Trey Anastasio (Phish) 1993
A never-published interview with Trey Anastasio (Phish)
I have a long, strange history with Phish. I’m an admirer—nobody dares do what Phish does routinely, which is to play a completely different show and challenge its audience—and a skeptic, because sometimes, they step on their dicks.
In 1997, after the August 10 Phish concert at Deer Creek Music Center in Noblesville, Indiana, I wrote one of the most negative reviews I ever wrote about anyone. The oft-quoted line is this: “To be blunt (and paraphrase the title of a popular book), Phish could urinate in its fans’ ears and tell them it’s music. The fans, in turn, would be there with tape recorders to capture the moment.”
There was not much Internet to speak of at the time, so the review made its way around the Phish world slowly. Angry letters trickled in for the next year or so.
But to his everlasting credit—and one of the reasons I’ll always be a Phish fan—Trey Anastasio responded like this.
At the time of this interview, in 1993, I was strictly an admirer, and Trey and I had a great conversation. The band had put out “A Picture of Nectar,” its third studio album, the previous year, and was about to play in Indianapolis at the 2,400-seat Murat Theatre. But most of our talk was about jamming and taping and the phenomenon that Phish was about to become.
In rereading the transcript after all these years, it’s funny to think that Phish was, at the time, being compared with the Spin Doctors, a band that bit the dust (commercially) not long after. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that no one compares with Phish.
Trey Anastasio (Phish) Links:
Trey Anastasio Interview Transcription:
Trey Anastasio: How you doing?
MARC ALLAN: Just fine, how are you?
Trey Anastasio: Great, thanks.
MARC ALLAN: Good, were you in Cincinnati?
Trey Anastasio: I’m in Cincinnati.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, that’s what I thought, okay. Just checking my area code knowledge, you know? Now you must be having the same ugly looks like it’s gonna rain day that we’re having.
Trey Anastasio: We’re not.
MARC ALLAN: Really?
Trey Anastasio: Not outside my window.
MARC ALLAN: Oh my God.
Trey Anastasio: There’s some clouds on the horizon, but it’s, the sun is beaming through where I am.
MARC ALLAN: Gee and we’re only 100 miles away. But onto the real issues at hand here.
Trey Anastasio: World peace.
MARC ALLAN: Yes, world peace and Phish music, okay. Peace Day is where you sort of have to have a little niche to fit in and an explanation for everything. How do you guys get away with this?
Trey Anastasio: How do we get away with it?
MARC ALLAN: Yeah.
Trey Anastasio: Perseverance? I think that might be it. We’ve been going for about 10 years now. Just basically making decisions based on what we really, I hope, making decisions based on what we really enjoy doing, as opposed to what would be, something that would make the big bucks, or whatever. Boy, that sounds idealistic, doesn’t it?
MARC ALLAN: Yes it does.
Trey Anastasio: I guess what I’m trying to say is that having a whole lot of fun. We had planned on being sort of a touring act from the beginning if there was a conscious decision it was to do that. To get our lives into the situation where we could support ourselves from touring. And so decisions were made with that in mind I think.
MARC ALLAN: So, no plan to be a big record selling band, just you want people to come out and see you?
Trey Anastasio: Yeah that was the, we never talked about getting signed. We never pursued that. We always pursued buying, you know, a better sound system, and practicing, doing musical exercises that would improve improvisation, and stuff like that. That’s always seemed to sort of be the goal and everything thing else just fell naturally into place.
MARC ALLAN: So what kind of improvisational exercises can you do?
Trey Anastasio: Well we’ve been doing things, the latest one, they kind of build on each other without sounding confusing. We do this thing where, right before this tour what we’re doing, we’ll sit around in a circle, four of us, right. One of us will play a short repetitive musical phrase. ♪ Ta-Do, doo da doo ♪ Whatever. Each of the other band members will then sort of complement that phrase with some kind of counter phrase until you have sort of a bed of sound going with everyone playing repetitive things. And the idea is that, each person is listening to the other three and as soon as they hear that the other three people have locked in, they yell, hey. So each person says, hey! And as soon as you yell hey, the person to your right, the person to the right of the initiator of the exercise then slightly modulates their phrase in some way, rhythmically, harmonically, or melodically, right.
MARC ALLAN: Mm hmm.
Trey Anastasio: As soon as that happens the other three members then slightly adjust their phrase to fit with the new phrase. And when you hear that all the other three people have locked into that new phrase, you scream hey again. You can’t move on to the next person until each person has screamed hey. And you can’t scream hey, until you’ve heard that every person has locked into the new phrase. Now, it sounds weird and complicated, but the gist, the crux of the biscuit there is–
MARC ALLAN: Is the apostrophe, I know.
Trey Anastasio: Right, is the apostrophe. The gist is that you have to be listening actively to every other person in the room that’s playing with you, as opposed to sort of getting into your own guitar part, or getting into your one person, you know just focusing in on the drummer. And it’s very hard to listen actively to three different things at the same time.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, that was my next question, how do you concentrate on that?
Trey Anastasio: It’s hard and the exercise has been, it’s great because then we’ve done exercises like this over the years when we practiced. And it’s tuned us into each other in really strong ways, so that when we’re just freeform it provides whatever up on stage. You find yourself listening more actively. A little bell goes off in your head, and if you’ve been ignoring what the keyboard player is doing, or you’ve been ignoring what the drummer’s doing you start reaching out with your ears. And that’s, I think, the most important aspect of improvised music, is listening.
MARC ALLAN: How do you know about these exercises?
Trey Anastasio: We made them up.
MARC ALLAN: Oh, okay.
Trey Anastasio: I mean it started out with things like I play a phrase and everyone imitates it exactly over a groove, which is also hard. You’d be amazed how many people would have trouble with that if I started playing and then everybody has to go . Very, very simple at the most basic level but that’s what, when you’re communicating with each other and you’re communicating with an audience in a live setting, you want to be able to get what’s in your heart straight out without all this blocks in it. It has to go through an instrument and a sound system and everything before it reaches somebody’s ears. And the closer you can get to directly communicating with the other musicians, that thing that you’re trying to say, the closer you can get to that, I think the more powerful the experience is for somebody that comes to the concert. And so these exercises in simplicity help that.
MARC ALLAN: So you’ll do that before you go on tour or will you sit around this afternoon and do that?
Trey Anastasio: No, because you have to have everybody in the same room and that becomes hard on tour. But we do it before we go on tour. We practice a lot, we really enjoy it. It’s a lot of fun. You should try it.
MARC ALLAN: I can’t. Most of the time the typewriter I can’t do.
Trey Anastasio: You could do it on a typewriter.
MARC ALLAN: Probably right. If somebody can play a vacuum cleaner, I can play a typewriter too. And in fact, Brian Eno has done some really interesting stuff on the typewriter.
Trey Anastasio: Right, absolutely. And didn’t John Cage do a typewriter?
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, I believe so. I believe so. I mean I’m more familiar with the Eno stuff but–
Trey Anastasio: These days it would be a word processor, which doesn’t make a very interesting sound.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, it makes kind of a clag. It’s not really much fun but it’s a lot easier to type on, so…
Trey Anastasio: That’s true.
MARC ALLAN: I guess when you get up on stage, do you have any idea what’s gonna happen? I mean is every night just completely different?
Trey Anastasio: Every night’s completely different, but I usually have some idea what’s gonna, I personally more than anyone else in the band have formed some kind of song list type thing. And the idea though is that you don’t have to stick to it. So figuring out cool song lists is something that I just like doing. So I’m always thinking in that way. It’s like writing a big piece of music, you know. And they’re definitely different every night and there’s definitely an anything goes attitude.
MARC ALLAN: Is it risky or are you that good that it’s not a problem?
Trey Anastasio: No, it’s a problem sometimes. And it usually is. This tour has been going very well. We’ve just been having, the more, it’s a funny thing because if you get tense about it, you’re gonna run into problems and if you just kind of let go of yourself and whatever your fears and ego and that kind of thing and get up on stage and just enjoy the experience of playing music, which was the reason that we all got into this in the first place, if you can maintain that, then it’s amazing how much fun it is. And if you’re having fun, that’s what’s translating out to the audience. If you’re worried about proving something, inevitably you’re kind of gonna fail, I think.
MARC ALLAN: What if you’re worried about only proving that you’re good enough? You just want to prove to them yeah, we’re really good, you know. I just wondered does anybody ever get lost?
Trey Anastasio: In the improv kind of?
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, in the improv or anywhere.
Trey Anastasio: Yeah, well sometimes, it depends on what your mood is that day or what your girlfriend said when you called her on the phone. All that stuff starts to come into play. That’s part of the risk. Somebody’s sick, people are tired. We just had one gig I did just recently that I really thought just we couldn’t pull it together. And it was right after the night after a gig that I thought was the best gig of the tour possibly. And there’s just no telling. You go out and you have this incredible show and you think it all feels so simple and logical the way everything’s coming out. And then the next night, who knows? Maybe you’re tired or something.
MARC ALLAN: Now you can tell. Can the audience tell?
Trey Anastasio: I tell you what, that’s a really good question. I’ll tell you what I’ve decided. I think that the audience can tell when it’s really good, everybody knows it, there’s no denying it. If I’m having a bad night, I don’t think that people can necessarily tell. Certain people might but in general, there have been enough times when I said boy, that gig wasn’t that great and then I talk to people in the audience and they all say that was the best show of the tour. And that happens a lot. But the only experience that seems to be sort of universal is when something really, really, truly great happens. I mean out of the ordinary, spectacular, everyone always seems to agree on that.
MARC ALLAN: The songwriting process, is this similar at all to the improvisational exercises? Do the songs come out of that?
Trey Anastasio: Uh, actually pretty different experience. A lot of the stuff I write, I think, most of it, and Mike writes some songs. That can swing all the way to the other side. Like on the new album there’s this song called, “All Things Reconsidered” and that’s composed totally, note for note, all the instruments, on paper and everybody gets their part. That would be the extreme.
MARC ALLAN: You did that? You wrote it out on paper for everybody?
Trey Anastasio: Yeah.
MARC ALLAN: Wow. A band that can actually read music, it’s incredible.
Trey Anastasio: Yeah, we do that. And “Mound,” which is one that Mike wrote, has a big section in the middle of it that’s all written out, which is really hard and it took a long time to prepare. But the cool thing about that, again, is that if you go back and listen to that song, “All Things Reconsidered,” it’s sort of like a fugue. It’s not a strict fugue but it means that each person is playing a single line, except the piano, which is playing two single lines. So it’s a four-part piece and it’s all this one theme that’s getting passed around from one part to another, into the bass, blah, blah, blah, all the way up to the end, never repeating. And when we play that, when you go through the process of learning that, which is pretty hard because it’s a pretty long piece of music, and then to play it, you feel in the playing of something that you feel locked with the other musicians in such a precise, clockwork sort of way that you experience what it’s like to be in that sort of space. And then when you are improvising, having played the written out stuff, opens up a whole new realm in your mind of how good it could be. So you start striving for really hooking up with the other people, as opposed to just kind of making a lot of noise or something. Though that’s a lot of fun too.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, you seem to be just unlimited as far as what you will write, can write, and you’re not locked, the band doesn’t seem to be at all locked into this role, we must write a song that sounds like X. I don’t mean X the band, I just mean whatever. So is that the way it is? Do you just go well, here’s an idea and just go with it?
Trey Anastasio: Pretty much it’s an open pad I think for anybody. And Mike, our bass player, just brought Rift for this tour. Brought in this traditional Hebrew song that’s a four-part acapella thing sung totally in Hebrew and it’s a beautiful piece of music. And really hard, like nothing we’d ever done before. This actually is I think I’m happier about this than anything else about his particular band. I don’t think there’s ever been a moment, since the first couple of years in the band where someone’s said tried this and everybody said oh, we can’t pay that kind of, you know.
MARC ALLAN: Right.
Trey Anastasio: And we’ve tried lots of things, we just are out of our range of capacities as musicians, especially in the singing department. There’s a saying, the first vocal line on Rift is this, a three-part harmony that does the sort of Train thing where it drops down a half . And we had written that in and none of us are gifted singers by any stretch of the imagination. But we work at it and when we got into the studio, we were working with Barry Beckett, who has worked with Aretha Franklin and Reba McEntire and all these really great singers. And we sang that part and the first thing that he said, it was sort of the first hurdle that we bumped into, he said that kind of a thing is something that he only really sees in veteran harmony singing groups would try, you know. You guys just aren’t really that. And we ended up practicing it for two weeks and doing it over an over again and trying to get it so we could, and we tried to stay in pitch with three people dropping down and going back up again. Finally, it ended up working out but I don’t know, there’s always that kind of an attitude anything goes, give it a shot.
MARC ALLAN: That must be fun. I mean that’s got to be a lot better than trying to sound like your last hit record or something like that.
Trey Anastasio: Oh, boy, I would hate that.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, taping is an interesting thing. I mean you guys encourage it and it apparently has really led to a widespread increase in the interest of the band. Do you think other bands are making a mistake by not allowing it?
Trey Anastasio: No, I don’t think so because most other bands have sort of a similar show that they do every night.
MARC ALLAN: Right.
Trey Anastasio: I know Metallica was letting people do it on the live tour. They had people taping it. The thing about taping for us is because it’s sort of different every night, people trade the tapes around and it ends up spreading the word. We don’t sell that many records so, so far, at least. But so I mean when something really great happens, I want people to hear it, you know. And you’re excited about it and I get really, I kind of get off on the idea that people are gonna be trading the tape around. I used to have bootleg tapes, I can remember a bootleg tape of Dixie Dregs I had when I was in high school, I used to listen to all the time. Pat would see me bootleg when he was earlier. He’s let tapes get around.
MARC ALLAN: I’m really into the obscure bootlegs, you know.
Trey Anastasio: Some of these people have huge libraries, mostly dead stuff, but people come to you sometimes with xeroxed copies of their tape libraries and they’ll have 50 bands, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and all type of stuff. Some of it’s good, I mean Carlos Santana, when we did a tour with him, he’s got a huge bootleg tape library. He’s got something like two or 3,000 hours of Hendrix.
MARC ALLAN: Wow.
Trey Anastasio: Video and audio. And Stevie Ray Vaughan, he’s really into and things like that.
MARC ALLAN: I agree with you I guess, now that I think about it. I mean who would like the tape of last night’s Bon Jovi show, compared to the night before?
Trey Anastasio: Because they’re the same.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, exactly.
Trey Anastasio: I mean, once we’ve played the show, as far as I’m concerned, people might as well hear it on a tape. It doesn’t hurt.
MARC ALLAN: Right.
Trey Anastasio: I don’t know what people are afraid of.
MARC ALLAN: Royalties, I guess. They want their money.
Trey Anastasio: I guess yeah, cutting an album deal.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, I would think it would just encourage people to go out and buy more.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, if they like the music, they’re gonna want to go buy the album. Yeah, I mean I doubt any Deadhead stops buying Dead Albums because he gets tapes. And speaking of the Dead, I guess you guys are compared to them all the time and so just open ended, is there anything you want to say about that? To me, I’ll say this, to me it’s a ridiculous comparison because the only comparison that I can really see is that you don’t, you know, you play a different show every night but I don’t consider the Dead adventurous in any sense. If you had to play a different show on every night, but it sounds exactly the same, whereas you guy, who knows. Well usually that’s kind of my attitude. I mean I don’t think that, I think we’re doing something different but sometimes what I’ve found is he who’s writing the article, or she, is gonna have their own opinion and it’s better for, I mean I think we’re doing something different but you either, as the journalist, either do or don’t and that’s gonna come through in the article sort of, you know. I mean in a way, it’s quite ironic, because the Dead, I would say have done two real different albums and those were Blues for Allah and Terrapin Station.
Trey Anastasio: Right.
MARC ALLAN: Generally, Deadheads don’t like those albums, especially with some–
Trey Anastasio: I’d share that with the one that I thought was really cool.
MARC ALLAN: They are. I mean those are my two favorite ones of theirs and I only own about four but it just seemed to me that Deadheads kind of looked down on those. But when you go to see them, everything is the same. I’ve seen ’em five years in row now when they come through and it’s the same. Yeah, it’s the same essential show. There are million, all the songs kind of sound the same, they go off at the same time, they get lost at the same time, it’s pretty different so. And one other question along those lines, and of course I’m asking with tongue firmly in cheek, in 25 years, do you expect to be a fat guy with a gray beard, just coming out of a coma?
Trey Anastasio: I’d better not be coming out of a coma.
MARC ALLAN: Okay.
Trey Anastasio: I don’t abuse my body to that level but I did have a hell of a night last night, you know. But I actually went and saw this thrash band. And wild band, downtown Cincinnati, we walked in this bar. Snowblind, they were called, and they’re two women, two men and the lead person was a woman. It was a lot like Sonic Youth sort of but with their own personalities. Lots of feedback and just this woman was wild. She was almost motionless on stage with this wild music going. And I remember at one point she, I’m getting off on a tangent now but let me pull it back. Anyway, we went over to their house and jammed all night, it was great. We had like this live jam in the basement. Okay, uh–
MARC ALLAN: That’s really cool. Do people, when you walk around, people know who you are, huh?
Trey Anastasio: Well, they ended up kind of knowing, I try to avoid it, I mean no, not like, it’s starting to happen more but it gets embarrassing sometimes a little bit, especially in that kind of scenario because I was there checking out their band and really liking their band. Whatever, I try to just ignore that.
MARC ALLAN: Okay.
Trey Anastasio: But anyway, what was the question?
MARC ALLAN: Well, we were just talking about you coming out of a coma and–
Trey Anastasio: Oh, coming out of a coma. Crazy, that’s right. Well, I’m hoping to get rid of a little bit, I don’t have a gut but it’s starting to grow around there a little bit. I want to get rid of that. No, I don’t want to be like that. I don’t know, sometimes I think, sometimes I think I wish I could write for an orchestra and sometimes I think, I don’t know. It’s sort of like two different issues because musically what happens I think with the success that comes and the touring that comes, that has been coming to us is for one thing, time pressures grow hugely. It’s harder to, when we were less successful, it was almost easier to be more adventurous in the songwriting, though I think that last album, we managed to continue to keep pushing some kind of new boundaries, which I’m psyched about, but just simply because of time. Because in order to write some of the really, like that thing I told you about, “All Things Reconsidered”
MARC ALLAN: Right.
Trey Anastasio: Man that took weeks of eight hours a day or three or four hours a day, probably.
MARC ALLAN: Okay .
Trey Anastasio: But I mean really, you should go back and look.
MARC ALLAN: No, I’m going to, yeah.
Trey Anastasio: It took weeks, it took two or three weeks and it’s only about two minutes long but it’s totally composed and you know you have to sit at the piano everyday with your pencil and your sharpener and your eraser and like go back and change the beginning and go back and rebuild it so it has, and it’s so much fun. I mean it’s like doing a crossword puzzle or playing chess or something. But it takes time and we don’t have time anymore, right now. I mean we were on the road for three and a half months and then we were off for like a month and a half, at which point I was just moving into a house actually. And we went back on the road for seven weeks, which is now. We’re home for two weeks and then we’re in LA for three months doing an album.
MARC ALLAN: Oh.
Trey Anastasio: So this is maybe a roundabout way of answering your question about where am I gonna be in 20 years. I’d like to have a family some time maybe off the road. But then again, I also love playing live and so touring goes along with my life. That’s as far as I can think about it, I think.
MARC ALLAN: All right, just two other things, I’ll let you go. Is there anything you want to tell people about the band or the show or the album that we haven’t talked about?
Trey Anastasio: Not that I can think of.
MARC ALLAN: And the other question I wanted to ask you for another story I’m working on is I want you to look in your crystal ball and tell me in the Year 2000, what do you think music is gonna be like?
Trey Anastasio: Oh, that’s a good question. Good question. God, I’ve thought about that. It definitely seemed to swing a certain way. I think people are, gosh, what do you think it’s gonna be like? You seem to be thinking about this a lot.
MARC ALLAN: I haven’t got a real clear idea. I mean part of me thinks it’s gotten so fractured and that it’s just gonna continue to fragment to the point where you can be friends with somebody and live next door to them and be listening to completely different music. You know when, I mean I’m 34 and a friend of mine at work and I always have this conversation, we listened to the same music growing up, even though I grew up in New York and he grew up in Indianapolis. We had the same experience. We listened to Top 40 radio and we listed to soul music as well as rock and whatever and we have a common experience. But now kids really don’t have that same thing because there’s radio to appeal to absolutely every little …
Trey Anastasio: Then you’ve got the whole black music, white music.
MARC ALLAN: Right and it’s always struck me as interesting like if you watch a movie or television show that’s based around the ’50s or before that, everybody knows the same songs.
Trey Anastasio: Right.
MARC ALLAN: And now you look at it and it would be very hard, beyond Happy Birthday and the National Anthem, I can’t think of too many songs that everybody knows the words to. So I don’t know, that’s sort of been my feeling about it.
Trey Anastasio: That’s a great point. I hadn’t really thought of it. Boy, I mean it’s got to have something to do with the state of our country and maybe in other countries it’s different. I don’t know, I’m wondering about Canada and if it’s going in that direction in Canada the way it is here.
MARC ALLAN: Well, probably, I would think.
Trey Anastasio: Do you think that’s a worldwide phenomenon or a national phenomenon?
MARC ALLAN: Well maybe it’s national because we have so much more media than everybody else.
Trey Anastasio: Right.
MARC ALLAN: But I don’t know, I mean it also seems to me like Phish would have been a bigger band in the ’70s because I think you would have gotten on the radio real easily.
Trey Anastasio: Oh, that whole thing just radio is just getting so conservative. And I think if it wasn’t for, we haven’t made a video yet, by conscious choice, because I’m not all that big a fan of that either. And we may, we will actually. This is just opening a whole new conversation but radio I think is, I think if it wasn’t for MTV, if there’s one thing you could say for MTV, if it wasn’t for MTV you wouldn’t have you know Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and–
MARC ALLAN: I think you’d have ’em, I don’t think you’d have ’em as fast.
Trey Anastasio: I don’t think they would have gotten there. Radio is, I’m just finding out more and more radio is ultra conservative. It’s ultra conservative.
MARC ALLAN: You could look at it in another way, for example, you’re coming here, you’re gonna sell out most likely a 1,900-seat theater. I haven’t seen an ad for it.
Trey Anastasio: Really.
MARC ALLAN: Okay, or heard an ad for it. I guess they probably didn’t think it was really that important. Maybe there have been ads and they just didn’t come my way but–
Trey Anastasio: They certainly haven’t heard anything on the radio .
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, well, it’s a weird kind of radio town. I mean we’ve got the big rock station plays you know I think it’s the old John Mellencamp station.
Trey Anastasio: Oh, yeah.
MARC ALLAN: All Mellencamp all the time. And then we have an adult alternative station that’s really good. It tends to play a lot of stuff that I like, even though they’re not particularly adventurous. And I don’t know if people would know exactly where they would try to sell your band to advertise it and get people to come out to the show. Although I think it’s gonna sell out word-of-mouth wise anyway.
Trey Anastasio: Right.
MARC ALLAN: It’s hard to say where things like that go but it occurs to me that if you were around in the ’70s and there were fewer bands then, there were fewer bands competing for things and the stations were more wide open, that you’d be on the radio without any trouble, whereas now, I mean I’m sure nobody has any idea where to put you.
Trey Anastasio: No, I mean they’ve tried. Our record company is scratching their heads.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah.
Trey Anastasio: We’re selling way more concert tickets than records and the radio stations did nothing. We didn’t put a single. We got into this concept thing and off it went so.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah.
Trey Anastasio: But I like it.
MARC ALLAN: No, as long as they can live with that, that’s not bad.
Trey Anastasio: Well, at least they feel like at least we’re not getting, I mean like one of the higher level executives came to us, came to a show recently in Boston. In Boston is kind of our most popular area so we had sold out like a 17,000-seat venue.
MARC ALLAN: Oh, my God. You played Boston Garden or–
Trey Anastasio: No, we played at Great Woods.
MARC ALLAN: Oh, okay.
Trey Anastasio: And he came backstage and all he could say was well, you guys are doing your job. I guess we’re not doing ours or something. I mean, I don’t care. I’m having a great time. Things are going fine for me.
MARC ALLAN: Well, I’ve written about it and suggested that radio should be a place where you learn because when I was a kid, that’s where you learned about music. I mean that’s where I first heard virtually everything that I like. Whereas, that doesn’t even come close to happening now. Even before I had this job, just as a general consumer, I would either hear it from a friend or read about it or any other way but radio. Radio wasn’t telling me anything that I needed to know.
Trey Anastasio: This is why we rely so much on the concert tapings and stuff because what you just said, hearing it from a friend, and getting a tape from a friend. The other thing that we found is that because of the state of radio, you’re not gonna, it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Like I remember growing up it was kind of a special thing, maybe it still is for kids, I don’t know, a special thing listening to the radio and waiting for and now, I don’t know, it just doesn’t mean much. And I think if your crowd has been, if you’ve developed your crowd through word-of-mouth, one friend telling this other friend or hearing some kind of bootleg tape or something, I think you’re just a lot more excited, intent on coming and having the experience of the concert and really getting into it. Whereas, if you’ve got some radio hit these days, the people that show up at the concert, it’s just a whole different feeling, I guess.
MARC ALLAN: They’re sitting on their hands waiting, waiting, ready.
Trey Anastasio: And everything else, I’ve seen it happen with some friends.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, it just seems like it’s built to be very disposable and that’s why you see so many of these one-hit wonders. I mean there are more now than there have ever been, I think. They just come and go, they have a hit or two and they can’t follow it up and by the time they follow it up, people aren’t interested anyway. They’ve moved on to the next thing.
Trey Anastasio: Yeah, they’ve moved on to a new band.
MARC ALLAN: So anyway, back to the question, where is music gonna be in 2000 do you think?
Trey Anastasio: I’d like to think that there’s gonna be a backlash against this kind of conservatism and that people will start trying new things and sort of some kind of underground upheaval with the dark and a whole bunch of underground bands and then maybe some good college radio stations and then maybe some brave, this is the optimistic view here, some brave radio station would realize that people are sick of it and really want to hear something different. Hopefully the pendulum will swing and it’ll go the other way.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah.
Trey Anastasio: I mean the economy is gonna have a lot to do with it. The ’80s you had this horrible period for music and it was in the middle of this whole Reagan thing and now economically on this downslide and maybe I think that that sometimes results in good music.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, it’s possible, I guess.
Trey Anastasio: You don’t sound too–
MARC ALLAN: No, I’m just, I think there’s a lot of really good music out there and I think it’s not getting to people.
Trey Anastasio: Right.
MARC ALLAN: I’m always very quick to blame radio for that but I don’t know, it’s hard to tell. I’m sitting here, I’m looking at a stack of about 30 CDs on my desk. A lot of great music, most of which I’m sure no one’s ever heard of heard of. And I think that’s kind of bad. I think that’s bad for music. It’s bad when they get the mentality that if you don’t sell 10 million records then you’ve failed somehow.
Trey Anastasio: Yeah, oh that is, we’ve actually had to have and it’s been, our relationship with the record company has been very good but even just the slightest tinge of that that I’ve gotten from the record company has resulted in me making a couple of phone calls and saying look, we have in no way failed. This is exactly where we’ve always wanted to be. I feel like we made a great record. It’s challenging, it’s different, no one ever expected it. None of us ever expected to sell because we knew there was nothing for the radio. And I mean you can fall into that trap. And I think even in their defense, even people in the record company sometimes there’s not really evil intent but suddenly you wake up one morning and you realize you’ve been viewing it as a failure. Oh, this record sold less than our last record and our concert tickets have doubled or something. So from an industry standpoint, that’s kind of, I guess that’s a failure. You want to double your record sales with each record or something like that, as a general rule.
MARC ALLAN: Plus I think you are gonna get, since you get lumped into that Spin Doctor stuff.
Trey Anastasio: Oh, that was a big–
MARC ALLAN: Then that’s a killer because then they go well Spin Doctor sold five million records. Why haven’t you sold five million records?
Trey Anastasio: Oh yeah, that happened, that happened. I mean there was this sudden push like we’re gonna break Phish. And it wasn’t gonna happen, you know. I know those guys are making out. They’re friends of mine. They’re all out doing that because we used to play with them a lot.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah.
Trey Anastasio: But it’ll be interesting to see if they can–
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, they’re a good band. They’ve come through a couple of times on this tour and they have been very different. The first time very loose and jammy and just you know that kind of happy sounding little Miss Can’t Be Wrong that just generally the set generally sounded like that.
Trey Anastasio: Right.
MARC ALLAN: Last time they came through, really just harsh and very straightforward, really darker sounding band.
Trey Anastasio: Wow.
MARC ALLAN: It was really cool. They had evolved. It almost seemed like they were saying, hey you guys are gonna lump us in this category but we’re not that song and we’re good players and we’re gonna show you
Trey Anastasio: That’s great.
MARC ALLAN: and they did so–
Trey Anastasio: That was the Soul Asylum thing?
MARC ALLAN: Yeah.
Trey Anastasio: It came through twice?
MARC ALLAN: No, the first time they came through on their own and then the second time they came through with the Alternative Nation Tour. Soul Asylum was just awful but the Spin Doctors were real surprising. That was a real good night.
Trey Anastasio: That’s great. Great to hear.
MARC ALLAN: But I imagine you’re just running into tons of that kind of thing.
Trey Anastasio: Well, we were but it’s over.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah.
Trey Anastasio: I mean Soul Asylum’s a big band now. Covering the Rolling Stones now in the 15 minutes or whatever, which is good. They’re probably relieved so they can move on to their next album.
MARC ALLAN: Well, I don’t know what their plan is but when they were here they seemed to be doing everything to countermand what they had achieved so far. They just came out and played one of the sloppiest sets that I’ve seen in a long time, especially from a band that was supposed to be out there trying to push itself.
Trey Anastasio: Right.
MARC ALLAN: Came out and just they did five covers in a row at one point in the set.
Trey Anastasio: Really?
MARC ALLAN: Yeah, including “Earache My Eye” by Cheech and Chong.
Trey Anastasio: Really?
MARC ALLAN: Yeah.
Trey Anastasio: What, now when was this?
MARC ALLAN: This was a few weeks ago, about two or three weeks ago.
Trey Anastasio: Man, that’s great. I did see them right near the beginning of the tour and they had gotten that, I think they were doing still the show I think at that point but it’s the beginning of this big, maybe what happened was they, like I said, I was talking to them and everything and I was definitely sensing a little bit of a nearing a breaking point.
MARC ALLAN: Yeah.
Trey Anastasio: Which is good. It sounds like they hit it. They picked a great producer for their next album. And what I mean by great is, I’m spacing on the guy’s name right now, but great in the sense that not a pop hit rock producer.
MARC ALLAN: This is Soul Asylum you’re talking about?
Trey Anastasio: Oh, you’re talking about the Spin Doctors, okay. Okay.
MARC ALLAN: Oh, you were talking about Soul Asylum?
Trey Anastasio: Yeah, I’ve been talking about Soul Asylum. Now Soul Asylum was the one who came out and played really sloppy and did a lot of covers and stuff. Spin Doctors came out and just absolutely just cranked it up.
MARC ALLAN: That’s great.
Trey Anastasio: Yeah, they were good. Anyway, well–
MARC ALLAN: I’m sorry. I was just gonna say if there was anything else you wanted to add, that would be fine.
Trey Anastasio: I think that’s pretty much it.
MARC ALLAN: Okay, well I appreciate your time. Unfortunately, you’re here on the same night as Clint Black so I’ll be at the Clint Black show but hopefully you’ll come back.
Trey Anastasio: We’ll be back. We’re always on the road, it seems like.