Shooting Phish in a Barrel

When I wrote for the college newspaper in Oshkosh, I made it a point to include several recurring jokes in my columns. Their purpose was to strengthen the consistency of the writer's voice. A lot of times, because I exaggerate and bend the truth so much, the character of me exists in a sort of parallel universe, and the recurring references were put in to make the visit to such a strange place less alienating and more reassuring.

For reasons that I will soon explain (at length), I lambasted a band named Phish on a semi-regular basis. Until now, I've never done a column that exclusively deals with my distaste for Phish, but through grumbling asides and tangents, I took swipes at the quartet from Vermont and the mental lethargy the group embodies.

To the reader, I'd wager that these brief grievances with Phish were not always well-received. Indeed, not everyone is familiar with their music, and so the Phish-bashing tangents could seem obscure and random. Concerning the Phish fan demographic, they are an ardent, defensive bunch, and not all of them are illiterate, so I know some of them were angered and offended. To me, the shooting of Phish in a Barrel was always noble yet wicked, hilarious, and just a wee bit sad and petty. (And it still is.)

At my high school, a lot of the popular kids in my grade wore t-shirts in support of the Dave Matthews Band and Phish. Those were the two most popular bands in the popular crowd. Neither band appealed to me then, and years later, I feel pretty much the same way. Dave's music sounds like a trendy hoe-down, and it seems really effeminate, too. Phish was/ is even worse: the stoner vapidness they offer reinforces the pot-smoker stereotype, and the lack of thought and emotion don't result in a good time for me; the music just feels empty and stupid. Both bands represented the comical, gimmicky nature of high school popularity, which I never really experienced, of course.

In college I became friends with a few of the Dave fans as well as a handful of the Phish-heads, without ever having to buy any of the t-shirts or CDs. The pros outweighed the cons in these friendships; really, the worst drawback was getting drunk while listening to a CD someone else picked because we were getting tipsy in their dorm room or apartment and they had every right to choose the night's soundtrack. It wasn't much of a bother. Albums such as Check Your Head and Odelay always stayed up late for me until I made it back home.

To be honest, my contempt for the Dave Matthews band wavered in time. "Trendy hoe-down" and "effeminate" are still descriptions that apply, though. Also, it should be noted that guys who fake or embellish their love of the Dave Matthews Band in order to work the sensitive-confident-man-angle with a Dave-adoring chick are, without exception, lowlife con-artists. But I'll stand by this: the Dave Matthews Band have recorded at least five great songs.

Phish was an entirely different story. The more I listened (despairingly) to Phish, the more their existence as a band troubled me.

Some of my worst memories involve listening to Phish. These experiences were by no means catastrophic, but getting your ear-drums raped while the people around you celebrate is never a good time.

One such instance occurred on New Year's Eve of 2005. I went to the bar with my friend Tim and his buddy Noah. Tim and I were enjoying our argument about rock music, specifically which band has the more impressive song catalog: the Beatles (right answer) or the Rolling Stones (wrong answer). We both knew it was a totally subjective debate, but really, that only made matters worse. But in a funny way!

We were on the subject of Sgt. Pepper when Noah walked over to the jukebox and put some quarters in it. He played "The Wolfman's Brother" by Phish, and Lord have Mercy, the jukebox was really fucking loud. So loud I couldn't think. I lost my train of thought, overwhelmed by what struck me as shitty sound-waves.

Noah sat back down and lit a cigarette. I turned to him and, in an annoyed tone that he did not care for, I asked him if he really meant to play the song we were listening to. He took a slow drag, the cherry flared, and he nodded once without making eye-contact.

About three minutes into the travesty, I decided to step outside, have a smoke, and call a cute girl I would ultimately never have sex with. She was nice enough to laugh at a few jokes and I was more funny than flirtatious. We hung up after a few minutes. I truly thought I had waited out the worst that the night had to offer. I exhaled a puff of nicotine/ cold air, littered, and walked back into the bar.

Inside, "The Wolfman's Brother" was still playing, at about the eight-minute mark. The band was all done spouting inane lyrics, but they persisted in dicking around on their instruments for the foreseeable future.


Now, just because you're not likely to get sniped for playing far beyond the point when you should have stopped doesn't mean you have to do it. What's the point in jamming when the basis of the song itself is so flimsy and vacuous? “The Wolfman's Brother” is probably about a Monster-Mash with bongs; it's a shoddy novelty song, and in a divinely merciful world, God would not allow anyone to play that tune for longer than two minutes.

Elsewhere: While David Bowie, the man, is an exceptional singer and songwriter, "David Bowie," Phish song, is terrible. And I don't mean "terrible" in a good way, either. On a late-night drive home with a couple friends, I listened to this nonsensical crap for seemingly nine hours.

To my knowledge, the only words are: "David Bowie, you-be forty." I thought Trey the hippie was singing: "David Bowie, UB-40," as in, the popular music group from the '80s. I was wrong. Either way, it's one of many, many Phish compositions that defaces virtues of singing, songwriting, and brevity.

A persnickety Phish-loving friend has since enlightened me on the subject. Apparently the tune was written as a birthday present to David Bowie. Oh, boy.

"Hey David, happy birthday. We dig your music, man. Anyway, I lost my bucket-full of thoughts. Hope you dig brain-dead stoner babble!"

That's how the lead hippie introduces the song.

This one is always good for a laugh...

"Bag it, tag it, sell it to the butcher at the store." This is perhaps the most thought-provoking lyric in the Phish catalog. At a party in college, an exuberant A-Phishionado--clad in a tight-fitting Polo shirt--expressed praise for this line while it blasted from the stereo. My friend Jill and I were sitting on the couch and he turned to us, almost spilling his Jack and Coke as he swung his gaze toward us.

"It's not just a sweet jam," he said. "This tune has a message. Bag it. Tag it. Sell it to the butcher. At the store. That's the truth, you know?"

His eye-balls bulged and he stared at us for a few seconds. We had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I have a fierce immunity to the shaky wisdom of hippies in their 20s. This guy, with his backwards fitted hat and cherry-colored chubby cheeks, was more of a yippie, and yippies are even less credible than hippies.

He went on about the group's concerts as well as the stories behind their songs. There was something disconcerting in the way he gushed over Phish. Jill and I barely knew this guy. But he wasn't addressing us to be friendly; rather, he seemed to be actively recruiting us. It was a bizarre interaction, and it wasn't until years later that I pieced together an accurate comparison. Die-hard Phish fans are a lot like members of a religious cult. Only instead of handing out pamphlets at the mall, they hand out live-bootleg CDs at parties.

I've had the misfortune of hearing a live Phish bootleg that features a jam in which the crowd chants the name "Wilson" for the first minute or two. I'm not a fan of chants. They're redundant, they promote blind conformity, and they generally give me the creeps. Chants are a major factor in my aversion to Catholic mass, and some other religions chant even more frequently than Catholics. Religious cults, especially, rely on chants to get all members to think along the same narrow train of thought.

Now, I don't know the back-story behind this "Wilson" character, or what he has done to merit a song in his honor. Perhaps the answer is revealed in the liner notes of Billy Breathes. Maybe Wilson was a roadie for Phish in the early days, and his chief duties were scoring drugs and driving the van when the band was too stoned to keep their eyes on the road. I'm not sure, but I know this: Wilson's back-story is rooted in bullshit mythology. At Phish concerts, Wilson is just a name you chant to blend in with the rest of the hive. The name has no meaning and the song is thoughtless, but nobody minds because they are all part of something BIG and nobody who chants feels excluded.

Chanting works the same way in religious cults. The only difference is that cult members chant "Spaceship Messiah" instead of "Wilson."

In the process of writing this essay, I watched an episode of the Comedy Central show Strangers with Candy. Jeri Blank, the sleazy and tactless main character, gets recruited by a religious cult while she is at the mall playing an arcade game. In addition to her lust for the female recruiter, Jeri is also lonesome and longing to belong, and so she accepts a ride in a van back to the cult's mansion. Later on she is introduced to the leader, a conniving egotist who describes a dream he had to his members. The scene is absurd and almost unbearably loopy. It's also really funny.

I had the misfortune of watching part of a Phish concert DVD when I showed up at a friend's house to play a game of John Madden Football. At one point in this DVD, while the rest of the band noodled throughout a formless jam that brought to mind elevator music, Trey Anastacio set aside five minutes to tell his followers about a dream he had the night before.

Pretentious and uncalled for? Yeah, I think so, but as a silver lining, at least I didn't have to listen to the guy sing.

During the dream-telling portion of the concert, Trey was not a (lousy) lead singer; he was the leader of a musical cult. Now, Trey is not an evil person, which is a relief, considering the extent of his influence, but there is a reason one of his best-remembered lyrics is, "Come waste your time with me." That's his mantra.

Even though I can cite numerous bands that I think are worse than Phish, they still bother me like no other group because I still have friends who play their music constantly. I'd love to banish those shitty sound-waves from my life entirely, but that would entail severing ties with people solely because they really like a band that I can't stand. A few months ago I went to the bar for a friend's going-away party, and someone from the group played a half-hour block of Phish jams on the jukebox (about three songs). Again, the people around me celebrated while my ear-drums got raped. I was the only one in the group not hippie-dancing, thinking, "Jesus...these are my friends?!" And yes, they are. This sophomoric essay is not intended to ruin friendships. That may seem like a melodramatic disclaimer, but honestly, plenty of Phish-heads defend their band the way a mother grizzly defends her cub: Viciously.

Friendship is wonderful, but I'd much rather spend a summer weekend alone than pass a joint to a pal while chanting, “Wilson.”

In closing, I'd like to offer an example of a standard Phish indictment I submitted to the Advance-Titan, in March of 2005, along with one of the responses it drew from a Phish worshiper.

Nick: "Phish's dopey lyrics have killed more brain cells than weed, mushrooms, and LSD combined."

Angry Phish-head reply: "It takes a right-brained dope not to understand Phish's lyrics. You're obviously a fag."

OK, guy. You can have an opinion, too. Now nobody can argue that a Phish-head wasn't granted a rebuttal to my rather biased and salty opinion of the Grateful Dead's dimwitted nephew.

But I have to confess: There is one Phish lyric that I'm fond of. It's the line that reminds me of what to do if I ever see a Phish-head at a shopping mall, approaching strangers and jabbering about "Father Trey, the Crunchy Shredder." In addition to the tie-dyed clothing, a fanatic such as this is sure to stand out because of the line of stitches on the right side of his forehead. That's the spot where "Brother Wolfman" made the incision to remove and destroy that pesky, anti-Phish side of the brain. When I see that wild-eyed hippie coming my way, I'll know what to do. I'm going to turn around and "run like an antelope out of control."