Funk Siren

_{"Forme is Power"—Thomas Hobbes}

The centerpiece of 9/29/99 (Pyramid Arena, Memphis, TN) is an extended second-set "2001," widely known as the "Pyramid 2001." It is relevant that the Pyramid Arena is a pyramid (it is the world's sixth largest). And unlike the Grateful Dead's 1978 concerts at the Great Pyramid of Giza, this performance takes place inside the pyramid. The phrase "Pyramid 2001" is almost too overladen with symbolism to begin to discuss: Phish as an art object built over decades by hundreds of thousands of slaves; blockheaded geometrical minimalism as an analog for Phish's aggressive formal obviousness; a pyramid/monolith/rhombus connection; the pyramid as a kind of spacecraft; pyramids as containing, in a sort of transdimensional way, infinite starry space; Phish, in their capacity as archeologists of their own childhood and adolescence in the 1970s, revisiting the King Tut-mania that swept America as the "Treasures of Tutankhamun" took up a three-year residence at the Met; "2001" as another name for 2012; the darker jams of 1999 as a form of automatic reading of the hieroglyphics briefly glimpsed while nodding out; serious drug use as a form of Egyptology; the sounds of Trey's self-embalming and -immuration and subsequent passage through the underworld; the feeling you get as you look out through newly powerful eyes that your face has become that of a jackal-headed god; and so on.

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The first time I saw Phish (1993), I remember being impressed by Trey's giant white hightops. He didn't strike me as unaware of what puffy sneakers might mean, fashionwise. But neither did he seem to be making a negative move at the expense of oblivious white sneaker-wearers. It was ironic, but sincere. Like, I absolutely love being weird in the world. Or consider Trey's striped shirt in this video from 1994; it's too big, and untucked, and a dress shirt. And listen to (at least) the first minute of his solo, say, :32 through 1:37. He starts out doing this muted-string thing, and it seems like a bad joke at first, like, "I am playing annoying guitar," but he keeps doing it, and the way he's swinging his hair he seems to be saying I am absolutely in heaven and could do this forever.

It's hard to say what exactly happened to Phish in 1997 (and this has been the subject of an amazing thread at Phantasy Tour, what was it like when phish funked out in 97), but part of it was that Trey no longer wanted to be a jazz brainiac from Vermont. It's like he got embarrassed. Trey makes a belated grunge turn, steering his weirdness toward underachievement, both in his appearance (no cardigans, but often the t-shirt-over-a-thermal-undershirt and the winter-hat-indoors; gone are the Colin Baker-esque baggy yellow pants of the Billy Breathes era) and his playing (willfully unstudied, aggressive and humorless, no longer overstuffed with pseudo-jazz altered notes). This video features not the eccentric-honors-student Trey of old, but schlubby-dropout Trey (Fishman's self-care seems to have declined, too). I suggest tuning in at 6:52. I'm in hell, but I'm going to act like I belong here.

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I first heard of Phish during a Peace Walk across the Memorial Bridge in Augusta, Maine, in January 1991. Candle wax dripped onto my mitten. This adult-seeming guy with long hair wore a blue windbreaker that looked like serious outdoor gear. I confused the band he was telling me about with the Rhythm Fish, a high school band I had gone to see at a Battle of the Bands in Waterville; the bass player was my friend Chris's math tutor. I was surprised to learn that they now had a large following all over New England. The man clarified: "Phish" with a "p-h." The Gulf War went ahead as planned. Hiking boots were cheap and plentiful. Making Sense of the Sixties was on PBS. "Phish"-with-a-"p-h" circulated by word of mouth. Some friends saw them on a package tour that came to Portland and came back with their first LSD, "Spaceships." When I finally saw the famous Phish, the high-register laser-gun guitar hurt my ears and I wished it would stop. The music on their early CDs seemed to be about experiences of water, swimmy crosscurrents of overlapping arpeggios, whereas Rift seemed to be about experiences of ice and snow, moon- and streetlight-lit drifts and banks of modernist winter. "Phish" was the name of the substance the band produced, the wobbly refracting swim, glowing and finny and seaweed-swept, something you felt in the many-particled whip of seaspray standing on the bow of some research vessel blasting into the Atlantic, and clearly you were wearing a blue windbreaker.