Ernest Guiseppe Anastasio III was born in Vermont and his father is one of the heads of ETS (Educational Testing Systems). That's right. Trey Anastasio's dad is responsible for all those stupid scantron tests everyone has to take in school. He's one of the people who picks the very QUESTIONS ON THE SAT!!! Academic Decathalons, you name it, Mister Anastasio is a very noted and lucrative scholar. And as such, not only would these traits pass to the man who would rise to the very top of the most meaningful forms of rock music there was, but Trey Anastasio would SUCCESSFULLY PICK UP where the Beatles left off. Nobody else could quite get it but tried for more then thirty years (imagine how many bands that is). John Lennon is our man because Lennon made peace cool. But after the right-wing eighties and the ball-hogging Michael Jordan and the credit-due-to-a-great-team Joe Montana and Wayne Gretzky, Trey Anastasio took the evolution of man one step further and made INTELLIGENCE cool.

Cut to 1998. He's playing in front of the dirtiest venues ever seen this side of Janis Joplin, but with the added bonus of NOBODY PAYING THE LEAST BIT OF ATTENTION. And he's singing about philosphical theology and babble while a PIANO is backing up his electrical guitar. Some of these songs are unbelievable, and people are starting to gather and listen...

"My heart's not beating anymore," sings Page McConnell.

"YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!" goes the crowd.

Okay, this is cool.

Page goes on...

"It's alright/it happened once before...I'm fine/I'm fine..."

"YEEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!" goes the crowd.

You sons of bs you're cheering because it's a heroin reference! Gah! You don't like this song "Strange Design" because it's a good song...Gah!

1983

An 18-year old Trey Anastasio is on the campus of the University of Vermont in Burlington. He puts a bunch of fliers up to get a band together. He gets Mike Gordon, Jon Fishman, and someone else I dunno wiki it. But Page McConnell wouldn't show up for a while. Trey added the music to the words that his friend Tom Marshal wrote. The song "Golgi Apparatus" on Junta was in fact written in eighth grade science class by Trey while he was supposed to do a biology lab with this Tom guy and another guy they called The Dude of Life.

Their first performance was in the basement of a nearly dorm on Halloween night. They played in front of 30 people and weren't very good. Alot of the kids tuned them out. But Trey wasn't discouraged. And by 1987, they were Burlington's favorite act.

Something great to remember about Phish is that unlike many bands that grow very big overnight within months or a year of becoming famous, Phish was continuously stuck in the bush leagues when they became famous. For eleven years. These were depressing days for Trey and company. It was like coming out with a great spread of hot actress photos only to realize you got 4 hits. Vermont winters are bad. They're cold. And it sucks to have visions that are EXPONENTIALLY and RIDICULOUSLY better then the cold when you're stuck in the cold.

But Phish would realize something.

Their very lack of national exposure...meant that they could play host to a variety of intellectual college students in small and secluded New England venues, and actually grow a huge fanbase this way.

A HUGE fanbase.

Since it was still the early 90s, Phish predominantely played to everyone at your college who was ever rich but mooched. Possibly he was joined by their injured wide-reciever-and-now-observant writer pal and everyone had a good time. Perhaps even he got to talk to a chick who was busy trying to make her philosophing pacifist boyfriend jealous...and was remaining so as a show of "f you bitch if I don't wanna pick fights with strangers for you I ain't gonna". Well by the late 90s, with Phish allowed to bring their own security, charging thirty dollars, and playing on privately owned blueberry fields at the behest of the big New Hampshire lawyer's son with Chester A Arthur sideburns, that same writer pal would walk around a campsite not seen or smelled since Civil War battlefields. They would look at you with suspicion, thinking you're some strange oracle and must be stabbed because your shoulders have filled out, your physical features pinning you essentially as a bunny rabbit compared to Ronald McPukebucket and his girlfriend who are by the way panhandling with Benetton gloves on.

But for the rest of us, who used Phish as something to walk to class to in the morning, you have a core audience of 20,000 kids times 50,000 high schools and colleges, you blend hippy parents-on-Family-Ties culture with the ever growing influx of fans of counterculture entertainment with the release of the Beatles Anthology coupled by the winning ways of Phil "Zenmaster" Jackson and Bill "God" Clinton, and you could actually...have something fun to think about while you wait for the campus bus in the morning? I dunno.

The albums Junta (1989), Lawn Boy (1990), Picture of Nectar (1992) and Rift (1993) include some of the very best songs of the last 20 years anyone in the world has ever released. Lawn Boy people say they like the best because they're posers, at this point it was actually the weakest. Phish's ten best songs will be available from me in another blog. I will teach you how to pad your song list. Tom Marshall was at his best, and it demonstrates that Trey was essentially the guy who dunked the ball that Tom alley-ooped, rather then it being a situation where Tom did everything and Trey got the credit. You look at the lyrics of Rift, Esther, Divided Sky, Fast Enough for You, Maze, Horn, Weigh, The Mango Song, Stash, Squirming Coil, and you tell me that you would have thought to add the kind of music to these songs as was added. Trey was the Kobe Bryant of music. The intelligence and musical genius that ran through Trey was something his dad knew ran in the family. He knew himself to be a genius, and thought it was only natural that his son would become a professional rock n roll musician if that's what he wanted.

But there was a catch.

Not a single proper national release for any of them.

Not until "Hoist" (1994) when MTV released the video for "Down with Disease", which turned out to be the blotch on an otherwise magnificent, magnificent album...

PART 1 of 2

Part 2 now available below!

http://hubpages.com/hub/Phish-Part-2

http://hubpages.com/hub/Phish