“The Sanders thing was something my wife and I seemed to be united on, so there was an extra urgency put on it: ‘Oh, this is something that will help me repair my marriage,’” he says, pausing often to catch his breath while laughing and crying at the memory of the ordeal. “I was trying to make Phish responsible for these fucked-up things in my personal life. They could have said, ‘Marriage counseling is an appropriate place to work that out, Fish.’ But they never said that.”
As much as the music they make, that sort of understanding seems to be at the core of Phish’s second act. Over four decades, they have developed a series of listening exercises, a way of rehearsing not by repeating songs they’ve played since the ’80s but by responding to one another in real time, right now. These days, they practice one dubbed “Including Your Own Hey.” Arranged in a straight line, the quartet begins playing a theme together. When one member changes something, the other three work to react as quickly as possible to that shift. When they lock into a new groove, they shout “Hey,” and another member makes a move, prompting the rest to follow. It’s about being aware, not being right. “There are no wrong notes in this exercise,” McConnell says, laughing. “So you end up with some really weird things that, otherwise, would not have been created.”
That level of communication has only enhanced their relationships with one another offstage. There are inevitable conflicts, Gordon says, but they’re able to hear one another in new ways now. During the summer tour, for instance, Anastasio began to notice that Phish were speeding through many of their standards. At Mondegreen, he sat backstage for hours every day with Jordan, the manager, and McConnell, listening to consensus fan-favorite versions of several songs, counting tempos. When he told the rhythm section they should slow down, Fishman and Gordon saw it as an opportunity to improve, not an insult to resent. The idea, Gordon tells me, immediately made the sets better.
“In a lot of band scenarios, if the guitar player, me, walked up to the drummer and said, ‘We’ve been playing this really fast,’ it would be a fight. ‘Fuck you, man, don’t tell me how to do this,’” Anastasio reckons. “But that doesn’t happen, because everybody’s going in the same direction. The only way this would ever work is with this level of friendship.”
Anastasio was right when he told Gordon in 2008 that the second edition of Phish would allow for life beyond the band. Though they’ve hit the road several times every year since 2009, 2020 excepted, they’ve never been bound to asphalt like they were in the ’90s.
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