I'd Catapult Downtown

The first Phish album I ever owned - purchased after reading an article lumping them in with the Spin Doctors, a favorite band at the time - was 1991's "A Picture Of Nectar". There was no song list on the back and - with the exception of the group's name scrawled on the spine in a dangerously irregular hand (a sure sign of delirium I should've picked up on) - there was no hint that it was by a band called Phish. I had no idea what I was getting into. Listening to it was a treat. It was full of complex, challenging music, the likes of which I'd never encountered. Of course, at the time, I didn't really think about it on those terms. I just thought it was nifty. As a neophyte, I was admittedly drawn in initially by the catchy and utterly weird melodies.

About three-quarters of the way through the album came the Mango Song. "Aha, oddly pleasant," I thought to myself. "Something I can play for my mother." After a short progression of solos came the last "verse", which featured a trio of band members singing the previous three verses on top of each other. It was jarring. The words ground and gnashed and crashed against each other, though the melody was the same. It was something of a shock. Probably because I could ignore the instrumental sections of the music if I so chose, the array of instrumental discordance on the album didn't quite bother me in the same way.

I noticed it upon my first close listen to the disc. The lyric book was open in front of me. I couldn't figure it out. I kept flipping the pages back and forth, wondering why the songs weren't in the same order as they were on the CD. I couldn't quite make out any lyrics in the last "verse" that seemed to match up with what was on the page. Eventually, after finding my way online, and consulting the FAQ, I found out what they were doing.

After that, I began to follow the band closely via the phish.net, trade tapes, and generally try to absorb as much as I could. With each album that came out after "Nectar", there was a tidal wave of criticism that followed on the net. This is old hat. It's been going on since the band's earliest days. People complain that, for whatever reason, the band is (gasp of gasps) selling out. There's an oft-told anecdote about a fan who sat at the bar balling her eyes out when the band migrated from the cozy confines of Nectar's to the... cozy confines of the Front. "They're just not our band anymore!" she wailed.

While every now and again, fans' grievances have to do with non-musical actions the band has taken (such as releasing a video for Down With Disease in 1994, for example), most complaints have to do with whatever current musical course - or plight, as some folks would have it - the band is on. "Selling out" - by most people's definition, including my own - involves compromising one's music in order to move units. At the first twittering of a possible radio single, people swarm over the band like goddamn vultures, picking, poking, and prodding at the band's intentions. "They're just doing this to get on the radio!" people cry.

Specifically, people often cite what they see as a decline in Trey Anastasio's compositional skills. The basic premise is that vocals equal accessibility and, ergo, commercial potential... and, from there, sell-out. In a sense, the predominance of vocals in Phish's recent music is a sure sign of the coming end-times; an apocalyptic period where Phish will catapult downtown and become America's reigning boy band. A more paranoid Phish dorque might take Catapult - a piece with only vocals on "A Picture Of Nectar", two tracks before the Mango Song - as the first indication that the band had signed a pact with the dark lord.

In "Moses and Monotheistic Religion", Sigmund Freud conceived a theory as to why the Jewish race - at least from a stereotyped, sociological perspective - consider themselves to be clearly the superior religion on this planet. It was rooted, he said, in the fact that the faith prohibited idolatry. In other words, no one was allowed to conceive of any image of God, nobody was allowed to think about what He might look like.

Freud, of course, managed to bundle this neatly into his always-applicable theory - his Holy Trinity - of the Id, the Ego, and the Super-ego. To summarize - a little bluntly, at that - the Ego represents the conscious mind; the Id the yearning to do stuff (good or bad); and the Super-ego the collective conscience of society, taken and internalized by the individual. The Jewish religion, Freud said, was one of self-denial. The Id yearned to come up with an image of God. Meanwhile, the Super-ego kept this urge in check, reminding the subconscious of the ban on idolatry. When the consciousness ultimately obeyed the Super-ego, the Ego was then bolstered. The person felt uplifted because he upheld the central tenet of his - and, for that matter, His - religion.

I think there's a very large element of that involved in listening to predominantly instrumental music, such as Phish's was and - to a large extent - still is. People listen to music without lyrics and, therefore, have no concrete imagery to go on. There are no graven images to lock onto and filter the music through. It's an automatic self-denial. In many cases, it results in snobbery. While it is true that Trey has forsaken longer instrumentals in favor of shorter more vocal-based pieces, I'd argue that his skills as a writer and arranger of music have remained quite intact, if just a little subtler. Many fail to take into account the actual substance and content of the vocals. They are, in a sense, articulated notes. In recent years, with the increasing maturity of Tom Marshall's lyrics, the vocals have taken on a new importance in Phish's music.

Through Phish's first albums and original songs, the lyrics seemed almost an afterthought. The only time when vocals really came to the forefront in an original composition was the vocal jam that developed out of You Enjoy Myself. While innovative, it was - for lack of a better word - unschooled. In early vocal jams, one gets the distinct impression that he is hearing the vocal equivalent of a bunch of dudes thrashing away blindly on guitars in a garage. That said, both garage bands and vocal jams have produced some pretty cool stuff.

Several years into the band's career, some amount of focus began to get placed on the vocals. The little three-in-one verse trick on the Mango Song is really the first example of composed vocal experimentation in Phish's music. The vocals layered on top of each other were a neat little effect. On the next disc, "Rift" (1993), the experiment continued on the chorus of It's Ice with Trey and Page McConnell delivering the lyrics just out-of-synch with each other (mirroring the mutated dualism of the lyrics). While the words were the same, the fact that they were slightly out of step resulted in an interesting discordance -- not entirely unlike that of the fugue form that Anastasio was so fond of in his earlier works. In both of these, the vocals had become tools of the composer -- actively, as opposed to grudgingly, employed to further the music.

Like the fight between body and reflection in It's Ice, the vocals had begun to pull apart from each other. An early draft of Taste - known as the Fog That Surrounds by some, Tasty Fog by others (in reference to its hybridization with an even earlier incarnation of Taste - played on the 1995 fall tour featured overlapping vocal parts by Trey and Jon Fishman. The arrangement failed for several reasons. One important one was that it was one of Fish's very first serious vocal parts. He wasn't quite adept at holding a melody by himself. When placed in direct contrast with Trey's part, it was unnecessarily conflicting.

By spring 1996, when it came time to record "Billy Breathes", the Fog That Surrounds had been scrapped. Featured on the album, though, was Swept Away > Steep -- one song that was really two... or, perhaps, two songs that were really one. The first half was a gentle acoustic ballad, very similar to the other material on the disc, featuring Trey singing an utterly beautiful melody, his voice cracking and creaking as it got quieter. The second half, Steep, was almost the first part's doppelganger. The music, drawn from an aborted attempt at recording a group composed album-length piece called "the Blob", is dark. The vocals feature a pair of contrasting melodies, right on top of each other, delivering the same part. The result is stunning.

The progression has continued. Instead of using guitar, keyboards, bass, and drums as his the primary colors on his palette, Trey has begun to use four increasingly in-tune voices to forward his musical ideas. Countless songs written since 1997 have used the band's voices to place different melodies in opposition or concordance with each other. Many of these songs are featured on 1998's "the Story Of The Ghost": Fikus, Meat, Limb By Limb, Roggae, End Of Session. Songs written since then have also highlighted this new layered vocals approach: Meatstick, Gotta Jiboo, Heavy Things and others.

Classical purists had - and have - a hard time taking the work of the late Frank Zappa seriously. Classical music is traditionally realized in strings, horns, and other respectable instruments -- not electric guitars, trap drums, and keyboards. Later in his career, when he began to adapt some his earlier electric work for classical ensembles (notably the Dog Breath Variations > Uncle Meat on "the Yellow Shark" [1993]), classical listeners began to take notice.

Would it take an all-instrumental version of Heavy Things to make some people realize the beauty of it? Of course, an all-instrumental version of the song would prevent the band members from playing their other parts. Breaking it down, Trey's music has really become quite ergonomic. Instead of having a series of verses with chord changes beneath them followed by "serious" explorations of the themes, the exploration takes place directly in the song's vocal melody. It essentially folds the music in half, at once adding a new level of complexity to it while simplifying other elements.

The band, specifically Trey, has continued to experiment with the vocals. On one hand, it seems kind of innocuous. On the other hand, that's part of the genius of it. The fact that the band is singing detracts from the "music" of the song. It's the lyrics that are delivering the songs compositional content. If Trey had come up with any one of these melodies, say, ten years ago, it would have been realized in instruments. The band members were already quite proficient at their instruments by 1990. It's only a comparatively recent development that they've become accustomed to their own voices.

Over the course of the past year, You Enjoy Myself vocal jams - so often a bastion of vocal chaos aided and abetted by soundman(ipulator) Paul Languedoc - have been increasingly melodic. The band has relied less and less on echoing and doubling processors from the soundboard and more and more on the power of their own voices. Just as the band moved from garage rock thrashers to schooled musicians over the course of their first years together, the same has recently happened with their vocal improvisations.

Catapult, that amusing little vocal-only ditty from "A Picture Of Nectar", has been seen ever more frequently in the band's live sets. The song is not fixed. Often, since it's debut in 1992, it simply featured Mike Gordon speaking the lyrics on top of a jam. In the past year - notably at the PNC Bank Arts Center on 7/15, at Alpine Valley on 7/24, and in Big Cypress on 12/31 - Trey and Mike have taken to creating spontaneous vocal arrangements for the song, the two singing the parts a few beats off, though in harmony. It's a subtle and beautiful experimentation. Though few in the downtown New York jazz scene would likely be open to accepting Phish into their ranks, it seems Phish continues to catapult downtown.

By the time you read this Jesse Jarnow will have fled the country.