Has Trey Anastasio lost the jam?
The guitar legend and former Phish frontman is touring with a new band – 70 Volt Parade, which plays Red Rocks on Saturday – but Anastasio’s new songs are less jammy and have the fretmaster spending more time on the mic.
“It’s the whole feeling of jumping off a cliff and doing something new, and I’m so energized right now,” Anastasio said earlier this week from Indianapolis. “The new stuff is more song-oriented, and I’m just enjoying singing a lot – maybe because I had a lot to say.”
But what about the jam- is it still in there?
“I still love ripping it on the guitar,” he vowed. “There’s always going to be that.”
Anastasio made international waves 15 months ago when he posted a note on Phish’s website saying the band was calling it a day after more than 20 years.
It said, “(We) don’t want to become caricatures of ourselves, or worse yet, a nostalgia act.” Fans of the group – which had taken the torch after Jerry Garcia’s passing and the demise of the Grateful Dead – were hysterical.
It was tough on the band too. But these days Anastasio is fine.
“Now that we’ve had some time, I finally have some perspective,” Anastasio said. “Something felt a little bit directionless, maybe spiritually or maybe because it was 21 years we played together.”
“It all feels very natural to me right now, to let things go, but it was hard because it affected a lot of friendships. And I love Phish. And people love Phish. And I love my connection with Phish fans.”
Anastasio still sees his former bandmates. Phish drummer Jonathan Fishman even played on Anastasio’s new record, which he recently finished recording, although the track Fishman played on didn’t make the final cut.
“Mike (Gordon) I saw a couple nights ago, and Page (McConnell) is working on his own stuff,” Anastasio said. “But they’re my brothers. We’re the closest of friends. That wasn’t the problem. People’s lives were just changing.”
The reasons behind the breakup were clouded in Phish’s unique brand of nice-guy mystique. The band spoke about changing lifestyles – including Anastasio’s “new gang,” as he calls his daughters, ages 8 and 10 – and the fear of becoming a nostalgia act. But listening to Anastasio talk, freewheeling his way from subject to subject with a surprising tenacity and sense of togetherness, he seems to favor one reason over everything else.
Call it the risk factor – or the lack thereof.
“Strangely enough, with Phish we never knew what we were doing – it was always on the cliff,” Anastasio said pensively. “And it was beautiful and I loved it. We all did. But the bigger it got, there was more of a structure built around it, and the more structured it got, the more risk started threatening everything. And it was harder and harder to take a risk, not necessarily onstage, but in a general sense.
“It felt less and less risky with each passing year,” he said. “The cool thing about it was that it had become so much more than the band. It became a community of friends and family members. But from a musical standpoint – even based on playing with the same people – it doesn’t get more risky. … And then the point of trying to be risky was overshadowing the quality of what was going on, and you’re grasping at straws at a certain point.”
Which is why Anastasio now overflows with energy. He just finished a new album in a new style with a new producer. He has a new band. And he has a new record label and a new manager.
“It feels like a rebirth,” he said. “It actually reminds me very much of the early days with (Phish). It’s different, because it’s not the band. But from an energy standpoint, I haven’t felt like this in a long time, where everything’s new and scary and you’re onstage and you don’t know exactly what’s happening.
“Most of the material I’m doing is stuff that I just wrote. I’m working with new musicians, and we’re developing relationships in real time. I like the process. I’m more interested in the process than whatever the results might be. I like the struggle.”
After 20 years in the same band, there’s little doubt Anastasio is on a bender of change. He almost always plays two sets and with one guitarist, but this tour has those numbers reversed. Saying goodbye to Phish and old habits reminds him of a William Blake quote:
He who binds to himself a joy/Does the winged life destroy/But he who kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
“It’s like, you’re gonna fall in love with people, and that’s going to naturally change, and I remember jumping off the rope swing in high school with my shirt off and everything was so beautiful,” he said. “But you can’t stay at that quarry for your whole life. As soon as you change, there is so much waiting for you right around the corner. Play with some new musicians. Take my 8-year-old daughter on a 10-day trip.
“I can see why people would be sad, because (Phish was) something they loved and it’s not around anymore. But I feel lucky it was ever around in the first place.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
