Phish Resurface

The four members of Phish face each other, ready to jam. But they cannot see one another, because they are all blindfolded. Guitarist Trey Anastasio, keyboard player Page McConnell and the band's namesake, drummer Jon Fishman, wear rolled-up dish towels over their eyes. Bassist Mike Gordon settles for a blue wool scarf. They look like prisoners awaiting a firing squad. It is early December, and Phish should be rehearsing for their first concerts in two years: four New Year's-week dates in New York and Virginia and a U.S. tour opening on February 14th in Inglewood, California. The shows, along with a new studio album, Round Room, mark the end of a long break from the road and from recording. Instead, up at the Barn -- a 100-year-old farm building on a snowy hillside near Burlington, Vermont, that Anastasio bought for $1,000 in 1996 and turned into a cozy studio and practice space -- Phish are playing a game called Zen Language Ball. Someone improvises a lick, and the others grab it as inspiration strikes, adding notes, bending the beat. But there is no speaking or eye contact. The idea is to write new music together from thin air, in total darkness. Anastasio calls it "throwing the ball around." He's right. The music bounces all over the room, from player to player, as it grows: a hot Gordon bass run quickly fattened with funky drums and organ glaze; a guitar drone slowly turning into a spooky bit of ballad. It is the sound of Phish doing what they love best: playing without a net, in the psychedelic-dance-party tradition of the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band; making new music out of nothing but friendship and telepathy. And it is the reason why Phish split up in October 2000.

Phish used to do things like the Zen Language Ball all the time, often with a little chemical liftoff, back in the 1980s -- before the gold records and sold-out tours, when they were college students sharing houses and apartments in the Burlington area. "We had these jam sessions," Anastasio says one night after practice, "where we drank hot chocolate with mushrooms and just played, trying to get in tune with each other, for eight hours." One of those jams, he points out, is on a record: "Union Federal," a bonus track on the CD reissue of Phish's 1989 independent cassette release, Junta. "We used to rehearse like demons," Anastasio, 38, says excitedly, a big smile busting through his ginger forest of beard. "A lot of it was mind games, challenging each other. We'd change roles: 'I'm always the natural leader. Page, you be that person now.' We'd make Fish set up his drums left-handed instead of right: 'Use your mind to play, not your hands.' Or we'd just play one note for an hour -- weird stuff."

The weirdness bloomed in concert: in clubs such as Nectar's on Main Street in Burlington, where Phish first played in December 1984 and honed their writing and jamming chops through 1989; then in theaters and, finally, arenas. Fishman, who turns thirty-eight on February 19th, played most gigs during Phish's first two years flying on LSD. "I still play with the feeling I got from those experiences, trying to generate wind and water," he claims quite earnestly.