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Reunited Phish living more serene life
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Phish and crew bustle about Shoreline Amphitheater's backstage area, a sprawling patio where memories linger of raging parties from bygone tours.
Hours before a recent show, the scene is markedly different. Voices and footfalls carry across the expanse of empty picnic tables. A baby stroller clatters across wooden planks. As afternoon slants into evening, a ruckus finally kicks up: The clip-clop of a pingpong game between Trey Anastasio and his teenage daughter.
"Fifteen-love," says the Phish guitarist.
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"We used to have a lot of people hanging around, and it was a crazy scene backstage - CRAZY," Anastasio says later, between sips of tea. "I remember being here, a number of times, and you couldn't get through. There were literally hundreds of people, all the time. Everywhere."
The scene was a symptom of a lifestyle the members of Phish knew they couldn't sustain. So after 20 years on the road together, they staged a farewell blowout in Coventry, Vt., in 2004, their seventh massive festival. It began with a freakish downpour and ended with the emotionally shattered band flubbing and struggling to say goodbye. More than four years after the split, Phish roared back to life in March with an electrifying three-night reunion stint in Hampton, Va., followed up with a summer tour chock full of bootleg-worthy shows.
Their new album, "Joy," released last month, was critically lauded for its musical and lyrical maturity and refreshed, live-show inspired sound. And on Friday, Phish completes its comeback victory lap with the kickoff of Festival 8, a three-night marathon of sets in Indio, Calif., on the same grounds where the Coachella music festival is held. A fall tour will follow.
While it would seem Phish back at full blast could risk relapse into old habits, the band agreed on a number of changes that have made their rebirth possible. For one, the number of dates the band plays has been scaled back; for another, the members have kept their pact to put families first, even on the road.
That means lots of kids backstage - seven in the Phish family so far, most of them on tour - and not so much the hundreds of hangers-on who had snowballed out of control through the years. As Anastasio likes to point out, there were 3,500 people on the guest list at their "farewell" show in 2004. At the reunion show this year, there were 10 - "and seven of them were under the age of 13."
