The Portal Opens

This feature appears online under the title “After Forty Years, Phish Isn’t Seeking Resolution,” but the print headline speaks to what makes it so compulsively readable. Whether you love or avoid Phish (mere tolerance doesn’t seem to be an option), the truth remains that no group of musicians so regularly seeks, let alone attains, a state of creative ecstasy. That state extends to the audience as well, many of whom are famously—and chemically—primed for the journey. Over nearly 10,000 words of journalistic jam session, Amanda Petrusich plumbs the phenomenon that has given the Vermonters a thriving multi-decade career.

Achieving this sort of dissociative bliss is not uncommon when listening to Hindu bhajans or Gregorian chants or other forms of religious music; I last felt it in the Pindus Mountains of northern Greece, when a Roma clarinettist played a mirologi, or ancient Epirotic lament, directly into my ear, at two o’clock in the morning, in a dark forest. I bring this up simply to say that it’s extraordinary that this sort of thing—a fleeting doorway to nirvana—is regularly occurring for Phish fans in minor-league-hockey arenas.

“When that portal opens, I don’t remember a single thing,” Fishman said. “I know which gigs are really good by how little I can remember. I do things on the drums that I never practiced and had no idea I was capable of. I have to go back and learn shit that happened in jams that I don’t actually know how to do.”