By BOB MARGOLIS, Special to the Times Union
First published: Thursday, November 17, 2005
Ernest Joseph Anastasio III talks in bursts. On stage and off, he can’t stand still. Despite his former life as the frontman of Phish – a band that became almost synonymous with a certain laid-back aesthetic – Trey Anastasio has a bear of a time taking a vacation.
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His peripatetic style can lead him to get ahead of himself. Anastasio admits he unveiled his new band, dubbed 70 Volt Parade, a bit too early; he likens their first gig, on April Fools’ Day in Phish’s hometown of Burlington, Vt., to Chad Pennington returning to the Jets too quickly.
“I made so many changes simultaneously. … I had gotten together with a lot of new people, and the feeling of those folks was ‘Just go out and play.’ But I didn’t have it together yet,” Anastasio said in a wide-ranging phone interview last week. “(The Burlington show) was the only time that I went on stage feeling like what I was doing had not developed into something unique yet. I mean, Phish was still dismantling – so playing with new people was too early for certain people who were bent out of shape.”
By “certain people” he includes the legions of die-hard Phish fans still reeling more than a year after the band’s farewell blowout in Coventry, Vt. Anastasio still feels their disappointment, and the heft of the questions that still linger about the reasons behind the band’s breakup after more than a decade as one of the nation’s most popular live acts.
“I … care about those people; I’ve got myself in a situation where I want them to be happy,” Anastasio said. “That’s so much of what Phish was. It was our job from the stage with the music, with the thinking of all the ideas and crazy things – ‘Hey, let’s do “Dark Side of the Moon” the night after Halloween!’ – all of that was nurturing a community.”
One-man affair
As if in response to the weight of expectations, the cover of Anastasio’s new record, “Shine,” shows him looking up to the sky jubilantly, Languedoc guitar held high.
The disc is very much a one-man affair, presenting Anastasio as solo songwriter for the first time in his career. As opposed to Phish’s free-form, almost jazz-based rock, the tunes on “Shine” are heavier in nature – Jerry G. meets Ozzie O.
On Friday, Anastasio brings 70 Volt Parade – featuring guitarist-keyboardist Les Hall, bassist Tony Hall, drummer Skeeter Valdez, keyboardist Ray Paczkowski and vocalists Jennifer Hartswick and Christina Durfee – to Albany’s Palace Theatre for a gig that will showcase new material and more than a few cherished older tunes.
Phish fans will have a field day combing through the lyric sheet of “Shine” looking for lines like “This time, what are you waiting for? Is it your time to walk away?” (from “Invisible”). The songwriter cautions them not to be too literal.
“Sure, in some parts those tunes are about leaving Phish, but it goes deeper,” Anastasio said. “I didn’t even know until a few gigs ago what some of these lines were really about.” He points to another new song, “Comes a Melody,” a tune that Anastasio says is about “leaving my ragged-ass self and becoming a human being again.”
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Drug role
But what was it that made Anastasio feel un-human? It’s at this point that he sees fit to address what’s become the elephant in the middle of any discussion of Phish’s breakup: the role that drugs played in the band’s final years, and in Anastasio’s decision to call for its end.
It’s a subject that was conspicuous by its absence in the period immediately after the band’s breakup announcement in May 2004. While fatigue was generally seen as the culprit, few fans were willing to chalk it up to anything more than artistic torpor or mundane road-weariness.
“I thought it went without saying how deep into our scene hard drugs had gone,” said Anastasio. (Despite his new frankness on the subject, he still resists getting into the specifics of who was doing what, and how much.)
“That’s why I was surprised at people saying, ‘How could you do this?’ How could I not do this? What’s the alternative here? I always thought our scene was so transparent, that everybody knew everything. That’s why it was hard to hear the anger and frustration from Phish fans.”
“I just want to say to them: I love Phish, too. But because of what was happening to Phish and happening to me, the decisions came from a place of love and respect for the same thing that you all loved and respected. That same light was going out pretty damned fast.”
"We got through the '80s and '90s without encountering hard drugs – which is pretty miraculous considering what those eras were like – and it is a testament to the guys in the band, in how intent we were from keeping those type of drugs away.
“Once we let our guard down around 1998, the scene started to eat itself and there was a massive loss of perspective. … The whole thing was being crushed under its own weight. The germ of the thing – that feeling between the four of us – is still there, but we were getting unhealthy and tired,” he said.
Even worse
The band went on hiatus in the fall of 2000, and didn’t return to the road until the end of 2002. “We came back and it was even worse,” Anastasio said.
After the breakup announcement, the summer 2004 tour seemed to encapsulate everything that was right and wrong with Phish; both tendencies came to a head in the hideous weather, epic traffic snarls and often frenzied music of the band’s weekend-long August farewell on farmland outside of Coventry, Vt.
“For Coventry, our guest list was between 2,500 and 3,000 people,” Anastasio said. “It was like a nightmare backstage – very dark. But still, it was great to be onstage with my friends,” Anastasio said.
When it was all over, “I went to Bermuda and slept for a week,” he said. “I needed to get healthy, which I am now.”
After a few attempts at putting together a new post-Phish touring unit, Anastasio enlisted the help of producer Brendan O’Brien, best known for his work with Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam and, more recently, Bruce Springsteen.
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“I need to do this alone,” Anastasio said of the recording of “Shine” this spring. “That’s why I didn’t bring my band. I needed to get on a plane with just a backpack and sit in a hotel room with my guitar. The first thing Brendan said was to sit down and play the songs on the guitar straight.”
No break
On this tour, Anastasio doesn’t take a set break. Instead, his bandmates depart and leave him on stage to play a number of tunes without accompaniment. It’s during this segment that Anastasio has been playing a wide variety of Phish songs and Phish-associated cover tunes.
“Each night, I go out and think of a few songs I haven’t played in a while and play them on the acoustic without the whole arrangement – like ‘AC/DC Bag,’ ‘Sample in a Jar’ and so on,” he said.
Anastasio seems keenly aware of his new status as a member of a famously defunct band. It’s a big club, though not always a happy one.
He recently participated in a tribute to Jerry Garcia at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, Calif., where he chatted backstage with Garcia’s ex-wife, the legendary Mountain Girl, and Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzman. As they were talking about Garcia, "Kreutzman just blurted out, ‘I love that guy,’ Anastasio recalled. “I loved that.”
But he noticed as well that Dead bassist Phil Lesh wasn’t there, because of a long-standing feud with guitarist Bob Weir. Anastasio also recently did a tour with former Police drummer Stewart Copeland, “and he was not on the phone with Sting.”
Together again?
In comparison, Anastasio’s relationships with his former bandmates – Jon Fishman, Page McConnell and Mike Gordon – are downright collegial. All of them have joined Anastasio on stage during this tour – though not all at the same time.
“I was on the phone with Mike, Page and Fish this morning,” said Anastasio, who lives outside Burlington with his wife and two daughters. “They are healthy and wonderful. Everybody has had our run-ins with the dark side, but we muddled through. And the option is still there.”
“Those stories can have different endings pretty quickly,” Anastasio said. "Everybody just needs to get their feet back on the ground. … My dream would be that everybody gets to a place where their own lives outside of this, that all four of us are standing on our own two feet.
“And then who knows? Maybe we could all play together again. I’d love it.”
