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

Having an audience with family values is probably unusual for a band that has a cult following. Maybe it’s not so much rebellion as it is genetics. A lot of your fans’ parents are of an enlightened generation, so their children should be more enlightened.

Gordon: I think there’s an evolution.

Until I went to your shows, I thought, “Hey, we were it. We were the end all.” But we weren’t and it’s such a great feeling to see that it didn’t end with us. And it’s still evolving because your music is complex enough to take a new generation to farther reaches.

Gordon: If you look at people that are very successful, being disciplined and applying themselves is almost a bigger chunk in terms of importance than having creative ideas. It takes commitment. When we first started jamming together in dorm rooms, 12 years ago, I actually thought that we didn’t really click together in terms of how we sounded. I think it was beneficial that we didn’t because we had to practice five days a week. It took a lot of discipline, real commitment and a sense of vision—all those things over the years. Some people sort of define commitment and love the same way. I think the audience picks up on this sense of commitment, and they in turn become committed to the situation. But in a way, that’s almost like a family value coming out. Whether it sounds good or bad, at any given moment, at least we’re gonna be in it for the long haul and try to make it as good as possible.

Do you think that you’ll cross over to an older market at some point, once it discovers who you are and what you’re doing?

Gordon: I don’t know. I couldn’t really say. Although, like I said, it’s happening a bit and I guess I’d like to think so. Bruce Hampton, a friend of ours who I have a lot of respect for, says that it’s important to always be child-like, but not to be child-ish. So in that sense, it would be nice to think that we would always have a child-like sense of exploring and innocence and that older people who have that attitude would become interested in our music. And also, that we would continue to explore the more mature and darker innards of the mind with our songs, and that would stretch towards people that are more mature, sort of from both angles. I could see it happening.

We live in a very pop-oriented culture. We’ve been force fed music that is, perhaps, more melodic than some of yours.

Gordon: We’re very dissonant, sometimes. Trey’s mentor, Ernie, is a composer of neo-classical music with a Big Band influence. They’re into atonal fugues, and the way that Ernie writes, you hear a lot of dissonance, but there’s a form to it. It’s not just clashing notes because they clash. It’s for a reason. It’s to try to stretch certain limits and to do it in a thoughtful way. So, for the listener, it’s a matter of opening your mind to be able to accept that as being something desirable. Trey likes to quote Stravinsky: “Run from beauty and it will follow.” I guess it’s true that maybe when people get older, they get a little more set in their ways, which, to some degree, makes sense because you’re learning, you’re testing out your values.

Life also seems shorter, so everything has to happen faster.

Gordon: Music that’s experimental and changing might be more threatening to some of those done with the phase of their lives where they’re exploring. They might not want to explore auditorally with us. But some of our favorite musicians were…I really like Buddy Rich, who was in his seventies when he died, and we actually saw him as a band a few times, together. And in the case of Buddy Rich, he billed himself as the world’s greatest drummer and he was one of the world’s greatest drummers. He was so incredible. He had big goals for himself, even in his seventies. He really wanted to learn new ways of drumming. He was exploring right up to the end. In that sense, he was also sort of child-like.

Age doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to be locked into the expected. Sun Ra always said to “Expect the unexpected.” That’s a philosophy we try to embrace, and for anyone to be part of our family, they would have to tap into that.