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Phish, No Fear Of Flying: An Interview with Mike Gordon Part II (Relix Revisited)

I’ve found some animosity between Phishheads and Deadheads. There is certainly a huge crossover audience amongst the younger crowd, and it would seem that both audiences embrace similar values.

Gordon: There’s a bit of a difference in the mentality. With us, with the band members, we just like any music that’s good. There’s such a wide variety of music being listened to. Actually, Trey is really into checking out what’s going on with current music. His favorite band’s Pavement right now. We all went to the New Orleans Jazz Festival, and Trey has been playing with Michael Ray who was the trumpet player in Sun Ra’s band. Sun Ra was another big influence on us.
At the New Orleans Jazz Festival, for anyone who hasn’t gone, there’s like 60 bands a day and that’s just at the festival. Then there are all the clubs. One of our favorite things to do is, after we play, to go out to different clubs and to see music and to meet other musicians with different ethnic backgrounds. If music has a passion and is being made with the right intent, then we like to check it out and maybe be inspired by it. Hopefully, with our fans, they have that same attitude. I actually went to a club last night where there was a Phish cover band that only played Phish songs. (Laughter) I actually laid down in the back. I wanted to learn some new bass lines for our songs, which I did. [Author’s Note: The band that Mike saw was the Phins, which was actually Franklin Turnpike doing a rare show of Phish covers during the summer Phish tour. The Phins were joined by Solar Circus’ keyboardist, Jason Crosby.]

The point that I’m getting to is this country is rich in music if you want to find it. In the nooks and crannies of this country, there’s just incredible culture. I think that anyone would be better off to be interested in discovering some of it. When we go to Chicago, there’s blues clubs that stay open all night where there are these bands. They’re unknown, but they’ve been playing this funky Chicago blues for so long that they’re living examples of it. There’s nothing like it. The same with brass bands in New Orleans or salsa bands in Miami. That’s been the great thing about touring. I’d like to think that by being inspired by an eclectic group and by coming up with music that has different influences, rather than following the trends, that we try to draw on all kinds of influences. People would be encouraged to try to discover for themselves what’s out there rather than limiting themselves to just one band.

Do you encourage taping or do you simply tolerate it?

Gordon: It’s not just tolerate, it’s more towards encourage. We sell taper tickets, and that’s another thing the Grateful Dead were probably a model for. I don’t know who else did that.

When we did our first tour, which was to Colorado for two weeks from Vermont, people had already heard about us because of tapes, and word of mouth has always spread through tapes. So it’s been helpful for us. Also, maybe in a little way, it encourages us to be spontaneous. If people are taping every night, we’re not going to be playing the same show. If we have a great experience playing, why not let people have a souvenir of it, even if it’s not the same experience listening to the tape, it’s something. We got a lot of flack—actually Elektra has been a great record company. They understand that we’re a phenomenon. We were before we signed with the record label, so they let us do what we want. Taping’s a big issue though, with record companies. They’re not too big on it. But they let us do it, and it’s questionable whether it affects record sales. Of course record sales, though we’d like to sell records, it’s not our big goal. The record company has been restructured, and they haven’t pushed us towards those kinds of goals more than we’ve been wanting to go anyway. Now, it’s even better with their new president and chairman and some new people. More than ever, they want to let us do our own thing. They’ve kind of accepted that we’re probably not gonna be a top 40 band. If it happened, that would be okay. The want to sell records, but I think that they’re letting us be what we are, and we’re selling some records for them.

By allowing to tape, the fan base is still growing as a result. So eventually, that will affect the record company positively.

Gordon: Well, the reason it’s questionable, now anyway, is because if we were to have a hit record, it would be because of a single…it would be because the mass public became aware of the band, and not just our fans. We have this song that sounds like a single now and our manager’s worried because we don’t necessarily want to have a hit single. But it’s not to say that we avoid selling records.

Your new album, A Live One, captures your live ambiance. Your fans are probably going to like it better than they liked the more produced albums. Who’s idea was it to make a live album?

Gordon: It was inevitable. It always made sense. But we wanted to wait until we really had the facilities to do it right, the right kind of recording equipment. We wanted to do it a long time ago. The fans have been asking for it for a while. Finally, the way that we decided would be right to do it was by taping every night on 32 tracks. So it took two months of listening to our own music to try to pick tracks, and that was tedious but interesting. Even since then, I’ve been hearing us on the radio. I’ve heard live tapes like when we played at Red Rocks and afterwards the radio station played last year’s Red Rocks show. I thought it sounded great. And that was what’s produced on this live album. We went in the studio and mixed it. In that case, we didn’t do anything and it made us think that we should think about doing more live albums if we have time to, but not take so much time. Just to release a concert or maybe just to release one jam and call it an album.

*Phish’s vault tapes.( (Laughter)

Gordon: Yeah.