Phish Shows It Could Still Learn From Old School

Welcome to Spin City.

That’s the scene at any concert by Phish: young neo-hippies twirling and flailing in that distinctive dance associated with Grateful Dead concerts. And the Phish show Sunday at Pauley Pavilion was no exception.

The Pavilion is a smaller setting than the quartet from Vermont generally plays in other parts of the country, but with an audience of 10,000 or so, the concert still marked the band’s emergence as a major headliner here. Whatever the band played, there were colorful swirls of tie-dye, flower prints and centrifugally forced braids throughout the arena--whether it fit the music or not.

They spun when the band opened with an impressive note-for-note version of Frank Zappa’s majestic fanfare “Peaches en Regalia.” They spun to the encore, a version of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” They spun to everything in the band’s own catalog, from intricate progressive-fusion to meandering jams.

They spun even though Phish itself looks--and sounds--about as hippie-ish as Bill Gates. Sure, leader and guitarist Trey Anastasio has glasses and a beard and wore a black T-shirt Sunday, but his resemblance to Jerry Garcia pretty much ends there.

The Dead fostered hippie community ideals with a mix of sloppy but spirited music and American-myth lyrics with spiritual overtones. Phish’s aesthetic, in contrast, is marked by musical precision (these guys have great chops), playfully clever but ultimately meaningless lyrics and tons of Phish shtick in the form of mugging, musical jokes and general tomfoolery.

It’s not something likely to anchor and sustain a legend-worthy counterculture for several decades, but maybe the Phish-heads don’t expect that.

“A lot of people are here because they don’t know what else to do,” said Pete Berger, 20, who was standing outside Pauley Pavilion with his girlfriend before the show, hoping to score tickets. “We’re going to have to get jobs eventually,” added the Connecticut resident, who has been following Phish on this tour for three weeks.

The challenge for Phish is to create something that will maintain the loyalty. Sunday, some encouraging signs emerged. Most impressive was a maturing sense of group interplay supplementing the foursome’s long-standing dexterity demonstrated by Anastasio, keyboardist Page McConnell, bassist Mike Gordon and drummer Jon Fishman.

Phish seems to be learning how to effectively mold and direct the dynamics of its extended jams and, with that, the dynamics of the audience--ironically, making the band sound closer to the Dead than ever before.

There was at times a sense of a journey that had been missing from the band’s music in the past--something hinted at but never fully realized on the new “Billy Breathes” album.

What’s still missing is--for lack of a better term--a spiritual quality. No matter how good the band sounded Sunday, no matter how well it seemed in tune with its fans, it needs to show it can swim at deeper levels. Without that, it’s just stuck in spin cycle.