In honor of the successful completion of Phish’s latest gigantic festival featuring only them, Festival 8, which happened this past weekend in Indio, California (and also because we are very busy at the start of this particular week, relocating for the third and final time), Satire on the Rocks is re-running this article, which first appeared in August.  We’ll be back with new stories tomorrow at the earliest and hopefully later tonight, but we are positive you understand.  So then, enjoy.  I totally knew they were going to do Exile on Main Street for the big Halloween night full-length cover.  Knew that shit since August, and I’m pretty sure I called it at some point.  Genius, I say.  Genius.

(The large picture on the previous page is not meant to tilt your reading of the argument that follows one way or the other. It was, quite simply, the coolest picture regarding either band that I could find – Sincerely, your humble editor)

Comparisons across different eras serve only one purpose: discussion of transcendent greatness in the hypothetical that confirms the legendary nature of those being discussed and elevates them above all contemporaries.

As far as jam bands go, there are no two bands with greater culture-wide significance in America (sorry, Widespread) than Phish and the Grateful Dead. We can’t definitively say who was or is better.  But we can argue about it.

On our staff at Satire, we have two writers who know a thing or two about music, one who thinks Phish is great, and another who longs to drain that writer’s blood for even considering Phish a worthy successor to the Dead.

With the summer concert season winding to a close, a season in which both bands enjoyed successful nationwide tours, a season in which countless freer spirits had some version of the argument that follows, we figured now would be as good a time as any to take stock of the situation and resurrect our Back and Forth category.

So who you got: The Grateful Dead or Phish?

The bloodthirsty Dead fan, Todd Lazarski, will fire the opening salvo.

***

Todd:

There’s been one confession brewing inside me since college – specifically since 2001, the year I briefly became enamored with the Phish album The Story of the Ghost.

I had been some years (well, really one year, but new college friends had no idea how immature my budding hippiedom was) listening to that beardy Vermont foursome. Their jams were perfectly conducive to my sloshy-minded love of good vibes and tie-died idealism. What’s more, my dealer – a sort of hipster guru based on his status in the world of heady commerce – was always blaring them when I stopped by his room after class, and every Birkenstock-wearing chick I dug at the time was way into them. It was groovy feeling that kinship with my fellow long-hairs, especially late on boozy nights while passing a bowl, pontificating over Trey’s incessant noodling, and discoursing on, you know, life, man.

Obvious: I should like Phish.

Then I heard Ghost. Why was this suddenly – almost – making actual sense? Why could I now see myself with that blonde in Comm class who always wore the Phish Big Cypress t-shirt (if you’ve been on a college campus, ever, you’ve seen it) when I heard “Wading in the Velvet Sea”? Why did “Brian and Robert” actually speak, in words, not just druggy riffage, to me?

What I would find out sometime later was that here lay the exception that proves the ruling endpoint in all things Dead vs. Phish: songs.

The Dead’s song catalogue is beyond reproach. Untouchable. They mesh Americana in a timeless stew of the definitive genres of the last half-century – Country, Blues, Jazz, Rock – and all points between. Even in their most imaginative forward thinking, the band never lost respect for what came before.

On the other hand, a random smattering of pre-Ghost Phish lyricism runs quite the sophistic gamut: there’s Uncle Ebenezer in the freezer; the fact that they’d like to cut your head off so they can weigh it; and your hands and feet existing as mangoes (but you’re gonna be a genius anyway)…

As a long-reformed hippie, one who still swears by the Dead and has lost consideration for what I should like, I find little regard for such self-indulgence and obtuse slapstickery. And, as a budding musico-literati with professional urges to call everything by it’s right name, I can’t help but lash out at my former patchouli-ed, dreadlocked, Bob Marley-poster-on-the-wall-having buddies: Phish songwriting is pure wankery.

JP:

Songwriting encompasses two things: words and music. While Phish have a lot of silly, cutesy, and stupid lyrics, their music is, for the most part, amazing. Sonically they are at least as far out and forward-thinking as the Dead and perhaps more so, when one considers the Dead’s insistence on what you dub “Americana in a timeless stew.”

I’m not trying to insinuate that the Dead are some dilettante-saddled noodle band. But when listening to Phish, one honestly never has any idea where these jams might end up. I have five different versions of “Harry Hood” on my iPod, and all five go in different directions. With Phish, the jam is the thing.

Keep in mind that the “musical press” you seem devoted to one day joining dogs the shit out of most Grateful Dead records, American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead excepted. The Dead were no more a studio band than Phish is. Phish studio records can be horrendous at times, but Billy Breathes, Farmhouse, and Hoist have several wonderful songs on them. Beyond this, the songs on Phish records are vehicles for the live show, and the musical chemistry among the four members runs those vehicles.

Phish harken back to the days of prehistory, when our ancestors sat around large fires, banged drums, chanted, danced around, smoked something to put them in touch with the spirit world, and attempted to commune with the larger universe around them. Movement and music combine to be the point: listening to the cavalcade of noise these men produce and dancing in lock-step with Jon Fishman’s drumming is as Nirvana-courting a moment as one can achieve these days.

It gives me no great joy to back Phish over the Dead. I could listen to the Dead for hours on end, and have before. The difference, though, is I listen to the Dead and marvel at Jerry doing his thing before growing somewhat sad and rueful that his guitars and voice are silent forever. Conversely, I can listen to a Phish show and think, Man, that show I saw of theirs two weeks ago with this same lineup in tact that has been the same lineup of four guys from Vermont for over twenty years (with the occasional hiatus and drug arrest) was fucking awesome.

And that’s a huge difference.

Todd:

How right you are, harkening the days of prehistory with a glance at your iPod. Perhaps if we both had iPhones, we could sync mp3 collections and then you could truly school me on the days “when our ancestors sat around large fires, banged drums,”etc.

Nothing wrong with atavism: summon those ancestral spirits day and night and I’m right behind you, banging my own drum with eyes closed and chin tilted toward the heavens. But when those throwbacks are perpetrated by private-school kids who substitute extensive knowledge of appregios for tunefulness, show-offy solos for craftsmanship, and out-of-skull drugginess for community, there’s a disconnect. Not only with me, but every elbows-on-the-bar finger-snapper that’s spent any amount of time in New Orleans, New York City, or their local jazz joint; or, for that matter, anyone that has a dash of Coltrane in the old record collection (records are artifacts that pre-date your iPod, but that’s an explanation for another day).

I once saw an interview with Trey where he said (paraphrasing), “Yeah, there’s certain things I like about the Dead, but there’s also certain things I like about Boston!”

Trey! Didn’t you see the camera rolling in front of you? You just admitted that you like Boston!

But, really, how perfect a metaphor: Could anyone in Rock best Boston for pedestrian tune-smithing, or sheer suburban, soul-crushing whiteness more than Phish? The group’s career has some life left, so we shall see. Perhaps there are some lines of the like of “Fluffhead was a man/With a horrible disease/Could not find no cure/Wont’cha help him if you please” in them yet. Or some albums on-par with Hoist.

Of course with five (fucking five!?) versions of the white-boy-reggae-tinged, 14-minute jerk-off “Harry Hood,” you may not have any space left on the iPod when the next one does hit. The digital space crunch is probably also the culprit behind your not mentioning Dead masterpieces Terrapin Station, Blues for Allah, Aoxomoxoa, and Wake of the Flood. Each album is different and unique, with a consummate professionalism and vision that destroys the Dead’s limited ‘live band’ reputation. These were tale-tellers, adventurers, musicologists and craftsmen. Albums for the Dead were not templates to travel and sell tickets, nor should they be.

And yes, you got me on modernity. But in winning that argument it’s still a point for me. Phish may be very much a part of the moment, but the Dead have reached timelessness. Equally at home in a dorm room or on classic rock radio, the Dead live not only on your iPod, but they lived 40 years ago on vinyl.

And they will still be living when your sacred mp3’s are long outdated.

JP:

Now we’re talking brother! For a minute there I thought you were going soft on me, pussy-footing around and being polite with your confessional tales of digging the hot hippie chick in the Phish t-shirt and – gasp! – smoking marijuana in college. You decided to actually talk about your band, and I commend you for it.

However, it does bother me that you spent the majority of both arguments made so far denigrating my band (for being white? Because there were so many funk soul brothers in the Grateful Dead?) while only sprinkling praise upon your own. You bash the holy hell out of Phish and the aesthetic of theirs that you find so offensive (noodle-heavy jams that go on forever? Perhaps you should re-listen to a Dead show…any show, really) without backing your own boys nearly as emphatically. There are eight paragraphs in that last section, and you didn’t address the Dead until the fifth, in your initial entry not until the seventh.

This is my largest beef with the Dead, and has nothing to do with their music: the people who hold them in the highest esteem scoff at the very notion of someone else attempting a similarly-spirited music, so blinded are they by devotion to Jerry and Co., which seems to violate the entire idea behind the Dead in the first place. There is that particularly odious hippy elitism not just to your argument, but those of all Deadheads who swear there can never be another Grateful Dead without giving a valid reason for why this must be the case.

Well, Phish are no Grateful Dead, and that’s the end of it.

By that logic, would a band who copied the Dead note-for-note be heirs to the throne? Because there is a band like that, Dark Star Orchestra, and they cover entire Dead shows, note-for-note. Eat your heart out, buddy. But the band keeping the Dead’s spirit of freedom, personal expression, and community alive for the generation that you yourself are actually a part of sounds nothing like the Grateful Dead, and this is a good thing.

You claim one of the supposed clinchers in this argument is the fact that the Dead have lived on vinyl for forty years and have become staples of classic rock radio. Guess what other band you could make a similar statement about? Boston! Not to mention a million other bands from the sixties and seventies.

But I ask you this: how many other bands have thrown their own festivals, at which only they themselves played, over the course of an entire weekend, and for which at least sixty thousand people have shown up each time?

Let’s see: there’s Phish (the eighth is scheduled for this coming Halloween weekend), and…um…I guess that’s it. They must be doing something right.

Todd:

Allow me to clarify, my no-soul brother, for your button-down existence has led to the misinterpretation of one key tenet: “whiteness,” in our usage here, has nothing to do with race. It is a distance from urbanity. A remove from grit. Unfamiliarity with hard-times. An absence of the lowdown. The Lowdown, from the Delta on to Billie, is what makes American music…

Consider Pig Pen. His was a voice so rotten with soot, so stale with smoke, so drenched in whiskey that it makes me reassess the negativity of my own b.o. I’ve never seen a pic of the man smiling, but I know he had himself some stained teeth. My favorite image of the singer comes from “Easy Wind,” of him “ballin’ that jack and drinkin’ my wine.” I don’t know what ‘ballin that jack’ means, but I know my college-educated fancy pants are sure as shit never doing it to get by.

Take Jerry. Couldn’t someone have gotten him some therapy? Where did that reservoir of sadness come from? To me, listening to “High Time” is like being 7-years-old and watching Bambi with a dying grandparent. Not exactly the most pleasurable experience, but isn’t that the point of singing the blues? Catharsis? Feeling?