Chasin' the Trey: Frustrations of a Fan

[Disclaimer: As a 23-year-old lover of Phish, my opinions could easily be dismissed as those of a “noob.” And while it's true that I've only seen Phish live a handful of times, I feel that I've earned these opinions after more than a decade of obsessive listening to the band’s recordings. And to those who assert that only “those who were there” can make accurate musical judgments, I counter that the proof is in the pudding. In this case, the recordings are the pudding.]

Trey Anastasio, the Young Lion

I’m a huge Phish fan (please, for the love of Jerry, don’t write “phan”), but it ain’t always easy. Apart from the incessant but ineffective jeers of my hipster friends, the greatest roadblock to my affections is the deterioration of frontman Trey Anastasio’s guitar skills. Once a psychedelic shredder nonpareil, Trey (like all Phish fans, I’m on a first-name basis with the guy) has somehow devolved into an avuncular noodler, a toothless caricature of his golden-age self.

In most rock bands, this might not be such a big deal. But Phish is not like most rock bands. Their sound is predicated almost entirely on face-melting guitar solos, the kind of six-string heroics that inspire rapture and, under the best circumstances, allow the listener to forget the dubious songcraft that allowed for the solo in the first place. In the absence of such heroics, what remains is Phish’s inimitable and unprecedented stage show, a live event that is both parts rock concert and experimental theater performance. It’s an endearing and often enthralling mixture - and it’s undoubtedly the beating heart of the band’s appeal - but it also becomes a bunch of bullshit if Trey can’t play his instrument convincingly.

For one thing, the songs aren’t great in any conventional sense. The early and ambitious stuff - Trey’s magna opera - actually are great, but their mix of Zappa-esque virtuosity, psychedelic hijinks, and prodigious compositional length might as well be the definition of “acquired taste.” On the other hand, Phish’s simpler rock tunes are often fun, but rarely deep. At their worst, Phish’s straightforward rockers and ballads dwell in a cheesy purgatory of on-the-nose wordplay and not-quite-there conceits. For all you Phish fans nauseated by my heresy, try to sway a non-fan by playing “Waste” or “Farmhouse” for them. Chances are they’ll drown in the cheez. And when that same non-fan asks graciously for a second sampling, try to get him or her to sit through an entire “Reba” or “Divided Sky” without looking at their watch. Not everyone has the patience for all that bagging and tagging and selling to the butcher in the store-o.

But let’s get back to Trey and his guitar. At the height of his powers in the early- to mid-nineties, Trey consistently tapped into a musical force that few musicians ever even conceive of. In fact, in some live recordings from 1994 and ‘95, Trey actually reminds me of John Coltrane. This might seem like hyperbole, probably because Phish doesn’t play “jazz” and Trey never approaches Coltrane’s linear or harmonic sophistication, but there’s an energy in Trey’s playing that is undeniably similar. Add to this feverish, demoniac energy an inspired performance by the rest of Phish, and you get a young band that almost sounds more like Coltrane’s classic quartet than the Grateful Dead. ‘Trane lovers with far heavier credentials than mine will scoff at this notion, but I couldn’t care less. I’ve heard it, and it’s the truth.

So what happened to this energy, this near-spiritual force that transcended its goofball surroundings and blew minds from coast to coast, continent to continent? There are several theories of varying validity. The first is aesthetic.

On Halloween night, 1996, Phish performed the Talking Heads’ seminal album Remain in Light as part of their annual “musical costume” Halloween gag. For those not familiar with this record, it’s a spare, funky, and haunting set of songs that mixes David Byrne’s pop sensibilities with an all-out embrace of the arty and weird (it is, after all, a Talking Heads album). Adrian Belew’s guitar solos on this record are few and far between, but they hit with maximum impact, in economical shards of post-punk noise that suggest mechanical malfunction just as much as human dexterity. In performing the album live, Trey played these solos note for note, or at least as closely as he could. At the same time, drummer Jon Fishman and bassist Mike Gordon copped Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth’s grooves to a tee, adopting a tight, funky style that would prove influential to Phish’s own evolving sound.

The Remain in Light performance remains (ha) a watershed moment in Phish history. Gone were the days of unrelenting, balls-to-the-wall shredding, replaced instead by a slinkier, more groove-observant band with a different lead guitarist, a dude who began to express himself more through chunky chords and wonky effects pedals than through heroic, thousand-note solos (there are countless exceptions to this rule, including much of the cocaine-fueled summer tour of 1998, but what is a rule without its exceptions?). As a listener, I actually love the ensuing “funk’n’space” years, which lasted roughly from 1997 to 2000, when the band decided to go on an indefinite hiatus. In the countless live recordings from this era, Trey sounds both inventive and strong, and he solos with his customary jaw-dropping force when called upon. But there can be no doubt: his playing overall has become more placid; he is no longer the late-period Coltrane of the jam world.

Phish's IT Festival, Summer of 2003; Few bands inspire devotion - or ticket sales - like Phish

Yet while the aesthetic theory might explain part of Trey’s musical transformation, it doesn’t tell the whole story. To get that, we’ll have to dig the Second Theory of Deterioration, which is very straightforward and unsurprising and has everything to do with drugs.  

I don’t want to oversimplify the drug use of a man I’ve never met, but the fact is that Trey Anastasio’s struggle with the hard stuff has played a huge part in his musical hero’s journey. This struggle (which involved untold amounts of cocaine, opiates, and, worst of all, heroin) started in the late nineties, took him on an awful ride that lasted nearly a decade, and ended with an embarrassing but life-saving arrest and rehabilitation in late 2006. When one considers this struggle on a human level, guitar playing and entertainment become pretty irrelevant.

But while we’re on the subject, I’ll try to lay out my “Trey and drugs” opinion as succinctly as possible: it must be damn difficult to play guitar in front of thousands of people when you’re strung out on dope. It also must be damn difficult to play guitar in front of thousands of people when you’re no longer strung out on dope. With all that in mind, it’s kind of a miracle Trey gets back up onstage at all. It’s also no wonder his playing has changed.

The Lion ages, conquers his demons, wears a spiffy suit to court

But what else leads to change, to entropy and ultimate dissolution? The answer, of course, is Time. And so we arrive at the Third Theory, which states that Trey is old(er), and that old men do not play like young men. This one is simple and requires, I think, no further explanation.

So, you may be asking yourself, why is this guy writing all this mess if he thinks Trey sucks now? The first part of my complicated answer is that I absolutely do not think that Trey sucks. He’s still a powerful string-bending force, the glistening centerpiece in his band’s wholly original sound, a sound he built from scratch over thirty years of playing crazy, rule-breaking music with his three closest friends. You can count rock bands with that kind of longevity on both hands (at the very most, you might have to employ a toe or two). But unlike the other bands in this hallowed echelon, Phish can boast a track record of frequent and relatively radical change. This is a band that never stays in the same place for long, and Trey’s changing (what I’d call diminishing) guitar chops are a part of that process, for better or for worse.

Another reason I’m still wrapped up in this band after over a decade of intensive, near-Pharisaic listening is my hopeful insistence that each tour might be different in the right way (or at least “right” as I selfishly designate it). With each leg of each summer tour, each New Year’s run, each one-off stint in Mexico, I tell myself that maybe Trey has been practicing, maybe, just maybe he’ll be back to his Coltrane-level prime.

But what I hear instead is something akin to Miles Davis’ deterioration as a trumpeter. Miles was never a blistering bopper a la Dizzy Gillespie or Clifford Brown (despite his years with Bird and his lifelong adoration of Diz), but he was still a truly great trumpeter, a consummate stylist whose burnished tone is one of the most recognizably personal sounds in all of American music. That changed as Miles aged, and sometime in the early 70s, around the release of the masterful aesthetic statement On the Corner (1972), his playing turned plangent and squawky, a reflection less of his artistic vision than, I would argue, the weakening of his embouchure and a burgeoning addiction to cocaine. The similarities to Trey’s musical trajectory are difficult to dismiss, although I’d say our hero is in pretty good company alongside the Prince of Darkness. Let's call him the Prince of Ginger.

Miles Davis, around the time his sound turned squawky

To make a very long story short, I guess what I’m ranting about is that, despite recent claims of a Phish Renaissance beginning in the summer of 2015, I find Trey’s latter-day playing only fitfully inspired. And, as I outlined earlier, as goes Trey, so goes Phish: the jams are completely dependent on his front-and-center guitar playing, whether he decides go with “sheets of sound” or with chunky, effects-laden minimalism. Either way, what I hear in Trey’s playing, as a lifelong listener and a not-untalented musician in my own right, is not only the weakening of the man’s once-godlike fingers, but also a narrowed guitar vocabulary - a series of permutations of maybe ten to fifteen minor pentatonic and mixolydian licks that Trey shuffles like a swindling mountebank, hoping desperately you won’t catch him in the act.

On the other hand, it might just be that I’m growing up and growing out of the musical obsession that ruled my teen years with a tie-dyed and ganja-stinking fist. Many fans I’ve encountered on Phantasy Tour (a.k.a. "PT," the Phish-focused and one-of-a-kind “drug band message board” I’ve frequented since 2006) express the exact same frustrations on a regular basis. The thing is, we’ve heard what this guitar player and this band are capable of, and we’re just a little put out by what they're doing now. Maybe we’re “jaded,” but I have a hard time believing I could be jaded about anything at my age. Maybe we’re just honest.

Or maybe I should heed the words of the man himself, who asks Wilson, the cruel dictator of the mythological Gamehendge, an important question in the eponymous anthem: “Ooohh, Wilson, can you still have any fun???”

Postscript:

The preceding rant might not sound like the words of a "true" Phish fan. But I really do love this band, and it’s a crime I’ve barely even mentioned its three other members, whom I love just as much as I revere (and sometimes revile) their fearless leader. There’s Mike Gordon, the weirdo bassist I learned so much from as a young wannabe jammer; Page McConnell, the pianist/keyboardist and designated secret weapon whose touch ranges from silky to strident, depending on the tune; and, last but not least, drummer Jon Fishman, the resident clown in an already beautifully clownish band.