The New Yorker:

David Remnick
Editor

Some things you “get” pretty much immediately. Like the Beatles. Or Aretha Franklin. (Or ice cream, for that matter. Who’s turning down ice cream?) Then there are a million other things that come your way—and Phish was never a band I developed a taste for. I’ve resisted the charms of their noodling psychedelia for decades. Yes, they can play. Yes, the concerts seemed (in theory) fun—particularly in an altered state. But, until I had the pleasure of reading Amanda Petrusich’s Profile of the band, in our latest issue, I did without; I was Phish-free. I figured that life was short, Spotify long, and who needed what I had always thought of as (stupidly, it turned out) the Grateful Dead Lite? But Petrusich doesn’t merely make a convincing and loving case for the band, she revels in their life stories, their trials and ambitions. She’s compelled me to listen, and listen better. I’m not a pescatarian yet, but I’m getting there.

In Petrusich’s telling, the members of Phish, friends since their undergraduate days, are fascinating in their self-awareness. The singer and guitarist Trey Anastasio admits to Petrusich that the genre of the jam band has always carried with it connotations of endless improvisation and self-indulgence. “The term didn’t exist in my formative years,” he says. “It’s possible its creation had something to do with us.” But as Petrusich explores in the piece—with her usual combination of precision, openness to wonder, and ability to listen like few others—there is a peculiar magic in this ensemble. In one great moment, she locates precisely when things tend to take off: “There is sometimes a brief yet transcendent stretch, occurring maybe ten or twelve or even twenty minutes into a jam, in which the band achieves a kind of otherworldly synchronicity, both internally and with its audience,” she writes. Eventually, she experiences it herself—“a short but delightful vacation from my corporeal self.”

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