Here is a great article I found about Phish:
True to Form, Phish Disbands on Its Own Maverick Terms
May 27, 2004
By JON PARELES
This time Phish is really breaking up.
On Tuesday the group announced on its Web site,
www.phish.com, that it was disbanding after a final tour
this summer. The decision was made four days earlier at a
band meeting, it said.
"We all love and respect Phish and the Phish audience far
too much to stand by and allow it to drag on beyond the
point of vibrancy and health," the band's guitarist, singer
and main songwriter, Trey Anastasio, wrote online. "We
don't want to become caricatures of ourselves, or worse
yet, a nostalgia act." Its final studio album, "Undermind"
(Atlantic), is due on June 15. The tour begins on June 17
at KeySpan Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn, and concludes in
Coventry, Vt., on Aug. 14 and 15.
If it all sounds a little familiar, that is because the
four members of Phish went separate ways in 2000 for an
open-ended hiatus and reunited two years later. "This is
not like the hiatus, which was our last attempt to
revitalize ourselves," Mr. Anastasio wrote. "We're done."
Splitting up in its 21st year of existence, when Phish
could easily coast along the arena circuit for as long as
it wanted, may be the last unorthodox move in a career full
of them. Many of those moves came from the playbook of the
Grateful Dead, which figured out how to be a band of arena
troubadours, making a career on the road while selling
enough albums to satisfy a record company.
The whole Phish template - making every performance
different, allowing audiences to make and trade concert
recordings, archiving and tabulating its collective works,
letting every fan feel like an initiate rather than a
consumer, never acting like rock stars - came from the
Dead, as did a significant part of its musical approach.
Like the Dead, Phish stays light-fingered, steering free of
any style that contains bombast. The band would rather have
fans "bouncing around the room," as one concert staple put
it, then feeling aggrieved; as with the Dead, Phish's
lyricist, Tom Marshall, is not in the band. And like the
Dead, Phish encourages its fans to prize all sorts of
music, to fight the niche listening that radio stations and
recording companies promote. When band members turned to
solo projects, they embraced big-band arrangements (the
Trey Anastasio Band), folky guitar (the bassist Mike
Gordon's duets with Leo Kottke), Frank Zappa-like humor
(the drummer Jon Fishman's Pork Tornado) and Latin music
(the keyboardist Page McConnell's band Vida Blue).
In disbanding, Phish may also have been glancing at the
Grateful Dead, whose final years on the road with a failing
Jerry Garcia were far from their best. But just as likely,
Phish was exercising the persnicketyness that always
separated it from most of the jam bands on the circuit that
Phish helped establish.
Countless jam bands live for the opportunity to vamp and
sprawl, spinning long stretches of music out of the most
basic structures. Phish can stretch out a song with the
best of them, but it has been determined not to sprawl; it
always had an ear for structure. Phish comes from the
generation after the Dead. Where the Dead looked back to
blues, folk and country roots, Phish is also steeped in
latter-day styles like progressive rock. In its catalog, it
was as likely to come up with suitelike songs as with
verse-chorus-verse, and it was as fond of odd time
signatures as it was of country-rock lilts.
Phish was always a paradox. A band that lived for
improvisation, Phish always had plans: performing other
band's albums end to end at its Halloween shows and
concocting goofy stage spectacles for arenas. It kept
trying different recording strategies, from meticulously
overdubbed studio productions to its reunion album, "Round
Room," made from rehearsal tapes. And it has played nearly
every place imaginable, from the club Wetlands Preserve to
gigantic, sold-out, multiset marathon concerts in the
middle of nowhere. Phish has nothing left to prove. After
August Phish's members are likely to turn up with any
number of collaborators. That's what happens in the
recombinant universe of jam bands. What disappears is two
decades of accumulated reflexes: the subtleties of knowing
just when another member is going to start shifting keys in
a jam, or when to pause for another member's rhythmic fill.
Reflexes can become formulas, and Phish was always too
perfectionistic to want to hear that happen. There are
songs on the band's Web site from "Undermind," and they are
as varied and breezy as ever. Whether or not Phish knew
what was coming, the lyrics hint at valedictory: "Run away,
run away, run away," Mr. Anastasio sings in "A Song I Heard
the Ocean Sing," and in "The Connection," he sings, "I
change my direction/One foot follows the other, one foot
follows something new." For two decades, that was Phish's
strategy all along.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/arts/music/27PHIS.html?ex=1086682160&ei=1&en=7262b7914bf06264
