Features

Phish: Back on The Train Part Two (Relix Revisited)

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When did the band decide to open with “Fluffhead”?

It was one of the big ideas, far in advance. It may be the hardest Phish song to learn because there are so many sections that are memorized and it’s not just that they’re memorized, it’s that they’re not always predictable. It’s not just a scale and a key and a meter. And yet it’s joyous and almost silly and lighthearted and we’d screwed it up before or bailed out from doing it, whatever it was.

At the IT festival in Aug. 2003, Trey told the crowd that you didn’t want to play “Fluffhead.” Was that the case?

We had practiced [the song], which takes a day or two. I really want to see a Phish cover band take on that kind of thing. Anyhow, we finally practiced it and I had probably learned it better than anyone, although in their defense there are less bass notes per bar than Page and Trey have to deal with. We hadn’t played it yet although we’d done it in the practice room. So Trey came up to me and said, “So do you want to give it a try?” And I said, “Yeah, let’s play it.” and then he went up to the microphone and said, “Mike doesn’t want to play it.” [Ed note: DICK!]

Phish performed one of Page’s solo tunes at Hampton [“Beauty of a Broken Heart”]. Did the band practice any of yours?

We actually learned “Andelmans’ Yard” [from Gordon’s album The Green Sparrow ]. Even though it might sound like a simple song—I mean it’s not even a hundred times as complicated as ‘It’s Ice’—it’s got enough changes where maybe it didn’t feel right.

Often with Phish, I’ll write a lot of songs and we don’t play them [laughs]. Maybe because I’m not as aggressive at promoting them and saying, “Hey let’s practice my song now.” Although whenever I do, the guys are very encouraging. Or maybe my songs are just quirky—and as with “Andelmans’ Yard,” it’s hard to sink yourself into something when there are so many parts to wrap your brain around. Plus, I guess what happened was it got to be all about the old songs and we only had a couple of newer ones [on the setlist].

I’ve written 100 songs since we broke up and we might end up playing one or two of them. But I’m not the songwriter in this band except on occasion. I’m the occasional songwriter. And Trey is prolific and we have a lot of great songs from him.

Some songs such as “Sanity” and “Guelah Papyrus” hadn’t been played since before your previous hiatus. What drew the band to those and how quickly did it take you all to get up to speed on them?

“Sanity” was a last minute thing because we wanted to try blow up one of those big balls, although it didn’t quite blow up. [Ed note: Several large, inflatable balls in an oval formation hung above the audience that lighting director Chris Kuroda incorporated into the show. They were released at several points throughout the weekend.]

“Guelah”—I know a few band members were psyched about it, but what I really like is the fugue in the middle called “The Asse Festival.” It’s one of two fugues Trey wrote that I think are masterpieces in the sense of theme and variations, where a melody is just twisted in all different ways. That one, and “All Things Reconsidered.” So I think it’s an incredible piece of music with that middle section, and then to have a kind of a reggae-ish groove makes it fun on a couple of different levels.

We had to learn them all ourselves first which was a week or two of work because with an atonal fugue, there isn’t really a meter or a key, and to play stuff that I couldn’t easily comp was difficult. It was all in my brain but I had to sit there, use a little bit of muscle memory where my fingers would remember what my ears didn’t and then my fingers would forget and my ears would pick up for a few notes. In some cases there was written music, and in other cases it was just listening to tape and trying to pick it up on bass. So, I used those four methods and tried to remember how it all went. The rhythm is actually the easiest to remember. I could sort of hum the rhythm of basslines. But it was really weird to find how much of that stuff was in my brain somewhere to get pulled out.