ARTICLE: “Coming full circle with Phish”
Phish is playing UMASS Amherst’s Mullins Center twice this weekend, and the Berkshire Eagle wanted an advance feature. I wasn’t offered an interview with a band member, so I wrote a bit of an essay on the band and where I seem them today. (I’ll share some more thoughts about the angle I took, and why, later on.) It was published in today’s paper. A review of Saturday night’s show will follow early next week.
“When Phish takes the stage at this relatively small venue on Saturday and again Sunday, it does so not as a subversive cult band on the rise but as a group of elder statesmen whose list of key achievements on its eventual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame display is, for better or worse, already written...
Smaller venues, an autumnal chill in the air, fall tour in the Northeast—in some ways, it can’t help but feel nostalgic. And indeed, while the band released a new album upon its comeback last year and has worked a handful of even newer songs into the live rotation in 2010, the bulk of the shows are taken up by relatively straightforward versions of the old musical warhorses of yesteryear.”
