It’s official: I’ll be writing a book about A Live One for Bloomsbury’s 33-1/3 series, to be published in September 2015 (a couple months after A Live One’s 20th(!) anniversary). It’s an honour. I’m grateful and excited. Here’s the blurb from 333sound.com:
Their first four albums were lampooned by critics and ignored by everyone else. They looked and sounded like utter dorks; lyrics about electric hangmen and ‘multibeasts’(?!) didn’t help. They weren’t grunge or pop or anything else remotely contemporary, or even recognizable. In 1995, as far as the media were concerned, Phish were a bizarre footnote to the rise of patchouli-scented popstuff like Dave Matthews and Blues Traveler (or worse, a Grateful Dead knockoff). 1994’s bright shiny Hoist LP hadn’t helped: their bid for mainstream cred — complete with characteristically silly video — flew straight to America’s remainder bins.
Meanwhile, without a hit single to their name, Phish were well on their way to becoming the biggest concert draw in America, selling out ever-larger venues 200 nights a year with their ecstatically inventive live shows: a mix of weirdo acid-psych, haunted ambient moonscapes, twisted vaudevillian Americana, and riotous postpunk energy, all filtered through bandleader Trey Anastasio’s screwball compositional sensibility and the group’s astonishing, unique form of collective improvisation. Phish bottled that lightning on A LIVE ONE, their 1995 double live album. It’s challenging, experimental music that still doesn’t sound like anything else in rock — a strange, beautiful thing, full of the kind of music otherwise sensible adults would drop everything and cross the country to hear night after night.
It’s not really a great album.
This book is the first in-depth study of Phish’s music.
It’s also kind of a love letter.
If you’re a fan, there’s one sentence in there that’ll probably rankle you—‘it’s not really a great album’—and we’ll talk more about that in a minute. (I wrote the blurb, and I mean it.) Whether you’re a fan or not, I hope it sounds exciting.
What kind of book will it be?
Let’s face it, even folks who’ve never heard a note of Phish have…opinions about the band, and especially about their fans, and maybe even about their music. In the Nineties they were the biggest touring band in the country; Rolling Stone’s review of A Live One called the band ‘probably the most self-indulgent act ever to sell out New York’s Madison Square Garden.’ (It is an unbelievably stupid, ignorant review.)
When I pitched the book to Bloomsbury, I wrote this:
Right now, in some American college town, an obsessive Phish fan is foisting a live Phish recording on a friend, who’ll press Play, hear ‘aimless noodling,’ and immediately press Stop. A LIVE ONE will, I’m confident, be the first book that has something new to offer both of them.
OK, so how am I gonna do right by hardcore fans and new listners in (gulp) ~30,000 words?
If You’re New to Phish…
…you should know that they don’t sound like the Grateful Dead or Dave Matthews Band. They’re descendants of Frank Zappa and Yes and King Crimson and Little Feat (and the Dead, sure), but also of Miles Davis’s electric bands (go hear Agharta if you haven’t) and Count Basie’s orchestra and James Brown and the Meters; they share DNA with The Residents and Brian Eno and My Bloody Valentine.
They’re a postpunk acid-prog-psych comedy drug band.
My introductory chapter is tentatively called ‘Finally the Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid.’
No band has ever improvised quite like Phish. Improv isn’t the reason for their existence, but it’s the core of their art. This book will explain how Phish’s unique improvisations work, why so many people love them so much, and why it matters—which means digging into where they come from.
The book will involve the Flaming Lips and the Church of the Subgenius, by the way.
If You’re a Fan Already…
…I’m not gonna rewrite A tiny space to move and breathe, which was about my own love of the band as much as it was about Fall 1997. I’m also not gonna rewrite Puterbaugh’s Phish bio (we don’t need more Behind the Music stuff) or the Companion or Mr Miner’s Phish Thoughts. Each of those books serves its purpose. Mine is different.
This one’s about two things: how the jams actually work (in deeper detail than this seemingly essential topic has ever seen) and where Phish fit into the history of American improvised music.
‘It’s not really a great album’ (a note of reassurance to fans)
It pains me to say it, but it’s not, not as live albums go, even if the music itself is pretty great. Astonishing, even.
I’ve been listening to A Live One a whole lot recently. Almost every track on it is extraordinary in some way. No one else in rock writes tunes like YEM or even Bouncing, and Stash/Tweezer/Hood were all beasts in 1994 (is Stash the most consistently killer Phish song over the life of the band?). But as a continuous sitdown listening experience, there’s something a little off about ALO. Needless to say, there’ll be more on this score in the book.
That said, I’ve always loved 1994 Phish, and my early research-listening for this book has deepened my appreciation of this phase of the band’s career. It wasn’t their ‘peak’ (let’s not start that ridiculous argument again), but late 1994 was unquestionably a moment of absolute purity w/r/t some aspects of their music.
This book will not be a hatchet job on early Phish. Quite the opposite: it’s a celebration of what’s amazing about their first decade of evolution, and hopefully the deepest analysis yet of what separates pre- and post-Remain in Light Phish—and the deep currents that bind them together.
What can YOU do?
Drop me a line on Twitter (@waxbanks) and let me know what you want from a book on Phish. Basic history/bio? Music-theoretic jargon, or none? Cultural analysis? Personal reflection, idiosyncratic prose? Pictures? Poetry? Rage? Personal attacks on political figures, bloggers, Phil Lesh?
Should the word patchouli be used?
I can’t wait to share this work with you.
