As a longtime Vermont politician at the federal level, Senator Bernie Sanders has become a mascot for the state’s independent, hippie spirit to the rest of the nation. So it was probably inevitable that The New Yorker’s deeply reported look at another Vermont icon, the beloved jam band Phish, would include a verdict from the politician.
In a comment to the magazine’s Amanda Petrusich, Sanders heaped praise on his constituents, revealing himself to be a true phan. “Phish is one of the great American rock bands, and they represent a lot of what I love about Vermont,” he said. “They create community, experiment creatively, and have an enormous amount of discipline around their music.”
Phish, which front man Trey Anastasio founded when he and two of his bandmates, bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jon Fishman, were students at the University of Vermont in 1983, actually dates back to Sanders’s tenure as the mayor of Burlington. The band is well known for its extended, meandering takes on their recorded output in front of large, appropriately loose audiences, so “discipline” might not be the first word you would use to describe them. But, as Petrusich documents, the band’s improvisational chops have been honed through years of practice, precise attention to detail, and encyclopedic musical knowledge of figures ranging from legends Arnold Schoenberg and Leonard Bernstein to newcomers like M.J. Lenderman and Mitski.
The obsessive spirit carries throughout Phish’s behind-the-scenes operation. Petrusich visited the band’s comprehensive archive in a Burlington warehouse, containing decades of show posters, stage props, oil paintings, and more. She even saw the hard drives that powered the band’s sold out run at the Sphere last year, adding that they were stored in foam-lined waterproof cases and weighed about 120 pounds.
Phish’s devoted fans—Petrusich documents a whole taxonomy, but the sweaty, hairy, tie-dyed ones that might come to mind are called “wooks”—have founded their own parallel culture. For decades, they have flocked to message boards and made pilgrimages to the band’s many live shows and their mostly annual festivals, which began with “multidimensional extravaganza” Clifford Ball in 1996. Phish was so instrumental in inventing the modern music festival that the founders of Bonnaroo asked for their guidance before their first event in 2002. Their most recent festival, August 2024’s Mondegreen, saw the band perform eight times in four nights for about 38,000 spectators at a racetrack in Dover, Delaware. The nonmusical offerings included a dozen site-specific art installations, a tattoo parlor, live comedy, yoga classes, and a post office.
The band’s lineup solidified in 1986 with the addition of keyboardist Page McConnell, and their touring schedule has been remarkably consistent ever since, save for two periods of hiatus in the 2000s, when Anastasio was struggling with opioid addiction. The front man said his high-profile December 2006 drug arrest might have saved his life. “I’ll talk to people in my life and say, ‘I guess I could have died.’ And they’re, like, ‘Could have? You were fucking days from death,’” he said. “I think I weighed, like, ninety-seven pounds. It was horrible. You don’t even know it’s happening. You just think you’re fixing the problem. You’re not getting high—you’re just trying to stave off horror.”
After pleading guilty to attempted criminal possession of a controlled substance, Anastasio avoided jail time but was sentenced to 14 months in drug court. He said his community service hours included “two hundred and eighty-odd hours” at a fairgrounds where he “cleaned the toilets by hand” and “parked cars.” He finished his sentence in 2008 and in March 2009, the band returned to the stage. “It took us a couple of years to get our mojo back,” Anastasio said, citing a specific jam at a 2013 concert in Tahoe as a turning point. “From that point on, I think it’s been improving every year.”
On New Year’s Eve 2024, the band played its 87th show at Madison Square Garden, and ended the night by climbing into a 15-foot foam hot dog that they first piloted in 1994. (They had to borrow it from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where it usually is suspended in an atrium.) They’re one of the Garden’s most prolific acts and in 2017, following a 13-night doughnut-themed series of concerts—during “Boston Cream” night, they covered songs by the bands Boston and Cream, for example—they hoisted a banner up to the rafters, where it still sits, alongside one from fellow MSG regular Billy Joel.
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