Jam Masters Get It On Tape

12/03/1998 7:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Mac Randall

"At the end of 1996, we instituted this 'no analyzing' rule. I don't know if you read about that." Trey Anastasio, the guitarist for Phish, pauses on the other end of the phone to utter a hearty guffaw over the somewhat unusual ways in which his band works. "We had been so hyperanalytical for years, about everything, and it was a really interesting path to go down with three other people, to be exploring every aspect of music to that kind of depth. But we got to a point where we said, 'The only way to get to the next level is to stop talking about all this stuff.' Which we did. We started just playing these shows and trying to incorporate all the exercises and things we'd been talking about for the last 12 years. And then at the end of these U.S. and European tours, we decided to just go into the studio and jam."

The studio was Bearsville in upstate New York, where the band had recorded its previous album, Billy Breathes. In fact, the sessions for Billy Breathes had begun with a similar tactic; the four members of Phish (Anastasio, keyboardist Page McConnell, bassist Mike Gordon, and drummer Jon Fishman) had conducted an experiment they called "The Blob," which began with each one of them playing a single random note, and then built from there. "It's funny," Trey remarks, "we always start extreme and then kind of reel things in. 'The Blob' was like, 'We've got to find some new way, so let's just start with one note.' And that was like a first step toward what we did on this one." But whereas little of "The Blob" appeared on Billy Breathes, the new jams at Bearsville would eventually yield the majority of the songs appearing on Phish's latest release, The Story Of The Ghost (Elektra).

It wasn't planned that way, though. Anastasio insists that going into Bearsville, the band had no intentions of releasing anything they recorded. Even after they'd put down over 40 hours' worth of spontaneous studio improvisations, all they figured was that maybe sometime in the distant future they could use the best of it for an instrumental album. It only became clear later, after listening to selections from the sessions, that they could potentially use the material for something more. Far from being random, the jams had "a natural sense of musical form. When we played the jam on 'Roggae,' for example, it just naturally took on A sections and B sections. That all just happened. It comes from having gone through so much history together."

And so, armed with some basic recording gear, a book of poems by longtime lyricist Tom Marshall, and four hours or so of tape comprising the best of the Bearsville jams, Phish retreated to a rented farmhouse in Stowe, Vermont, and set about turning the raw material into actual songs. Just like the original tracks, the vocal melodies and harmonies that they added in the farmhouse were generated spontaneously. "It was a really cool process," Trey says, "really spur-of-the-moment. It felt like, by not even thinking we were making an album, we kind of fooled ourselves into capturing genuine spontaneity on plastic." Returning to Bearsville, the group tweaked the songs that they'd constructed from the jams, and added several more that Anastasio and Marshall had written separately over the same period of time. The result is Phish's most accomplished and engaging studio album to date, ranging from the furious, Talking Heads-ish funk of "Birds Of A Feather" to the airy, fragile harmonies of "Frankie Says."

It's a little surprising that a band that basically made its name, and acquired a legion of followers, over the last 15 years for its live jamming would have taken so long to harness that same approach in the studio. The reason for that, Anastasio explains, is that it's taken Phish a long time to "answer the question: 'How can we get into that space to unapologetically track in the same sense as we improvise onstage?' Album-making in the past has been a totally foreign element to us," he admits. "We're most comfortable as a band when the four of us are in an atmosphere where we can improvise at some level and be in the moment. But at the same time, we've never liked long, meandering albums. I think somewhere there's a belief that improvisation and spontaneity equals boring, non-concise music. Which it doesn't, to me." Finding the proper balance between spontaneous and concise isn't easy, but on The Story Of The Ghost, Phish has pulled it off.