After Forty Years, Phish Isn’t Seeking Resolution

People who love Phish do so with a devotion that is quasi-religious—deep, eternal, and rhapsodic. People who dislike Phish do so with equal fervor, often while making jokes about the degenerative effects of LSD on the prefrontal cortex. This divisiveness speaks, in part, to the band’s abiding disinterest in capitulating to the Zeitgeist. The barrier to entry is high: to experience the phenomenon on any significant level, you need to see the band live, probably more than once. The songs will be complicated and partly improvised. There will be two sets, with a twenty-minute break in between. There will not be much in the way of banter, though there will be a light show designed by the band’s longtime lighting director, Chris Kuroda. You might hear a song in which the phrase “Gotta jibboo!” is repeated far more often than you’d like.

Phish requires commitment—a subversive idea in our moment of minuscule attention spans. Even the songs that go viral on TikTok—a platform that already demands a kind of maniacal concision—often have their tempos increased in order to arrive at the hook sooner. Yet Phish fans embrace searching, forty-minute jams with enthusiasm. The band has built this world largely outside the architecture of the music industry, with minimal radio airplay, mainstream press, or strategic marketing. “The other day, my wife and I watched the Grammys,” McConnell, the keyboardist, told me. “It was a really good show—so much young talent. Then the whole thing ended, and I thought, It feels so strange how completely disconnected I am from this. It’s not as if I have a desire to be a part of it. But how odd is it that I’m in the music business, and really successful in the music business, and I have absolutely zero to do with this?”

“I remember after we got signed to Elektra, around ’93,” Anastasio said. “We were developing this crowd that was nuts for the band, in our own self-supporting bubble. I went into the label’s office with this record, ‘Rift,’ and the A. & R. rep said, ‘It’s not just that I hate this music. I don’t just hate it—I refuse to work this record.’ And then they handed me the new Frank Black record, the one with ‘Los Angeles.’ And they said, ‘Go home and listen to this if you want to hear what cool music sounds like.’ ” Anastasio laughed. “I was, like, ‘Look, we all love the Pixies. But what do you want me to do with that?’ It represented this fear. Like, we are so out of step with what’s cool and what’s happening.”

Phish’s fans have been characterized—perhaps ungenerously—as burnouts who wish only to stand around in parking lots huffing nitrous oxide from balloons. At Mondegreen, when I finally emerged from my car, I found that stereotype both challenged and corroborated. The air was heavy with cannabis vapor and leg sweat. The crowd felt culturally if not particularly racially diverse—men, women, young, old, sober, plastered, minor felons, investment bankers, minorly felonious investment bankers. To be fair, there is sort of a type. T-shirt: tie-dyed. Pupils: dilated. Merch: bootleg. Haircut: surely not. This category of Phish enthusiast is referred to as a “wook,” a term that evolved from “wookiee,” the big, brutish, hairy creatures from “Star Wars.” It is now applied to anyone who has not visited the shower trailer and is desperately trying to bum a cig.

“O.K.—for the next batch, I need you to spin it into shareable content.”

Cartoon by Edith Zimmerman

A Phish show is always a kind of homecoming—if you are there, you are received. The band has been hosting festivals since 1996, when it put on the Clifford Ball, a multidimensional extravaganza—carnival rides, circus performers, aerial stunts—at Plattsburgh Air Force Base, in upstate New York. Phish played seven sets over two nights, including an instrumental jam that it performed while rolling through the parking lot on the back of a flatbed truck at 3:30 A.M. (To learn about the “Flatbed Jam,” as it came to be known, is to hear about a kind of mystical visitation. One history, published on Phish.net, reads like an account of a U.F.O. sighting: “The dimly-glowing scene continued to crawl, just faster than walking speed, around the south edge of the parking lot, then briefly north near the lot entrance, before circling back.”) More than seventy thousand people attended the Clifford Ball, making it the biggest rock concert in the U.S. that year. A Times headline read “Small Adirondack Town Is Host of a Giant Concert.”

In the decades following the Clifford Ball, the popularity of music festivals exploded, a trend that Phish inadvertently helped engineer. (In the early two-thousands, the founders of Bonnaroo, when planning their first event, reached out to Phish for guidance.) Yet Mondegreen, which was attended by around thirty-eight thousand people, felt spiritually distant from happenings such as Coachella, where calculated preening is both the central pleasure and the purpose. People came to Delaware for Phish.

Mondegreen also featured a variety of nonmusical attractions, including a Ferris wheel, a farmers’ market, a post office, a record store, a radio station, live comedy, yoga classes, and a spa offering beard trims and I.V. hydration. There were a dozen mostly site-specific art installations, including a twenty-three-foot internally lit moon suspended over a clearing. (The piece, by Luke Jerram, was titled “Museum of the Moon” and featured an ambient score composed by Dan Jones.) An enormous cardboard structure designed by the French artist Olivier Grossetête, called “City Hall,” was assembled by volunteers on the first day, using tape and nearly two thousand cardboard boxes. Once complete, it stood more than eighty feet high and weighed almost two tons. (On Saturday afternoon, it was rigged with ropes and deliberately toppled.) At the Cerealist Bowl, a bizarre, Salvador Dalí-meets-Lewis Carroll speakeasy tucked away in the woods, I watched a guy on a gurney entomb himself in cotton candy, the sugary pink wisps blown onto his body by a fan. There was a porta-potty that led to a planetarium. There was a seventy-four-foot retro-futuristic viewing tower called the Heliograph; on Sunday, Questlove performed a d.j. set from the top, pulling his vinyl from a cooler. (It was hot.) There was even a tattoo parlor, where fans could immortalize the experience with a silhouette of Anastasio’s face or an iteration of the band’s logo. I met a sweet couple there, Gram and Erica, who had just got engaged and were about to have matching doughnuts tattooed on their ring fingers.

Gram, who was forty-six, guessed that he had been to a hundred and fifty Phish shows; Erica, forty-five, thought that her count was around two hundred. They met in 1998, at a Phish concert in Chicago. “We’ve both been through a lot of shit,” Erica said. “We’ve known each other for a long time, but we weren’t ready for this before now.”

It’s hard to say exactly when doughnuts entered Phish lore, but since the mid-eighties Jon Fishman, the drummer, has worn a tunic—it’s a dress, really—printed with colorful rings. On some metaphysical level, the food simply suits the band. The connection was cemented in 2017, when Phish played thirteen consecutive shows at Madison Square Garden, a feat dubbed the Baker’s Dozen. Each night was themed around a different flavor of doughnut: on Boston Cream night, the band played a medley of tracks by the bands Boston and Cream; on jam-filled night, the band went long even by Phish standards, stretching two tracks into thirty-odd-minute jams. Each Phish set list is unique, but for this particular run the band didn’t repeat a single tune: two hundred and thirty-seven different songs in less than two weeks. “Not repeating songs is at the core of what Phish is,” Anastasio said. “There were people who went to every single show.” On the final night, a banner commemorating the achievement was lifted to the rafters, where it still hangs, next to Billy Joel’s.

Gram and Erica kissed. The tattooists clapped.

Phish took the stage at around 7 P.M. on Thursday. Anastasio, who turned sixty the following month, remains youthful and spry, with rimless glasses, a flop of red hair, and a gently graying beard. The doughnuts on Fishman’s tunic were emerald green. Gordon and McConnell each occupied a side of the stage. After forty-some years, the members of Phish remain earnestly and improbably enamored of one another: whenever I told Anastasio that I was doing something with one of his bandmates, he would say, without guile, “I love that guy!” Part of the band’s emotional tenor has to do with the parity built into its sound. “Any one of the four of us could be leading the moment,” McConnell said. “For a few bars, the bass will be doing something extraordinary, and we’re all following Mike around. Then it’ll be Fish. It just gets passed around between the four of us.” (The members’ equanimity does not stem only from musical synchronicity. “We were able to afford to get our own hotel rooms just in time,” Fishman joked. “We were able to afford a road crew to help us move equipment just in time!”)

The band opened with “The Moma Dance”—a mondegreen, appropriately. (The actual lyric is “The moment ends.”) I had last seen Phish in 1997, at Hampton Coliseum, in Virginia, when I was seventeen. (Hampton is referred to as the Mothership, largely because it resembles an enormous spacecraft.) Twenty-seven years later, some things felt familiar; others were new. Anastasio is vehemently uninterested in Phish becoming a nostalgia act—the band’s sets contain a mixture of songs that it has been playing since the eighties and more recent material, including, that night, “What’s Going Through Your Mind?,” which Anastasio wrote last year. (Eight days earlier, the band had played it live for the first time, at a show in Grand Rapids, with the bluegrass prodigy Billy Strings joining on guitar and vocals.) Anastasio sometimes collaborates on lyrics with his childhood friend Tom Marshall, and the results tend to be intricate and fantastical. His solo writing, however, has become considerably less abstract and more confessional in recent years. In “A Wave of Hope,” a boisterous song from “Evolve,” he sings about a kind of spiritual exorcism: “The pillow drowns the moans.” When Anastasio sang the line on Thursday, his voice was nearly cheerful. The crowd went bananas.

At one point, a friend leaned in to make an observation. It was quick, and he was speaking quietly, but we were immediately shushed by a dude who appeared seemingly out of nowhere, holding out his hands, palms forward, saying, “Please, please, please.” He made his way down the line, shushing in every direction. In jam parlance, talking during a set is known as chomping, and it’s a humbling thing to be caught doing. The expectation that tens of thousands of people hanging around an old NASCAR track would be library-quiet for three-plus hours felt slightly deranged to me, but such is the cult of Phish.

During my days at Mondegreen, I came to love this about the community. The music is worshipped, but elsewhere there is an undercurrent of lawlessness and benevolent revolution. One morning, I took a photo of a large black flag blowing proudly in the breeze:

Quit your job
Go on tour
Bang a wook
Sell grilled cheese
Boof a crystal
Live in a van
Never return

All around us, institutions were failing. Why not bang a wook and never return? (I had to text a friend to decipher the line about the crystal. “What does ‘boff a crystal’ mean?” I carefully typed into my phone. He replied immediately: “BOOF AMANDA BOOF. It’s where you put drugs in your ass.”) Though the scene is peaceful and loving, there is a lot of rebellion baked in. Do what you want. Except chomping.

The crowd at a Phish show dances. Should I leave it at that? There are a few common styles, including the Floppy Puppet (picture someone distractedly operating a marionette) and the Invisible Surfboard (feet planted, knees bent, arms akimbo). People get loose, and they have a blast. There was a striking lack of cellphone usage, both during the show and on the festival grounds. Attendees were encouraged to keep up with the news by reading the Daily Greens, a paper produced and distributed on site. At one point, the Mondegreen app sent a notification: “Good morning! You should not be on your phone so much.” Phish’s earliest festivals were held in obscure and off-the-grid locales—between 1997 and 2003, it hosted three events in Limestone, Maine, a town of about fifteen hundred people, near the Canadian border—and the band is still intent on creating such an immersive and self-contained experience that, Anastasio said, people have no choice but to “come out the other end having shared something.”

Cartoon by Eugenia Viti

It turns out that all these things—the unplugging, the dancing, the utter lack of corporate branding—matter. The vibes were so solid. Since the mid-nineties, when it became more common for amphitheatres to plaster barricades and other surfaces with advertising, Phish has been vigilant about covering up any audience-facing billboards, a job that can require a cherry picker and some scrupulously draped fabric. For many artists, the richer they get, the more entangled they become with corporations. Phish has adopted the opposite approach: the money buys the band freedom. “There might’ve been a fantasy, or individual fantasies, about having a hit song on the radio,” Gordon told me. “We didn’t want to make music that was so quirky no one would want to crank it up at a party. But maybe having this unique experience every night is bigger than the having-a-hit-song feeling.”

Anastasio is a voracious consumer of new music: M. J. Lenderman, Waxahatchee, the Japanese House, Mitski, Mannequin Pussy. He writes songs constantly, almost compulsively. He showed me the voice memos on his phone, an endless scroll of ideas, composed early in the morning, over coffee, on the piano in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Sometimes he sent me sketches. Once, when I told him I was making chili, he wrote me a little song about stirring the pot.

Though Phish is considered the ur-jam band of its era, many of its more outré improvisations remind me of Brian Eno: cinematic, elegant, soft, dreamy, modern. In general, it’s challenging to ascribe genre to Phish. One night, over dinner at Café Carmellini, in New York, Anastasio and I shared a dish called Duck-Duck-Duck Tortellini, which led us to revisit a conversation in which I had repeatedly confused Goose (a jam band from Connecticut) and Geese (a post-punk band from Brooklyn). Anastasio found this very funny. He likes and relates to punk; he is less sure what, exactly, “jam band” connotes, beyond “too much soloing.” He told me, “The term didn’t exist in my formative years. It’s possible its creation had something to do with us. But when I saw Fugazi, in Burlington in 1989, I remember thinking, These guys are thinking exactly the way I’m thinking. We played a show in 1992 with firehose, Fishbone, and the Beastie Boys, in a parking lot at UMass. We felt like we were planting a flag, too.” (“I remember seeing Phish and being impressed that they were onstage with a full-size B3 organ,” Mike D, of the Beastie Boys, told me. “There were a bunch of New England collegiate and hippie types all watching, knowing this band that I had never heard of.”)

“I respect them,” Ian MacKaye, of Fugazi, said, of Phish. “They’ve always been iconoclastic. They do these festivals on their own. It’s insane. I’ve never seen Phish, but I am not surprised that they were at that show. We could be much farther apart.”

On the second night of Mondegreen, the band played a surprise third set. The members set up behind a screen featuring projections by Moment Factory, a design studio known for its immersive, trippy environments. The fifty-minute instrumental improvisation that followed would come to be known as “Mondegreen Ambient Jam.” A Phish jam is usually preceded by an enormous amount of preparation. The Mondegreen jam was divided into seven parts, and each was assigned a key, an image (“Organic Architecture,” “Shape Shifting Trees”), and an energy level (a number between one and ten). Despite the planning—there were PDFs—it still required what Anastasio called “a willingness to fail right in front of people.” He finds parameters generative. “If I know what the image is—flying saucers in blue air, or whatever—and I know what the key is, and I know the level of intensity, and I get handed a guitar, those limits allow me to play with raw emotion, which is what everyone responds to, anyway,” he said. “The theory is, art lives by limitation. You develop the theme, you can go backward, forward, stretch it out. But don’t keep bringing in more material.” At one point, he was playing two guitars (an acoustic set to an open tuning and placed in a stand, and an electric) simultaneously. The feeling in the crowd was a kind of dazed submission. It was late; people were woozy and receptive. The band remained concealed behind the scrim. I stood there, vibrating. At times, it sounded like Aphex Twin, or William Basinski, or Eno, but more human, less synthesized.

Since 1992, Gordon has kept a list in his journal titled “Bass Playing Thoughts.” Many entries read like koans: “A high note can be felt as low, repeated.” It has been a useful repository for his own self-reflection. “Acceptance has been a big theme for Phish over the years,” he said. “In the nineties, we had a thing where we would get backstage between sets and talk about the set. And then we decided that wasn’t allowed anymore. For me, the shows got twice as good at that point, because I knew that I wasn’t going to be judged.”

Fishman paraphrased Charlie Parker: “ ‘Study and study and learn everything you can, and then forget that shit and play.’ That ambient jam is the safest, most comfortable place I know in life.”

“It’s like hang gliding, in the sense that you do all kinds of preparation to make sure you’re safe—you check your gear, you tighten the knots,” Anastasio said. “But you still have to jump off a cliff.” He added, “You’re never gonna find four people who are happier diving off a cliff than the four guys in Phish.”

There’s a particular moment that Phish fans wait for. It doesn’t happen at every show, and it’s difficult to describe without sounding as though you’ve been a whiff too cavalier with your dosing, but here goes: there is sometimes a brief yet transcendent stretch, occurring maybe ten or twelve or even twenty minutes into a jam, in which the band achieves a kind of otherworldly synchronicity, both internally and with its audience. This kind of moment, though mysterious, has been an essential and meaningful part of the band’s gestalt since the beginning. I felt it during the Mondegreen jam—a short but delightful vacation from my corporeal self.

Musically, Phish braids three major elements: formal composition, improvisation, and—despite what you may have heard—pop hooks. (Fervent fans tend to favor the more sprawling songs, but the band’s most streamed tracks—“Farmhouse,” “Sample in a Jar,” “Bouncing Around the Room”—are bona-fide earworms.) These elements might appear to be in opposition to one another, but the band’s capacity to hold them in balance is arguably its defining achievement; all three are crucial, in different ways, to whatever trapdoor occasionally opens up mid-set. Anastasio and I spent dozens of hours parsing the physics of it. “Last night got so deep,” he texted me one morning, after Phish had played its second of four shows at Moon Palace, a resort in the Riviera Maya, in Mexico. “Gratitude, emotions, heavy heavy hurt anger explosion, safe space to let feelings go. Fear, confusion. Sometimes the guitar is the only place it’s safe to let that out.” He pointed me toward a particular jam, during “Twenty Years Later,” the track that closes “Joy,” the band’s twelfth album, from 2009. It’s hard not to understand the lyrics, which Anastasio wrote with Tom Marshall, as a rejoinder to excess:

I can hold my breath for a minute or so
Five days without food is as long as I’ll go
I didn’t sleep once for four days and three nights
I once didn’t stop for seven red lights

Around five minutes in, you can hear the band members find one another and begin to coalesce. Phish is generally oriented toward euphoria, but there are instances in which it gets dark, brooding, nearly carnal. Fans refer to this as Evil Phish. (The most consistently beloved example of Evil Phish is “Carini,” a creepy, taunting song that has never appeared on an album. It opens with a vicious riff and an ominous lyric: “I saw you with Carini and that naked dude!”) “Twenty Years Later” is a hopeful song, but the jam got heavy. “Often there is a moment when it feels like the safety rails fall off,” Anastasio wrote to me. “We lose any sense of time passing. Then I feel safe letting people see how I actually feel, which is terrified a lot of the time. Around eight minutes, it starts to feel like my heart is wide open. It feels like pure emotion when the music gets like that. No sense of notes/scales. Just energy.” He added, “It’s why people come.”

Achieving this sort of dissociative bliss is not uncommon when listening to Hindu bhajans or Gregorian chants or other forms of religious music; I last felt it in the Pindus Mountains of northern Greece, when a Roma clarinettist played a mirologi, or ancient Epirotic lament, directly into my ear, at two o’clock in the morning, in a dark forest. I bring this up simply to say that it’s extraordinary that this sort of thing—a fleeting doorway to nirvana—is regularly occurring for Phish fans in minor-league-hockey arenas.

“When that portal opens, I don’t remember a single thing,” Fishman said. “I know which gigs are really good by how little I can remember. I do things on the drums that I never practiced and had no idea I was capable of. I have to go back and learn shit that happened in jams that I don’t actually know how to do.”

One night, I asked Anastasio to walk me through what it felt like onstage when the band passed through the portal. “I’ll pick a jam and try to describe what’s going on,” he said. “Camden, New Jersey, 1999, ‘Chalk Dust Torture.’ The song is what it is. It’s fast, it’s ridiculous, and still, in some weird way, it’s my fucking all-time favorite Phish song.” About five minutes in, after a spontaneous key change, the band starts communicating musically, changing keys and rhythms. “I throw out a melodic phrase, something we can all jump on. That leads to another spontaneous key change, which can only happen if we’re all fully listening. And then the universe opens up, and I feel like I don’t exist,” he continued. “I’m not locked in my mind anymore. I feel entirely connected to the people way back on the lawn. I can sense the scale, how insignificant the venue looks from above, how minuscule we are in the grand scheme. I don’t understand any of it—it feels like being pulled by the music like a water-skier. It’s a miracle, this moment. But it’s ephemeral—it can’t last. And slowly, around twelve or thirteen minutes, it goes back down to earth. But I’ve gotten to peek behind the curtain for just a moment. The set continues, and when I step off the stage someone walks up and says something like ‘The bus is leaving’ or ‘What time do you want to eat?’ And—ugh. Fuck. I’m back in this shit.”

Phish invited me to visit Anastasio’s recording studio, in a barn in the Green Mountains just outside Burlington. When I arrived, in February, the city was buried in more than a foot of snow, and I white-knuckled my rental car up a long switchbacked driveway. Anastasio and McConnell were sitting at a wooden table, eating sandwiches. Anastasio jumped up and offered to show me around. “I love giving the tour!” he said. “I get very excited.” We walked onto a deck overlooking the mountains. In the mid-nineties, after acquiring the land—seventy acres—Anastasio bought the two-hundred-year-old barn for a thousand dollars. “That’s Mt. Mansfield,” Anastasio said, pointing. “See that white patch? The barn was down there.” A team of woodworkers eventually transferred the building, beam by beam, to its current spot. Once the barn was reassembled, a second structure was built around it, mostly for insulation. Anastasio got out a photo album and showed me some grainy snapshots from its construction. “That’s me, working the saw,” he said, proudly. “They let me help out. There’s me hammering while they drink beer.”

“Let me at least put the dishes away in the wrong place so you’ll never ask me to do it again.”

Cartoon by Lynn Hsu

The interior is warm, rustic, and inviting. “There isn’t a single chain or screw that was bought new at a hardware store. Anything that got worse when it got old, we didn’t use,” Anastasio said, as he led me around. The light fixtures were salvaged from a local school; a blackboard had been used to make tiles for the shower. There are several large stained-glass windows. Everything there is meaningful to Anastasio, from his grandmother’s davenport (“I used to eat nuts on that,” he said, laughing) to a mosaic tabletop his mother made and two seats from the Spectrum arena, in Philadelphia. “When my dad took me to see the Flyers the year they won the Stanley Cup, we sat in those two seats,” he said. The floorboards were culled from trees cut down to make the driveway. “This is one of my favorite details,” Anastasio said, pointing at them. “We’ve done at least fifteen albums here. Long projects, where everybody’s staying up till two o’clock in the morning, running around, skateboarding, whatever. These are random sizes, rough-planed on one side. We wanted people to be able to spill beer and feel good. I didn’t want anything fancy.”

There’s no control room or isolation booth at the barn; the recording console is out in the open. “It was purchased in Miami, from the people who did the ‘Cops’ soundtrack,” Anastasio said. I asked him if he worked differently here. “Yes,” he said. “I really believe that, without the barn, there wouldn’t be a Phish. You go into a recording studio, it’s business hours. Most of our time here is spent laughing. It’s been a tether to remembering who we actually are.”

Phish maintains a sizable archive, situated in a Burlington warehouse. The rooms are kept at 64.7 degrees, and their contents are managed by Kevin Shapiro, the band’s full-time archivist. One morning, Shapiro and Beth Montuori Rowles, the general manager of Phish Inc. and the executive director of the WaterWheel Foundation, showed me around. There were old stage props (a plywood time machine, miniature trampolines, copper balls from the Clifford Ball), oil paintings, gig posters, costumes, ticket stubs, T-shirts, books, photographs, newsletters, and seemingly endless shelves of media, from eroding four-tracks and VHS tapes with titles such as “Random Party, UVM, 1987” to almost a hundred and twenty pounds of hard drives, held in foam-lined, waterproof cases, which contain the visuals that the band used at its sold-out four-night run at Sphere, in Las Vegas, in 2024. “When I started, in ’96, my dad was, like, ‘Are they a rock band? Is this what you’re gonna do?’ ” Shapiro said, standing next to a humming stack of computer servers. “I was, like, ‘Well, maybe.’ And he said, ‘What’s the longevity of that? It’s just gonna burn alive—that’s what rock and roll does.’ Which is a true statement. But I thought, If ever a group might endure, this could be the one.”

From the beginning, Phish both taped its shows and allowed others to tape them, which means that there is now an overwhelming amount of recorded music to manage. (Shapiro and Montuori Rowles referred to the magnitude of material as “the archival conundrum.”) We paused in front of a series of cobalt-blue boxes. “You asked about a holy grail,” Shapiro said. “For the fans, the holy grail is a release of Big Cypress. We’ve done a fair amount of the background work—these tapes are already transferred.” At one point, Shapiro handed me the original copy of Anastasio’s senior thesis, the music for a concept album titled “The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday,” which is set in a mythical land called Gamehendge. It is the basis for several of Phish’s most beloved early tunes. “I feel like I’m looking at the Gutenberg Bible,” I joked. “You are,” Montuori Rowles replied.

The next day, I met McConnell for breakfast. After touring the archive, I’d felt overwhelmed. What did it all mean? “I don’t know what it means, either,” McConnell said, chuckling. He was wearing bluejeans and a Mets hat. “I don’t try to.” Later that morning, McConnell drove me around Burlington, pointing out where the members of Phish had lived, practiced, hung out, and gigged during the band’s formative years. A lot of the clubs from that time were gone—Finbar’s, Hunt’s, Memorial Auditorium, where the band once opened for Allen Ginsberg—but the scrappy apartments mostly remained. McConnell guessed that he’d rented something like seventeen different spots, in total, around town. (He and Gordon still live nearby; in 2006, Fishman bought a blueberry farm in Lincolnville, Maine, a Down East town where he has served as a town selectman.)

McConnell joined Phish in 1985, when the band still had a second guitarist, named Jeff Holdsworth. Anastasio, Fishman, Gordon, and Holdsworth had all been undergraduates at the University of Vermont; McConnell was studying at Goddard, an experimental college in nearby Plainfield. McConnell was doing the booking for Goddard Springfest, which featured a dozen acts. “There was a band called the Cuts, which played eighties music,” McConnell recalled. “They wore black suits—they had a thing going. But they had to cancel. Mike found out they cancelled, got my number, and called me in my dorm at seven-thirty in the morning. The phone was just ringing, and ringing, and ringing. I ended up picking up, like, Stop calling me.” Still, Phish got the gig. “I just knew kind of immediately that I was supposed to be in this band,” McConnell said. “Even before I heard them, just seeing them driving up.” In 1986, Anastasio and Fishman both enrolled at Goddard, and McConnell received a hundred-dollar finder’s fee from the school—at the time, the college had just thirty-three undergraduates.

We wound through the U.V.M. campus. “The very first time I played with the band was right up here,” McConnell said, slowing down and pointing toward a courtyard between two buildings. For about six months, Phish was a quintet—then Holdsworth quit. “I was bringing in this massively composed music, and he didn’t want to learn it,” Anastasio told me. “But Page was all in.”

“When I first joined, Trey asked me, ‘How much will you commit to this? Are you gonna be gone in a year?’ I was twenty years old at the time,” McConnell told me. “And I said, ‘No, I’ll be here for ten or fifteen years. I will really, really commit to this.’ I remember thinking, This music is unconventional, but it’s good enough that there’s gonna be a niche for this.”

At Goddard, Anastasio started studying with a composer named Ernie Stires, whom he described as “kind of a second dad.” With Stires’s guidance, Anastasio began writing atonal fugues. In Phish’s earliest songs, he said, “all four parts were composed and fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.” (He later showed me pictures of some of those early, handwritten compositions, including “The Squirming Coil,” from the band’s second album, “Lawn Boy,” fully annotated, with marginalia like “WEIRD TIME STUFF.” “I have hundreds of pages of this,” he said.)

For Anastasio, composition and improvisation are not quite antipodes, though they do function differently. “Rhythmic variation is a huge part of the way that I improvise—that’s something a little bit unique about my guitar playing. When I’m composing, I tend to lean into harmony,” he said. “Improvisation arises from a gut-level reaction rather than from rational thought. Composition—arranging sounds to create a musical narrative—is slower.” Both, he offered, “are a very direct path to the heart and emotion.”

The band began booking regular shows at Nectar’s, a bar and restaurant in downtown Burlington. “Nectar’s was three nights a month, three sets a night,” Gordon said. “That’s one way to be relaxed—to have all that time and nothing to prove.”

“We knew everybody’s name in the audience,” Anastasio said. “Burlington was particularly cool right then. Bernie was our mayor. Ben and Jerry were handing out ice cream. We would play a show until two in the morning, then we would all go to Howard Johnson’s and eat French fries. It was a really deep social scene during that incredible age when you’re figuring out who you are.”

“We were rebelling, but no one cared,” McConnell said. “We weren’t rebelling against anyone in particular,” he added, laughing. “We just weren’t gonna not do what we did.” Slowly, Phish’s audience got bigger. “It used to be easy to track, because we would go to a town—Northampton, Massachusetts—and play to five people in a club in the basement,” McConnell said. “And the next time there would be twenty-five people. And then they’re, like, ‘O.K., we can move you to the club upstairs.’ And then there were fifty people. And then it was the next club, and the next club, and then it’s the arena at UMass.”

Phish has long been likened to the Grateful Dead, a comparison that feels easy but is also apt. (Both bands are known for improvising and for self-actualizing onstage rather than in a studio, and have been trailed around the country by packs of sandal-wearing devotees.) After Jerry Garcia’s death, in 1995, some followers of the Grateful Dead saw Phish as a viable alternative—a new anchor for the life style. “There was a real change sometime in ’96,” Anastasio said. “We got famous. The pace of the growth was so astonishing. We were all just hanging on for dear life.”

On my last day in Burlington, Anastasio and I met for coffee. The night before, at dinner, I’d been asking him about Phish as a disobedient force that refuses to acquiesce to the whims of the culture. I was thinking specifically about the band’s screwball humor—what it meant to play an Electrolux vacuum cleaner, as Fishman occasionally did, or to sing very long songs about lizards in the early and mid-nineties, when rock music was perhaps at its most righteous and angsty. (I recalled, as a teen-ager, watching Eddie Vedder, of Pearl Jam, scrawl the phrase “PRO CHOICE!!!” on his forearm, on MTV, and thinking it was easily the most intense thing I’d ever seen.)

Anastasio said that some degree of exuberance and absurdity were simply ingrained in the process for him—that he had always thought of songwriting as collaborative and fun. Anastasio was brought up in Princeton, New Jersey, where his father worked for the Educational Testing Service. His mother was a children’s-book author and an editor at Sesame Street magazine. He started singing and playing guitar as a teen-ager, hanging around the Princeton campus with his friends. (Anastasio was one of the first employees of the Princeton Record Exchange; for a while, he was paid partly in vinyl Led Zeppelin bootlegs.) “There’s a rhombus sculpture at the Institute for Advanced Study, and we would climb up on this thing with a four-track machine. It was hard to climb up—it was a big success story if you could get on it. We’d bring acoustic guitars and a six-pack of beer, a couple joints, and laugh and make up these songs,” he said. Some of those early tunes eventually made their way into the Phish repertoire, such as “Guy Forget,” which was named after the French tennis player and contains just one lyric: “I’ve never met a man that I could not forget / Except for Guy Forget.” “Everyone was laughing and falling over, and I’m just playing the guitar, making up this ridiculous non-song, but it’s catchy and it’s funny. Years later, I spontaneously started to sing this thing at a Phish concert, at Nectar’s, and suddenly it’s in the lexicon. It’s nothing, and yet people have signs and they scream for it. So you do it, and it’s fun. But half of my brain is thinking, Oh, my God, shoot me now.”

Still, Anastasio said, he didn’t really see silliness as the nucleus of Phish’s countercultural ethos. He took his phone out and started playing “Fluffhead,” a song he wrote when he was nineteen or twenty. “This was always the point of rebellion,” he told me. “This is all written out—it’s tongue and groove, piano and guitar.” He played a bit more of the song. “Right now, the countertheme is the bass. Then it’s the piano. Now it’s the guitar. Now we’re playing it in a different key. There it is again. Then we do it without any rhythm, same theme. Now I’m playing the upbeat, and Page is playing the downbeat. Same theme. Now Page is on the upbeat, I’m on the downbeat. That’s backward. Now I’m going up keys, and he’s answering me. There it is again. O.K., practice that for fifteen hours.” Anastasio laughed. “That’s one theme, developed. We do a twelve-minute-long song, and then we start improvising.”

Anastasio pointed out a window toward a church where he used to watch Stires, his mentor, play organ. He said, “One of the first things that he taught me was the concept of the emancipation of dissonance, which was an idea put forth by Schoenberg. Conceptually, what it means is that as music progresses through time it ought to become more dissonant.” He paused. “I was writing atonal fugues as an exercise to figure out those outer realms of harmony. If you listen closely, you can hear nods to that in the middle of ‘Fluffhead.’ ” For Anastasio, this was the truest point of insubordination. “That’s Phish,” he said. “And that’s the defiance.”

During my time with Anastasio, the musician he spoke about with perhaps the most passion was Leonard Bernstein. Anastasio’s enthusiasm for Bernstein is based, in part, on the composer’s ability to effectively wed classical theory with popular song. “ ‘West Side Story’ was the first album I ever got. I’m talking about fifth grade,” Anastasio said. “Even then, I was thinking, How the fuck does he do this?” He went on, “I don’t think Bernstein wanted to do a Broadway play. He felt like it was a waste of his talents. But it wasn’t! The best part is when Tony gets shot and dies at the end. I’ve got to play it for you. I’m sorry.” He pulled out his phone again. “You’ve heard this melody before, and it was hopeful. And then when he dies, and she’s over him, they play it again, and he re-harmonizes it, and it’s heart-wrenchingly horrible.” Anastasio’s eyes filled with tears. “This is the moment I fell in love with music. It’s like a funeral dirge. That’s all liberated dissonance, everything you’re hearing. This is a very simple phrase, a simple melody. And then he modulates. And he’s consonant now, the last shred of hope . . .” The song kept playing. “That’s in key. Finally, he gets there. He goes, ‘There’s a place for us, there’s a place for us, there’s a place for us . . . somewhere . . .’ And then it never modulates. It ends on the most dissonant interval.” Anastasio looked stricken. He wiped his eyes. “Ernie and I would talk about this stuff when I was eighteen. ‘Don’t give it to ’em. Don’t resolve,’ ” he said. “Instead, I would just keep going and going and going.”

On September 14, 2000, Phish performed an aching cover of Neil Young’s “Albuquerque”—a song about the isolation and stress of life on the road—at the Darien Lake Performing Arts Center, in New York. Anastasio’s voice was uncharacteristically melancholic. By then, Phish had been pushing the limits of most everything for nearly twenty years. Soon afterward, the band took a two-year break, but it wasn’t enough.

In April, 2004, Phish played a series of exceptionally grim shows in Las Vegas. Anastasio was addicted to opiates. “I remember coming offstage, and, to anybody who was standing around, I’d say, ‘Did people like that shit?’ ” Anastasio told me. “I knew it wasn’t good.” The financial pressures of the operation (at the time, Phish employed around fifty people) were overwhelming; the scene backstage was decadent and depraved. There were marriages and children at home. The drugs caused problems; the drugs obscured problems. “I don’t know what came first,” Anastasio said. “When you feel bad about letting people down, a great solution is to take an OxyContin. If you aren’t working as hard as you used to, you think, I’ll just do a line of cocaine, and then I can work harder. We had doctors who were writing prescriptions in order to get backstage: ‘Oh, you must be tired from all this touring. Here are five hundred OxyContins.’ ”

Anastasio was locked in a cycle of indulgence and repentance. “What would happen is we’d go home, and I would do yoga and go to the gym, run on the treadmill, get my shit together,” he said. “Then we’d go out, play one set, and, bam, it was back. Because it was fun. Everyone was having so much fun. There goes the people-pleasing. You don’t want to be the one to say the party’s over.” On May 25th, Anastasio posted a note to Phish.com announcing that Coventry (the band’s seventh festival, held at a small airfield in Vermont) would be their last show. “We all love and respect Phish and the Phish audience far too much to stand by and allow it to drag on beyond the point of vibrancy and health,” he wrote. His language was defensive: “For the sake of clarity, I should say that this is not like the hiatus, which was our last attempt to revitalize ourselves. We’re done.”

“If you want to talk about the statement, you’d have to talk to Trey, because that was where his head was,” McConnell told me. But not, I ventured, where McConnell’s head was? “No,” he said. “I was sad. I wasn’t, like, This is the wrong decision. I just thought, This is the decision. It wasn’t going well for any of us, really, but especially not for Trey. And Trey’s the locomotive that drives this thing.”

Fishman recalled a distraught Anastasio telling the rest of the band that if he didn’t get out of Phish he was going to die. “What I remember is Trey saying, ‘I just can’t keep doing this,’ ” Gordon said. “And Page and Fish saying, ‘Yeah, I think you’re right.’ And me saying, ‘I don’t agree.’ I went through this grieving period, which was really hard. And I would have these dreams—we’re still together, and we’re playing, maybe it’s Ohio or something. There’s a hillside. It’s grassy, and there’s a long dirt road. And there’s already a few thousand people there. I get into the building, and I’m backstage, and there’s a river right out the back door. And I get into this little gondola.” Gordon’s eyes were wet. “It felt like a river within my soul. That’s what I was grieving. That’s what was gone.”

Coventry is still a sensitive topic among Phish fans. Torrential rains flooded the festival grounds in the days prior; sixty-eight thousand fans showed up anyway. Many of them left their cars on the side of Interstate 91 and hiked the rest of the way. (The state of Vermont cleaned up the highway afterward and sent the band a bill for thirty-five thousand dollars; Phish paid it.) The sets had their ups and downs: some of the improvisations were gorgeous, but the more composed elements felt messy. “It was really obvious that the band was sick,” Fishman said. There was rancor in the crowd. Fans blamed Anastasio for pulling the plug. “There was this backlash of loathing online, directed at me,” he said. “It was so shocking, and it fucked me up so bad. Maybe I deserved it. But it was an experience that I was not prepared for.”

In December, 2006, when he was forty-two, Anastasio was arrested in the early morning, while driving through Whitehall, New York, a small town a few miles from the Vermont border. The officer who pulled him over found drugs—Vicodin, Percocet, Xanax, heroin—in his car. He failed a field sobriety test. He was in ghastly shape, both physically and emotionally. “I’ll talk to people in my life and say, ‘I guess I could have died.’ And they’re, like, ‘Could have? You were fucking days from death,’ ” he said. “I think I weighed, like, ninety-seven pounds. It was horrible. You don’t even know it’s happening. You just think you’re fixing the problem. You’re not getting high—you’re just trying to stave off horror.”

The day after Anastasio’s arrest, the Whitehall police sergeant, William Humphries, told a reporter from the Rutland Herald, “From talking to the police chief, he told me he was very cooperative, probably one of the most cooperative people that they’ve arrested.” Anastasio pleaded guilty to attempted criminal possession of a controlled substance, and was ordered to serve fourteen months in drug court, a voluntary program for nonviolent offenders that allows them to avoid jail time. Anastasio rented an apartment near the courthouse. His license was suspended, so he bought a bicycle. “I was really immersed. For a year and a half, all I did was go to meetings. I took drivers’ ed, I did my community service. I had a curfew, I had to call every day at seven in the morning. It was house arrest. I was alone most of the time,” he told me. “My family would come up during the weekends. I had little kids at the time. Whenever I talk to them about it, they say those are some of their greatest memories, because I wasn’t running off on tour.”

Anastasio spoke about the experience with an almost preternatural gratitude. “I did two hundred and eighty-odd hours at the Washington County Fairgrounds. I cleaned the toilets by hand. I parked cars. People would recognize me,” he said. “It was great, though,” he went on. “It was a relief. It was a humbling, healthy, beautiful thing.” Later, Anastasio thanked Andrew Mija, the police officer who arrested him that night. “Twice,” he said. “I sent him a letter, and then somebody said that he didn’t get it, so I sent another one.” In 2023, Anastasio and his drug-court case manager, Melanie Gulde, opened Divided Sky, a forty-six-bed residential drug-recovery program in Ludlow, Vermont, named for an early Phish song (“Divided sky / The wind blows high”).

Anastasio is now sober, and he is active as a sponsor in the recovery community. Late one night, I asked him if he ever felt haunted by it all: the mug shot, the handcuffs, court. “That’s not what haunts me,” he said. “What haunts me is what I could have done to someone else. I met a guy in jail who got in a car accident and killed two people. He was smoking a joint and crashed his car, and that was it. He hit a tree, and his friends went through the windshield. That’s what haunts me.”

On October 1, 2008, not long after Anastasio graduated from drug court, Phish announced its return, beginning with three shows at Hampton Coliseum the following March. It had been more than four years since Coventry. “Now the leader of the band is sober,” Fishman said. “But it wasn’t that big of a deal for the rest of us to not have that shit backstage. We just returned to how we were for the first fifteen years. In a way, it was more familiar—it was formalized by Trey’s sobriety, but in our youth that was just our work ethic. Back then, anything that affected our ability to play well was edited out.”

In Hampton, the band opened its first set with “Fluffhead,” which begins with the line “Fluffhead was a man / With a horrible disease.” Even watching the footage years later on YouTube—when the band walks out, the depth and intensity of the crowd’s roar is staggering. It goes on for more than a minute and doesn’t stop when Anastasio plays the opening notes. I brought up the moment with McConnell. “I know exactly what you’re talking about,” he said. “It was beyond incredible. I’ve gone back and listened to what that sounded like. It was a lot.” He paused, choked up. “It’s still a lot.”

“It took us a couple of years to get our mojo back,” Anastasio said. “There was a show we did in 2013, in Tahoe, where we played a long jam in ‘Tweezer’—that opened up a new realm. From that point on, I think it’s been improving every year.”

The idea of replacing a member of Phish has always seemed impossible, but it feels especially ludicrous now. Time is a liability for most rock bands, but it has enabled Phish to communicate through a private musical language, honed and expanded over decades. “There’s a ‘Ruby Waves’ from 2019, in Alpine Valley, that I’d put up against any jam from the nineties,” Anastasio said. “There’s no question to me that we’re playing better now. So much has happened—we grew up. Modern-day Phish exists in a realm that none of those years can touch.”

This past New Year’s Eve, Phish played its eighty-seventh show at Madison Square Garden. The venue, which has a concert capacity of around twenty thousand people, has become an unlikely home base for the band. Anastasio describes his relationship to M.S.G. as intimate, from the proclivities of the staff to the particular wobble and bounce of the floor and the way that a note reverberates around the room. The New Year’s show was the final gig in another sold-out four-night run.

I arrived in the early afternoon to watch the band sound-check. Each New Year’s, Phish stages a “gag,” or some sort of elaborate theatrical experience, at midnight. Like many things in the Phish universe, the gags are kind of hard to explain. In 2011, in the middle of a performance of “Meatstick,” a boisterous song about sausage, the band began singing in Japanese. Moments later, costumed coalitions from around the world (Swedish ski bunnies, a Mexican mariachi band, Hasidic rabbis) sprinted onstage, singing about the meatstick in their native tongues. Then the band climbed into the hot dog, briefly reclaimed from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and soared around the arena. Excuse me? you might be thinking. Yet I am here to tell you it happened. The band often loses money on these shows. Its management once suggested that it might as well stuff wads of cash into T-shirt cannons and fire them into the crowd.

Anastasio starts plotting the gag almost a year in advance, working closely with the artist Abigail Rosen Holmes, who often functions as a creative director for big events. (The rest of the band finds out about the gag only a few days in advance.) This year, at midnight, Phish would perform “Pillow Jets,” a song from “Evolve,” and a kind of hyped-up, E.D.M. version of “What’s Going Through Your Mind?” I’d heard bits and pieces of the “What’s Going Through Your Mind?” remix in a recording studio in Manhattan earlier that month. Anastasio had spent the weeks leading up to New Year’s in the studio, working on new material—maybe a Phish record, maybe a solo record, he wasn’t sure yet. Fishman had recently come through to add some drums.

“Pillow Jets,” which Anastasio wrote during the pandemic, was inspired by Wangechi Mutu’s “The Seated I” and “The Seated III,” two regal bronze sculptures of feminine figures, installed outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019. It’s a buoyant song about praying for an otherworldly savior—described, in the lyrics, as a “conjurer of thunder.” The gag this year was that a thunder goddess would actually appear: an enormous golden mask with big, blinking blue eyes descending from the ceiling. There would also be a live goddess, played by the Off Broadway actress Jo Lampert, and scrums of masked-and-robed dancers. From there, the band members, wearing flight suits (except Fishman, in his dress), would play a few bars of “Auld Lang Syne” before launching into the “What’s Going Through Your Mind?” remix. In the empty arena, this all looked and sounded particularly bonkers. (A mostly blank page in my notebook says only “K-hole? Ibiza???”)

It was a lot to sound-check. Anastasio is exceptionally good-natured, but, like anyone who has wrangled a complex creative operation for several decades, he is also exacting. “Whatever was just in my ears was not remotely the mix, and that is sad,” he announced from the stage. The first night of the run hadn’t quite coalesced—the portal didn’t open. Before the second show, the band attempted a new exercise, proposed by Gordon. It was a variation of something Phish has done for years, called “Including Your Own Hey.” The musicians begin playing a theme, and then every minute or so someone initiates a change—maybe a new key—and the rest react. When they’ve reconnected, they each say, “Hey.” The new drill was called “Never Vary,” or “We N.V.,” and it demanded the opposite: not changing the pattern for as long as possible. It seemed to reset something. The second night, the band played a glorious, thirty-seven-minute version of “Ruby Waves.” It led into an especially poignant “Waste,” one of my favorite Phish songs. In one verse, Anastasio sings about the hubris of wanting something big and unlikely, of understanding some latent desire as absurd but still believing in it entirely: “A dream, it’s true / But I’d see it through.”

The backstage at M.S.G. is a maze of over-lit hallways and cinder-block dressing rooms. Union guys with chewy New York accents slump on stools, eyeball credentials, and exude a kind of seen-it-all nonchalance. (I watched McConnell get stopped while attempting to return to his dressing room. “I play keyboards in this band,” he said politely, gesturing back toward the stage.) Anastasio had decided to wear a rhinestone-studded black polo sweater by the Lower East Side-based Bode, a cultish fashion brand. He showed me the top hanging in his dressing room. It glittered under the light. “I think I’m gonna wear this?” he said, and laughed. Yet it made a kind of aesthetic sense: Bode is known for repurposing vintage patchwork textiles into boxy garments, a look familiar to anyone who has ever roamed around a parking lot, eating a veggie burrito purchased from a cooler with no ice, waiting for an arena’s doors to open.

A few hours before showtime, the Garden allowed general-admission ticket holders to stream inside, single file, in timed groups. Security guards held up a yellow rope, establishing a sort of makeshift corral. People lucky enough to snag a spot in the front row started “tarping,” or spreading blankets on the floor. (Tarping is a controversial practice—too greedy.) Already, you could feel a kind of frantic hunger in the air.

I watched the show from up in the stands, where I could see everything. The thunder goddess descended, promising protection, rebirth. “Pillow Jets” is a song about a conquering yet compassionate creature, but it is also a song about music. Help arrives on “pillow jets of sound”:

They will come
Through smoke rings in the glare
With mace and discus
Slicing through the air
Restoring light
As the lost become the found

At midnight, there was confetti, balloons, light, a kind of ecstatic yawp. It felt, briefly, as if the crowd were a single organism. I leaned in. Around 2 A.M., the show ended, and we stumbled outside into a new year, stupefied, warm, together. ♦