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Energy is Eternal Delight: The Budnick-Silberman Rap On Phish and The Dead

[Editor's Note: The bold text in this article is meant solely as a reading aid, and in no way establishes any sort of favoritism between the two writers. (even if Dean does work here)]

[Steve's note: When Dean Budnick's The Phishing Manual came out, I felt like I was reading a cousin-once-removed of the book I wrote with David Shenk in 1994, Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads. Though it turned out that Dean hadn't even read our book when he wrote his, Dean and I share a funny role in the annals of jam-band fandom, being members of the subcultures we tried to do justice to in books, and trying to tell even obsessive fans things they didn't know about the thing they love most, while remaining comprehensible to readers who are just learning what it's all about.

One night about a year ago, Dean and I rapped about the bands we love, the improvisatory process, psychedelia, the Dead's last batch of tunes and Phish's most recent batch at the time, along with bliss, transcendence, and the future of the music. Special thanks to Jean Sienkewicz for transcribing our free-floating riffs. - S.S.]

[Editor's note- while Steve and Dean produced an initial stab at this article in the fall of 1997, the following conversation actually took place in the spring of 1998...}

Dean Budnick: Last night, some members of Phish went to see the band the Disco Biscuits, at a little club in Pennsylvania. I dig the Biscuits and obviously I dig Phish so I kept receiving reports... Mike was in the audience, bobbing his head, Trey was at the bar buying tequila shots. Basically, they were there enjoying the music. To some degree, I assume that's getting more and more difficult for them to do. I've been up to Burlington a number of times when they're been in the audience, and I've seen them on stage with some local bands. It's obvious that there they have their own niche, so people give them space. I think it's interesting and actually quite wonderful that they're still making an effort - particularly when they're on the road - that they still want to be at the point where they can just go into a bar on their day off, and hear a band.

Steve Silberman: When I interviewed Trey for DDN a few years ago [issue #31], he mentioned that something that had made a huge impression on him was going to see Adrian Belew [guitarist who played on Talking Heads' "Remain in Light" and other albums] when he was a kid, and Adrian was just hanging out at the bar. He was very approachable.

DB: They used to do that. I can particularly remember seeing them at the Living Room, the old Living Room, the Big Bubble Living Room [in Providence, RI] and they stopped playing, walked right offstage and went up to the bar. People came up to them and talked to them. It was chill. I think that kind of exchange makes everyone happy. I didn't go to Europe, but I heard very similar experiences, particularly in February and March, that they were very much doing that as well.

SS: One of the things that struck me about Phish when I first saw them, and then very much when I got the chance to talk to them, was that they seemed like a band made of peers of mine. They're a little younger than me, but it seemed like they were a band that consisted of people who were young enough to have grown up really digging other bands - understanding not only what it means to be a professional musician, but what it means to be a fan.

DB: I think they're still in touch with that. I think the fact that they opened shows for Santana in Europe during the summer of 1996 very much speaks to that. The members of Phish pretty much are my age - I'm 32. And actually, age plays a role in my enjoyment of the band. Maybe not so much age itself, as the shared cultural experience it represents. The members of Phish pretty much grew up listening to a lot of the same music that I did. They were tuned into the same '70s FM music, and they're certainly not ashamed of that fact. Listen to the Mike's Song on "Slip Stitch and Pass," for instance. While we're talking, I just threw on a show I was at that I really like, from Dallas in '94, and there's this jam out of Tweezer that just goes through a number of '70s songs, like Sparks, Sweet Emotion, Walk Away. I really like the fact that on occasion, they'll tease or quote a song and something inside me clicks.

Anytime they quote Sabbath or Deep Purple, I blink back to junior high and I think about the journeys I've traveled since then and how satisfying it is to be right here, right now. Although the revelation is instantaneous and ineffable - putting it into words doesn't do it justice. But when that happens, this wave of electric glee will just travel through and tickle me. It's like when they did the acoustic version of Foreplay/Long Time acoustic. I found it entertaining on any number of levels, to take the quintessential mid-70's electric album and perform a song from it with acoustic instruments. It's funny, and at the same time it allows you to reconsider the song itself, and decide if there's more to it than just Brad Delp and Tom Scholz's screaming vocals and guitars. When I first saw them play this, there was this moment of recognition, that yup, they too were listening in 1976 when they played that Boston album all the time on the radio.

SS: Right. And one of the great things about the band is they don't make a distinction between "high" and "low" culture in music. They'll play the 2001 theme, they'll play Walk Away, they'll play Free Bird. But they'll also play How High the Moon, and get into these spaces that are like McCoy Tyner meets Bill Frisell. There's almost a redemptive quality to their music, because they say, "Yes, these tunes are in the back of your mind - and it's okay!" You can pour those tunes into a jam, and if you play your balls off, it'll be music worth listening to, and worth playing.

DB: Yeah, in fact, I wish they did more of that. I wish they would feel comfortable playing more jazz standards. Caravan has come back a little bit. I mean aside from my '70's comment, they have a very strong sense of history. I think it's great when they introduce people to music that might be unfamiliar. I think it was when I first heard Paul & Silas, I went out and bought a Bill Monroe disc. And then, after some initial resistance I'll admit, I really started getting into bluegrass. I had always found it sort of hokey, but now I see it as authentic. It's one of our own indigenous musics. I imagine the Dead must have been like that for you on some levels.

SS: Very much so. Certainly I ended up using albums like "Old & In the Way" and "Diga" as stepping stones into lots of other music. There's an album called "Seastones" which is about as far away from pop music as you can get - 20th Century musique concrete. And the main thing was having drums and space and the jamming every night, which gave me ears to hear and appreciate tonalities that I wouldn't have had ears for if I had been listening to a less imaginative band.

DB: Sure. What do you think about Phish's explorations along these lines?

SS: I remember being very happy, during Reba at the Spreckles Theater in '94, that the jams seemed to be going to more and more strange and committed places, places that were further away from the melody. Something used to happen with the Dead which definitely has been happening with Phish for some time now, where they not only leave the confines of the melody, but they arrive somewhere else that is fully itself - creating musical landscapes, one after the other. In the last year, they've been playingwith funk space a lot. I remember hearing a tape of Ghost from Vienna, where they started bending the pitches on their instruments down as they kept jamming, so the context of everybody's notes kept changing, but they kept it together. It was the strangest music that I'd heard since the Dead, but it was also very danceable.

DB: That's where they're at right now - almost all of their segues are funk. And many second sets have been four or five songs with really long, funky jams. I think that sometimes people who aren't necessarily big funk fans don't appreciate it. Sometimes it seems like these people are genetically predisposed against it. As a result, they don't care to listen to the changes you're describing. They did this jam out of Runaway Jim at Worcester, 11/29, and while some people really liked it, and not only found it danceable but also rather complex and interesting, other friends of mine whose musical tastes I typically share were bored by it. To me these people just couldn't get past their funk issues.

SS: Right.

DB: There was a lot happening. Some people around me were really into it - they were dancing their butts off for an hour just to that one song, and there's a beauty and majesty to that. I was really into Fishman. I was really locking on him during that jam. I think people don't always appreciate what's going on there. The bottom's real interesting at a Phish show. There are times where I'll lock on Mike for an entire set. I'll listen to everyone else, and I'll appreciate Fish and Page and Trey, but in the context of locking on Mike. Phish makes beautiful, catchy, pleasing, energetic music, and it's wonderful to enjoy it on any number of levels.

SS: For me, the moment of realization about what the Dead were doing came when I was lying on my friend Marc's bed when I was in high school - probably in 1973 or something - and he was playing China Cat Sunflower into I Know You Rider from "Europe '72." I had been raised on vocal music. My mother was an amateur folk singer during the coffeehouse era. The first album I ever bought was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's "Deja Vu," so I knew that lyrics could tell a story. But listening to the transition between China Cat and I Know You Rider, I realized that instruments could tell a story too, and that you could be taken somewhere, go on a journey that was just as coherent - if a little bit less easily explainable to someone else - with sounds alone. So I'll be happy if I hear a 60-minute Runaway Jim this New Year's run, because Phish is so tight and so telepathic in the way that they improvise, they're always together, no matter where they're going.

DB: They've stated that one of their goals as band members is to listen to everyone else at the same time - to become unconscious, egoless. And when I am listening to them, I'll try to do that. Either by locking on one of them, and letting the others sort of flow by, or if I'm really feeling rowdy, I'll try to absorb all four of them, individually, at once. It really is a very exhilarating experience when you can work yourself up into that mindset. And frankly, I'm not sure at times if I'm doing it or I'm just hallucinating that I'm doing it, but I really find that level of concentration and aural participation leaves me with quite a buzz.

SS: Right. People talk about the whole notion that the music is already there in the air, and the musicians are a hose - that you just have to get out of the way of an ongoing process. Tom Constanten, who played keyboards with the Dead in the late sixties, was talking about Dark Star, and he said something like "Dark Star is always going on - they just drop into it sometimes, and then drop out of it." It's a conception of spirituality that has nothing to do with believing in God or any other deity, but just believing that there's some kind of self-organizing intelligence that you can access through music or writing or other art. The Beats talked about "spontaneous bop prosody" - writing as a picture of the spontaneously inventive mind. Ginsberg and Kerouac would lie and say that they didn't revise, but still there was that taste of that kind of raw, unprocessed, unmediated spontaneity that the Dead and Phish chase every night.

DB: I think that's right; I think that's something that anyone who does any sort of creative art often taps into as well. For instance, if you're just writing an article or a paper or a play, or even just posting something to a Usenet newsgroup, every once in awhile you'll be in a zone, and you'll put together a wonderful collection of words or articulate a particular thought and you'll think, "Wow, where did that come from?" or sometimes even, "There's something much deeper there than I realized when I was writing it." It doesn't have to be written, it can be anything that involves creative expression. And I think that everyone in some phase of their lives, taps into something - that force, that spooky-good force that enhances the creative process. And it's a really an exceptional ecstatic experience. That's why I enjoyed seeing the Grateful Dead, and it's why I love seeing Phish, because I guess you could describe them as Cosmic Enablers. I feel that they can draw me into that zone.

SS: That's also why some of the tribute stuff that has followed the death of Jerry Garcia - even when executed by very well-meaning bands - it's like, "OK, now they're going to play a Grateful Dead song the way the Dead would have played it." The great thing about the Dead and Phish is that they would deconstruct themselves every night, and try to come up with something which was totally unlike what they had played the night before.

A lot of Deadheads' favorite performance of all time is a Dark Star from February 13, 1970. I have a tape of the Dark Star they played the next afternoon, and you can hear - when the rest of the band tries to go into the same melodic sets of changes that worked so gloriously the night before - you can hear Jerry almost harshly vetoing those pathways, because they had just played them. He forces the band into places that are, in fact, not nearly as pretty as the night before, but they're relentlessly new.

So the Dead never turned into a tribute to themselves. There's something about hearing these really polite readings of Friend of the Devil and that doesn't strike me as very much in the spirit of the Dead, because the Dead would attack pious recreations of the past with whatever strangeness they could tap into in the moment.

DB: I have the same experience when I see Phish nowadays. They constantly re-configure and recreate a lot of their songs. The final jam in Harry Hood, for instance - one of my all-time favorites - they used to perform differently, in a way that peaked in 1992 and 1993. Before the final verse, the jam would build and and build, and then Trey's guitar would just start screaming over the top, a glorious tension and release. It was an exhilarating, joyous contrast to the beautiful, intricate jam that the band had built prior to that. Sometimes I'd hear that, and I'd just turn to jelly. Then in 1994, they stopped doing it that way because, basically, at some point they could only go so far with it, and they started adding a lot more textures to that final jam. And I continue to enjoy it, but it just doesn't provoke the same visceral, giddy reaction. Every now and again I'd love for the band to do it again the old way, but I can appreciate why they don't. I'm a bit torn on that one, I have to admit.

SS: Now that we're coming to the end of the century, there's a little perspective on the music of the last 50 years. I think about a musician like Miles Davis, who started out inventing be-bop with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, and he actually wasn't as good as they were technically, but he took their drive towards new sounds, and his whole life, one album after the other, his albums would destroy whatever beauty he had come up with before, for the sake of the possibility of creating new beauty. To be honest, I don't like some of Miles' electric stuff from the late '70s. At a certain point, I wish he had gone back and played acoustic music. But he never would have come up with "In a Silent Way" if he'd still been trying to play "Kind of Blue." Same thing for an artist like Joni Mitchell or Neil Young or Bob Dylan, where they refuse to do again what they've already accomplished, and they almost weird you out on purpose. I hear a new Joni Mitchell album and I think, "Oooh, this is kind of - I don't know about this." And then two weeks later, it's as if I've been given an education, and then I love it. I think that Phish is doing that for their audience.

DB: Although I do believe you can take it too far, to the point where artistic integrity meets selfindulgence and saps the joy out of the whole thing. I'm thinking here of somebody like Todd Rundgren, whose career hinges on the battle he wages with his particular demon, which happens to be the ability to write witty, intelligent pop music. I respect what he does, from a capella to a full band in the 60's mode, to his interactive rap disc, to his bossa nova project out right now. I think it's important to experiment and stay out of the ruts but at times I just wish he'd go back to what he does best, at least occasionally. That's my knock on Todd, whose music has brought me a lot of pleasure over the years. That and the fact that I have to hear Bang on the Drum All Day every time I go to a sporting event, which drives me batty.

SS: Right, well, you wouldn't want Phish to keep an amp open every night so that some guy could wander up there and jam with them. That might be amusing for one night, but basically we want them to deliver us somewhere, to take us with them. That's why we pay money to see them.

DB: With Phish, I definitely get the sense - and this really holds true if you're up front when you can watch them interacting and their facial reactions - that they are just as that amazed by what's happening as you are. It's easy to be glib about that, because obviously they're extraordinarily proficient musicians, but nonetheless, you really get the sense that like the audience, they too are watching this amazing thing going on, as they call to the heavens and summon forth this beautiful music. To me, that's one of the great pleasures of being up front at a Phish show - that sense of majesty that they share with the listener. When I saw the Dead, those few occasions where I was up front, I didn't necessarily get that from them. And I'm not sure why that is. Maybe if I had seen them earlier in their career, or maybe that's just my misreading of their facial expressions and tics. Jerry certainly didn't smile as much on stage as Trey does, but maybe I'm just picking up simple cues, I don't know, that was always the impression that I...

SS: When did you start seeing the Dead?

DB: Oh, mid-'80s. And I probably didn't go up, I never had good enough seats where I was up front until a few years later.

SS: When I would see them in the '70s, Jerry would, in fact, smile a lot, and it was fantastic to see him do a little dance if he was really getting into something. To someone who had only seen the early '90s Jerry, the thought of Jerry doing a little dance of joy as he came into some incredible jam is almost unimaginable. As time went on, I think they not only had to accept the fact that it was a job, and they were supporting all these people, but also I think, unfortunately, the magnitude of their following and the intensity, the particular intensity of the scene - you know, if Jerry had cared to look out into the audience and lock eyes with people, ten percent of the crowd would have thought that he was having telepathic communications with their particular acid trip. I think the heat, the incredible psychic energy that was focused on the Dead, made them withdraw. I was certainly a part of it - I had my own moments when I was right up front, and I thought that Weir was connecting with me or something [laughs].

Garcia had been a hilarious bullshit artist onstage when he was a bluegrass musician, constantly joking around - even in the early days of the Dead, up through about 1970, you heard Garcia making a lot of comments and jokes from the stage, and what happens around 1970 or so is that you hear people shouting out the names of songs, and then whenever the band starts interacting with the audience, it turns into people yelling "Saint Stephen!" I think eventually that punishes the band, so that they withdraw into this bubble, a psychological bubble, and also an actual bubble of roadies, trying to keep people away from them. That's something I've always appreciated Phish for, the processes they have - like the big ball jam - to tear down the wall between them and the audience.

DB: Sure, the BBJ or even something as simple as the chess games that Phish played with the audience in the fall of 1995. One of the highlights of my Phish concertgoing experience was when I made the audience move on a Saturday night in New Haven [12/2/95]. The assumptions and messages the band sent out with the chess game were that we're all very much in this together, we respect the fact that you're all here, and that many of you are here night after night after night. So here's something else we can do. The one funny thing about the chess game was - well, I tape, and I was down in the taper's section where the tapers would do nothing but bitch about the moves that everyone else would make. Some of those people who were there night after night would gripe. And I would say, "Come on, let's go over to the Greenpeace table and make a move." But no one would want to leave their decks. They felt, "Hey, we have the right to bitch." That speaks to something else, the fact that whether it be Dead or Phish, people love acquiring the cultural capital to show that they've been to enough shows or have enough knowledge to start complaining about the band.

SS: In a sense, bitching is a binding force in the culture. If you can bitch - "Oh my God, another Easy Answers!" - you must really be inside the culture. One thing that was great about going to shows with people who were not every-show Deadheads was, I'd be sitting there thinking, "Oh no, Miracle out of Space?" And they'd be like, "It was great!" Because for them, it would be a rare chance to immerse themselves in the process of discovery, whereas for someone who'd been there three nights that week already, what they were hearing on Thursday wasn't as good as on Tuesday.

DB: Sure, that's like, there are certain Phish songs that are quick and sweet, something like Sparkle or Poor Heart that have caused my friends to sit down. Sparkle, for the most part, doesn't change, and if you're really at the show to have some transforming experience, that probably isn't going to be the song for you, although frankly it's often a nice change of pace. And frankly, when they play that tune, what I'll often do is look around and find the one person who is insanely into it because it's such a gleeful, happy song and this is someone who really came to the show in many ways hoping to hear, among other things, Sparkle, because they happen to love that song and they want to dance really fast to it. And I sort of vicariously enjoy the tune through them, or at least I remember what it was like when I felt the same way about it. Of course, my other approach is just to listen to a band member who I usually don't focus on during that particular tune. During Sparkle for instance, I might focus more on Fishman. But I have to admit that one of my pet peeves is people who arbitrarily bitch.

I also think that people who are into the Phish scene - because the band doesn't have as much history as the Dead- they really want to accelerate to the point where they can start bitching about stuff. I know someone who did most of the fall tour last year, and all he did was complain about the set lists and the number of repeats. To me, if you're going to complain about setlists, and stand there inside the show and make a spectacle of yourself when they do a repeat, if that's all the Phish experience has become for you - the chance to be there to see a really rare song - then maybe you should re-evaluate why you're there in the first place. Because there's certainly a remedy for that: take a step back and start seeing fewer shows.

SS: Phish has been breaking out a lot of new compositions in the last year or so. How do you think their music is changing compositionally?

DB: I think they've gone through a couple of phases. Certainly, I think that going back, let's say, two years, that they turned to simpler or more classic song structure with the songs on "Billy Breathes." Now I'd assume that these songs were very much a reaction to a lot of what they had done prior to that point. And now the stuff that they've come back with has been a little bit more varied and complex. Meanwhile, the lyrics have become, I don't necessarily want to say more mature but many of them tend to reflect more mature themes, without losing their wry perspective on life. OK, maybe Dogs Stole Things is a bit goofy and I mean that in a positive way. But a song like Dirt, I think, draws in the listener and produces an emotional reaction that something like Slave, or Reba, or even Rift, never did. I think that the latest batch demonstrates that the band can certainly still write and perform songs with complexity but nowadays they call much less attention to it. They're less flashy but just as intricate and captivating, if not more.What did you think about the last batch of Dead songs that came out?

SS: Days Between was a masterpiece, I thought, because it was melodically so simple - that little sequence of notes that Garcia would play was like this huge door opening. And the lyrics were so mature. A young lyricist could never have written that lyric because of its mixture of sadness and resignation and joy and wonder and understanding of the complex nature of experience.

There was something about Days Between - about the place the band would go in it - that I think everybody felt: that something really magnificent was coming to an end.

For the last year and a half or so of the Dead's existence, I was constantly rebutting rumors online, because Deadheads would come into a chat room on AOL and say, "I heard that the Dead are going to stop touring, because they played Unbroken Chain, and that means it's the end." There were all kinds of folk superstitions circulating, especially with all the horrible news from the final tour of people being struck by lightning, killed by collapsing balconies, and that sort of thing. I remember I was called by the Washington Post, and the reporter said to me, "So - do you think there's any truth to the rumor that this tour is cursed by God?"

I wanted to say like, "Fuck you!" But actually, in a sense - it wasn't "cursed by God," but what everybody was feeling was that something huge was coming to an end, and it literally turned out to be true. A song like Days Between was able to express that - the magnificence and the sadness, and the feeling that a great source of energy was about to pass out of our lives - in a really beautiful way.

Other songs in that batch, like Lazy River Road, Liberty and whatnot, they were all right. But a song like Lazy River Road I thought was almost like "Garcia does Garcia" - it was like a re- creation, Garcia toying with the ability to produce another song like that, rather than discovering what he could do in the course of writing a song.

DB: That's interesting. Yeah, that song always sort of reminded me of something that one could find on "Reflections."

SS: Lazy River Road was like a trademark tune - though the lyrics were really tender. Liberty was bitchy and honest in a funny way, but I certainly think that Days Between was the last truly great song that they did. Corrina was interesting. A lot of Deadheads said it didn't sound like the Dead - "Oh, it sounds like Talking Heads." Well, I loved the Talking Heads, and it does sound like Talking Heads, and I loved where the band would take it - it inspired Phil to play really greasy funk lines, and the keyboards were amazing. I appreciated that the Dead were moving into a sonic texture that they had never tried to tackle before. On the other hand, by the time they got to songs like Corrina, Garcia wasn't really able to pilot the band in the same way that he had, so oftentimes, you had the rest of the band playing as well as they ever had, playing with incredible power to make up for the lack of the leader, but the voice that would really punch it through to the next level was simply not there.

The last tour that I did was Fall Tour '94, and night after night, there was a lot of great music, but Garcia was blurry, and he was using effects pedals that would allow him to be less precise in his note choices, things that sounded like pedal steel and what not. So you could tell that he was kind of cheating, and it was so disheartening - even when the rest of the band was playing really well, it left one with a slightly sad taste in one's mouth - even when they weren't singing "This may be the last time," as if to taunt everyone.

So I feel like the last batch of songs was kind of a mixed bag, but there were songs like Eternity that, if the Dead had been thriving, could have pointed into directions that they might have gone in.

DB: There was a point - maybe a year or so after Corrina came out - where Jerry started opening up the jam a little bit at the end, and that really caught my attention. 1993 was a weird year for me. I caught more Dead shows than Phish shows. I saw 30 Dead shows. I had a wonderful spring tour, and there were some other notable moments - I really enjoyed Eugene, for instance, but by the Boston run in the fall, I was real disappointed. Maybe I was burnt out on the band at that point, but I really had the sense that they were burned out too.

If you were to compare Phish to some phase in the Dead's career, for the sake of people who want to compare, where would you place them?

SS: I would say they are, right now, somewhere between '72 and '74.

DB: Not a bad place to be.

SS: Right. I think they're completely in command of their powers - they can head off in any direction and arrive somewhere interesting. The ensemble telepathy is seamless at this point, they're all incredibly clear, powerful and versatile voices on their individual instruments, and there's still a sense of play: it hasn't ossified, as Phil Lesh, in later years, said had happened to the Dead. It's still open - anything can happen. There's still the possibility that Trey will play drums, or that a second set could be three songs, or one song.

DB: That's my dream, incidentally.

SS: Right, exactly. I certainly would not mind going to a Phish show, having them open up with David Bowie, and close with David Bowie, and not play anything recognizable in between. I'd be fine with that.

DB: I eagerly anticipate that day, and I'll say here now that I think that's going to happen, and I can't wait. There have been two times when I was at a show where I thought that they were going to do it. One was Halloween 1995, the You Enjoy Myself that opened the third set. They really stretched out each of the component segments of the song, and by the 45-minute mark, I really thought that was going to be their set, as if to say "OK, here's the second set- the Who's "Quadrophenia." Here's the third set - ONE of our songs." I was standing there enjoying the music, but digging the idea of that as well, which sort of deconstructs the notion of setlists and their importance or lack thereof.

The second time was at Worcester on Saturday night this past November [11/29]. When they finished that 58-minute exploration that began as Runaway Jim, I really thought that was going to be a set - a one song Runaway Jim second set. Which is not to say that the stuff that they played after Jim wasn't satisfying - the Hood, Caspian, and even Strange Design, which I thought was a nice change of pace, although some of my friends disagreed.

Yeah, I can't wait. I hope we're at that show where we get to hear that single song second set Bowie.

SS: How much do you think Phish saw what a band like the Dead did, and what they didn't do, and are trying to push the envelope even further?

DB: Well as you might imagine, this is something of a controversial question in the Phish community. You know, my honest belief is no - at least not from a strictly musical perspective. I think that I'd give you a very different answer if we looked at the scene that envelops the bands, but musically, I don't think they paid as close attention as some might like to think they did. But obviously I'm coming at this with a bias. Phish is my favorite band. As you might imagine, this is a question that I've grappled with before - although the comparisons actually come less these days as more people take the opportunity to hear Phish rather than just hear about them. But no, I just don't think that Phish gave that too much direct thought, except in a general sense. I remember your interview with Trey in Dupree's when he talked about going to see some Dead shows.

SS: Mike obviously went to them...

DB: Mike certainly. There's no question that Mike admires Phil Lesh and the Dead. But - and I could be wrong - I still don't think that Phish actively looked at the possibilities offered by the Dead and consciously followed that path. I mean, it's clear that like the Dead, Phish does two sets, they have some similarities in their efforts to improvise... hell, in their early days they did play Scarlet, Eyes and Fire, so they obviously enjoyed Garcia and Hunter's compositions, but I don't think that they considered matters in the terms you described. But I'd be curious to hear what you have to say.

SS: I think you're right, and I think there's something pathological about Deadheads who try to gloat over the fact that Phish would never had existed, if the Dead hadn't set some sort of supreme example. The Dead never would have done what they did without Miles Davis setting some kind of supreme example. Yet, the Dead didn't do anything that Miles Davis did, and Phish have gone off in a completely different direction than the Dead.

Something I've always admired Phish for is that they're almost obsessively into developing their own personal vocabularies both of music and experience. All the inside joking and the insidery jargon, and little things like that many Phishheads know - like the Gamehenge stories, and the fact that Trey's dog is called MarMar - the nickname of a dog is common knowledge for thousands of fans and many fans probably know about "the MarMar show," whenever that was. It's like all of those things - even though they're very annoying perhaps to people who are on the outside of the scene, and who see it all as kind of this frat boy-secret code-clubhouse sort of thing - I've always admired them for doing it, because in a sense it gives Phishheads permission to get as into their own thing as deeply the band is into their thing.

DB: Right, right.

SS: So I'm not interested in drawing direct comparisons, or highlighting how much of a historical debt Phish may or may not owe to the Dead. The one thing that I do wish, and make no bones about, is that I wish that Phish would play a couple more Dead songs, just because I think they could play the hell out of something like Playing in the Band or Scarlet Begonias. I think that they could play those songs better than anyone else could at this point, and I'm kind of sorry that Phish has had to deal with so many people comparing them to the Dead in stupid ways, because I think that it's made them self-conscious about it, and they almost go out of their way not to play Dead tunes.

I was very happy the last time I saw Phish at Shoreline, they played a really adventurous show - in fact, too adventurous for some Phishheads who were saying, "It was just jamming they didn't play enough songs." Then at the end of the night, Trey made some homage to the spirit of Jerry Garcia, saying something like, "We're trying to keep his spirit alive in music," and that was the key for me. They weren't trying to keep his spirit alive by showing a slide of St. Jerry with a halo of roses, you know? They were trying to keep his spirit alive by being as into their thing, musically, as the Dead had been into theirs.

I do think there is a kind of natural conversation that could occur between some Dead tunes and what Phish does, that really hasn't happened much, perhaps because there is so much focus on that issue of how much Phish owe the Dead.

DB: But then again, they are so self-aware, and also are tapped into a community of people who share such views, that I wouldn't be surprised if at some point out west you hear a Playin' jam. As the years go on and comparisons fade, as Phish builds its own reputation, I think the odds will only increase. Frankly, I would love to see them do it once and get it over with, you know, although whether people would consider it a tribute, or some sort of exorcism, remains to be seen. At any rate, assuming they do Halloween again and they allow people to vote, we should start our campaign for "Europe '72."

SS: That would be cool. Or "Live/Dead."

DB: Or "Live/Dead."

SS: Absolutely.

DB: I would be interested in that. Maybe I can get my friends to work on it. A bunch of them stuffed the ballot box for [Zappa's] "Joe's Garage" in 1995.

SS: That would be great too.

DB: Apparently that won, but Phish didn't play it, which I can understand - that's something that would have been hard to translate to 15,000 people. I think they had trouble in 1996 with "Remain in Light," which I thought was really really interesting. But it's not an album that a preponderance of people who were at the Omni had actually heard that much, if at all. I mean, I did, and my friends did, and I think that goes back to demographics. Given the cost of compact discs, people today just don't dip into back catalogues of bands as much, myself included. But when I first heard "Remain In Light," it wasn't back catalogue, it was the newest Talking Heads release. Some people at the 1996 Halloween were in denial. The guy behind me, even after we'd received the program that Phish printed up, the "Phishbill" that talked about "Remain In Light" even then he was telling me that no, it was all just a practical joke and that they'd actually be doing something else.

Anyhow, "Remain In Light"was an intriguing choice, because a lot of it is overdubs. When I learned they were going to play it, I sat back, threw that album on, and listened to it over and over. The guitar parts, for instance, are Adrian Belew layered over Adrian Belew layered over David Byrne layered over Adrian Belew. I kept asking myself, "Well, how are they going to do that?" It was exciting. And the answer was they added percussion and horns and translated a number of those songs into their own idiom. It was an impressive evening.

SS: Why do you think that they don't keep as many of the songs from the Halloween albums in rotation?

DB: I wish I knew. They still do Crosseyed and Painless. But I would love to see Born Under Punches and The Great Curve again. From the year before, Drowned and The Real Me are still with us, but what about 5:15, which smoked. And as far as the White Album goes, I'd love to see Cry Baby Cry or Julia work their way back into rotation.

SS: To shift direction a little, why do you think improvised music is so appropriate to psychedelic experience?

DB: If you're talking about improvised music that one sees live, I think the audience and the performer are tapped into the same thing at the same time, and each takes cues from the other. To me, the great thing about having a psychedelic experience is the moment of revelation. Whenever you have a moment of revelation, it's a miraculous thing, and you don't need psychedelics to have one. Moments of revelation can occur at any time and at any place: in the shower, when you're raking leaves, whatever. But when you do have a moment of revelation - and psychedelics certainly can be a catalyst - the pleasure of that moment can be increased to the nth degree when you share it with another human being. And when a concertgoer is having a psychedelic experience, and is sorting through layers of consciousness and working through an array of ideas or images, while at the same time someone on stage is doing the very same thing, in an analogous manner, then you have a moment where the two psyches click. Since the audience member is sharing that moment with someone else, it really hits the sweet spot. For me, that kind of moment is unlike any other personal experience. What do you think?

SS: I think you said that very beautifully. I think that there's something about psychedelics that opens one to the eternal present, the fertility of the eternal present: that any moment is a womb of potential beauty, potential scariness, risky danger, interesting new combinations, the two faces of God, creation and destruction. There's something about improvised music, because it's a group of people who are trying to invent forms to express the forward flowing of their feelings, and also the electricity that develops between them as they have a musical conversation. That process is a natural conduit for the tripping mind. And the tripping mind can move forward through the different spaces that are created by these musicians, and come to conduct its own process of discovery, as the musicians do.

I used to think that there was some uncanny fit between the structure of a second set at Dead shows and psychedelic experience, because you'd start out in a kind of structured form of experience where there was melody, verse, chorus, etc., and then you'd move more and more away from the house of melody and predictability, and out into the storm, and sometimes you'd get rained on pretty heavily, and sometimes suddenly the clouds would break, and you'd see a rainbow, and the rainbow would mean a lot more to you because your clothes were still wet, and you had just been soaked to the bone.

In a way, one of the things that drums and space did for me - and Phish jams do for me too - is that they don't cling to beauty; they're willing to sacrifice predictable loveliness for something much more real and occasionally terrifying. I remember, I was at a show at Cal Expo, and I was tripping, and the Dead played a very up and sprightly first set and everybody was like, "That was cool," and I thought it sucked, because I just wasn't in that space. I was in a much edgier place, and then they came out for the second set with Victim or the Crime, which was such a harsh tune that a lot of Deadheads hated it, but they turned it into this kind of monstrous exorcism of dark energies, and what was great was - the exorcism worked. They were actually able to turn my trip around into a place of authentic joy, rather than just bubbly hyper clinging to good vibes.

That's what I thought was so ironic in the late '80s after "In the Dark" - when endless newspaper articles would depict Deadheads as these happy-go-lucky, tie-dyed,'60s lava-lamp- head marshmallow people with the avuncular Jerry Garcia, Papa Bear of the Tie-Dyed Hordes, as their department-store Santa Claus. I thought that the Dead played some of the most frightening music that I ever heard! I thought that some of the places that the Dead would end up made punk sound lightweight.

The same with Phish. I heard an It's Ice at Arco Arena that got to some really dissonant places. There's something about the willingness to not impose any kind of foreordained sense of beauty onto the process of discovery that is really appropriate for psychedelic experiences, because you have to strip away whatever your ideas of what's going to happen, and simply be present with what is happening.

DB: Absolutely. Since we're talking about journeys, I'm reminded how the second set of a Dead show was very much like psychedelic travel, which for me peaked with the long, slow Jerry number after Space. Which is why I was always very impatient with Dead first sets, and I wondered why the first set couldn't be like the second sets.

SS: Well, it had been earlier in their career, but that was part of that ossification that Phil talked about.

DB: I think it's interesting because to me it touches on a larger difference between Phish and the Dead - at least the Dead after that ossified period. For me, a Dead second set was always one big tension and release. The tension would build until that heavy Jerry tune deep in the second set. I can recall literally sitting on the edge of my seat trying to figure out what was going on, where they were going to go, and then if they went into a Bobby tune, again just straining myself at the end waiting for the long, mellow, cathartic Jerry. Quite often that was the make or break point for me as far as having a great show.

But Phish isn't like that. A Phish show is a collection of tensions and releases. I can remember a friend of mine, a long time Deadhead, being emotionally drained at his first Phish show in 1992 because it was just so much more than he had been accustomed to seeing. Beyond that, for me at least, as opposed to the Dead, Phish may go off into dissonance, but they come back to the sweet spots, they hit the pockets a lot more often than the Dead ever tried to do. The Dead might go out and scare you and abandon you. Phish will always lead you home, at least temporarily, before they travel off with you again.

SS: I think that one of the things that Phish is able to do that the Dead didn't really have the taste for, is that Phish is able to - especially in a song like Harry Hood - build up the tension, and then release it, and for minutes on end come to this place that is so absolutely blissful, it's like honey streaming down from the sky, you just want more of it - it's a buzz that's in your body and in your mind, and it's pure delight. It reminds me of something that the poet William Blake said,"Energy is eternal delight."

There are moments in many Phish songs that say the same thing to me, where just being alive and just hearing it feels good. It's like when they sing, "You can feel good, good about Hood," it's obviously not about the milk! It's about being your stoner-pimply-skinny-weirdo self, and you can feel beautiful, you can appreciate how beautiful you are, and how beautiful the music is, and how great it is that they're playing this well - and you know you could go home and play too, if you wanted to. So I definitely agree with you that they're able to deliver to the audience a kind of a straight shot of pure bliss that the Dead would deliver in more complicated ways.

I think that Garcia - even though he could certainly write extremely uplifting melodies, and as you say, drive home certain points of transcendence like no one else - but he wrestled with some pretty dark things for most of his life, and his offstage life was incredibly confounded, drug problems, relationship disasters. He and Hunter always loved the most haunted kind of ballads, you know, "ten thousand drowneded that never were born." They loved that space, and I think they were a little more death-obsessed than Phish are. Phish are life-obsessed - "Set the gearshift to the high gear of your soul." That's much more blatant invitation to ecstasy than the Dead were prone to doing.

DB: True, although I'm not sure if they would write that particular line today. I think that's a very youthful expression of exuberance. I think they've become a little bit subtler, particularly through Tom Marshall's very skewed, very wry sense of humor. A lot of the Robert Hunter songs are very much about life lessons, and they're very self-consciously so. I think Tom's songs are life lessons, but at the same time, they're self-consciously saying, "Don't take my advice, this really isn't how you should do it, I mean this is sort of a goofy little story, don't necessarily take this advice." Although frankly, at times he's offering suggestions nonetheless. I get the sense that Hunter was trying to touch on a lot of deeper truths, where I think Tom might feel silly if he were doing the same.

SS: The thing about Hunter is that he was so schooled in both the tradition of English literature and also in the folk tradition. Hunter would sometimes get out of the way and let this oracular truth be spoken, not so much out of his mouth, but out of the voice of the tradition. Hunter would put together symbols, like in a song like Terrapin, symbols that came to life in songs much older than Terrapin, and allow them to speak through him. Tom almost refuses that oracular role and says,"You're not going to find the ultimate truth here" - and then it sneaks in anyway somehow.

For people who say, "Well, Phish, they can play really well but their lyrics are just so goofy..." I think that's true, and I think it partly comes out of the fact that - at least compared to Hunter - Tom is not as much as self-consciously a scholar of various traditions as Hunter was, but also I think that there's something very appropriate to that refusal to take on an oracular role. There's something very appropriate for - now I sound like an old man, "young people today," you know. Hunter's generation didn't mind being the voice of some new truth and yet, for people our age and younger, we saw the truths that that generation come up with turn into cliches.

Like the Beatles were obviously a fantastic band, but I remember turning on the radio in 1989, and it was a Beatles song, followed by a Led Zeppelin song, followed by Crosby, Stills & Nash song, and I thought, "God, this is all great music, but what if you had turned on the radio in 1969 and heard Benny Goodman live from the Rainbow Room in 1949?" There was something weird about it, there was something weird that those gestures made in the '60s somehow had acquired this immortal aura. Like you couldn't say anything better than Dylan had said it, so why even try? One of the great things about Phish is that they try, and even if they're not saying things as poetically, they end up saying things musically that are very appropriate to this moment.

DB: Certainly people - for better or worse - will always define the Dead as a quintessential '60s band, although I think many people would say they did their most vital work in the '70s. But nonetheless, they're associated with that era. Do you think that when all is said and done, that people will point to Phish and say that they were a quintessential '90s band in the same way?

SS: I hope not. I always thought that was bogus that the Dead were pigeonholed as a "'60s band." I thought that was the kind of thing that was said by lazy journalists who didn't really know that the Dead had completely reinvented themselves at various points: 1970, 1972, 1975. I never thought of the Dead as a '60s band. I thought in 1989 that the Dead were a very 1989 band - they had adopted MIDI technology, so they could make literally any sound imaginable in the human universe, and put it into their music. In 1989, I thought the Dead were the most cutting-edge, forward-looking group of musicians on the planet - and that planet included Ornette Coleman's Prime Time, and any number of great space jazz bands. I thought the Dead were their equal.

I'm not trying to peg Phish to a particular historical era, and yet there's something about their attitude and their music and lyrics that feel very appropriate to young people now. A song like Chalkdust, where they literally say, "Can I live while I'm young?" I remember being at Red Rocks two summers ago, and I was standing next to this handsome kid from Nebraska who was, I think, 17. He never saw the Dead, and there he was at Red Rocks, and he was tripping, and there was a moment when I looked over, and the band was jamming, and his eyes were closed in absolute bliss, and he was rocking back and forth, and I saw my younger self. Was I supposed to prod him and say, "Dude, if you think this is good, you should have been..." You know? No! That was all the eternity that kid was going to have, and it was plenty. That was the moment when he was realizing that there was a living presence in the universe that could produce this music just for that moment, just for that night, just for him, just for his ears at that moment. And this is the only time he was ever going to be young, and it was the only time that it was going to happen for him, and nothing had been lost - there was no diminishment that it wasn't the Dead. This was it, and it was beautiful!

DB: Fair enough. That touches on something else that I often hear. People will say that Phish is unquestionably accomplished, but also soulless, and they don't tap into the spirit of the times the way the Dead did. I can see the argument -OK, maybe not the soulless part. Well OK, maybe even that if you take the lyrics to Dogs Stole Things literally... But the second point, we live in an era with all the emerging technology and all our self-awareness of the many cultures and environments that are existing on the planet, and even within the United States. So I think that there's no one band or one style of music that could ever speak for a generation in the same way that people say psychedelic music spoke to a particular generation at a particular point in the late '60s or early '70s. Maybe hip-hop does, frankly, but I don't know. Then again, I think that maybe just as Phish only addresses or is welcomed by a particular subculture or subgrouping within the larger culture, that this in and of itself is the quintessential American experience of the '90's - demographic structuring. Everyone has their own little niche, and so by representing one of them, Phish is a voice of a diverse, fractured generation.

SS: That's true, except that I actually think it's a mistake to think that the Dead were the voice of their generation. I remember reading in one of my parents' Communist newspapers in the late '60s how the Dead were sellouts because they weren't writing songs against the Vietnam war, they were just like singing these old songs about gamblers and trains and that sort of thing. They always occupied their own weird mythopoetic bluesy ancient ballad-inspired space, and yet they ended up being opened to playing the sounds of a particular moment in time, just because they didn't get onstage knowing what kind of sounds they were going to make beforehand.

I remember seeing them on January 10, 1979, and they played Dark Star, which was the first time I had ever seen it, and in the middle of the jam headed towards St. Stephen - this was at Nassau Coliseum outside of New York City - they started making the traffic sounds of Times Square, cars honking and sirens, and I thought, "Right on, here they are in New York City, and they're channeling New York City into the music." There's a Zen to that that goes beyond trying to sing the ultimate anthem for your generation. Being open to whatever forms are hanging out in the wings of the musical imagination is more profound than trying to address the concerns of a generation. Allen Ginsberg had a line in one of his late poems like, "Anything that comes to mind is the best weapon against the police state."

DB: Fair enough. I don't think committed Marxists will ever be happy with improvisational music - it appeases the bourgeoisie. It lulls them into a false sense of bliss and anaesthetizes them. Though if that's how you want to define anaesthesia then I say, bring it on. As far as Phish goes, those guys are anaesthesiologists' anaesthesiologists.