Mike Gordon

27:45And by the way, I taped it. I had little realistic microphones from Radio Shack taped to the mic stands. And I refused to listen to it because it was so much of the moment. So I walked down the hill. This would have been after the second set. Everyone went in their own direction. And I remember hugging a tree. I'm not really a hippie, but it was the thing to do. and I said okay I need to do this I need to travel around with these people see if I can have this kind of experience in different cities everywhere and live in the woods and even the filmmaking career I'm about to start isn't as important nothing as important as this actually feeling a little a little teary thinking about this I've told this story but for some reason I maybe it's the jet lag or maybe it's having you here but it's it's very emotional seeming and I didn't want to play again but they did they wanted to play a third set another one yeah and they were you didn't want to because you felt like it was the peak moment and anything would diminish it yeah that's an interesting challenge for people who have peaks is what will the later peaks be like will they be as big or will they be different or i think at least for me you talked about jumping up and down yeah and do you think the physicality of it is a component yes maybe for two reasons one is i felt like i really looked stupid now the fact that we're in the middle of the woods and it's dark and there's only two people doesn't make a person too self-conscious but i i could feel the self-consciousness go away i could feel like it doesn't matter what i look like even to the other four bandmates that you know they just look like my friends in this little circle so i think transcending that self-consciousness 100 was part of it and then i think maybe the actual movement maybe it's no coincidence that you know in davening people are moving in many spiritual traditions there's movement involved yeah i felt like the base was like an amusement park ride that was hovering me through the woods over this new snowfall and over the years that was a feeling that the base was just a conduit but it's also a ride that carries me and so i wondered if i switched from playing with my fingers to playing with the pick, you know, would that change the level of the peak that I was having?

30:07And it didn't. Anything I tried, the peak was unstoppable. We did the third set, still peak. I was worried that it wouldn't live up to the second set. And then we all sat at a table and I said, I said, I had a life peak experience just then. Did you? And they said, well, not really, but we're glad that you did. Have any of the other band members ever reported having that experience besides you? That's such a good question. I'm surprised after 41 years and still being friends that I haven't really asked them, but I will. I'm curious. That's, I mean, I know that they've had feelings after gigs where it was just the most incredible thing.

30:51And several of them over certain ones. For me, it was sort of a religious experience. I don't know if it was that Do you feel like you accessed something in yourself or outside of yourself? I think it would have to be both. Maybe starting on the inside. So in later peaks, still just free-form jamming, which is very different from noodling. When it works, it's a very focused, it's patterns that are repeating, it's a meditation. we had to go through all these exercises within the band to avoid the noodling that happens and the getting lost in our own separate worlds. I want to understand the process of jamming.

31:34Do you start with an existing riff? So with Phish, in experiences like that, there were no plans even for whether we'd start with a riff or whether we wouldn't start with a riff. But what happened as we started touring and playing a lot more since early 90s is people would play a lot, a lot of notes, a lot of ideas at once. And the language used is, oh no, we weren't hooking up. We were in our own worlds. And there was nothing more important for us than hooking up. How long did it take for that to start happening, the hookup as opposed to the... Well, one thing we did is we developed something called, well, listening exercises.

32:19So we would get in a room at practice, and there are many variations on these. And the first version, it was designed to get us out of our own worlds and listening with bigger ears. So the first simple version is someone would play a lick, and then we'd go in a circle and just copy it, often maybe a two-bar phrase. And even Fishman, the drummer, would create something. We very quickly learned that it wasn't only the listening, it was the communicating in simpler ways to be understood. And then we realized, then our gigs ended up having a lot of mimicking, where someone would do something and the other person would just mimic.

32:53So we realized that the listening exercise was a little bit stuck. So we changed it so that we would be complimenting rather than mimicking. And the more we did the listening exercises, the more we hooked up. How did the idea of listening exercises come? I think it was probably Trey's idea, but we just all knew that we were lost because the fans liked that era because it was so experimental. And I mean, one of our influences is the Grateful Dead. We were Grateful Dead fans along with a bunch of other things. And with the Grateful Dead, I like how the, I think it was the Boston Globe put it, they were like a bunch of butterflies in a field randomly fluttering.

33:35Or maybe a worse analogy would be a bunch of people trying instruments in a music store and kind of hearing each other randomly. With us, it was described that we were like a herd of buffaloes that would be going at full speed ahead and then suddenly turn left together. How would you know when to turn left together? Well, that's what we were cultivating with the listening exercises. It could be a rhythmic shift. It could be a key shift. It could be a pattern. It could be any of the above. Would there be a cue? There was something kind of kitschy that we developed back then. We called it the language.

34:08So there were actually musical cues where we could talk to each other in riffs. Eventually, that was demoted to just a novelty that we did for the fans. We had one that indicated we should all fall down, and we all just stopped playing and fell down. And we had a way to describe people in the front row in musical riffs, and we would stop and just point at them. There were some musical cues within that. But by doing these listening exercises, sometimes it wasn't the notes. Sometimes we would just follow each other with tempo or with legato versus staccato or different kinds of you know key changes or so we got more attuned by doing that and then just by having you know hundreds of shows so in those examples in a key change yeah does someone change keys and then everyone follows and how do you know i'm gonna fast forward all the way to this era now okay um trey loves it when i change keys as the bass player and we practice making sure everyone can hear clearly so they can follow that you wear in years now we do for years it was very controversial so we didn't but now we do you didn't because it was controversial with who with ourselves the idea was that i mean okay i'll say it in harsh words the band members thought that using in-ear monitors was a bigger detriment to the Grateful Dead than Jerry Garcia's drug addiction because they thought that music is made to, that the sounds are made to collide in the air.

35:35I think that's right, by the way. Yeah. I think that's true. Yeah. What I was also going to say about the current era and what we've grown to is the Phish guys are really good at not trying to prove anything. And that's taken to an extreme. There's hundreds of songs, and there are all of these atonal fugues that Trey wrote with his composing mentor, worked into the songs. So there's songs, and there's fugues, and then there's jams. Not in every song, but some songs have all three. When we get to the jam part, these days, we might just sit on A minor, and there might not be a pattern or a lick or anything planned.

36:17Those guys, after 41 years, there's so much relaxation. and acceptance. It's incredible what they don't do. They'll sit on A minor and do nothing. In the 90s, people were doing, in the band, were doing everything. They were saying, okay, we're going to go to a key, a tritone away, and we're going to do a triplet rhythm, and it's going to be the most shocking thing, and we're going to do it together because we're listening so hard. Now, they'll just go to A minor. It might take five or 10 minutes for anything to happen, but they'll just wait and then when it happens it's a beautiful thing it's the muse you know it doesn't always take off into a religious experience but i think being so relaxed about it not trying to prove anything is what lets it go more often than not to a special place with no plans no patterns no lips thing that makes it open typically be rhythm it has to start from rhythm the rhythm has to be there has to be a floating quality that is desired and cultivated so that's the starting place but it might be a melody we might not know it might be any of the above it might be that fish might i mean he practices all day every day and he has incredible all of his limbs are independent as all hell for better or worse because sometimes in the middle of a rock song that's not what you want but he's figured that part out too he's really the namesake for more reasons than people would guess.

37:51He's a very flowing, relaxed, and yet thoughtful person. And he's crazy and silly and just being himself. So he might have this pattern between a ride cymbal and a woodblock or something. I might not even be, you know, and I always had the observer going even in these big experiences, but I might not be analyzing it. I might just be hearing it and playing. I love what I don't understand. And I might make up a baseline. I might change the rhythm. So it juxtaposes against that in a way that I couldn't count. I'm just feeling it. It might be all of those things. A lot of times listening to everyone else or listening to the whole is much better than listening to myself if I can stop listening.

38:31Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that might be the biggest key to all improvisation. Yeah, I think so. Listening to either the whole or everybody else and not yourself. These lessons have to be learned over and over again. Maybe that's why those of us who meditate, meditate every day and not just sometimes, because it's easy to fall back into trying to control something that the muse does a lot better controlling than we do. And so it's kind of interesting to look at this, cultivating these religious experiences by looking at what the challenges are. So I talked about noodling a lot, being in our own worlds.

39:10Another challenge we had was analyzing. We would get off stage after the first set, and we would go backstage, and some comments would start flying around. And Trey would say, well, that was a good set. Fish, everything was kind of fast. And then we would get out for the second set, and everything would be so slow. So we realized that one of the problems was this analyzing and judging that was happening. So we developed something called the no-analyze rule. This is now late 90s. we were not allowed to get off stage and analyze other than saying, oh, that was really good. That's what we could say.

39:45How did that happen? The second sets were sometimes crummy because of feeling this judgment. Did everyone recognize it or how did it happen? I can't remember so specifically. I will say that we're all visionaries and thinking about some deeper issues in music, but Trey really is a great leader in that he's the one that's going to step up to the plate and say, okay, we should, let's try this. So I would say that he probably instigated it. I would get glares sometimes in the first set, and it was always for two reasons. Either there wasn't a bed of solid rhythm to sit on, or the opposite, that I was so intent on laying down the solid groove that I wasn't listening and flowing freely.

40:31So that was always a balancing act. So glares are okay. Glares were not okay. Well, the no-analyzed rule set the tone for no glares. Less glaring, less judging. When we made the no-analyzed rule, life got much, much better. Because I would be in the middle of playing and I would think, I'm having the feeling that I want to go here and here isn't expected, but that's my feeling. I wouldn't worry that I'm going to get shit for it later or a glare or even a side comment later. It could be truer to yourself. But could that create confusion musically if different members have inspiration to go in a different direction at the same time?

41:11There's a crash. Yep. I mean, they're still going to be clashing while playing or while talking. It's amazing that we get along so well. I don't know another band that has that amount of time with being good friends. The communication has just been so flowing. and offstage, you know, talking about what we want to do and our goals. And these problems of different values, different opinions, different goals, they're just worked through with us. A lot of it also has to do with acceptance. It's been a big theme. Let's say there's a song. Let's say it's supposed to have a reggae groove, and it doesn't feel right.

41:54It doesn't feel like even a reggae groove. It doesn't feel slow enough. and I'm playing there's the mode from when I was younger more often when I would think darn it it's not right if I could just get everyone to slow down you know or hit the right hits then it would be so much better so not to do that is very powerful to say this is what it is it's not what it normally is and accepting in every way so everyone has that philosophy where we might later at practice say when we did this song it was too fast can we just you know it's in a humble way it's not between sets though during this experience that's okay that's just progress but to be playing and accepting can lead to some incredible experiences and honestly so i think that the for me one of the hardest things to accept is if something sounds cliche and my whole career is I'm in a band that's not considered cool you know but now some people are coming out in the music business saying oh actually this was an influence but generally speaking it's not a cool thing we're not following any trends at all ever and then there's the cliches within what I hear with what we're doing so if we're like I said we're sitting on a minor someone might start playing a melody or I might play a bass line it might be in itself a cliche as a phrase or a chord progression that we've done so many times.

43:22And that feeling of going through the motions of regurgitating something from before is a crummy feeling. But if I can even accept that, that, okay, this is not cool with a capital C. Maybe I'm playing a bassline. Maybe I'm repeating one note for half an hour. And that's a peak experience. And if I'm thinking, well, there's bass players out there. They want to learn some interesting patterns and basslines for me. It's the opposite of that. It's like, I'm not looking for cool. I'm looking to literally have the feeling of floating over the crowd. And sometimes there's cliches. And if I can accept them, oh, this sounded like something like the Rolling Stones we're doing in 1973.

44:02Why can't we be more modern? Why can't we do poor progressions that we haven't done? And why do we have to be, you know, when all that kind of thinking goes away and even the cliches are accepted, nirvana can be reached. So these are the challenges i feel like even in the cliche you can find subtlety in it yeah yeah makes it transcendent there's a book friends with this guy pat patterson is called writing better lyrics it was the best-selling book on music and all of amazon he's an interesting guy there's one chapter on cliches and that's one thing that he says it's as soon as there's a little tweak where it's now fresh and it's not something that's been overdone it's not a cliche anymore and it can be the smallest adjustment you know it could be the smallest leaning in a slightly different direction can it can change everything that's right and maybe even the listener doesn't know the difference but when you're playing it you can feel i noticed the way it bounces off of the other things is It's new.

45:08In songwriting, it's like that too. It can take one note in the phrase or that makes it feel fresh. Yeah. Oh, so you had asked about these kinds of experiences outside of Phish. And I started playing with Leo Kotke early on. And we have three albums together. How did you come to me? So that was another epiphany. I had heard him play. Actually, just starting college, all the Phish guys were at a great club in Burlington called Hunts. and he was doing a set it was you know it's very eclectic sounds like classical music for a moment and it sounds like jazz for a moment and it's and you know you could hear a pin drop and during the silent moments and he's so funny and whimsical so I was attracted to his music pretty early on and I met him briefly once or twice and I heard a radio interview it must have been in 1999 or so and he was about to come to town.

46:06It just clicked that this sense of humor would align. He often uses a kind of a groove that's like a train, but he couldn't tell you what he's doing, but then he tweaks it. He doesn't know augmented chord and language like that. So I decided to put together a little care package for when he came to town in Burlington, Vermont. It was, well, the main thing is I took a piece of his unaccompanied guitar and I added a bass line, which I composed over three months. It was called The Driving of the Year Nail. It was really interesting to do that. I didn't know whether I should be harmonizing to him or doing some lines in unison or just being a more traditional bass player, and I sort of combined all these elements.

46:44I made a cassette, and then I brought my first magazine cover on Bass Player Magazine. I'm jumping in the air in Vermont with hills in the background. And then my book that I wrote, which is silly little blurbs called The Mike's Corner Book. So I gave it to him, and on stage, he referenced a story in my book. He said he really liked it that I had used the word elemosinary because he hadn't seen that word since some other book. And it was in a story I wrote only to use big words that I thought were pretentious because who knows what they mean. And then three months later, I hadn't heard from him and he called me and he said, I listened to the tape.

47:19I finally listened to the tape. And he said, well, you know, a lot of people have given me tapes like this over the years. And actually it's a kind of cheesy thing to do but there's something about your tape that's a little different so let's get together and jam and then i'm shocked that anyone else ever did this yeah i know it's like oh this happens all the time puts it on the stack that's wild yeah it's kind of like when when we met willie nelson for the uh farm aid thing that he does our guys wanted to give him a vermont bud and we get on his bus, which is so pretty, and the woodwork and everything.

47:56And he says, oh, thank you so much. And he takes out a huge bucket and throws it in the bucket. It's kind of like that. I've gotten lots of tapes. So we went to Trey's barn on a mountaintop. It's a 200-year-old barn that's been rebuilt on a mountaintop by our crazy builder friend, Mike Larson. And we went there and we played for two or three hours and it was a nightmare. Everything that I tried to do on the bass took the mystery out of his playing by anchoring it, by attaching it to a genre until we did one lick it was maybe like a little one or two bar pattern and that was the ticket to us playing together for the next 20 years so between the word ellie most and area and that in those 10 notes of music we had a career and a friendship together can you play me the lake probably not i know on the first album we made it was it was a song called june i could mimic it but yeah see if there's if we can find it yeah the first album was called clone and we just used pots and pans from the kitchen and we were in a little shack there wasn't even going to be an album i was getting divorced the first time and i had to go get out of vermont and we were in a shack

49:19Let's let it go and see if there's like a B part that's the point.

49:24We're so entwined and messed that it's hard to end.

50:02I haven't heard this in 20 years.

50:11I guess we're just trying to make variations.

50:30It'll be this leg, I guess.

50:35You're so entwined. It's hard to know what's what.

50:51guitar solo

51:17On our latest album, there's a song of his called Ants, which is kind of similar and it modulates to a whole bunch of different places, but that is a monster on the guitar. And then I figured out a monstrous bass part to go with it. This seems like the precursor to what was later going to be Ants.

51:44Probably something that simple, even though I can't hear it.

51:58Yeah. Even with my other band, which is just my, goes by my own name at this point, there was another epiphany, St. Albans, Vermont. I live on the lake north of Burlington, Vermont, and I've been building a studio for three years and now it's done and my kitchen is pink modeled after seeing yours at Shangri-La it's beautiful but before building the studio and before living on the lake I was in St. Albans Vermont it's an old war town and I was walking around having a peak experience in the artist way one thing that people that do the artist way one of the exercises is to go on an artist date every week for two hours you turn off your phone you go alone and you go with your inner child it's all that book's all about you know developing your child like sense of wonder again despite your inner critic so it might have been that and i'm walking around st albans and i suddenly realized that this person scott murowski who i had met years and years ago would be someone i should get in a cabin in the woods and write songs with so we developed this repertoire and this uh how did you meet him he played in a band funny thing is he had a band called Max Creek he's played with for now 51 years or 52 years all this happened when I was 18 and went to college within one month I saw Leo Kotke play at Hunt's I met the fish guys and I saw this person Scott Murawski play usually these big changes are supposed to happen in groupings of seven so I wasn't 21 yet I was 18 it's not aggressive anyway be interesting to look at your astrological chart on that I should time that's interesting yeah and now I'm playing with all those same people 41 years later.

53:41So Fisk broke up in 04. Why? Probably because some people's problems with drug addiction. That's probably the biggest thing. But there were some other tangential things. There were some questions about the management had grown very big. We were doing everything in-house. We had a genius manager, John Peluska wanted to keep control over everything. It got to be too much, too many band meetings, too much planning. It became too much of a business, would you say? I wouldn't quite put it like that. We do these festivals with no other bands. Our manager, John Peluska, started the first one and it would be 12 months of work and art installations.

54:25And so it's not just all about the money side of the business or even trying to get to be more popular. It's really even trying to make the experience as original and as, you know, all the artistic ideas coming to fruition. Even that part of it was too much. We got together to approve T-shirt designs several times a year because we had merchandise in-house. And so there was that. And maybe there was the feeling that we had been doing it since we were 18. and with everything going on with such a big infrastructure and so many fans and so much management and maybe it was just a lot of everything a lot of time a lot of planning and and then with the drugs especially with trey he wasn't in good shape and so he called a meeting and he said we got to stop and i was the one at the meeting who said actually i think we're still playing well i'm disappointed about this and the fans made these shirts that said mike said no which later was attributed to another thing but so we had our last concert that was a festival in vermont coventry and it got rained out it was a mud fest it's just on that's interesting that's like a cosmic yeah message yeah and people came anyway so it wasn't rained out people parked 20 miles away along the one highway that led to northern vermont one of the highways and walked

55:55in a world of artificial highs and harsh stimulants there is something different something clean something precise athletic nicotine not the primitive products found behind convenience store counters not the aggressive buzz that leaves you jittery but a careful calibration of clean energy and focused clarity. Athletic nicotine, the lowest dose tobacco-free nicotine available, made entirely in the USA. No artificial sweetener, just pure, purposeful elevation. Athletic nicotine is a performance nootropic. Athletic nicotine is a tool for shifting mindsets. Athletic nicotine is a partner in pursuit of excellence.

56:40Slow release Low dose Gradual lift Sustained energy Soft landing Inspired results Athletic nicotine More focus Less static Athletic nicotine More clarity Less noise Athletic nicotine More accuracy Less anxiety Athletic nicotine From top athletes pushing their limits to artists pursuing their vision. Athletic Nicotine offers the lift you've been looking for. Learn more at athleticnicotine.com slash tetra and experience next-level performance with Athletic Nicotine. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

57:31what would you say each member of fish brings to the table well trey is an incredible leader because he is really good at bringing out the best in everyone else that's probably the first thing and then supportive supportive encouraging i still need my my solo career so i can write more songs and see them through because it's very important to me as a creative person but the fish career is incredible you know to have all those fans you know we We play at Dick's Baseball Stadium in Denver every Labor Day, and there's 27 ,000 people in four nights. It always sells out in 10 seconds. And Fish, who I started talking about before, he's unhinged.

58:18He's very disciplined, like I was saying, but he flows. I think his ride symbol is his best instrument because he can flow so gently like waves in an ocean. And Paige is an interesting one. Back in the day, he would have kind of like the dab-like qualities. He would be the one to, if someone needed to be fired or they would get a call from Paige. So he might have a grounding, I think he has sort of a grounding personality. Although I don't know if this is a keyboard thing. And when we're doing freeform jamming, I think it was the hardest for him to get into repeating patterns. He was more varying.

59:01Go on one tangent, this is reminding me of. I had a few experiences that led to this idea that with my own band that we have something called a non-varying exercise. And at a soundcheck, each person has to come up with a lick. And once we come up with it, that complements what everyone else is doing. We're not allowed to vary in five or ten minutes, which is in eternity during a soundcheck. And it's a life-changing experience. And it sounds like a new song being written every time. you know by the third minute there's an inclination to oh if i just added this note the seventh or something or another note here but not allowed to and by not varying i start to hear all of the nuances between the notes in my band there's a percussion player craig and and i'll hear between two conga hits that there's a world of varying already happening and by not changing the notes it's really interesting it deepens the experience by many multiples because with people who have facility on their instruments to be able to play all the scales and all the all the ideas that come that can bring us back to that early 90s problem but by limiting it it kind of started from this I was the first bass player in the band which became dead and company with bob weir and his friends and john mayer and just for the rehearsal the first rehearsals and all that and there was so much noodling that week by everyone loud millions of notes and toward the end of the week bobby said well he said two things he said first of all rock and roll is about swinging and being straight and all rock and roll is based on that's the rock and the roll so be mindful of that he was talking about elvis in elvis's band the guitar player would play straight and the drummer would swing or I think that's how it worked.

1:00:46The second thing he said though is I want to just play this song on the pattern without doing anything. No chord changes, no singing, no soloing, no embellishing. And it was a life-changing experience because you know I had been a Grateful Dead fan and gone to a few shows when Jerry Garcia was alive and this was the experience where the air around me crystallized and became like those incredible concerts I went to a thousand million times than earlier in the week when everyone was playing a million notes just by making it a meditation mantra. So I took that to my own band. And even with Phish, we did it a little bit, forcing the non-varying.

1:01:28So that's why when we're talking about the band members, and Page is the one that was the hardest to hear. He brings a grand piano, and it's such a dynamic instrument with such range and such dynamics. And if the monitors aren't just right. And if he's doing a lot of varying, it's really hard to hear. But he's gotten in the last few years so much better at reaching out with a simple melody and repeating it. And then it's another one of those balancing acts where sometimes the thing to do is to vary and to say, okay, well, I'm going to be free and see where my fingers go. And it ends up being a fine line to figure out what to do.

1:02:07Anyway, yeah, I would say Paige, he still feels kind of like a dad type, I would say. I'll still give him that role. How loud do you guys play on stage? Not as loud as some rock bands that I've heard on stage. It got out of control before the in-ear monitors and before I started using molded earplugs. There was a lot of mid-range in the arenas that would come back at me just sort of glaring, glaring. So I don't know how much of is from the stage and how much of it is from the front of house you know different people have different degree of hearing loss and so first using the earplugs but the inner monitors have actually been pretty liberating because we can each control same thing with my own van so you can hear what you need to hear to be able to hear you can mix in ambient microphones and it doesn't feel so taboo anymore although we just played at the sphere do you know about the sphere yeah how that experience it was incredible tell me about it it was especially incredible we had three rehearsal days and we were the first band to play after you two did their 49s so for the rehearsal days we got to go out in the audience and so visually there's 180 million led lights and it's 100 times bigger than an imax movie so you're really placed in a dreamscape and like i said dreams are one of the most important things to me well actually i'm going to go on a little tangent That's fine.

1:03:27So for me, knowing that a jam or a set is going to be a deep peak experience, my indication is I have access to my night dreams. I feel like I'm actually in my night dreams. And certain ones that are reoccurring, I feel like I'm actually there. And not just visually, but the emotion that comes with the dream. So dreams end up being a kind of a benchmark for me to have this access. It's opened up in that way. now the sphere is being in a dream because it's the highest resolution screen in the world you know because we don't ever repeat a song over several weeks it meant that all four nights were going to be different songs and that the visuals created we had a team of people work for 10 months making visuals and each visual for each song is related to the song but not so literal and then there's 167 000 speakers it's a whole new technology they're all phase aligned And one thing I don't think you two did is make use of all the directionality.

1:04:27And so in the middle of a jam, there might be a synthesizer sound that's going from lower left to upper right, and a guitar that's going from the right to the left and just moving all around. And we got to hear multi-tracks back from the seats. Plus, the seats have vibration, so the bass is actually vibrating the seat. And I hear that each seat has smell as well, but we didn't use that. So the whole experience is so immersive. playing from the stage, there were some more challenges. Visually, there's a lot of people instead of the visual, so I found myself looking up and looking around. I mean, sometimes we're underwater and way up high.

1:05:01There's little guys swimming like this. And the stage is below the audience. Pretty much, except those on the floor. But I don't think the floor is the place to be. You know, the fans will line up. In the past, they would line up for 24 hours to get in the line to rush to the front. In fact, some fans would skip the encore to get in line, like in madison square garden for the next night's front row or hire someone if they could afford it to stand in line for them then we developed a lottery system so that i don't think they have to they see who would get up there but they want to be up front talk about the grateful dead tell me about the first show that you saw you said you saw them in boston yeah what the experience was like compared to any other concerts yeah i mean the only other two arena concerts i had been to at that age were the first one was jay giles that was difficult it was very loud for one thing a couple hundred decibels of magic dick playing the harmonica um and then the almond brothers at boston garden and that was pretty good but with the grateful dead did you go with your parents no i went with two friends my friend dan mcbride who was not to be confused with danny mcbride the comedian who i met who had a fish show dan mcbride from high school and our mutual friend Susan Pearlstein who knew nothing about the Grateful Dead or concerts.

1:06:17And I know we smoked a bunch of pot. I remember there was something hilarious about the person selling hot dogs, though I don't remember what that was. But what was great about, I think it was happening on many levels. It wasn't just a singular thing. There was the way what they did with sound being different. And I got to be friends with Dan Healy, who really innovated a lot of their sound. For example, not having the kick drum be full of sub information, having a high pass so that the kick drum is controlled and things like that. So the sound is very pristine, mixing a lot of different genres and influences into what they're doing from, you know, rootsy country and bluegrass to jazz and funk and just a kind of a melting pot.

1:07:00Well, so Bruce Hampton always used to talk about intention. It's a lot about what your intention is going in. And the intention was to have a transcendent experience. That was apparent. They weren't performers, you know, flicking their hair back and that kind of thing. They wanted to share these musical traditions and have it elevate beyond where they're coming from. I really like what Bob Dylan said when Jerry Garcia died in about nine words. Something like he is, I'll screw it up, he is the personification of that which is deep, muddy water country and screams up into the spheres so it was both the traditions and the innovations and and yeah it's hard to be put into words and with the improvisation it's just the inner play that was happening it's just wasn't done it's not often done at rock concerts there you know there are almost never almost never almost yeah and then the culture around it and then how would you describe the connection between the Grateful Dead and the Grateful Dead?

1:08:08Yeah, that's very interesting because in our first few years, when we started doing a lot of interviews and the record company would give us a lot of things to do, one of the questions was always, how do you feel being compared to the Grateful Dead? And we thought musically it was pretty far off, but in terms of some of the values and connecting with the fans and varying each night, so that each night's a different experience, there were some relations, but it was so frustrating and then when they did their last shows before jerry garcia died it was at soldiers field in 95 they asked us to be the opening band and we said no and everyone just that was another example of a great no because we already had enough troubles with the passing of the torch people say oh when jerry garcia died fish took over the legacy of the grateful dead that's not quite accurate first of all we already were selling out the arenas the year before but secondly, if you really love a band and where they're coming from, you're not going to like another band to sort of be a replacement.

1:09:04The real older deadheads had no interest in us. I think it might have started with people who wanted to travel and sell burritos in the parking lot and t-shirts, but then whether or not they came into the shows. And if they did come in, they knew that every night was going to be an experience rather than a performance. And that was a paradigm that lends itself to... It's more like the format of the bands were related more than the music. I think so. Actually, we avoided musical things that they did specifically because we were – Because it sounded like the dead. Yeah. For example, we didn't allow ourselves to play a country-ish song with a shuffle beat.

1:09:42They did that all the time. And we didn't allow ourselves to play the Bo Diddley beat, the bump, bump, bump, dum-bum, ever, early on. And then once we started playing with the members of the Grateful Dead and that kind of thing, it was a little bit less strict. It's kind of cool, though, to say that's their thing. We're not going to do that. Yeah. There's enough other flavors. And also Trey was – he grew up going to a lot of Broadway shows. Now, one of them that he scored was nominated for Tony. But there was a lot of that element. He had his senior project at Goddard College, which was a musical.

1:10:19And we performed the songs from the musical. and there's just kind of a vibe that's very different than there's also the frank zappa influence is pretty big in terms of these crazy compositions that are worked into i mean before every fish tour or certain of the shows i'll have to learn a 10-page atonal fugue that i've been playing all these decades and there's muscle memory but there's not quite enough i have to sit there and just go through it one way or another it keeps changing keys it keeps changing where the one is and we don't play those songs a lot, but enough so that it's another thing just like my electrical engineering tests before my peak experience, where it's the winding up of all these notes.

1:11:01Explain what the, I'll say, what's the purpose of a piece like that? Yeah. How does it work? Well, the intention, it's probably something that Trey got from the Broadway world where there's different acts and there's different parts. So a song itself is like that, where when we play one of these fugues, it doesn't sound like what they called the fusion bands in the 70s or, you know, where it doesn't sound like math. It sounds like it's delivered with a carefree approach, maybe because we're just faking our way through some of the notes that we've forgotten, but just the attitude is it's a looseness.

1:11:42It's not prog rock. Not exactly. It's related to it. There were big prog influences, especially Trey and Fish. They liked early Genesis and King Crimson and, you know, Yes and some other more obscure bands. So there's that influence. And I would say in the compositions themselves, I mean, I've written a couple. But the first one I wrote is, I would not call it a fugue, but my song called Mound. Trey calls it the payback song because I had to learn so many notes. and suddenly there's these guitar chords in 5-4 that change. Every chord is a different figuring all across the guitar for five minutes.

1:12:21But Trey's compositions are very beautiful. He had a composing mentor, Ernie Styers, neoclassical composing person in Vermont. Very interesting stuff, his own material. And he would work on one of these fugues for five years with Ernie, just going back each week and tweaking it and then plop it in a fish song. We would have some verses and choruses. we'd have the fugue and we'd have the freeform jam. And in terms of the purpose, again, I think it's a rite of passage into where the jam is going to be. I mean, I'm not saying that those songs have better jams than the ones that just go straight to the A minor sitting on whatever, but there is a release that comes from having gone through these thousand notes.

1:12:59And because it's a fugue, it's a theme and variation and the melody will come forward and backwards and juxtaposed. And so maybe it sets up a way of thinking for the brain to allow that kind of thing to happen in the jam. Yeah, it's something that a lot of people don't realize about Phish, that's all this composed music. I'm kind of happy that it's only sometimes that we'll play those. I mean, their song Fluffhead is one that Trey wrote when he was probably a freshman, but it's 22 sections. And often there's juxtaposed rhythms where I'll be on the upbeat the whole time. Someone will be in the downbeat, or we'll have parts where I'm doing three beats and someone else is doing four and someone's doing five, and then it catches up in the end.

1:13:38It's really difficult stuff. Should we listen to a little bit? You know what I would listen to as an example? Let me give you a different one, which I think is a great example. There's Trey's piece. It's called All Things Reconsidered because it sounds like the All Things Considered theme song. I think it's a really good example of, and it's not one that we play anymore, but it's a good example. Let's hear a little of it.

1:14:07Thank you.

1:14:39Thank you.

1:15:08Thank you.

1:15:38Thank you.

1:16:32Theme and variation by Trey Anastasio. It's really good. It's funny because when you describe it, it sounds like something I might not want to listen to. Right, right. But in actuality, it's an interesting piece of music and feels very much rooted in the classical tradition. Trey was and his mentor, Ernie, were influenced a lot by the Impressionists and Debussy and Ravel. And I had a couple lessons with Ernie myself. And he said, I want you to give me a four note pattern. And I sang him four notes. And he played it as Bach would have played it. And then he played it as Debussy would do it. And then he played it as Art Tatum would do it.

1:17:08It was instantly making it up on the spot. It's very interesting. So it's coming from a good intention. I just have to tell you a funny story. We've done a few practical jokes as a band. And one of my two favorites, or this I guess I would call my second favorite, when we mixed that, Barry Beckett was the producer. And John Fishman had disliked the drum sounds on some previous Phish albums. I mean, I have my complaints about the bass sounds. and some of the early ones. And he especially didn't like it when the kick drum had too much crack to it. He'd just like a puffier kick drum. And we said, okay, the mix is ready.

1:17:43Do you want to hear it? He was watching a movie. And he said, no, it's okay. You just do it. I trust you. And so we made a mock tape. Every night we got in a rental car and we went to our little hotel 20 minutes away. And we made a tape just to get him. And then the tape, he also, it was not too far out of the 80s. He hated having a lot of great reverb in the stair drum. So we made the mix that starts with that incessant drum beat. And, you know, the kick drum sounds like... And there's washes and washes of the snare drum, the gate reverb on the snare drum. And it's pitch dark. And we wait a few minutes.

1:18:15And then Trey says, you want it to put on the tape for the day? I was like, sure. And I'm already trying so hard not to laugh. And it comes on and it's like a nail gun going into your skull. And Fish waits maybe a minute. And he's like, I fucking hate this. It's like, oh, why don't you like about it? The trance, it fucking sucks. Why didn't you come and listen to the mix? That was a good one. It's amazing. Would you say there are any allegiances within the band? Are there like factions? Yeah. And have they changed over the course of the 41 years? Only a little. Trey and Fish are very aligned. It's hard to put into words, maybe.

1:18:56They had a band together in the 80s where they just did like an improv duo in restaurants. And it's insane. Were you the last member to join? No. I answered this ad for Bass Player Needed. And I went to a dorm lounge next to Trey's dorm at UVM. And there was Trey and Fish. And Jeff Holdsworth was our other guitar player and me. So I guess I was the fourth. And then Jeff left. And then the idea to get a keyboard player was a couple years later. But there were already 25 people dancing in the little dorm lounge playing cover songs. And how much of a role did Drugs play in the band over the course of the band?

1:19:36It's been in eras. I know different people had done some dabbling starting in high school and then college. Not as much me and certainly some psychedelics. So I've never done any psychedelics. I still intend to and I want to sort of ritualize the experience. and people that know me think that it will be my drug of choice. I am so into dreams. My thing is I would, back in the day, eat a couple bites of a pot brownie and play music, even for 80 ,000 people at one of our festivals, and sometimes get to the point where I can't even form words or hardly stand up. But for me, personally, it was a great experience.

1:20:16It changes my appreciation and my attitude, and I feel like the stage is my home, my living room, and my playground, and I don't want to be anywhere else. and makes me very, very present and experimental. And in the 90s, when we first had a tour bus, the thing to do is we would play chess all night to sunrise. And by the end of the 90s, it changed a little bit where some drugs were coming into the picture. And, you know, whether it was a little bit of cocaine and having a nitrous tank around and having these parties on the tour bus, cranking old James Brown recordings or Sun Ra or whatever. Oh, Fish and I met Sun Ra in his hotel room.

1:20:51That was an incredible experience. Tell me about that. Sun Ra, well, he was a big influence. And maybe he's a big influence on anyone who wanted to be different, you know, avant-garde. He was playing at the regatta bar in Boston at the Jazz Club. And we've actually since then played with some of those people. Marshall Allen, I think, is still alive. He's almost 100 years old. And Michael Ray. But then we didn't really know them so much. And it was three nights. And Fishman had already met Sun Ra. Sun Ra was talking a lot about this thing he called the Book of Information that had been beamed from outer space to Istanbul between every song.

1:21:25And he had Xeroxed it for Fish after the first night. I was only there on maybe the third night to give it to him. So we went back to the hotel room, and they had the book of information Xeroxed for him. And it's all about these different numbers and numerology and spirituality. So we went in his hotel room, and we sat there for five hours until five in the morning, me and fish and Sun Ra and this really annoying Jewish guy who's like the uncle you don't want to be next to at a Passover Seder. He was saying, so Sun Ra, when you said, did you mean that, you know, that kind of annoying personality.

1:22:01But he said all of these things, Sun Ra, for hours that were mind-blowing. He said, he divided out the different religious centers by numbers. And he said, number five is Jesus Christ. And he said, just look at Do re mi fa so, the sun. And he said, just look at our country, which is a Christian country. And right in the middle of our country is the Pentagon, which is five. And what is the Pentagon surrounded by? Virginia and Maryland, which is the Virgin Mary. And this went on for five hours like that. Sounds great. Yeah. And he said, look at the middle of Jerusalem is USA. That's not a coincidence.

1:22:38And he went on a tangent around that. And then, yeah, at five in the morning, he was tired and he went to bed. He was wearing a tie-dye t-shirt at that point. and his bandmates brought his synthesizer in bed and tucked them both in under the covers and he was still talking and they just faded out. How old was he at that time, would you guess? It's hard to guess. When someone was born on Saturn. Yeah, later he had the stroke and my first girlfriend who I went out with for 10 years, Becca Buxbaum, Becca Simons, her sister at UPenn was Sun Ra's psychiatrist when he had a stroke, not too long before he died.

1:23:12He still had a lot going.

1:23:16So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy using one of Squarespace's best in class templates. With the built in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins and menus. So your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with Fluid Engine, a highly intuitive drag and drop editor. No coding or technical experience is required. Understand your site's performance with in-depth website analytics tools. Squarespace has everything you need to succeed online.

1:24:04Create a blog. Monetize a newsletter. Make a marketing portfolio. Launch an online store. The Squarespace app helps you run your business from anywhere. Track inventory and connect with customers while you're on the go. Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace.com slash tetra and get started today.

1:24:47Describe the different eras of the band musically. Okay. Well, yeah, the first few years there were more covers, old covers from some of our influences, all of our influences sprinkled in. Would you do the covers in a traditional way or would you make them yours? I think it was in a traditional way to a fault, actually. I mean, we play, you know, a Led Zeppelin song and every note is, I always wish they would vary a little more. Maybe the jam part would be a little more like ourselves. And as we, I mean, one thing we've done is every Halloween, we cover an album by another band as a musical costume.

1:25:19That's a great idea. Yeah. Well, we've learned so much for spending a few months. So the first one was the White Album in 94. And then we did Remain in Light. And we did Loaded. And Waiting for Columbus, the Little Feet Live album was one that we liked. We did that. We actually had the Tower of Power Horns. And then in more recent years, we've had alter ego albums where we make up an album that supposedly existed. Yeah, there was one. The first one of those was called Kazvat Voxed. And it was supposedly these guys who were scientists meeting in some Nordic country and making a legendary album.

1:25:53And we created websites that were farcical and pack dated. And we have an Emmy-awarded comedy writer, Steve Waltine, and he was helping us write the backstory. And this band had two cousins with a very long name, same last name. And that was great, Kasvat Voxed. Because we were writing from jams and wanting to have dance music and simple grooves that people could dance to. That one night would be the only time you'd play that material? No, we actually, after all of the Halloween albums through, oh, the second one we did was Quadrophenia. There are always albums. And the first few were double albums.

1:26:27You play a double album, but you don't release the album because those albums exist. No. But what about for the ones where it's new material? We did release that. But what I was going to say is whether it was the cover albums or the original ones, a few songs would stay in the repertoire and kind of influence. You know, like by being in the mind of The Who for four months, it really inspires. And then with our own albums, because they were created in this way, our own alter ego albums, but it's created in a way with grooves that we like. And then we actually did some writing together. Actually, we took one of the exercises in that book.

1:27:04I was mentioning writing better lyrics. And we did it as a band where it's designed to have stream of consciousness, finding lyrics by doing some stream of consciousness stuff and actually writing together. But much more often over the years, Trey would just have a lot of material and he would bring it. When Trey brings in material, does it sound like fish or does it sound like an acoustic song? More like an acoustic song. Does it have all the parts? He's very creative with what used to be four-track machines and onward. Yeah, it has parts. There's so many varieties in the Phish repertoire that there isn't one answer.

1:27:38But often there would be drums and bass. And with the more complicated pieces, usually he would bring written music. That's only sometimes that there's one of those fugues. But there are some more complicated pieces where we were encouraged to make our own parts. There was one song called Reba, and there's one song called Gaiuti. It's a lot of tricky music to play, but I came up with my own bass lines. Often we would do it for a couple bars at a time. He would say, okay, I'm going to just loop this little guitar pad and make something up until we all like it. But many more times over the last couple decades, it's just a song.

1:28:13It's a simple song. How much of that, let's use that example of looping it up and coming up with a bass line. Would that happen live in the room playing, or would that be to recorded? Usually live in the room, in the practice room, playing together. Yeah, a lot of what Phish does is live and in the studio, and there's sort of a mythos around so much is done with looping and layering these days and Pro Tools, et cetera, that we have such a telepathy as a quartet that it's worth harnessing that. So it's essentially live band in the room documented digitally for the most part. Well, for writing, yes, exactly.

1:28:53And then for recording? Yeah, and playing a lot. I'm very impressed by how much those guys want to get, whether it's in the studio or at a soundcheck and just jam. And if you were to record in the studio and the song's written, how different would it be take to take?

1:29:13Oh, pretty different. There's differences in terms of decisions around what's the tempo's going to be. Is it in the right key? Is it too many sections? and then there's differences in how good the take is we recorded a couple albums with steve lily white and we would start at 5 p.m we'd go to 5 a.m and i remember the song free i really like the way it came out in that album the album's called billy breeze and i remember so we would do takes from 5 p.m till let's say midnight and then take a break maybe we'd have a dinner break and then we used to go to this place called the pine crest near woodstock there in the backwoods It was like something straight out of a David Lynch movie.

1:29:54And I remember also Evan Dando from Lemonheads was also recording in town that whole summer. And he was there, so we would see him at the Pinecrest. And then we'd go back at 3 a.m., and I was the one that was staying on an earlier schedule, so I'd be a little pissed at that. But let's say we've done 30 takes of this song, Free. And sometimes it is the first take, and I'd be lying on a couch, and they'd say, okay, we're just going to do a couple more takes. And it's not. It's two more hours until 5 a.m. The sun's coming out. But in the case of that one, it was the one at 4.30 in the morning. After the surrender of after, like, I'm beaten.

1:30:26My soul, I can't fight it anymore. That's the good take. So sometimes it's really true. Did you ever come back the next day and hit it again or rarely? We would hit it again. That album, Billy Breathes, I think it's a good one from the early days. We weren't going to have a producer. We just were going to go in by ourselves that time. And we went in and we decided we would make this thing called The Blob. We were going to take, it was all two-inch tape, and it was going to be 45 minutes, so one and a half tapes. And we were just going to add, each band member could add something to somewhere in that 45 minutes anywhere.

1:30:56And someone else could add something to that or somewhere else, and we were going to create a blob of music. And after two weeks, we realized we were lost, and we decided to get a producer, and it was Steve Lillywhite. And that thing that was the blob, this creation, is in the middle of some segues toward the end of the album. It was still used. But then we were doing the 30, 40, 50 takes of songs, and band members were encouraged to bring their own songs at that point, which is often how it works. Usually people bring their own stuff. Tell me about your Rainwave research. Yeah. So I had an experience with biofeedback that sort of worked for me.

1:31:29Tell me about that experience first. Yeah. I remember there was just like a store in Boulder, and I spent some time there, and there was a biofeedback machine, and the idea was to get it to an alpha state, And that's the state where we're half awake and half asleep. It's very creative. A lot of composers said they did all their writing in that state. The idea was to make a gadget that would allow someone while playing music to get into that state using biofeedback. And the feedback loop would happen because if they're playing guitar, it would start to maybe chorus or flange or something when they're in an alpha state.

1:32:04Oh, so it changes the sound. Yes. Depending on your brain state. Yeah. That's really interesting. Yeah, and that was what worked for me. Usually, I mean, it takes some practicing with biofeedback, but that first experience in Boulder, I gave it some time in the shop and it really worked. So I got together this team in the last few years of neurologists. There's this guy from the MIT Media Lab who runs what's called the Dream Lab. And it's an interesting group. They've changed over the years. There was someone in Seattle, actually, who allows quadriplegic people to play music just by thinking. they can get specific notes with only a 60 millisecond delay and have two people jamming together.

1:32:42And 60 millisecond isn't great, but for people who can't move their arms and legs, don't have arms and legs. So we had a great team of neurologists. Bob Weir got involved because I've known him for a long time, but I had read an article where he talked about how important dreams are to him in everything he does, creating music and writing his book and creating an opera. And And so he was involved on the Zooms for a while. And this one person from the MIT Media Lab, he's a young genius. And his group isolates nine levels between being awake and being asleep. And they want to keep artists in the middle, four and five, levels four and five, using technology.

1:33:24I don't know what their technology is, but they've been successful at it. So we wanted to do some research to figure out whether this is doable because there was a lot of challenges. And one of the challenges is if a musician is moving, usually movement gets in the way of reading the brainwaves. But the technology has gotten better over the years. So we did a few experiments. I was actually recording one of my albums with Sean Everett. He's a wild, wild man. You should know about him. He's kind of the go-to indie crazy guy producer. But he's very outside of the box looking for interesting sounds.

1:33:57And we were mixing in his place in downtown L.A. And we decided to do this, the first brainwave experiment. And I had 27 electrodes. And we decided to bring in someone who makes beats for like Kendrick Lamar and whoever. And so we had a jam with bass and beats with me wired up. And I was supposed to indicate when I feel like I'm in the zone. And it was partially successful. The readings were good, but the correlation was iffy. It was a very interesting group of people. Because Sean is crazy and creative and he was just recording. But you might know Michael Burrill, who's David Lynch's assistant.

1:34:33He was there filming on a black and white surveillance camera from one of my dad's doors I had given him. And Paul Dano, the actor, was there. It was just a tiny room with some interesting people, this jam. We're trying to get some correlation between feeling like we're in the zone as musicians and there being an indication that we can create to a binary on-off thing that would turn that flanger on and off. So the second one was with Bob Weir at his studio. and this time we had wireless brainwave helmet. We had five neurologists and we had also another device that was measuring not brainwaves, but body metrics, heart rate and things like the skin temperature.

1:35:13Because the idea is that if we could do it without brainwaves, that would be even better because it's cumbersome to get that working right, the EEG. And Bobby and I each were wired up and we had a switch we could push that would say either I feel like I'm in the zone now or I just have been over the last 30 seconds. They actually made a wall between us so we couldn't see what the other one was pushing. And then we had three members of our team, Jared Slomoff I've worked with for years and a scientist friend, John Cohn, and then one of the other neurologists. They were wired up as well because even without any of the wiring, just to know who is choosing when is the special parts is fascinating.

1:35:48And we could see all the results on one screen. So the experiments with Bob Weir were really fun. I got to stay with him in his beach house too. So we had a lot of interesting bonding, which I'm very thankful for. So it was fun, but I don't think it was helpful for us so much. I think that the situation of just playing with the two of us and singing was a little bit out of our comfort zone. And when we got there, he said we should have a drummer or a drum machine. And I was very proud of the fact that my groove was steady enough that he felt comfortable that we didn't need that. But in retrospect, I think he was right because we're used to playing with drummers and playing less.

1:36:23It's really interesting with Phish when we switched from five people back to four, how I felt like I had to fill in 150 % of the bass notes or whatever to make up for the lack of the other person, how that happens. Do you think of you and Phish as the rhythm section? Do you think of it that way? Well, that's a great question. It was a little non-traditional for our first, let's say, decade because you were talking about different factions within the band and Trey and Fish have a similar crazy connection. And so Fish would listen to Trey more than the rest of us and play off of what's happening on the guitar.

1:37:04And the bass and drums were not filling a traditional role. And that was actually frustrating for me. So the guitar was leading the charge. Yeah. By the way, there's not a right way. Every band has a way of operating. I don't think it worked for us as well as it could. And what happened in the end of the 90s is we were listening to a lot of groove-oriented music and these obscure James Brown recordings and some other things like that. And we recovered the Remain in Light album. And so we really wanted to lock down the low end. And we were doing less jamming where we changed keys a million times and really wanting that solid bed of groove.

1:37:44So Trey, at the end of the 90s, stopped playing guitar part of the time. He had a percussion rig and an attitude change in the individuals and maybe in the whole, but where the bass and drums could lock and become that bedrock that is needed. And honestly, it was a lot more satisfying for me. In your catalog, would there be an album where it changed? i wonder when story of the ghost came out because that's an album where we jammed all day long in the studio studio a at bearsville for 12 hours a day and we took the best parts and then we wrote to them together i really liked creating that album this is called story of the ghost is that the only one you've done that way no there's been more well oh and that one created an all instrumental there's also an obscure one called the sick at disc john sick at the engineer was we named it for him later i was the one who i'm a archivist by nature for better or worse possibly worse and i have cataloged all of my fair journals but i also have my favorite jams from a band practice now what i do on stage i have a button that'll record little bits and even while we're playing even in the middle of a peak experience or something i'll hit it for a minute and then turn it off you always remember to turn it off no i very often leave it on for two hours.

1:39:02Yeah, that sounds right. I know to listen near the beginning and near the end because it's probably wanting to hit it again. It makes me realize that it had been on. So when we... Does it light up? Yes, it lights up. That's one of two esoteric boxes I have. The other one is my daughter's Tessa. She's 15. And we've actually been singing together publicly since she was nine. She's incredible. She's my best singing teacher because she has such a pure heart. You know, families, when they mix their voices can have a special thing. So Trey had said one of his daughters was sad when he was on stage that he couldn't be reached.

1:39:33And I decided to make this thing called the Tessa box. So on her lanyard, there's a fob and she can blink with both of my bands. She can blink a light that's very bright that gets my attention. And then three, one to tell me if she's stage left front of house or stage right. And then if we see each other, we give each other a little signal. So cool. Yeah. Beautiful. She knows that if I'm in the middle of a fugue or maybe a big jam, that that's not the time. Yeah. But the recording is, I've really liked writing from jams because it's naturally where the fingers are wanting to go without me being part of the equation at all.

1:40:08It's just the muse. Would you edit the jams ever? Oh yeah. To turn it into a song? Oh, especially on my own stuff. I've done that a lot. But then when Phish got together with, we did two albums with Bob Ezrin that involved a lot of writing by ourselves. And I had cataloged a bunch of jams over the years. And one of them is a band practice from 1993. And one of them is a huge show, maybe the soundcheck and just these little bits. And so I think our album Fuego has some of those. And then one other album. Anyway, I have a little playlist of the original jam where you can hear the little bit that became the song.

1:40:45It's just really natural to when it falls into place by itself. So a lot of times, so Trey's had his own band, Trey Anastasio band for 25 years. And a lot of times he'll flesh out his songs with that band. So I'll get a bass line that didn't come from my own soul it came from his bass player who passed away tony and it's a little awkward so when fish broke up we broke up in 04 and i had some work to do with leo cocky and some with the grateful dead drummers and then it was time to write my own repertoire and my own solo career i wanted to write three albums or 50 songs and start my own band and i did and the first song just came right out and i decided i was just going to improvise in this kind away, like sitting backstage with the bass.

1:41:26And I loved the way that came out. And then it was writer's block for three months. And I thought, oh, shit, this is not as easy as I thought. And I called Trey and he said, you should do the artist's way. And that changed my life. Beautiful. I haven't had writer's block since then. That was 07. So I got back into it. But this idea of creating from what naturally falls into place, and same with lyrics too, my experience with that. I had this fantasy for years that I just want to write how Paul Simon probably writes by sitting in a room with a guitar. And then when I read a Rolling Stone interview, it said that all he's been doing for 20 years is taking beats, African beats or whatever other kinds of beats and using that as a bed.

1:42:06And then some random thing like a billboard that he sees as inspires without knowing what it means, never sitting and starting with the intention of a story or concept. So I felt a lot more validated at that point. tell me about any changes from the breakup to the reformation yeah when did you reform in 08 and we played again in 09 so four years off yeah i gotta say let me trace that a little bit so i was the one who said no it was a big grieving process and the music is so inspiring but the friendship, not just the friendship, the experience of the travel, of the adventure. I had dreams every night about being backstage.

1:42:50There's this guy, Brad Sands, who used to drive with us on the band bus. And so Brad would be there. Often it would be a hillside with a few thousand people and just grass. And then backstage, behind the backstage, there's a river. I think it was like the river of my soul or something. And we'd be going up and down the river in gondolas before playing. And that was a huge grieving that that wasn't going to happen anymore. This bonding. Did that place ever exist or only in dreams? Only in dreams. There might've been places like we play it now. We're about to play three nights at Alpine Valley. That's all grass.

1:43:22Well, I guess there's a little pavilion. There are places that are all grass. It's a little bit more in dreams. And I'm usually arriving. I'm the one who goes out and drives through the parking lot in a golf cart and hangs out with the fans. So I'm usually arriving with all the fans down road i have even more dreams still with my own band because it's smaller and we're in this little car and we're going from town to town the sort of stuff outside of the concert is very important it's the whole experience do you have a pre-show ritual yes i usually run through some scales to get my fingers just knowing that it's not only the physicality and the stamina it's also framing that there will be rhythms and patterns.

1:44:02And then I do some vocal warmups. I can't drink anything because I'll have to go to the bathroom during the set. And so that's not going to happen. When I started hanging out with the Grateful Dead, one of them asked me a question, is there a recipe for a good gig? Do you find that there's a recipe? And I made a list. I wouldn't say being well-rested because some of the best ones are on zero minutes of sleep, but being somehow balanced emotionally. If I have lunch with an old friend and it feels good, that will make for a good gig. And liking my shirt is important. It doesn't have to be a fancy shirt, but it has to feel sort of inevitable, comfortable.

1:44:37Like I'm not trying too hard, but nor am I wearing what I wore during the day. It has to be just the right comfort level. So you change clothes for the gig typically, or at least shirt. If I'm thinking in advance, I'll put on the one that I want to wear for the show to get used to it. But if it feels like if the shirt is trying too hard to make a statement or uncomfortable, that's not going to make for a good gig. So we'll always play four nights, usually Madison Square Garden, leading up to New Year's. And New Year's is going to have a big gag that's been planned for at least six months with extra performers and et cetera.

1:45:15That's not always the one with the peak experience jams because there's a lot of hype. Although I think even these days, we've let go of the worrying around that. Actually, TM for me has helped. Sue was my second wife. Once I started doing TM, she said, now you don't get stressed before tours. And that was huge. And the stress comes at four in the morning. Oh, no, I'm going to have to do this and I'm going to have to do that. When did you first get into meditation? My mother brought me to a Vipassana. actually it was the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center when I was 15. And for 25 years, I did, I guess we would call it mindfulness.

1:45:55When life got hard around my first separation from Scylla, I started doing some silent retreats. I did a 10-day silent retreat with Vipassana. In 2015, I saw David Lynch's eight-minute thing online about what TM has done for him. and then I also saw Jerry Seinfeld's. That night that we were on national TV the first time, Jerry Seinfeld was the other guest and we had watched all the Seinfeld's on our tour bus and you never meet the other guest, but they shoved him into a little closet that we were hanging out and he said, okay, here he is and they closed the door. And they were saying the opposite things.

1:46:33David was saying, you know, when you wake up, your consciousness is like a golf ball. We just want expanded to be like a beach ball. So it seemed to be around creativity and possibilities, Whereas Jerry Seinfeld was saying that he had a hit show in the 90s and he was the actor and he was the writer and he was the producer. And there were 200 people on the set. It was a huge amount of stress. And if he hadn't stopped everyone for 20 minutes to do his meditation, he couldn't have gotten through it. So I started, I got trained and now it's been nine years. I hardly ever miss a sitting, even if it's 3 a.m.

1:47:07and it's on the tour bus and I haven't done my second one, I'll still do it. And now I'm going to sleep less. It's been great. How would you say the difference between the TM and the Vipassana for you have been? So what I like, there's something about Vipassana, you know, I guess the idea is to become mindful about everything that we're doing, whether it's chewing or walking. But a lot of concentrating on the breath is done to build up the mind power and the focus power. That felt particularly organic because we're breathing anyway and particularly helpful during stressful times. what I didn't like it's very simple when vipassana the general message is this is going to be difficult it'll probably take 10 years before you can concentrate on the breath for even one minute without a distraction not that the distractions are bad there's no judgment and they don't tell you specifically how much to do it I love with TM that they say this is going to be easy and if it's not easy then you're not doing it right and you have to do it 20 minutes twice a day plus the line down so that structure has been just great for me any genres or styles of music that have caught your ear lately where you're doing a deep dive in something that you didn't spend a lot of time with before well I've always been into West African music King Sonia Day and so that's not new, but it's a continuing discovery for me.

1:48:33And then I like what happens on Spotify where, you know, I have some friends and it's late night and it goes onto the tracks. If you liked that, then you'll like this and new names keep coming up. And actually the connection between West African music and Caribbean music is always resonated. That first trip to the Bahamas, they were playing Calypso, what they called rake and scrape. And I had never heard music like that before in the 70s when we were in the bahamas and then later it kind of just i went back but it was transmuted into other but when i hear that kind of tropical i just got to play with vampire weekend my band opened for a week so how was that it was great it was just really great and i got to sit in with them and and they have some of that ska influence and some of that it's it resonates yeah that was it's really inspirational actually checking out their sets and I loved our sets.

1:49:27How far from the recorded version of a Saw and a Fish album, how different might that song become live? Very different. In two ways. First, we're discovering the nuances of the groove and what makes it work. Will it always be recognizable or not? Maybe not. But then there's the way it expands and that it gets fleshed out with a jam. Um, there have been songs that I've maybe played 800 times and there's, it's always frustrating. One section that just doesn't sit right in the bass. And then after 800 times, I'll realize, wait a minute, I don't have to do it that way. I can just let it be a way that feels good.

1:50:09And then a door opens. So fans might not realize that. This shows are so different from one to the next. And people look at the set list and they say, it looks like you had a good show. But for me, it has nothing to do with that. it has to do with other factors you know one night might sound like a band trying to be jazzy all night and the next one might be something like a band trying to be a rock band and the whole theme and vibe changes and i don't like them all i might like you know half of them or something and so if i have a new friend that wants to check out the band i say you should probably come two or three times because you'll get three different experiences so different yeah how would you say your relationship to the music has changed over the years that thing that i was saying about accepting has gotten a lot better because my attitude for some reason is very varying from being having a bad attitude and thinking i don't like the way this sounds i don't like my role and all kinds of things like that too and that's why for me eating a little bit of marijuana that changed my attitude as one way these days it's not often i'll usually be sober but overall all, I think I have an acceptance, especially of my role.

1:51:23Having a mother who's an artist, et cetera, I've been very creative. Making things is what I enjoy. As I'm saying things, I'm remembering dangling parts of our conversation from a little bit ago, because I was saying with peak experiences, my goals are not always to have peak experiences. The idea of writing and recording a beautiful song and that kind of experience is a different, it's not exactly a peak, but it's now even more of a goal of mine. So the goals change. And with my role with Phish, you know, if I write 50 songs, if I'm having a prolific era, I know that we're only going to play a couple of them with Phish.

1:51:59So Trey is always very encouraging. And he'll say, you know, bring songs. And by the way it works out, that's the way that it works out. But I don't mind that now. I really like my role. It's the best job ever. I've told people I have the best job in America because, first of all, I get to be a rock star, but second of all, not in the traditional sense. I get to be in a band that likes to have religious experiences within all the fans in the band, having these religious transcendent experiences. And I get to be the bass player. And as the bass player, I don't have to solo. And as not the band leader, I don't have to make a set list or make decisions.

1:52:35And that allows me to get in the flow even more. It just saves more brain power for, oh, I'm just going to play these notes. And guess what? I'm not even going to be the one to decide them. The universe is going to decide them on a good night. And, you know, I make enough money to support my other ventures, my own career and my movie ideas. And I have this one note that I've been keeping since 92, I call base playing thoughts. And on the plane, one of the many plane rides to get here, I reviewed it, just some highlights. I do that from time to time when I want to just think back of what's been the high points or the philosophical points ebbing and flowing.

1:53:11So I get a lot of inspiration still at these Phish gigs, and I'll write in my journal, I'll write to the members of my other band, and I'll say, I learned that music can be this if we do this. Let's try it.

1:53:48Tetragrammatin is a website.

1:53:54Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

1:54:03What may fall within the sphere of tetragrammatin? Counterculture Tetragrammaton Sacred Geometry Tetragrammaton The Avant-Garde Tetragrammaton Generative Art Tetragrammaton The Tarot Tetragrammaton Out-of-print Music Tetragrammaton Biodynamics Tetragrammaton Graphic Design Tetragrammaton Mythology and Magic Tetragrammaton Obscure Film Tetragrammaton Beach Culture Tetragrammaton Esoteric Lectures Tetragrammaton Off the grid living Tetragrammatin Alt spirituality Tetragrammatin The canon of fine objects Tetragrammatin Muscle cars Tetragrammatin Ancient wisdom for a new age Upon entering Experience the artwork of the day Take a breath And see where you are drawn

1:55:05You