Phish Resurface

Anastasio always made music outside of Phish. In 1996, he masterminded a free-improvisation recording date with Fishman and members of Sun Ra's Arkestra, released as Surrender to the Air. In 1999, he toured with his own power trio. The morning after that weed-and-champagne hugfest backstage at Shoreline Amphitheatre, Anastasio went right to work scoring "Guyute," an old Phish song, for the Vermont Youth Orchestra. Within a year, he had made an album with a second power trio -- Oysterhead, with Primus bassist Les Claypool and former Police drummer Stewart Copeland -- and toured with his own big band, performing the new songs that became his 2002 solo album, Trey Anastasio.

In comparison, McConnell flew from Shoreline to New York, where he lived at the time, and, by his own admission, "slept for a few days. I didn't know what to do. I stayed home for a whole year and tried to figure it all out." He eventually formed his own fusion trio, Vida Blue. Fishman worked with the Jazz Mandolin Project and recorded with his side band, Pork Tornado.

"It was weird for a while," Paluska says. "We did lay people off. But the band was so active with different projects, our personnel situation moved back to a fairly similar place. And I had a lot of things to do for Phish. The Beatles haven't played together since 1970, but they still have an office full of people thinking about the Beatles every day."

Gordon thought a lot about Phish during the break. Born in Sudbury, Massachusetts, he was an electrical engineering student at the University of Vermont when he answered a campus flier posted by Anastasio, who was looking for a bass player. Gordon switched his major to filmmaking in 1986 and later directed the band's only video shown on MTV, "Down With Disease." "It was on Beavis and Butt-head," he says with a kind of pride. "They were talking about how fish swim around in their own shit." Last year, Gordon released a full-length documentary, Rising Low, about the band Gov't Mule and its late bassist, Allen Woody.

"I was exploring other things," Gordon says, "but I went through this phase of reading all of my old journals, from our first jam in a dorm room to the whole blossoming career. We were releasing these live albums" -- the Live Phish series, now up to sixteen volumes -- "and I had specific thoughts about different gigs. I made a fifty-page document and sent it to the office.

"But I got nostalgic doing it," he admits. "There were so many adventures, so much fun. Reading the journals, listening to old live tapes -- I started to feel like it was going to be hard to replace this in my life." So he did something about it. Last August, he booked a getaway weekend for all four band members (again, no management or family) at a hotel in Lake Placid, New York. "I wanted to treat them in style," Gordon cracks. He bought fruit baskets for everyone's room, booked a group boat ride and typed up a list of topics for discussion, including: When will Phish play again? Anastasio already had the new songs he wanted them to play. At a Labor Day picnic he hosted at his house, Anastasio held a little listening party. "He had each of us individually get into his car, and he blasted his demos," Gordon says, grinning. "And while they were playing, he described the stage antics that might go with them." By mid-October, Paluska had booked New York's Madison Square Garden for New Year's Eve (another jam band, String Cheese Incident, had been holding the date for a possible show) and Phish had recorded and mixed Round Room.

Which wasn't even supposed to be an album. Phish wanted to mark their return to the road by cutting a new record at the Garden, in front of their fans, then making it available for download at the stroke of midnight, January 1st, 2003. But the band liked the practice tapes of the songs they made at the Barn so much that they decided to put them out.

There is an austere, spacey quality to Round Room. It's an album of demos. But it is the purest Phish on record, more so than the band's official live albums, because it is how they sound in rehearsal: away from the crowds, jamming for the sheer private thrill of filling a room with new music.