improvisational slant that encompasses everything from classical to calypso.
In concert, Phish offers its legions of young listeners the possibility that anything can happen. At a marathon three-set show last fall in Glens Falls, N.Y., for instance, Phish's second set was a start-to-finish cover of the Beatles' ``White Album.''
A Phish show is an event - part musical exploration, part neo-hippie spectacle, part ironic sendup of larger-than-life rock concert conventions.
Some fans can't get enough; in recent years, a ragtag army of ``tourheads'' has taken to following Phish from show to show, Grateful Dead-style.
Phish was hitting its stride in the late 1980s just as bands like Blues Traveler, the Spin Doctors and Widespread Panic were popularizing loose-limbed, improvisation-fueled rock for a new generation of listeners.
This larger trend, coupled with Phish's decision to build its audience through its live shows rather than through recordings, combined to lock in the band's fan base. The band toured prodigiously and kept its faithful up-to-date with its five-times-a-year newsletter (current circulation: 80,000).
By the time Phish signed with Elektra in 1991, it boasted a sizable core of listeners that would balloon over the next several years, mainly due to word-of-mouth endorsements from zealous converts.
Concert revenues continued to climb throughout 1994, a fact that helped Phish sell Elektra on the idea of making its next release a live album.
The result, ``A Live One,'' contains more than two hours of music recorded during its 1994 fall tour. It bears a price tag of less than $20, which also happens to be the ceiling price of a Phish concert ticket.
Elektra beefed up its promotional efforts for the album, but without subjecting Phish to what Bobby Sheehan of Blues Traveler calls ``the cheesy promotional stuff'' at retail outlets and radio stations.
``They'll make an appearance somewhere if it is absolutely necessary,'' says Lisa Michelson-Sonkin, a director of radio promotions for Elektra, ``but I won't run them around like I would a new band.''
Instead, the label is using a variety of outlets Phish already has in place, like Phish.Net, an on-line fan club begun by listeners, the newsletter and the markets where the band has a large following.
Anastasio says the band's touring is self-sustaining, which means it never has to take tour support from the label or underwrite it with corporate sponsorship.
Phish tours only as much as it wants to (about 100 dates per year) and chooses where it performs. It is winning more control over what and when it records, and it is free of pressure from the label to write hit singles.
``It took a lot of convincing, but Elektra has finally come around to the idea that Phish is not a hit-single-and-MTV kind of band,'' says Paluska. ``We could stop putting out records and continue to grow.''
Phish's popularity is big enough to breed a vague sense among fans that the band has somehow sold out; as one fan said at Great Woods, ``Phish is already way too big - but what can you do?''
It's a lament Phish has heard repeatedly since its days as a Burlington, Vt., bar band, and one it is doing its best to ignore. ``We get it all the time,'' said Gordon. For Anastasio, it comes down to the vision thing, a need to keep in mind why the band got together in the first place. ``You can't hope to satisfy everybody,'' he said. ``The only person you can satisfy is yourself, and the only way we know how to do that is to take ourselves to a higher level musically.''
by CNB