That last sentence, as it happens, could be affixed to any of Phish’s work in the 15 years leading up to The Siket Disc. While conventional wisdom (and reams of music criticism) might suggest otherwise, they had already covered quite a lot of ground as a studio act, and they worked hard to differentiate their official discography from the scratchy bootleg tapes that catalyzed their loyal following. Among its entries was a set of dazzlingly weird compositions played live in the studio (1989’s Junta), a moody concept album that upped their emotional stakes (1993’s Rift), a brash rock album tailor-made for alternative radio (1994’s Hoist), and a tasteful, rootsy album that helped win over the jam skeptics (1996’s Billy Breathes).
During their formative gigs for fellow college students in Vermont, the appeal of a Phish show was all about what happens next—where any given song might take them, what new tricks they might reveal, what would happen when other scenes discover this wild, ecstatic music. Like so many gifted kids chasing their passion, the band’s boundless potential seemed to spur them on—even if the members seemed more interested in making each other laugh than singing in key or writing anything that might appeal to radio. As OG Phish head Tom Baggott recalls in Parke Puterbaugh’s Phish: The Biography, “It was like there was a big joke going on and all the early Phish fans knew the punchline—which was that this was gonna be something big.”
Here is the dream of every small-town weirdo, as played out on the stages of the music industry: One day you will step to the front of the classroom and dazzle everyone, from the snobby cool kids to the stuffy professors who never thought you had it in you. And once you’ve won them over, there’s no one left to please but yourself. With Phish, this posture was written so conclusively into their ascent that the trappings of mainstream success had little bearing on them. The major-label studio albums, no matter the effort and money behind them, would never hold fans’ attention like the cherished bootleg tapes. And even as they started selling out storied halls like Madison Square Garden in 1994, they had their sights set elsewhere: specifically, five miles north in Plattsburgh, New York, where they launched their own two-day festival that became the largest North American concert of 1996.
It’s an enviable place for any band—creating your own standards for success and finding an audience to achieve them with you—but it’s also dangerous territory. It’s one thing for the underdog to rise to the top of the class; it’s another thing to have to run the school. These concerns informed Anastasio’s 1988 college thesis, a heavily mythologized rock opera called The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday. The plot, if I’m understanding it right (and I’m not sure I ever have), involves a utopian society called Gamehendge that becomes corrupted by power, then overthrown by a revolutionary, then eventually corrupted once again by that same revolutionary after he steps into power. Breaking onto the jam scene at a time when some heads saw the Grateful Dead in danger of burning and/or selling out, Anasatsio understood that good intentions and high ideals could only get you so far before real life starts to intrude.
