JAMBANDS.COM: Trey Anastasio has, many times, given credit to the Grateful Dead. He’s made it known that [Phish] tire of the comparisons, but he has expressed his appreciation for the doors that [the Dead] opened for them. I think that bands like moe. and String Cheese Incident probably owe a lot to Phish. You mentioned Medeski, Martin and Wood — are there any other bands that you guys feel a debt to?

WR: I think Sonic Youth.

MP: Yeah. Sonic Youth came in and started making noise and people just had to learn to appreciate sonically, the noise.

WR: Also, Nirvana comes in [with] the gritty, hard, noisy stuff and then they also drop into this really beautiful thing, and people are all of a sudden aware that you can combine these two things and that these are appealing. Suddenly you can take these totally different worlds and stick them together. A lot of what we do is from DJs — DJ Shadow. . .

MP: Yeah, DJ Shadow’s whole thing is he took a lot of different records and made a song. He would take a guitar riff from a Metallica song and then drums from a Zeppelin song and then flute from Herbie Mann or something, all these different elements. You’ve got jazz, and you’ve got hard rock or whatever. He introduced the big, rock drum sound to the kind of music we’re playing: not the tight, computerized, drum machine thing, but the big John Bonham drum sound. Or somebody like Amon Tobin, who we’re playing with next month at the Knitting Factory. I heard somebody call [Tobin] the Gil Evans of electronic music. He’s more like an arranger. He takes these sounds and arranges them into these beautiful compositions. Some of it’s very dark and very powerful. The sounds are pretty much all analog — they’re not electronic — but he’s just arranging, and that’s basically what we’re trying to do on stage.

WR: We don’t have any synths or anything, but we have delay pedals and shit like that. You know, Matt takes the Rhodes and puts a delay on it and fucks it up, so it sounds electronic, but he’s just manipulating raw organic sound, which, to me, is the real signature of what we do. It’s five instruments, and yeah, we’re fucking with it, but it’s not a synth. I mentioned Medeski, Martin and Wood: I remember when Friday Afternoon In the Universe first came out, we saw them and it was the first time in my life where I was like “Wow! That can be done!”

MP: People would just stand there and watch these people play.

WR: Yeah, and it was like, “That’s in us! We want to do that!” Sometimes I feel like we’re this horror show. People go to horror films and they want to get scared — I want people to go out and get scared. I want people to be like, “What the fuck! W hat am I listening to and why do I like it?” Do you like it for some weird, subverted, deviant reason? I want to be on the border of offending people who go to our shows. We play our best when we’re just like “Fuck this. Let’s scare these people. I hope they’re scared.” There’ve been nights where we’ve just cleared an audience out and we’ve been just like, “Fuck yeah.”

JAMBANDS.COM: That’s the one thing that’s really impressed me about y’all, especially over the last year and a half. What impresses me isn’t your musical ability, but the ideas that come out of your collective head.

WR: That’s our hope. That’s what we want. I remember a couple of years ago, we played at the Boathouse in Norfolk or Virginia Beach and I remember we were doing a song where I played this Santana-type rock solo. The crowd was twelve- to fifteen-hundred people and it was just like [cheering]. I had never heard anything like it in my entire life. Me and James looked at each other and I was just gloating up on stage: “Do you hear these people screaming?! I will do this solo every night for the rest of my life!” It was unbelievable. But it’s just funny, because a couple months later, we never played that song again.

JAMBANDS.COM: What song was it?

WR: “Alcino.” But it was like boom! It was this total crowd pleaser and people were coming up to me, “That’s one of the greatest rock solos ever!” And a couple months later [we said], “Ah, we got such a good response. . . let’s start doing something else.” [laughter] Like I was saying, we used to do that, we’d just go off: Matt would play these big, long sax solos and then Ed would play leads and then Mike just rips it up. . . we quickly cut all that out, because it really wasn’t what we were all about.

MP: I’m not sure there ever was a good sax solo.

WR: Yeah, I never believed we were all ever really that good. When were soloing, the focus started becoming chops and speed and all that kind of stuff and we’re so not about that, even though any one of us really could play if we had a gun to our heads. But it’s not about that. I’m always really impressed by a great player; there are some combos like Coltrane and Elvin Jones, players that we listen to so much, but with us, it’s really about the collective, and soloing just sort of takes away from that . It’s not what it’s about.

JAMBANDS.COM: One more question I really wanted to ask you guys: I know you guys are friends with Ellis [Goddard, Mockingbird Foundation]. How did you guys react when he asked you to record a track for the Phish tribute album?

MP: At first, I was like, “Why would we want to do a Phish song? Why would we be asked to be on the album?” I didn’t really want to, and then we heard who was gonna be on it and why they were doing it and we started getting ideas for it and then. . . watch out.

JAMBANDS.COM: How did you guys go about picking what tracks or what song you were going to do?

WR: Well, the one Phish album I ever bought and listened was Picture of Nectar. That was the album that we all sort of were familiar with. So we went back to that album and said, “OK, what really affected us?” We decided what we wanted to cover just based on little ideas, just even a note, that really affected us. I always respected what they do and what they did at live shows. But after Picture of Nectar, I bought the album, listened to it for a while, went to a few shows and beyond that, they really weren’t that big of an influence. But we all remembered that album and a few small things — you hear a riff and you wanna do a remix, you go, “That would be cool in this situation.” You’ll just have to wait and hear.

MP: It’s a rockin’ song.

WR: It’s crazy, crazy. Balls to the wall!

JAMBANDS.COM: Are y’all gonna do it live after the album comes out?

WR: It depends. If people really like it, then we’ll give it to ‘em.

BG: All right, that’s it. I’ll let you guys get back to business. Thanks a lot.

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