flashback: trey - june 7, 1995

[Itsnotanexperience]

sorry - last ancient article post of the day!!!


Trey Anastasio Interview
June 7, 1995 - Addicted To Noise
by Addicted To Noise

Recently, Addicted To Noise caught up with Anastasio the morning of a show at the Boise State University Pavilion. While initially quite sleepy, after some fruit and coffee, Anastasio was more than ready to talk shop.

Addicted To Noise: You're compared a lot, when you do get press, to the Dead, and are referred to as springing from the same tradition. You're also often mentioned in the same breath with Blues Traveler and other bands who get tagged with the Dead of the '90s label. How do you feel about that? What do you think about that?

Trey Anastasio: The Dead are the Dead. They were the forerunners, and are. They were on a certain level probably the most influential band on this era of music, the p.g.e., post-grunge-era. Last night at about four in the morning I turned on MTV and I mean, that grunge thing is just so beaten into the ground. I mean, Blues Traveler's having incredible success right now, and the Dave Mathews Band has a hit single, I think that in general, I mean, you know, probably what drives us is this quest to push music further. I mean music is the thing.

ATN: So it doesn't bother you that...

Anastasio: It used to bother me more just to be compared to anybody.

ATN: Right, that's what I was going to say, just to always be mentioned in the same breath...

Anastasio: It bothers me less even to be mentioned in the same breath as the Dead maybe even than Blues Traveler because that...those guys are great. [Blues Traveler lead singer John] Popper's such an incredibly good guy. So it doesn't really bother me much at all. But the Dead, they made the path.

ATN: In terms of musical exploration?

Anastasio: Well, my favorite bands, the bands that've influenced me the most, I think, are all kind of experimental bands.

ATN: Like what?

Anastasio: Right now I think Miles is probably the cutting edge in every stage along his career. I've been really heavily influenced by this Miles Davis album, A Tribute to Jack Johnson. John McLaughlin plays on it, and he plays really differently from how he normally plays, he's in a great space on that album, and I think that's really affected me a lot, that whole kind of style. And Miles influenced a lot of these rock bands, like the Dead or something. But the thing about the Dead, in terms of rock, they crossed it over into rock...

ATN: They brought over that style of experimentation.

Anastasio: In terms of experimentation on-stage, and lifestyle, and music as a community, and all kinds of stuff, but none of those bands are single influences on us musically any more than any other one, from the music part of it.

ATN: What other music are you listening to these days?

Anastasio: I went through this big Velvet Underground phase for about a month there, that and some of the Miles stuff, but I really like Pavement right now.

ATN: I just saw them.

Anastasio: How were they?

ATN: Well, you know, the thing that's lacking in their presentation sometimes is that they neglect to act as if they care about what's going on.

Anastasio: That's what I like about them in a way, that they're in it for themselves. I just spent about two weeks straight listening to Crooked rain, Crooked rain.

ATN: Yeah, it's a great album. In terms of pop melodies, you just can't get them out of your head.

Anastasio: Yeah, that's what happened to me. And their intention, they seem like they're not out to get famous.

ATN: I think that's very true. They want to make the music they want to make and don't care if they get famous in the process.

Anastasio: So I like them, and, ever listen to My Bloody Valentine? I just started getting really into that album. And Sun Ra. Sun Ra I now think is about the most important band ever, in the world.

ATN: In terms of what?

Anastasio: It's hooking up with the right kind of force, and I hear it in a band like Pavement. I mean, it's not about hot licks or anything, I'm talking about knowing what was important. And that's what I mean, that's why I don't mind being compared with the Dead or these other bands cause they totally know what's important. You know, there's this core of music floating around the universe, and then there's like a bunch of bullshit all around it because music is such a powerful thing, so there's an incredible amount of bullshit all around it. It's exactly like sex--it can be so powerful, but then you think about the prostitution industry. Sex is so powerful at its core, I mean if you talk about what really good sex is, or what really good music is...there's other things too, you know, like family or whatever--deep, important things in the world. But with music, you know so many people out there know that they can it and sell and make money, so you get a lot of shit out there. [Many have speculated that Phish's song "Reba" off the Lawn Boy album--with a chorus of "Bag it, tag it / Sell it to the butcher in the store,"--has referred to this tendency of exploiting the music industry.] All those bands that we've mentioned--the Dead, Sun Ra, Pavement, My Bloody Valentine, Miles--know what's important. When I hear them, it's beyond music for me. For whatever reason. And they're all totally different, I mean a couple of those bands are in the "Guitars are out of tune and we only know three chords" category, like the Velvet Underground were certainly like that. I mean, they're a great example. They knew where it was at, and their shit was so deep on a certain level.

With Sun Ra, the shit was the deepest, I mean the Sun Ra Arkestra was like, when you hear them it's just amazing. When you play with Marshall Allen from the Arkestra or something, I mean when I played with him there were eleven people, and sometimes I would hear this shit in my ear like someone whispering or some moaning or something like that, and it was so human it shocked me. It was Marshall Allen, and it was scary, it was scary shit. I mean to reach that level...I wonder what it would be like to be inside his body and hear the shit that he hears. So it's that kind of a thing. And that's the whole goal in life, and once you--a lot of different musicians have talked to me about this--once you've had it, you know, your life is never the same and your whole life becomes a quest to get it again. But too many people get too concerned with all the wrong shit about music and instead of going deeper they go shallower. I never feel comfortable picking anyone out, but there are these bands out there...that's the best way I can describe it.

ATN: Well, I agree. There's some music that taps into a deeper vein, and it doesn't matter what type of music it is, if its Klezmer music or whatever. Now, in terms of the press that the band gets, it doesn't seem like there's any other band out there that has the same measure of success as you do while getting so little press.

Anastasio: If you could show me another band, I'd be amazed.

ATN: Why do you think that is?

Anastasio: Because people, the whole press thing, I mean, I don't know. I don't think there's ever been, we spend, our whole focus in life is on improvisation [Page McConnell's undergraduate college thesis at Goddard College in Vermont was about music improvisation] and music as communication and no one has really written an article that talks about that. A lot of times we get compared to bands and it's a bunch of crap. I mean we're not doing the same thing as the Spin Doctors. They write great pop songs, that's what they do, and there's nothing wrong with that. I mean the Beatles wrote great pop songs and look at them. But that's not what we're doing at all, and these writers don't do any research and don't want to listen. And then they write these fucking articles, and it's like, "Does anyone really listen?" I mean there was an article in Rolling Stone and the writer didn't even go to the show and he trashed it, I mean that kind of shit. It's like, we play a three and half hour improvisational concert that ebbs and flows and has all these stops along the way, and we throw out a bunch of beach balls into the crowd or something because it's fun, and it takes about two minutes. You know the lazy journalist is going to talk about that. And I think partially we don't get press because it's harder to write about an intangible thing which is undoubtedly powerful despite the fact that it's intangible. People hear it and I know they hear it because they're showing up for the concerts. And I guess that's part of what bothers me about being compared to these other bands.

ATN: What bothers you?

Anastasio: In terms of hooking up bands together, in terms of generalizing, it's what bothers me and is also why I don't mind being compared to the bands you mentioned. A lot of them are in the same boat.

ATN: But even a band like Blues Traveler gets more press than you do, and I can't find any logical explanation for why that is.

Anastasio: I mean it's not really that big a deal. We're so happy with the way things are. Lately I've been thinking when we have meetings with our manager and the band and stuff, more and more I think the worst thing that could happen to a band is to have a hit single.

ATN: Why's that?

Anastasio: Because you weaken your fan base. People start coming in that aren't interested in the whole thing. And then they're expecting to hear that one song. There's so much stuff that comes along with it. The record company wants another one. You think they're going to stop at one? I mean, once they've had a taste, they want more. And you may just ignore them completely and good for you. But you're still going to have to deal with that shit, with people coming to the concert just to hear that one song, that subtle feeling of, "Oh, we had a huge hit, we'd better make another one." There's too much false stuff going on. It seems to me that things just happen too fast for bands. Last night we did our tech day in this arena, and I realized that--we did three days of tech days at this place, just jamming and stuff--and I was looking around and realized it took us thirteen years to learn how to play in a room this size, slowly growing into slightly bigger rooms, experimenting with my guitar and stuff like that. Little things, mic placement, monitor setup, what kind of guitar sounds work in that kind of a room, subtle placements, how you have to articulate, you know all that shit is just the shit that you learn along the way.

ATN: And so you ask yourself what would have happened thirteen years ago if you had had a hit single...

Anastasio: And were flipped into a room like the Boston Garden, I think it would have been too much for us on a certain level, we wouldn't be...

ATN: Well there's been something very organic about the growth of the band. You've constantly been moving in what feels like a very natural progression...

Anastasio: Yeah. Kind of like life. You don't go from being thirteen to being thirty, you gotta go through everything in between. Music is life to a musician. Having a hit single is very similar to going up to someone in eighth grade and saying, "Wow, that thing you did in eighth grade was really great. We're going to skip you to college. Here you go! Good luck!" Take it slow. Life is long.

ATN: Now, in terms of your fan base, it's very much a young, neo-hippie, alternative crowd. Do you ever wonder why there aren't people who are in their thirties who are listening to Phish?

Anastasio: I think there are people in their thirties who listen to Phish although I agree with you if you go to their concerts and you look around there are going to be a lot more young people. But a lot more young people are going to be at places in their life where they're going to be going to a lot of concerts. I mean I know I was. The letters we get...I guess I don't really wonder that, when I think about the whole crowd thing, the main thing I feel is just that I'm counting my blessings over and over again. The crowd is just, like I said we went and did that Lowell show [Phish played a May 6, 1995 Voters For Choice benefit in Lowell, MA. They previewed mostly new material, including a cover of "Gloria" for host Gloria Steinhem], and they loved it, and it was essentially all new material.

ATN: That's amazing for a band to be able to go out and do that.

Anastasio: I mean they want more, they want more new stuff.

ATN: And that's the kind of stuff that'll probably get harder and harder to do once you get a hit single.

Anastasio: That's it. Oh man, it's terrible. I mean let's say you're playing a 2,000 seat arena. And then all of a sudden you have a hit single and are playing at 10,000 seat places. You know 8,000 of them are there to hear that hit single. So should you play the hit single? It's kind of a no-win situation. If you don't play it, you're kind of looking at the audience and saying, "There, I'm not going to play the hit single, fuck it." If you do play it, you're looking at the audience going, "Well, here it is."

Without any of that pressure you go on-stage you have a 100 per cent feeling of "We're going to have a great time together, we're going to play what we want to play and what we feel like, what the crowd's in the mood for, it's all an experiment, we don't know." It's just a much healthier attitude and probably results in a much better concert. You know it's always weird when you see a band that's just had a hit single, and you're like, "Are they going to play it early in the night to get it out of the way or are they going to do it for an encore?" And it's never really that exciting when they do do it.

ATN: At this point there's a whole culture that's grown around the band. Do you ever think about what your impact is going to be on society, or even on the rock community? Are you going to have an impact?

Anastasio: In terms of an impact, if we could have an impact on the rock community...I guess I never really feel we do because we never get any press or anything, we're like an ugly little secret on the side that nobody wants to talk about. So no, I don't really think we're having that much of an affect on the community. But I do think we're having an effect on the people who come to the shows and hopefully that's to expand their minds about how much great music there is out there and listen to shit you wouldn't have listened to otherwise. To bring people to some kind of ecstatic point, to help them get to some point that they wouldn't have gotten to otherwise. I mean part of the thing with us is that we've been together for so many years. We get along so well, we work so hard at communication, playing together is really like an incredible journey or something. By keeping the same members in the band you can get deeper and deeper and deeper without having to change the personality balance. It's like a marriage or something. You get to know each other so well, I suppose any time you change the balance that each person's relation to each other changes in content to that new person.

ATN: What do you think about the fact that in terms of album sales, you've never really matched up to the volume a band is expected to move when they sell out Madison Square Garden in four hours and Boston Garden as fast as the tickets can be processed?

Anastasio: I think it's our fault. I think we haven't made very good albums.

ATN: Do you say that for all your albums?

Anastasio: I mean, I always go back and forth on it. I don't think we've come close to making the album we have in us, I mean not even close.

ATN: And why do you think that is? Do you think that at the base of things, Phish is a live band?

Anastasio: No. I think it's the recording process. I mean, I keep having a feeling that we'll make our great album a couple of years from now, or maybe even on our next album, but it has to be when we're totally in control, and we don't feel any kind of pressure.

ATN: What kind of pressure do you feel now?

Anastasio: Well, you pay a lot of money for engineers and people in the studio who have their agenda and your music kind of ends of getting filtered. I mean Junta is the closest thing you'll hear to us feeling no pressure. The very closest is that White Tape. Did you ever hear that? [The White Tape is a rarely circulated, highly prized copy of a demo album that Phish recorded even before 1988's Junta. There are continually rumors among serious Phishheads (and indeed, even among Phish management) concerning the release of this elusive recording.]

ATN: I've heard it once, but I don't have a copy.

Anastasio: Well The White Tape is to me almost like if you combine all of the good aspects of all of our albums--the creative freedom on that first White album, the playfulness of Junta, the sound quality of Hoist and the conciseness of Hoist --someday, there's an album like that. But every time, it's like we can only cover one bit.

ATN: When you talk about the conciseness of Hoist, do you think one problem is that it's hard to do what Phish does in a four minute format?

Anastasio: I don't think it would be if we were left to our own devices, which is what I want to do. I mean, Primus is the best about that. They got their shit together. They own all their own equipment at [Primus head honcho Les] Claypool's house, and they record right in his living room. And I want to do that, man, I really do. They just did it right, from an album standpoint, they did the right thing by starting right at the beginning by buying record equipment with advances, so that their first few albums were probably recorded on lower quality equipment but the whole time they were building towards having a great recording studio. It takes a lot of time and money to do.

ATN: So do you think that's something Phish is going to be strive for?

Anastasio: Well, we're talking about it. I've got my own studio now in my house but it's small, small but high quality, where I can do guitar over-dubs and vocals. And for the live album, we bought that equipment used during the recording. Granted, it's A-DATs.

ATN: There's a sense in so much of your music of deconstructing and restructuring melodies and rhythms. Where do you think that sense came from, because that's something that seems very different from even what bands like the Dead or whomever are doing.

Anastasio: That's sort of what we think. That's why we think people don't want to listen to the differences. It's like there's a big group of bands and everyone's the same. But in either case, that came from a lot of different places. Deconstructing and restructuring melodies, that probably came from writing a lot of fugues and stuff early in our career. The fugue teaches you about variations on a melody, exhausting every possibility. I hear that when I listen to Sonny Rollins. He'll jam on very simple melodies, and build it up for a long time. He's into the slight variations. Which kind of traces back to a gospel type of thing I think, where the song would go on for a long time, and they would take the melody around and each person would have their own little variation. The exact study of that would be like writing fugues. So the fugue in "Fluffhead," that's all theme and variation type of thing.

From an improvisational point of view, we do these exercises in band practice called "An including your own hey," which is a communication and improvisation exercise. Like I'll start with a very simple melody, and then each person joins with me in a simple repetitive counter melody until we form a bed of sound. When we each hear that the other three members are locked under their bed of sound we say, "Hey." Then the person to the right, which would be Page, alters his melody, and then we all alter our melody--it doesn't need to be a melody, it can be whatever the heck we're doing--until we've got a new bed, and then we say "Hey." That sounds like a really simple thing but it's hard to listen to three things simultaneously. And if you say "Hey" when somebody isn't ready yet, they know that you're not listening to them. So all four band members need to be listening to all of the other three continuously, and this thing goes around in a circle very fast. And it trains you to ditch your ego, not play anything from a riff, ego standpoint, and try to train you to only play by listening. Listening first, and complementing. And, it teaches each person to switch roles from being the leader to being the support person.

That was just the basis of a lot of our exercises. Then, we started really getting into it. So we started doing things like "Filling the Hey hole," where we'd do the same exercise, but you can only play in the spaces. No one can ever play on the downbeats together. It's totally wild. And that trains you to really be supportive because then you become part of a cog in a machine, with each person filling in different parts of that note. And then we'll do it focusing only on one aspect of music. So then we'll do it for a half an hour purely on texture. Or we'll take one note and only jam doing the "Hey hole" exercise, but only do it by varying texture, or by varying speed, or dynamics, or melody, or harmony, but always focusing on reorganization. Like that.

We've been doing these exercises now for a number of years and its had a huge effect on us, it just trains you to be a lot more open and to listen a lot more carefully. On "Tweezer," [a thirty-minute version off A Live One] you can hear a new section every two minutes. Every different variety. The textures change, the tempos change, the harmony changes. Or like in "Stash," [also off A Live One] in the jam in that, despite the fact that the general pulse stays the same through the jam, we're improvising by changing the harmonic structure of the song as it goes along. So if you listen to the jam what we've got is rhythmic patterns going against each other that are in different time signatures from each other. And that's a really cool thing. And then, there's actual good block harmonic structure that was improvised. It's normally just a D-minor jam, but the whole time you can look back at it and figure out what the harmonic structure was, going to the five chord, and the five of five, and to the two chord, and I don't really know other bands that do that. The thing is, you couldn't do that in a normal soloist, backup band atmosphere. The backup band is trained to support, define the chord progression and let the soloist do his thing. We kind of look at it from a different light, more from a King Sunny Ade band perspective, where there is no soloist, everyone is playing.

The other thing is having the groove speeding up and slowing down, that's a traditional no-no, like if the drummer is lagging everyone will glare over at him, "Keep the pulse, practice with a metronome, keep the pulse going." What we did to get over that was these exercises where we'd get in a circle and practice each person speeding up and slowing down and we'd follow them. For a couple of years, Fish and I would get into this thing where if he started to lag I'd be glaring over at him hitting my guitar louder trying to get him to catch up, and this is something that's happened in every band I've ever played in. It's like a typical problem, and no one ever does anything to solve it, so what we did was, we started practicing slowing down and speeding up, and now, it's something we want, so when he starts to lag, then we'll just lag with him. And then he'll lag really hard, and the next thing you know you got jams that are speeding up and slowing down. Nobody really does that. Usually a long jam consists of a groove and soloists taking turns playing on top of it, and there might be a harmonic structure, like in jazz where everyone's playing over the chord changes of the song, or it's free, and everyone's going in all different directions. But in terms of making that shit up spontaneously as you go along, the only way to do it is to practice spending hours doing it as a group or it just won't happen.

ATN: At the beginning of the interview you were saying that it was the end of an era for Phish. What do you imagine for the future?

Anastasio: It's the end and it's also part of a continuum. The best way to describe that is people always ask me, "What were your influences?," and that's such a fucked-up question, you know. It's changing so much from month-to-month. I mean six months from know I might be listening to something I hate now. That's why I say the easiest way to describe what's changed is that we're all thirty now and we used to all be twenty. I mean, when I first met Mike, Page wanted to do some jazz standards, and Mike was like, "No, I hate jazz, any kind, across the board." And I was like, "I hate country music. Any kind, across the board." I thought it was cheeseball. Now I love bluegrass, and Mike loves jazz, but even to say that sounds kind of silly. You just can't say where you're going to be in ten years. We'll probably listen to the Bay City Rollers for a while. (laughs) You listen to different things at different stages in your life. Don't they say that every cell in your body, over a certain number of years, has died and been replaced? How long does that take?

ATN: I'm not sure if I've heard that. I mean, I know brain cells don't get replaced.

Anastasio: Hmm, that's right, brain cells don't come back. And I don't know about nerves. I don't think nerves regenerate. But anyway, most of your body is made up of totally new cells, so, after however long that takes, you're really almost a completely different person. I thought it was like twelve years or something.

ATN: Maybe you're right.

Anastasio: Yeah, I think it's about twelve years. Maybe that's why things feel so different from when we started the band. Because we're all totally new people with none of the remaining cells left. (pause) Wow. (pause) I don't know. (laughs)