Phish Resurface

"I said, 'We're done,' " Fishman recalls. "Trey said, 'Yeah, we're not coming back.' I said, 'All right, I'll see ya later.' We got in our cars and went home."

I suppose I should accept my responsibility for the whole thing," Anastasio says with a guilty laugh over dinner in a small Italian restaurant in downtown Burlington. Phish's disappearing act "was probably my idea." He is being modest. Nothing much happens in Phish -- songwriting, stage gags, breaking up, reuniting -- that isn't his idea or greatly driven to fruition by his strong work ethic and blitzkrieg energy. He actually talks a lot like he plays guitar: Words tumble out in torrents, spinning in long digressions, much like the notes in his extended solos in live fan favorites such as "David Bowie" and "Runaway Jim."

Born Ernest Joseph Anastasio III, he comes from creative and disciplined stock. His mother, Diane, was an editor of Sesame Street magazine. Trey says her idea of fun was to "throw a pile of stuff on the ground, boxes of junk," and tell Trey and his older sister, Kristy, "to 'make something.' " Trey's father was an executive at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. He was also Trey's hockey coach.

"Trey likes to point back to his experience playing team sports -- he loves practices," says Paluska, who booked Phish for a campus show at Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1988 and soon became their manager. "Trey enjoys pushing everybody. But they all like to be pushed."

Gordon, Fishman and McConnell agree that Anastasio is Phish's leader. "It was his vision, more than anyone's, from the beginning, and that hasn't changed," says McConnell. The New Jersey-born son of a pharmaceutical research scientist, McConnell joined Phish in 1985, two years after Anastasio started the earliest version of the band at the University of Vermont with Fishman and guitarist Jeff Holdsworth. (Holdsworth left in the spring of 1986.)

Fishman is a native of Syracuse, New York. A strong, swinging drummer with an unusually soft touch, he's an irrepressible comic who wears a housedress onstage almost every night. "The band is named after him for a reason," Anastasio says. "The guy is a character." But Fishman says that for Anastasio, from the beginning, Phish was life.

"We used to have this yearly meeting," Fishman explains, "where we said, 'Is everybody still into being a band?' 'Yeah, yeah.' Then we got to the six-year mark. Everybody was getting out of college. Trey was very serious. He said, 'We can't go from year to year and have this meeting. I'm in it for the long haul. I need to know everyone else is in it, too. If we can't commit for the next ten years, then we dissolve it now.' "

Asked whether he is, in fact, the boss, Anastasio cannot bear to go all the way. "Half of me thinks it's a great thing, and half of me is embarrassed by it," he says. "That's a real problem inside of me. The essence of Phish, truly, is group existence, equality. But equality implies individuality. And that's been the battle." He takes a deep pause for breath. "Because I can be overbearing." He is also loyal. Many of the songs on Phish's nearly three dozen studio and live albums were written by Anastasio with lyricist Tom Marshall, a computer programmer by day for the Prudential Insurance Company. The two met, and first wrote together, in the eighth grade at Princeton Day School; they have been friends and collaborators ever since. "I have no training in writing," Marshall confesses. "And there have been times when some guy will hand Trey an entire book of poems, really good stuff. I felt threatened by that at one point. Trey just said, 'Don't worry about it.' "

Phish first talked of breaking up, or at least getting off the road, at some point in the last half of the 1990s. Exactly when depends on whom you ask. Anastasio remembers playing the last notes of the band's nearly eight-hour, outdoor millennium set on January 1st, 2000, as the morning sun rose over the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation in the Florida Everglades: "Fish and I turned to each other as we went offstage and went, 'Now what? What are we going to do next? We should just quit right now.' "

McConnell says he heard Anastasio and Gordon say the same thing after playing for 135,000 fans at Phish's 1996 two-day festival, the Clifford Ball. "Not in a bad way, either," McConnell insists. "It was more like, 'We just did a great thing. What if we just stopped now?' "