In honor of Trey Anastasio’s 50th birthday, we revisit this cover story from the August_September 2001 issue of Relix.

Trey Anastasio is excited. The new Oysterhead album has just arrived and he can’t wait to hear it. Two days ago, he was rink side for Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals in Colorado and wound up hoisting the coveted trophy at a post-game celebration with the Avalanche. Given his exuberant personality, this sight is not hard to imagine. Today’s plan was to spend the afternoon at his Vermont barn, but at 2:30pm, producer/engineer John Siket (Phish’s The Story of the Ghost, Billy Breathes) is still asleep upstairs after a long night of recording. Trey, dressed in jeans and a short-sleeve button down, is cautious not to wake him. “Do you have a CD player in your car?” he asks me, “because I don’t.” Cast aside any preconceived notions you have of a rock star. This man may be one of the most important creative forces in the music world, but he is more normal and down-to-earth than the majority of performers still at the club level.

As we drive down the long, winding driveway that leads to the 150-year-old barn, Trey spots a deer in the woods and asks me to stop. He rolls down the window and greets the animal with a soft, comforting voice. We sit there in silence for more than a minute, staring at this beautiful creature, not ten feet away. It gazes back at us, frozen.

On the highway minutes later, en route to nearby Burlington—Phish’s birthplace—Trey can’t stop talking about Oysterhead. The trio features Anastasio, bassist Les Claypool (Primus) and drummer Stewart Copeland (the Police). He pops in the new CD, tentatively titled The Grand Pecking Order, and cranks the stereo up to eleven. It is the first time he has heard the album in sequence and by his own account he is bouncing off the walls with anticipation. Midway through the first track, “Little Faces,” I am startled by a thunderous power chord that sounds like the work of a heavy metal guitarist. “Is that you?” I ask, puzzled. “Did you get some new gear?”

He loves that I am confused by the new tone. “It’s great, isn’t it?” he says with an infectious grin. “I’ve always wanted to play like this, but I’ve been in a band with a bunch of fucking hippies.” He chuckles and cautiously adds, “myself included.” As we drive by the University of Vermont, where Phish formed in 1983, Trey is pumping his fist and we are both bobbing our heads (think Wayne’s World, “Bohemian Rhapsody”). There is a stark contrast between the brash sounds coming from the CD player and this small, heady town that for so many people has come to personify Phish. The new album has the definitive sound of a power trio.The rock-solid drumming of Copeland is complemented by Claypool’s ferocious slapping and Anastasio’s chunky comping and aggressive solos. There was a time, I’m told, when the band considered adding a fourth member. “When we first put Oysterhead together,” says Trey, “one of the musicians we approached was Tom Morellofrom Rage Against the Machine. We wanted to have two guitarists. I thought that would have been such a cool collision of worlds.”

During the 30-minute commute, Trey is also eager to share the demos of his other band, which is touring nationally this summer. Advertised simply as “Trey Anastasio,” it’s difficult to refer to the group by name. “Having been in such a band with Phish where everything was a constant give-and-take, I think I needed to be in something that didn’t have a name. With this band, I didn’t have to ask anybody if they thought it was cool to go from a trio to an eight-piece. Next tour I might want to bring in a 25-piece string section or four African drummers and two mandolin players or something. Five years from now, I could see this band having forty or fifty people in it. I think of it as a big band, in the tradition of Duke Ellington. That’s why it doesn’t have a name. Once you have a name, then everything has to be voted on by committee. It’s so funny because Oysterhead is exactly the opposite, but that’s the beauty of it right now. I’ve got one of each.”

Trey rummages through a stack of hand-labeled CDs on his lap until he finds the right one. He inserts the disc and I instinctively turn up the bass. Although Phish has explored space-funk-fusion in recent years, this band features a rhythm section that never strays from the beat. Comprised of Tony Markellis (bass), Russ Lawton (drums), Andy Moroz (trombone), Jennifer Hartswick (trumpet), Dave Grippo (saxophone), Russell Remington (saxophone) and Ray Paczkowsi (keyboards), the ever-growing ensemble is Trey’s new outlet for solid funk. He has fallen in love with Markellis’ subtle, yet hypnotic playing style. “He is a groove scientist,” Trey explains. “It’s gotta be so deep for him and it’s not at all about flourishes or anything. It’s just about the solidity of the bottom end. Playing with him is like floating on a pillow of groove. It’s the safest feeling in the world; it’s like being held up by a pad of groove.”

The summer shows will feature fewer acoustic songs than the two previous solo tours. Instead, the band will concentrate on thick, textural grooves made up of simple repetitive patterns. The goal is to create a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. When asked about the similarity to Bob Marley’s vision, Trey’s face lights up. “Bob Marley is the greatest musician who ever lived. He’s probably the most important musician, if not person. I think that will hold up 500 years from now. His albums just get better and better with time. His intent was to bring people together through music, and everybody rose up.That’s what’s so fascinating to me and what I’m most interested in right now.”

Along with childhood friend and Phish lyricist Tom Marshall, Trey has written 14 new songs for the summer tour.As we listen to one of the instrumental tracks, his head and torso begin to sway in half time to the beat. His distinctive movements are identical to his on-stage mannerisms. He jokes that the song sounds like a ‘70s television theme.

The recordings were made in Trey’s basement and are the genesis for yet another album. While tour rehearsals have begun, the full band has not yet played in the same room at the same time. “The whole idea is that the first day we ever play together as an eight-piece will be recorded on multi-track, because a lot of times that’s the most amazing stuff. The reason I have those sectional rehearsals is so that no one will have the experience of standing in the room together until the material is learned. So after three weeks of recording, we’ll go out on tour for a month and get really tight. By the end of a month, you’re usually cooking. Then we’re going to go back into the studio and play the whole album over again. So I’ll have bits and pieces from each session. You don’t even have to use whole songs. There are things you can do at that point and just get the best of the best. Maybe we’ll use one version of one song and another version of another one. From that point on, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I might just sit up in the barn for like six months and rewrite everything.”

Trey recommends a quiet local restaurant. The young waitress pretends not to recognize him, but it’s obvious that she does. He is a hero around these parts and many heads are turned throughout the afternoon. He orders a chicken burrito and immediately starts singing “The History of Tenacious D,” with the appropriate lyrics: “A burrito supreme and a chicken supreme and a nacho supreme, supreme, yeah!” He is cracking up, as am I. His theatrics are not surprising, though. This is the way his mind works. It is this playful sense of humor that has been one of the driving forces of Phish for 17 years.

Trey is nothing like most Phish fans, except maybe in appearance. Although the online world is responsible for so much of the group’s grassroots success, Trey is not connected. “I don’t use the internet. I think I’ve logged on, like, once. I actually gave my computer away. That was the end of that. It was like homework, ya know? Email is homework.”

The most striking thing about Trey is how genuinely happy he seems at this point in his life. He explains that all four members of Phish are at peace. To him, success is not measured by ticket sales or reputation, but by personal gratification. What matters most is constantly doing something new. Everything is a reaction, an evolution of artistic expression.

On October 7, 2000, Phish performed its last show at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California before going on hiatus. For Trey, there was no vacation planned. The following day he began rewriting “Guyute” for the Vermont Youth Orchestra, which performed the piece twice in February, 2001. “It took four months to get it into orchestral form,” he recalls. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. If you think about it, there’s more music written for that version than I had written since ‘Split Open and Melt’ or ‘Foam,’ back when I used to chart everything out. It has more brand-new composition than anything I’ve done in a long time. It’s something I’ve really wanted to do, but it’s just been impossible with Phish.”

Oysterhead made its concert debut last May at the Saenger Theater in New Orleans and hasyet to perform another complete show. While there was novelty in seeing these three musicians with such different backgrounds on stage together, the set was rather sloppy. The energy was off the map, but with only a couple of days to rehearse, the end result was pretty raw. “We felt like after the show, there was potential, but we were a little embarrassed about people trading that tape around because we didn’t feel that [our performance] was anywhere near what it could have been. Les made a lot of phone calls to me about it. Finally Stewart wound up cutting the live show together into one sixty-minute CD, made up of the best moments. It was so much better and that kind of convinced us that we should do an album.”

With Phish on the backburner, Trey is bubbling with creative juices. This past April,Oysterhead convened at his barn to begin recording. The first night was not spent practicing or writing. Instead, the three musicians went snowshoeing in the woods, a humorous sight,according to Trey. Eventually they got around to setting up their gear in the barn and simply began jamming. The rustic, organic vibe of the antique structure played a major role in the birth of the album. “We had no songs when we went in, except for a couple,” Trey remembers. “Stewart said that there’s no way we could have ever made this album in a conventional studio. There would have been too much pressure. We were just making it up as we went along and changing stuff. People would ask me how it was going and my reaction would be ‘I have no idea.’ It wasn’t until about a week before it was done that I started to get a handle on it. We were still overdubbing and taking stuff away. It was very much like liquid. It’s definitely just about the coolest album experience I’ve ever had.”

Oz Fritz (Tom Waits, Primus) engineered the album and is also the inspiration for the track “Oz Is Ever Floating,” which Trey envisions as one of album’s biggest hits. “Oz is a float tank junkie. He spends two hours a day in an isolation tank. For some people it’s a relaxation thing, but there are also deeper levels. When he’s in the float tank, he thinks about preparing for the passage up to the next plane, which is something that a lot of religions and cultures think about, but we don’t for the most part in America. People get really terrified of death, even though it’s inevitable. The float tank for him is a way of rehearsing to die.

“We got to talking about this guy, Dr. John C. Lilly, who invented the float tank. He’s like an acid warrior. He would take a lot of acid and other psychedelic drugs and get in the float tank, which to me seems really amazing. I love that. So the song started to be about him, and we changed the whole focus.” Trey stops eating for a moment and takes a sip of beer. The expression on his face suddenly becomes serious.He is now in performance mode and begins singing a passage from the song: “Drifting as the time goes by, across the inner cosmos, he is flying. In the liquid he will lie, rehearsing for the final act of dying… Oz is ever floating.” His voice waivers a bit and he raises his eyebrows and laughs at himself. On the album version, the vocals and the overall mix have a tinny, trippy quality that evokes flashbacks of The Beatles’ psychedelic period. When asked, Trey admits that he definitely had a “Dr. Robert” feel in mind. Claypool also draws influence from the Fab Four and often covers “Tomorrow Never Knows.” The opening line, “Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream” is an appropriate source of inspiration for “Oz Is Ever Floating.”

The Oysterhead album, due out in October on Elektra Records, features four songs that the trio unveiled at the New Orleans show—“Mr. Oysterhead,” “Rubberneck Lions,” “Pseudo Suicide” and “Owner of the World.” Italso includes the track “Radon Balloon,” which incorporates music from Trey’s acoustic piece “Happiness in My Pants.” Once an instrumental played on his solo tour this past winter, the song now has lyrics and a Peter Gabriel flavor to it.

As he speaks of recording with Oysterhead, Trey’spassion for the project is evident. “It was exciting to be in a situation where everyone had an opinion on things like the album cover, the title, the song titles and the lyrics. There were some really cool, healthy debates. That’s the thing about the three ‘alpha dogs’ as we call ourselves. With most bands, the roles are kind of defined. Sometimes you get a little too comfortable in your role and nobody’s challenging you anymore. That’s part of the whole reason that we all had to get away from Phish. I mean, where would the Beatles be without a John Lennon and a Paul McCartney and a George Martin stepping in and making John argue his point to Paul? That’s what makes it interesting. I think people start to get so used to their roles, however small and insignificant. A good example would be [Phish drummer Jon] Fishman, who is a character that I’m endlessly fascinated by. In the recording process, the one thing that Fish really cared about was the sound of his kick drum. So he’d come in and tinker with the sound of his kick drum before the mix even started. Well, that’s not how you get a good mix because the kick drum is a part of the mix. You have to be there the whole time. You can’t just go in when you’re making a soup and fiddle with the amount of salt and then leave.”

Plans are currently underway for an Oysterhead tour this fall, which raises some interesting questions. Who will be the leader on stage, Trey or Les? Does Stewart Copeland know how to improvise? “We had these philosophical debates about the tour. Stewart’s philosophy is that we should have a show that’s completely rehearsed, listen to it every night on tape, and fix all the mistakes until it’s perfect. My philosophy is exactly the opposite. I’m much more excited with the stuff that we don’t plan. We actually got into a conversation one night about trying to find some kind of common ground. All three of us are used to being leaders.”

Our waitress cannot contain herself any longer and brings a Phish band photo over to the table. “Can you sign this for us?” she asks nervously. “You’ve got a lot of fans here.” Trey immediately tries to make her feel comfortable. “Oh, thank you so much,” he says with sincerity. Well, you’ve got a lot of fans, too. I love the food here.” She runs off with her signed glossy, her day made.

In the past, Trey’s often claimed that he is a filter, channeling existing music in the universe. Carlos Santana and jazz legend Sun Ra, among others, have talked about the same concept. Phish’s explosive improvisation of the early- to mid-‘90s definitely seemed representative of this belief. Because of his drastic stylistic change in recent years, Trey is asked if this analogy still applies. He puts down his fork, smiles, and turns his head to look at me from a different point of view.

“You know, I have a new theory. I was on this camping trip in the Utah Canyon Lands last week. I was up all night in the desert and it was a full moon. I started thinking about music. The thing about the desert is that it’s such a delicate environment. When you look closely, there’s acrust that forms from this dust that blows across the plains, and it actually becomes the equivalent of soil. There are these plants and they’re struggling so hard to live in that harsh environment. The thing that makes it work is that everything’s perfect. If you changed one thing, it would throw off the whole balance. The way that it was connecting to music in my head, was that I didn’t even want to take one step.It was this enormous vast landscape, just miles and miles of these plateaus and canyon lands, and yet with one step you could crush this crust that’s been collecting for hundreds of thousands of years, which is creating this atmosphere that life can live in. The thought that kept going through my head was, ‘It’s perfect.’ You couldn’t change one thing. It’s almost like there’s a mathematical order to it. I kept having these thoughts of math and that got me thinking about music. I could see how moving one piece would change the whole balance of life. At the time, music felt like a mathematical description of the way things work. The right notes falling into place in the right spaces in time, feels the same way as I was feeling camping in this desert. It makes me feel like the universe is in order, you know what I mean? Music is a description of order; a way that you can get a sense of the order of things. That’s what music is. It’s a universal language to describe the way things are supposed to be.”

As the check arrives, Trey is in no hurry to leave. Our waitress gushes again and saysthat the highlights of her life have been at Phish shows. He responds as if he’s never heard that before and thanks her three times.

***

With no touring plans anywhere on the horizon, Phish has announced the release of six complete concerts in an ongoing series called Live Phish. It’s small consolation for legions of diehard fans that have scheduled their lives around the band’s concerts for much of the last decade. Suddenly, they have nowhere to go this summer. I approach the subject cautiously; aware of the constant badgering the band members have endured since the hiatus began (bassist Mike Gordon hands out business cards to people who inquire about the band’s future.The cards read:“I am in fact enjoying my hiatus. I am doing lots of little things.We don’t know how long.”)When speaking on the topic of Phish, Trey struggles to decideif he should use the past or present tense. He looks me dead in the eye and seems to have no clue if the band will ever play again. It is not necessarily a sad subject for him, but he chooses his words much more carefully than when talking about Oysterhead or the meaning of life. His burrito is gone now, and he fidgets with his baseball cap, worn backwards.

“I would say that if there’s anything that makes me want to start the whole Phish thing up again, it’s this live album series. I think I was losing perspective. I think we all were. We always had such a handle on what we wanted. I don’t know if we got tired or what, but we started to lose perspective. I was kind of walking off stage confused, right at the very end because I couldn’t tell whether we were moving in a forward direction anymore. I never felt like that for years. I always felt vehemently that whatever the last show was, was the best show we ever played.”

The four band members (Anastasio, Fishman, Gordon and keyboardist Page McConnell) recently began reviewing concert tapes in an attempt to narrow the search for the initial six releases. In the past, this has been a rare occurrence. “None of us ever listened to Phish, ever. Maybe a really long time ago, like when we were playing in bars, I might have listened to a couple of tapes, but not really. It just seemed like time was better spent writing something new.”

When the group started hearing live recordings of classic shows, Trey rediscovered the magic of the mid-‘90s. “It was very eye-opening, listening to the tapes. I started to see things, because we had truly put it to rest that we weren’t playing anymore. I could listen to the tapes with a little perspective.

“We selected a show from ’94 and a show from ’95. Those were amazing years. I thought we had done the right thing [in taking the hiatus], when I heard those tapes. I had completely forgotten. I felt really lucky to have even been part of it. It just seemed so weird to me. It was such an energy blast. It was just shocking.

“There are also three shows from 2000 in the series. Page and I picked one of them because it has this version of ‘Carini’ that I’m convinced is the greatest version of all time. I’m not convinced that it’s the whole greatest show of all time, but I love this version of ‘Carini.’ I also like the song list, because if you didn’t like Phish and you heard this set, it would be very interesting. There’s ‘Punch You In the Eye,’ ‘Reba,’ [Neil Young’s] ‘Albuquerque’ and ‘Carini.’ I think it sounds like such a weird band.” Trey cracks up. “Those four songs in a row? You can’t make any sense of it. The ‘Carini’ is like 15 or 20 minutes long or something. It’s a complete metal meltdown. It’s the bass and drumming in the background that I really liked. It’s really strange. Nobody’s playing the beat at all. Those guys are playing in quarter time and the guitar and keyboards are just creating this wash of color on top of this heavy booming. It’s right after ‘Albuquerque,’ which has harmonies and then this heavy metal thing. If you kind of step away from it, they’re both really odd.” Although he is trying not to reveal any specific dates of the release series, he has given away too much. It is obvious by his description that the show is from September 14, 2000 at Darien Lake, New York.

Trey continues to discuss the shows in Live Phish and is becoming progressively animated. “One of them is a club gig from the Japan tour in 2000. To listen to that and then the one from ’94, they’re so different. Talk about emotion. I don’t think that the show from ’94 is better, but it sure is completely different. I think the four of us felt like, from an emotional standpoint, it just went up the whole time. The last year was ridiculously emotional, every minute of it. That whole last week of the tour was one of the most amazing times. Starting in Vegas for my birthday, right up until the end, it was just over the top. I don’t think any of the four of us slept the whole time. It was like we wanted to squeeze every ounce of emotion out of that last week.”

I ask him about the final show at Shoreline Amphitheatre and he gives me a comforting smile. As he reminisces, there is no sadness in his voice. “We ended up playing ‘You Enjoy Myself’ for the encore. The four of us always felt like it was the defining song of Phish. We got to the vocal jam at the end and I remember looking down at this group of people right up front. I don’t know their names or anything, but there’s this girl with sort of shoulder-length brown hair, who will know who she is. She was in the front row every night for five years. I don’t have any idea how she did it. She’s got a really distinctive style of dancing and she was with her buddies. I always had such a good feeling about this group of people. Every time we’d walk on stage, either in front of me or in front of Page, they’d be there, every night. I would always look over and kind of acknowledge them and I never once got a vibe from them that they wanted anything. You know, sometimes people complain about us playing certain songs and stuff. They were just there to have a good time and were always dancing. I mean they were everywhere, even Japan. I don’t have any idea how it would even bepossible. They were representative to me of the coolness of our fans.

“They’re a part of my world, but I never spoke to them, that I can remember. So I just remember that last vocal jam in ‘You Enjoy Myself’ was so emotional. After we finished, I was walking off stage and I remember just glancing down and kind of making eye contact with these people and kind of saying ‘so long.’ It just stuck in my head how amazing it was. I mean, I have a relationship with these people that’s very deep in the sense that there’s been a back-and-forth of playing music and dancing going on for years, but I never spoke a word to them. It was such a symbiotic relationship and it just struck me as I was walking off stage how amazing that was. I saw them as a representation of all the fans. I see these people in the front row every night, but in my mind I was always extrapolating that to the back of the venue. There’s the guy who likes to stand two feet behind the soundboard or the girl that likes to hang out at the back of the lawn. In my mind I was saying goodbye to them, too. It was an incredible thing to have that experience in life.After the show, the four of us just went off and sat and talked for four hours. The whole thing is pretty mind-blowing, to be perfectly honest.

“The hiatus is good for the four of us. There are definitely no plans. That’s the most important thing. This is what I want the fans to know. We are so appreciative of everyone’s support. We’re really happy right now. I feel like the Phish scene, in the last ten years, has proven things to most people in the concert industry who wouldn’t even have believed it was possible to do some of the things we’ve done. I certainly didn’t believe it was possible. If you just take that New Year’s show [’99 – 2000] alone or any of those big events that led up to it, certainly there was plenty of revelry going on, but at the same time there was definitely respect. That was going on simultaneously with every article in Billboard talking about how a lot of the concert industry was experiencing problems and riots and whatever. Usually, respect isn’t the word you think of when you think about live concerts. Usually [concerts] are a way for people to yank a lot of money out of everyone else’s pockets. I think our fans were so amazing in that way.

“I hope that at this point it is clear to people that this is something that the four of us need. I hope people are happy about that and see that the best chance for Phish ever getting back together is for us to have a life right now outside of Phish. That would mean that if we did get back together it would be amazing. That’s what I feel like in the back of my mind. But it’s not going to happen until everyone does what they have to do. I wouldn’t get back together unless all four people really wanted to get back together and put full effort into it. I don’t think I would do it unless everybody was dying to do it. It would have to be a situation where we couldn’t live without it.”

Trey finishes his beer and it’s time to head back to the barn. The Vermont sun is now low in the sky and a few drops of rain speckle the windshield. We drive through the same neighborhood that watched a quirky, young quartet play its first gigs in the mid-‘80s, when it was all still a big secret except to a few local fans. We’re within a couple blocks of Nectar’s, the tiny club where the band performed regularly in the early days. We pass a car plastered with Phish stickers and Trey turns his head to read each one, like it’s the first time he’s seen such a sight.

Back on the highway, he reaches to the floor for his CDs, which by now are mixed with mine. As we listen to the second half of the Oysterhead album, he picks up my copy of Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush and I comment that it’s a pretty solid record. With the most serious look I’ve seen on his face all day he states, “It doesn’t get much better than that.” He tells the story of Farm Aid ’98, when Young joined Phish on stage for a stirring version of his classic, “Down By the River.” He speaks in depth of getting to know Young after being inspired by his music for so many years. His description of Young is a fitting end to our interview. “From the bottom of my heart, I have to tell you, everything you think about him is true. What an amazing human being he is. He’s got so much integrity and his relationship with music is so deep. He is the real deal.”

The same could be said of Trey Anastasio.