Here is the conclusion of an extended conversation with Phish bassist Mike Gordon, conducted by former Relix editor Toni Brown for the October 1995 issue of the magazine. Click here for part one if you haven’t read it yet.

I’d expect there to be differing philosophies in the band. Where do you think you’ll be in ten years?

Gordon: Usually, we talk about our goals, and we never predict the future. We like to think that certain ideals that we had would stay, and one of them is that idea of evolution. Having the music continue to change so that we would be writing new songs and trying new things, and I guess the other is that some things would stay the same. That brings it back to the same thing, the continuity that we’d still be able to get on stage and sort of fly.

Do you ever have a night where you just don’t feel it?

Gordon: Yeah, yeah. There used to be nights that were horrible. I think that we’ve gotten to a point where, even if things aren’t clicking quite as well, it’s still okay. We’re more likely to say, “Well, tomorrow will be okay.” It’s a bad feeling to leave a gig, especially if the last song was bad, because then, as musicians, we’ll spend the next 24 hours till the next gig in a bad mood and we’ve just let people down and let ourselves down. If that happens, it’s usually because different people in the band are distracted or they’re in their own worlds. There are other reasons. It could be that the acoustics are bad and we couldn’t hear each other and we couldn’t hook up for that reason. If it’s really roomy or maybe sometimes it’s good to be in an alpha state, but if we’re overly tired – it takes a certain amount of healthiness and clear-headedness to be able to focus and focusing is what it’s all about, I think.

Often, we get off the stage and analyze what we did, probably more than most bands. Maybe a little bit too much. Actually, I’m thankful for it because we’re so good at communicating, so open, that even if we go overboard sometimes, at least it gets our feelings out. Sometimes it’s not clear, there’s a lot of communication that goes on on-stage. Even just eye contact. But sometimes, we’ll get the wrong message. Trey will look at Fish and Fish will think that he’s sped up the song too much. Really Trey is trying to say “You’re not hooking up with me.” These days, it’s usually not bad but maybe not as great, and sometimes it’s just unpredictable. It’ll just happen and it’s definitely the nature of taking risks and improvising.

Do you go out with set lists?

Gordon: Trey actually writes out a set list, which ends up being a sketch of what we’ll do. We’ll veer off from it. It’s more of a list of ideas in case we can’t think of what to do, we’ll return to it.

Do you find that you just pick up in things and go with it?

Gordon: I never see a set list myself, actually. But, yeah the best sets are sets where it just goes up on tangents. I like this idea of playing with structure, and sometimes we’ll just start jamming between songs for no reason, and occasionally, we’ll break up on a tangent in an unexpected place, like between two verses of a song, or we’ll cut a song in half. But going with the flow works out the best. Trey writes the set list in an effort not to repeat songs. He gets a computer printout of what we played last year in the same place, what we played the last couple of nights and anywhere in the region recently so that we can be as different as possible. And then he writes a set list, and then we veer off from it. Lately, almost every night, we’ve been having at least one unplanned jam which is thirty or forty minutes long. We don’t know when it’s gonna happen or if it’s gonna happen. So the set list really gets forgotten.

You do a lot of Beatles covers.

Gordon: We have a lot of respect for the Beatles as songwriters. We just watched The Making of Sgt. Pepper’s where it shows them in the studio. For Halloween, we asked people to vote on what album they wanted us to play. They sent in letters through [our newsletter] Doniac Schvice.

The Beatles’ White Album got the most votes, so we learned that. The songs were simple, but to learn all of them and all the harmonies in two weeks, it wasn’t at all that easy and that was just the second set of a three set gig. It was a five-and-a-half hour gig. But we still play some of those songs. The Beatles were extremely creative in the studio with songwriting, and I think we all have a lot of respect for that. Growing up, the first album I ever listened to was Abbey Road, which my parents had. My first few years, that was the only album that I ever listened to.

I think you guys would probably jam into infinitum if you felt like it – if it weren’t for unions and curfews.

Gordon: Sometimes we might. You never know. (Laughter).

I’ve found some animosity between Phishheads and Deadheads. There is certainly a huge crossover audience amongst the younger crowd, and it would seem that both audiences embrace similar values.

Gordon: There’s a bit of a difference in the mentality. With us, with the band members, we just like any music that’s good. There’s such a wide variety of music being listened to. Actually, Trey is really into checking out what’s going on with current music. His favorite band’s Pavement right now. We all went to the New Orleans Jazz Festival, and Trey has been playing with Michael Ray who was the trumpet player in Sun Ra’s band. Sun Ra was another big influence on us.
At the New Orleans Jazz Festival, for anyone who hasn’t gone, there’s like 60 bands a day and that’s just at the festival. Then there are all the clubs. One of our favorite things to do is, after we play, to go out to different clubs and to see music and to meet other musicians with different ethnic backgrounds. If music has a passion and is being made with the right intent, then we like to check it out and maybe be inspired by it. Hopefully, with our fans, they have that same attitude. I actually went to a club last night where there was a Phish cover band that only played Phish songs. (Laughter) I actually laid down in the back. I wanted to learn some new bass lines for our songs, which I did. [Author’s Note: The band that Mike saw was the Phins, which was actually Franklin Turnpike doing a rare show of Phish covers during the summer Phish tour. The Phins were joined by Solar Circus’ keyboardist, Jason Crosby.]

The point that I’m getting to is this country is rich in music if you want to find it. In the nooks and crannies of this country, there’s just incredible culture. I think that anyone would be better off to be interested in discovering some of it. When we go to Chicago, there’s blues clubs that stay open all night where there are these bands. They’re unknown, but they’ve been playing this funky Chicago blues for so long that they’re living examples of it. There’s nothing like it. The same with brass bands in New Orleans or salsa bands in Miami. That’s been the great thing about touring. I’d like to think that by being inspired by an eclectic group and by coming up with music that has different influences, rather than following the trends, that we try to draw on all kinds of influences. People would be encouraged to try to discover for themselves what’s out there rather than limiting themselves to just one band.

Do you encourage taping or do you simply tolerate it?

Gordon: It’s not just tolerate, it’s more towards encourage. We sell taper tickets, and that’s another thing the Grateful Dead were probably a model for. I don’t know who else did that.

When we did our first tour, which was to Colorado for two weeks from Vermont, people had already heard about us because of tapes, and word of mouth has always spread through tapes. So it’s been helpful for us. Also, maybe in a little way, it encourages us to be spontaneous. If people are taping every night, we’re not going to be playing the same show. If we have a great experience playing, why not let people have a souvenir of it, even if it’s not the same experience listening to the tape, it’s something. We got a lot of flack – actually Elektra has been a great record company. They understand that we’re a phenomenon. We were before we signed with the record label, so they let us do what we want. Taping’s a big issue though, with record companies. They’re not too big on it. But they let us do it, and it’s questionable whether it affects record sales. Of course record sales, though we’d like to sell records, it’s not our big goal. The record company has been restructured, and they haven’t pushed us towards those kinds of goals more than we’ve been wanting to go anyway. Now, it’s even better with their new president and chairman and some new people. More than ever, they want to let us do our own thing. They’ve kind of accepted that we’re probably not gonna be a top 40 band. If it happened, that would be okay. The want to sell records, but I think that they’re letting us be what we are, and we’re selling some records for them.

By allowing to tape, the fan base is still growing as a result. So eventually, that will affect the record company positively.

Gordon: Well, the reason it’s questionable, now anyway, is because if we were to have a hit record, it would be because of a single…it would be because the mass public became aware of the band, and not just our fans. We have this song that sounds like a single now and our manager’s worried because we don’t necessarily want to have a hit single. But it’s not to say that we avoid selling records.

Your new album, A Live One, captures your live ambiance. Your fans are probably going to like it better than they liked the more produced albums. Who’s idea was it to make a live album?

Gordon: It was inevitable. It always made sense. But we wanted to wait until we really had the facilities to do it right, the right kind of recording equipment. We wanted to do it a long time ago. The fans have been asking for it for a while. Finally, the way that we decided would be right to do it was by taping every night on 32 tracks. So it took two months of listening to our own music to try to pick tracks, and that was tedious but interesting. Even since then, I’ve been hearing us on the radio. I’ve heard live tapes like when we played at Red Rocks and afterwards the radio station played last year’s Red Rocks show. I thought it sounded great. And that was what’s produced on this live album. We went in the studio and mixed it. In that case, we didn’t do anything and it made us think that we should think about doing more live albums if we have time to, but not take so much time. Just to release a concert or maybe just to release one jam and call it an album.

*Phish’s vault tapes.( (Laughter)

Gordon: Yeah.

I hate to keep going back to that but…

Gordon: Too many parallels. We’ll have to talk about the Sun Ra connection.

Sun Ra is an older, more abstract artist. You guys are relatively young so I’m a little surprised that he’s an influence.

Gordon: We probably listen to as much old jazz as new jazz. We did a bunch of Duke Ellington covers. The thing about Sun Ra, his band was 20 people that would jam and usually in such a big band setting – people don’t go off on such wild tangents. But he once played Boston for a few nights. Fish and I actually got to meet him and listen to him talk in his hotel room for four or five hours. It was pretty wild ‘cause he had a way of tying everything together.

Well, when you’re from another planet…

Gordon: Yeah, that makes it easy. (Laughter) Easy to put into perspective when you’re from Saturn. But he was, at the time, onto this thing called The Book of Information which supposedly was beamed in from outer space to Istanbul on certain radio frequencies. They had given him a copy of this sort of guide to the cosmos. He Xeroxed it for Fish, and he went on talking about it. And now, Trey and Fish have been playing with Michael Ray who was his trumpet player, Michael Ray and the Cosmic Crew.

Who are some of your bass influences?

Gordon: I didn’t really spend a lot of time listening to any single bass player. The first time I sat down to learn bass lines, I think it was Big Brother & The Holding Co. (Peter Albin), that Janis Joplin, sort of Motowny sound.

Actually, the first time I decided I wanted to play bass in a band was when I was around 14 and my family was in the Bahamas. There was a band called the Mustangs that played by the poolside at the hotel. They were great. My dad and I were standing inside the pool and listening, and the bass could just vibrate you, whereas the guitar could make pretty melodies, but the bass could actually vibrate your whole body. I really liked that physical thing, and I told my dad at that point that if I ever were in a band when I got older, that I would want to play bass.

You talk about playing with two notes and using textures on those notes.

Gordon: The bass, for me, is such a great thing ‘cause it looks like a piece of graph paper. It’s patterns. But those two notes, if they’re going back and forth…well, that’s sometimes the selflessness thing.

Some of my best jams…if the flow is going, if you feel like you’re flying, who would want to ruin that by trying to do something interesting? (Laughter) But it ends up being interesting anyway because those two notes have a certain emotion, a certain point, and if you’re on a really deep note, like where does that take you? Does it pull you down or does it launch you? You feel yourself being physically drawn in certain directions because of the way the patterns and the notes go. I think that’s one thing I really like about Phil Lesh’s playing. I would say that Phil Lesh and Bootsy Collins are probably my two favorite bass players. But with Phil, first of all, it seems like he makes it a meditation. Second of all, he’s got this way of making the ups and downs, the peaks and valleys of the bass line, be the only thing that matters. It’s like physically, you are being vibrated at your knees and in your chest. What does it feel like to just go up and come down? With other bass lines, with some of the Motown bass players that are so great, certain bass players, you’ll hear like a melodic use of the scale. But there won’t be so much attention to the ups and downs. Like, they’ll jump in a way, so it’s almost less important, the physical nature of it, of the high and the low notes. In the case of Phil, I think he’s a person that embraces just the pure kinetic physicality of the note. I really like the way that happens.

We went to see Bootsy Collins in New Orleans after we played, and it was just wild. It was the slowest, funkiest groove, and this club was packed with people just getting down. It’s also funny the way humor can enter into the equation with notes that sound funny, which is suppose is just another emotion in the sea of emotions. With Bootsy, there’s definitely a lot of humor that goes on.

Well, there’s a lot of humor with your band.

Gordon: Yeah, yeah I think so. We used to search for things that were deliberately funny, but I think now it’s more abstract. We make jokes all day on the tour bus. We like to try to twist people’s minds in our own special way if we can. (Laughter)

What are some of your favorite songs to perform?

Gordon: It varies. We just wrote nine new songs, which we’re playing since the mixing of the live album, and I like a bunch of them. I like one called “Theme From The Bottom,” which has a lot of underwater themes again. There are a couple of songs that we actually wrote as a group, just jamming and taking pieces and writing songs. That was one of them. There’s another new one called “Free,” which almost sounds like a Southern rocker. I really like playing that one, but the jam in the middle of “Free” is all textural. Trey just plays one note and jams on texture for the whole jam, making it sound different. We do some bluegrass. In the last tours, I’d play banjo, the keyboard player plays upright bass, we would have all acoustic instruments. Now we do this four guitar thing. I actually listen to mostly bluegrass myself.

The song “Ginseng Sullivan” by Norman Blake, we started doing again, which is a bluegrass song that we do with the electric instruments, and I’ve really been liking that one. It’s just a simple song. My favorite songs are probably the songs that end up being the most open-ended, where we can take it to the furthest places, but then it’s not the song that’s being appreciated. It’s the ability to get away from it, in a sense. My favorite songs are probably originals, but we were at Waterloo and we played “Waterloo,” an ABBA song, and we had John Popper from Blues Traveler come up and play with us, and I kind of liked that. Trey didn’t like it. He ended it in the middle.

Sometimes I like to say that music has four functions. If it were an art, it wouldn’t have any function except it would be art for art’s sake. Functionally speaking, I divide it into mind, body, heart, soul. With some of our songs where the lyrics were sort of strings of syllables, to me, there used to be a lacking in the heart department. Maybe in some of the jams there would be heart, it’s very emotional, but when you think about your favorite song, to me it’s what would make me feel a strong emotion. Songwriting can have that. Whereas it’s really the beat that makes you physically want to dance, and the spiritual connection would be the soul. And the technical aspects of the music would be the mind. But in terms of heart, “Ginseng Sullivan” sort of touches a part of the heart, an aorta or some ventricle. (Laughter) There’s actually the new song, “Strange Design” that we have, that’s sort of like that. It’s a song that Page sings. It has a lot of heart to it.

What are some of the songs that you get the best audience response to?

Gordon: Well, they like songs that we haven’t played in a long time. They really like the obscure ones. There’s a song called “Punch You In The Eye.” They really like that one. Seems like what they like the least is what we’ve been playing a lot. They like new stuff. Some people have a hard time adjusting to the change of having new songs in the repertoire, but in general, they really like to hear [songs like] “Theme From The Bottom.” People have been saying that they really like it. But since it’s a song that starts out with just the high hat and the instruments come in one at a time, it’s not a song where there would be necessarily a big roar when we started playing the song.

You do some quirky audience participation things, rolling giant balls into the audience.

Gordon: Actually, lately we’ve been doing a little less of the stage antics. We like to allow it to be a carnival at times, if it will.

You’ve made the vacuum a viable instrument.

Gordon: Vacuum, trampolines, the big balls. Actually, on New Year’s Eve we rode across Boston Garden in a hot dog while playing wireless instruments, and that was wild. We had the hot dog lowered down onto the stage while James Bond music was playing. We got on the hot dog, and it raised up pretty quickly. It went all the way across Boston Garden to the cheap seats, as they call them. (Laughter) There’s actually a picture in the new CD of us in the hot dog, and there’s a huge ball that came down from the ceiling that Page was reaching out to touch. Talk about the feeling of motion while playing, I mean there we were, actually in a hot dog, moving and playing.

I know it was a tofu hot dog, too. (Laughter)
Not only that, but it was Kosher. We actually had a rabbi come kosherify it, so my grandmother was happy.

I know you did an interview with the Jewish Press recently.

Gordon: I tend to do a bunch of those. I actually had a strong Jewish upbringing. In my grade school, everyone spoke Hebrew for half a day, every day, from third grade on. They were fluent. I was a little bit behind. I didn’t pick up on it like the rest. And now we play a couple of songs in Hebrew. We sing them. One’s a prayer, and one’s a folk song.

My dad was actually a leader in the Jewish community at the time of the Soviet Jewry movement, helping Jews who were denied exit visas to get out of Russia. He was a national leader of that. I feel like, in some ways, I’m doing something for Judaism, too.

It’s important to keep the values that you grew up with as part of who you are. I think it’s great. A lot of your fans are Jewish…Let’s talk more about your fans. From my view of it, you seem to have a very young audience. Younger than you guys are by about a decade.

Gordon: Definitely. One sector of it is actually getting older, but I think it’s especially younger. When we were a college band, we didn’t play in all ages places, it was all college [students]. Then their younger brothers and sisters started listening. So, yeah, there are a lot of real young people.

I have a theory. Your fans are the children of first generation hippies, which explains their ability to comprehend the intensity of your improvisational excursions.

Gordon: Right. They definitely bear with us as we venture outward.

They ride with you.

Gordon: Yeah, they ride with us. They definitely do. I don’t know if [your theory] is always the case because when we actually talk to our fans, in some cases, it’s almost back towards the rebellion thing. There are people with parents who are very conservative, and it’s almost like an exploration. Maybe their parents are so conservative, in some cases, that they felt it necessary to go off on their own and discover a more free-flowing way of living. I know that there are second generation hippies also. I think some of it is sort of born by itself. There are probably a lot of upper middle class people with their parents’ expensive cars. It makes sense in a way that we’re from families that are not only successful, but all of our parents were really creative and driven. Between that and the fact that we grew up in suburban households, it makes sense that our fans would have a similar composition.

Having an audience with family values is probably unusual for a band that has a cult following. Maybe it’s not so much rebellion as it is genetics. A lot of your fans’ parents are of an enlightened generation, so their children should be more enlightened.

Gordon: I think there’s an evolution.

Until I went to your shows, I thought, “Hey, we were it. We were the end all.” But we weren’t and it’s such a great feeling to see that it didn’t end with us. And it’s still evolving because your music is complex enough to take a new generation to farther reaches.

Gordon: If you look at people that are very successful, being disciplined and applying themselves is almost a bigger chunk in terms of importance than having creative ideas. It takes commitment. When we first started jamming together in dorm rooms, 12 years ago, I actually thought that we didn’t really click together in terms of how we sounded. I think it was beneficial that we didn’t because we had to practice five days a week. It took a lot of discipline, real commitment and a sense of vision – all those things over the years. Some people sort of define commitment and love the same way. I think the audience picks up on this sense of commitment, and they in turn become committed to the situation. But in a way, that’s almost like a family value coming out. Whether it sounds good or bad, at any given moment, at least we’re gonna be in it for the long haul and try to make it as good as possible.

Do you think that you’ll cross over to an older market at some point, once it discovers who you are and what you’re doing?

Gordon: I don’t know. I couldn’t really say. Although, like I said, it’s happening a bit and I guess I’d like to think so. Bruce Hampton, a friend of ours who I have a lot of respect for, says that it’s important to always be child-like, but not to be child-ish. So in that sense, it would be nice to think that we would always have a child-like sense of exploring and innocence and that older people who have that attitude would become interested in our music. And also, that we would continue to explore the more mature and darker innards of the mind with our songs, and that would stretch towards people that are more mature, sort of from both angles. I could see it happening.

We live in a very pop-oriented culture. We’ve been force fed music that is, perhaps, more melodic than some of yours.

Gordon: We’re very dissonant, sometimes. Trey’s mentor, Ernie, is a composer of neo-classical music with a Big Band influence. They’re into atonal fugues, and the way that Ernie writes, you hear a lot of dissonance, but there’s a form to it. It’s not just clashing notes because they clash. It’s for a reason. It’s to try to stretch certain limits and to do it in a thoughtful way. So, for the listener, it’s a matter of opening your mind to be able to accept that as being something desirable. Trey likes to quote Stravinsky: “Run from beauty and it will follow.” I guess it’s true that maybe when people get older, they get a little more set in their ways, which, to some degree, makes sense because you’re learning, you’re testing out your values.

Life also seems shorter, so everything has to happen faster.

Gordon: Music that’s experimental and changing might be more threatening to some of those done with the phase of their lives where they’re exploring. They might not want to explore auditorally with us. But some of our favorite musicians were…I really like Buddy Rich, who was in his seventies when he died, and we actually saw him as a band a few times, together. And in the case of Buddy Rich, he billed himself as the world’s greatest drummer and he was one of the world’s greatest drummers. He was so incredible. He had big goals for himself, even in his seventies. He really wanted to learn new ways of drumming. He was exploring right up to the end. In that sense, he was also sort of child-like.

Age doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to be locked into the expected. Sun Ra always said to “Expect the unexpected.” That’s a philosophy we try to embrace, and for anyone to be part of our family, they would have to tap into that.