From: shell@smeagol.Berkeley.EDU (Shelly Culbertson)
Newsgroups: rec.music.phish
Subject: Interview with Mike Gordon, 11/25/92
Date: 23 Jan 93 01:17:52 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Statistics, U. C. Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: smeagol.berkeley.edu

Interview with Mike Gordon, 11/25/92, Philadelphia, Pa.


Do you have any plans at this time to do a video?

     We might at some point; there have been a lot of discussions about that
lately.  There have been a lot of discussions going on within the band and
with the record company, but mainly within the band, about whether to do a
video for MTV.  I can fill you in on some of them...the other three band
members are more against it than I am, because their feeling is, from what I
can gather, that one, they don't like what MTV stands for, that it's changing
music into a series of commercials and that people watch it all day and the
whole experience of music is changing because of it -- people used to listen
to albums, their imaginations could go wild; now their visual images are
prescribed for them.  I guess that's sort of two issues, the fact that it's
really commercially oriented and the fact that the images are prescribed. 
Those are the two big things that they were saying.  
     The other general category is that they feel that if we had a song on
MTV, it could ruin the song, because people wouldn't be able to get absorbed
in the song no matter how cool the video is; it would be between a Madonna
video and something else, and it would be presented to a person who's been
watching short videos all day and if the song had some emotional content,
putting it in that context and prescribing these images from our minds for
theirs, it could ruin the emotional content of the song.  A person wouldn't
be moved by it.  Then when they hear it on the radio, they might just be
reminded of the video.
     The guys in the band like the idea of images and music sometimes being
put together; they just think that MTV is a particularly bad example of it. 


On the other hand, what might be some of the positive aspects of doing MTV?

     I was arguing in favor of the video; in the course of arguing things
came up like movies -- what about a certain scene in a movie where a song is
really enhanced by the situation it's in, and Trey said, well, in a movie
you're sitting there for a long period of time and you get emotionally
absorbed and then the song can really work well with it whereas with a video,
there isn't time for that to happen.  So a lot of different examples of that
sort of thing were brought up; we argued for two hours on one day about it,
me against the three of them, pretty much.  We brought out the Phish.Net
pages and read what people said about it -- some people were talking about
the popularity issue and some were against MTV and the concept of us going
mainstream and all that kind of stuff, and others said we should just embrace
it and consider it to be a good thing that they're growing.
     This all came up at the meeting, and I was arguing for doing a video. 
One, because I was a film major and I'd like to get involved with doing it;
I think that I could give it that emotional content.  And two, because I
don't have the philosophical problems with MTV that they have.  They kept
saying, you should at least sit down and watch it for a couple hours to be
able to make a decision, which I've never done; I've only watched it now and
then when other people had it on.  It's a sort of paradox...I actually made
a whole film about TV being bad and I never watch TV because I don't like it. 
I don't like MTV; I'm bored by it and I don't watch it.  Occasionally there
are videos I like, but...so they kept saying, why do you want to support
something like that, that you don't like?  I kept saying, it's true that I
don't like TV, and I don't like MTV; but I'm not offended by it like the
three of you are.  I see it as another creative outlet, and because I'm not
offended by it, I don't think that I'd be endorsing something that I hate, it
might just be an opportunity to make it better.  
     We talked about that argument too, which I was reading about in Mondo,
the idea of making something bad better...or, can you?  

Given that videos on MTV lack context because of the 3-minute format, are
there other venues for video?

     Well there are, we talked about that too.  They were more willing to be
involved with that, you know, there are animation festivals <laughs> or Night
Flight, different shows...
     There's this promotional video...I'd actually like to do a documentary
film on 16mm with a film crew on tour, which could be hi-8 video, but we were
thinking a film would be cooler.  I don't know...another issue in the big
band debate is time, between having new parts of the world to go to and play,
wanting to put more time into albums, wanting to keep our practice time and
time off; there are getting to be too many things to do.  We take time off
now and then, but when we're working it's 15 hours a day.  If we were going
to do a video for even one single each year, it would take too much time to
put the amount of care into it that we would want to.  We always try to put
a lot of care into everything.  Now that there are so many people involved
and so many projects being worked on, it gets to be harder.  One example is
proofreading the newsletter -- Page wasn't happy with the fact that some
newsletters were going out without the band seeing them....if we had time,
there would be different outlets for film and for video and for different TV
shows; of course we want to play live on a couple shows, no-one has any
problem with that.  
     The thing about MTV, though, is that it's a direct commercial
application, it promotes the single that's on the radio.  Some of the more
artistic outlets wouldn't have the cost-effectiveness; maybe the record
company wouldn't want to pay for half of the project like they would an MTV
video.  So it's a matter of time, money, and what outlets are available.

What about the possibility of making the Shoreline video available?

     We were going to.  It got held up because the idea was that to make it
really complete, it should have our 45 minutes and then 15 minutes of the jam
with Carlos.  I don't think that Carlos or his people are all that psyched
about letting us do that.  It kind of makes sense, because they figure that
if we were to market this thing in stores and people saw his name, they might
buy it even if they had never heard of us, and so his name being on the cover
would be a main selling point yet he wouldn't have so much control over what
the product is.  I don't think he wants to let us use his footage, and
without that footage it's sort of not complete enough.  Maybe...we're still
talking about it.  They did a really nice job editing it.

What about the possibility of doing CD-I that Trey talked about in the
newsletter?

     We're definitely talking about that.  I don't know when.  Maybe the
Gamehendge album would be like that.  We were talking about having filler on
Junta that would be something you could play back on your computer, but we
didn't do that for a couple reasons; one was that the medium hadn't been
standardized enough.  We're still thinking about doing it at some point.  I
like the idea, I just don't know yet; Trey might have a better idea of what
we might do.  

Back to the 3-minute video format, there are also now alternative video
channels besides MTV --

     I guess it's not just the context; it's the context and the goal.  The
goal is really to promote the single.  The people that are behind it are
often just business people, making videos.  And the third problem is that the
people who make the videos are these bands -- and this brings me to one of
the things brought up by Nancy Jefferies, our A&R [Artists & Repertoire]
person -- about how most videos are bad because it's situations where
directors who might be good are given all this input from bands who don't
have any sense for visual production.
     We were arguing about it every day and then it sort of peaked out in
this long two or three hour argument...afterwards, Trey had a long talk on
the phone with Nancy, and she said some things in favor of doing a video. 
First of all she said, if you think MTV is bad you're being naive; she said
the radio is run by a bunch of Mafia thugs, pretty much, and MTV has been a
breath of fresh air for bands that couldn't make it on the radio.  She said
if it weren't for MTV, bands like Nirvana, the Chili Peppers, Janes Addiction
and a whole bunch of others like that couldn't have existed and we'd still be
listening to bad disco.  That was her opininon.  Then she cited some of the
political things MTV has done -- getting involved environmentally, getting
people to vote.  She also said that if we don't do a video, we'll still just
be selling the albums to our fans rather than exposing ourselves to a wider
audience.  I should say that there's a lot of resistance within the band to
growing in general, mainly from the others, again <laughs>.  I'm glad it's
been gradual, because it's definitely healthier that way, but I don't mind
playing in bigger places, if we can keep it intimate and fun and the sound
good and all that.  In fact, we played in Albany for 2800 people and that gig
was a lot better than some gigs I remember for 40 people, so who's to say?  

Do you think it's still gradual, or do you perceive a recent, sudden increase
in growth?

     No, I think it's still gradual.  For example, this year we played in our
first indoor arenas, first with the Horde and then with Santana and then with
the Spin Doctors for the WBCN benefit [Boston Garden, 10/30/92], and all
three situations are where we were playing with other bands, and I guess
mainly because of that it didn't seem like a sudden switch from the last
places we were playing, which were some big theatres.  And now we're not
playing in arenas or civic centers in general, it's just occasionally when we
get to play with another band we do that; and then sometime down the line
we'll probably do it by ourselves, but then we'll already have done it.  It's
not a big jump; it's just like getting your foot in the door and then.... 
Same with media; I was really psyched to get into some national publications. 
It's not like suddenly Rolling Stone did an article on us.  That might happen
to some bands that get to be famous overnight; but we were in an article
about five bands, and by the time we have our faces on the cover of Rolling
Stone, it's going to be a long time.  First we'll have our own article...so
everything seems to be gradual.  Even the album, we've sold a lot more copies
than the last album, but it's not huge amounts.  
     What I was going to say, is that it's not just some of the fans; it's
also people in the band that say, "Do we want to do a video that will expose
us to such a big audience?  Do we want to grow that much?"

Isn't it possible that the current venues being 1500-2000 capacity could give
an artificial sense of the audience being smaller than it really is,
considering that most of them sold out so quickly?

     That's true, but there's another way of looking at it too -- the fact
that it sold out so quick might make it seem bigger than it is because it's
all the same people <laughs> that are going to all the shows, a lot of them
anyway.  From night to night, when Trey says something about the last night,
everyone yells, most people were there the last night, within a given
area....  The fans that we have are very loyal.  
     For a while people were saying, it's time to get on a major label, and
we waited a couple years; people in the band were saying, I never want to be
on a major label.  But it's been pretty great -- it's been really good.

It seems as though they've offered a lot of good things, for example
reissuing Lawn Boy and Junta.

     They're a great resource for us.  That combined with the fact that major
labels own the means of distribution makes it all that more attractive.

One aspect of the resistence to growth discussed on the net, which coincides
with the theory that shows are selling out because a large portion of the
audience is going to a number of shows on a single tour, is that there is
currently a sense of community and a fear of losing that if the audience
increases too much very abruptly.  If you take that community of perhaps
8,000 or 10,000 people throughout the country and suddenly involve another
200,000 people through MTV, what effect might that have?

     That's come up too, all along the way.  In terms of the idea of a
community growing, the first thing to remember is that people are always
afraid of change.  We've all probably talked about the story of how we used
to play at Nectar's and a couple of other small bars and then we moved to the
Front in Burlington.  Nectar's is maybe 150 people, 200 on a packed night;
the Front is like 400.  The first time we played at the Front there was this
girl sitting at the bar crying, saying "They're not our band anymore"; we
hadn't even played outside of Vermont, and this is 400 people.  Every step
along the way, people were saying that.  So who's to say which is the step
where the community is too big?  People are saying that now, people were
saying that when we played for 500 people, each step they said the last step
was more intimate, but then that step itself gets to be intimate in a certain
way.  
     The other thing that I think about is, we could have a song on the radio
that a lot of people would like, non-Phishhead people.  I think what would
happen is, a bunch of them would come to the concerts and we would still be
the same band that we are.  Some of them would like the concert and some of
them would find that it's not more of that same one song that they liked, and
they just wouldn't come back.  I suppose some might come and just sort of
look at the people outside of the door and say, this isn't my crowd; I guess
now that they have to get tickets in advance, it depends on the size of the
venue whether the outlanders will be able to come at all <laughs>.  
     I think that what will happen is that the people who keep coming back a
lot will be the people that really like it; there will be a smaller
percentage of people that are always there that are just experimenting with
something new.  Why shouldn't they be able to?
     One of my favorite Dead shows was the last one I went to, and it was
Foxboro with 60,000 people, two or three years ago.  The sound was just so
good, and I liked the way that they were on stage -- I hadn't been to a Dead
show for two years before that, and I just liked the way that they didn't
seem to care about anything except the music, and they weren't being
pretentious, despite the 60,000 people or anything else going on; and there
were shows that were a lot smaller that I didn't like, for whatever reason. 
Not that it was as intimate as a little club...but sound is an important
thing to me, and the sound was so good; I think that that's more important
than the size of the venue.  To continue with the Dead example, there are
people who saw them when Pigpen was with them, or when there were "real
hippies" rather than the second generation, that don't think it's the same
thing will all of these thousands of beer-drinking fraternity brothers that
come down...that's probably true.  But still for me, the experience was just
as deep.

Speaking of community, there's a lot of active two-way communication between
Phish and your audience, like the newsletter, and being cooperative with the
net, and the beach balls; what is your philosophy on the value of two-way
communication with the audience?

     I place a high value on it.  This is where my religious view of it
enters.  I think that when we're at our best, we're actually just playing
something that's already there.  Not that it's necessarily coming from the
audience, or from anywhere, it's just sort of already there.  Some of my most
profound playing experiences are discovering the bass line that best fits
into the moment by changing the notes around slightly until they end up
fitting in that moment the best with what's going on, and then it ends up
being a reflection of what's already there.  So in terms of the two-way
communication, it could enhance that process.  Now with the bouncing balls,
it's going to be a long way before we can refine it to the point where we can
actually get in tune; it's a fine line between things that are just
novelties, and things that are really profound musical experiences.  We have
a lot of stage antics going on and a lot of little silly songs, and sometimes
it just sort of grates on me, that we're not actually just playing music, and
we're doing all of these silly, not necessarily all that funny things; and
other times I think that when the flow and the moment are right, that all
those things are just part of the whole atmosphere of the night, the carnival
atmosphere with everything going on and fitting into the puzzle.  It depends
on the flow.  So with the balls, it's the same thing; we put out the balls,
and now we're just playing notes whenever they land; but at the next step
we'll be able to play music and watch our respective balls and really have a
bed of music that the balls can play rather than just these blurps.  But I've
always liked the concept of interaction.

What do you think is the relevance of humor in music?

     That's a really good question, actually.  I have some different
opinions.  I think humor is really important in music, or in life.  I also
think it has to be handled in a right way...I think actually what humor needs
is to be mixed with some seriousness, for it to be the most effective or the
most valuable.  I'm just going to freely go back to my Grateful Dead example
<laughs> since there are no other band members in the room.  One thing I like
about them is that they are very serious.  They are very different from us in
that they get on stage, they don't crack jokes, they don't do silly things
and jump on trampolines and any of that; and yet some of the Dead shows I
really liked when I was completely zoned into the music, maybe after smoking
pot or whatever, I really saw a lot of humor in the musical notes that came
out and that I was perceiving.  So they started out with a serious intent but
they ended up having humor.
     A better example would be my peak musical experience at Goddard in 1985. 
I was laughing the whole time and I had a huge smile, every little note
seemed really funny; but at the same time I felt this really deep sense of a
wholesome feeling, looking at the woods outside and the fresh snow and
feeling the love from the other band members, kind of this cool, calm, deep
sense of reflection, which isn't a humorous thought by itself.  It was
combined with this humor because the musical notes sounded funny.
     So I think that humor should always be there, but it should be
accompanied by seriousness.  

The word that comes to my mind when I try to think of serious humor is joy...

     That's true.  That's sort of the cusp between them.

Humor also establishes a certain level of trust with people; you open
yourself up by doing something that might be funny or might not, though it
usually is.

     I tend to like humor that's the kind that might work and might not, sort
of subtle, dry.  Frank Zappa has a different kind of humor; he's very
satirical, and that's really not my cup of tea.  Different people have
different senses of humor.   I'm trying to think...I'm sure there are bands
out there who have a great sense of humor that I don't like, probably because
they're not serious enough as musicians.  
     It might have been Bruce Hampton who said, you should take the music
seriously but not take yourself too seriously.  These days the problem is
that most people are the other way around -- they take themselves seriously
and they don't take the music seriously.  

On a different subject -- how do you feel about the current, rapid
development of information technologies, and the virtually infinite amount of
available information that results?

     In terms of the information age, it's definitely overwhelming to me; I
have so much information to deal with, like the manuals for these new pieces
of equipment that I got, and all the Phish.Net stuff that comes in that I'd
like to read...there is a ton of information.  There's so much music
available too, on CDs, and soon with the mini CDs people will be able to fit
huge libraries of music in small spaces.
     Sometimes I think we'd be better off to go back to a time where there
isn't any of that and the only music that people make is from their regions,
because they don't move around, or I suppose there could be travelling
minstrels.  Things get kind of homogenized when there's so much information
spreading around; that way when you went to Atlanta to see an Atlanta band
that had only been in Atlanta, sucking up the culture around Atlanta, there
wouldn't be a chance that it would sound like a band from anywhere else.  But
I guess my overall feeling is that I'm glad we have all the technology that
we do, and I definitely like to buy a lot of gadgets and things that provide
me with more information.
     I guess the overall implication is that people have to be more
responsible about filtering information.  Like you were saying that you spend
four hours a day on the net -- what if it got to be twelve hours a day; you
have to draw a line.  Fish still likes to go to hard-to-find record stores
where you can find all these old albums that never came out on CD; but that
takes a lot of effort, and most people wouldn't want to make that effort.  I
guess that's another issue, with all the information that's available, who's
controlling all the pathways of information, and how are they filtering the
information if it gets filtered, and with the Phish.Net maybe it's not
filtered right now but there's so much of it that eventually it will be too
much to deal with so it'll be a question of...well, it could be categorized. 
     We talked about this -- I was in a communications major and we had some
courses in mass media and there were books that I probably never finished
that I was supposed to, about the information age growing and what the
implications are.  

Another way of looking at MTV is that it is simply more information added to
the pool, and that deciding globally that MTV is bad is a failure to consider
the medium in enough depth; with MTV as with any information source, it is
the responsibility of the consumer to choose how to filter their individual
information intake.

     With having more information available, it makes people tend to take it
in in smaller chunks, which is happening more and more all the time, with the
news shows having ten seconds of each thing.  With the exception of some
public TV shows, now and then there's an exception, but everything is getting
to be quicker and quicker, all the fast edits on MTV...I guess that's not
necessarily because there's more information, it's because peoples' attention
spans are getting programmed to be less.  But the fact that there is so much
more information makes it easy.
     There's this ad on MTV where this person has to keep track of all the
videos that are on MTV for a week, for some reason his job is to write down
all the videos that are on and at the end he's all tired and his mom walks in
and says, why don't you just do it one day and multiply it by seven?  And
then the caption at the end is like MTV - we're in the business of high
volume.  It seemed weird but I guess that must appeal to people, that there's
so much stuff going on and it keeps changing.

Is there any way in which the Phish.Net has an impact on the band?

     It definitely does.  Now just about every day in band practice Trey
walks in with a packet [of offprints] -- we either start off band practice or
interrupt it in the middle to read a couple pages to find out peoples'
opinions.  After the music is made and the community comes out of it and
there are people having this community and discussion, it comes back as
feedback to us, right to the band practice room where new music is being
planned out -- so it sounds like a complete loop.  It definitely is having a
big impact on us.  It makes me wonder whether people on the net are
representative of the general Phish audience or not, whether they have a
certain bias of their own by being on the net.  We can tell from the letters
[through regular mail] though that it reflects some of the same issues, just
in more depth.  
     It might be fun to try putting a computer terminal on stage interacting
with people in different parts of the country and change the setlist that
we're playing by getting ideas from people through the net, while we're
playing.  Another idea I had was, I like the idea of calling up the Spin
Doctors or some band that we know and hooking up the two sound systems so
that we can have a jam together in two different rooms at the same time.  

The bandwidth required to move that amount of information in real time would
probably be a limiting factor....for example, I think that currently on the
Internet insufficient bandwidth is available to transmit digital audio in
real time.

     If you could, that would be something, in terms of tape trees <laughs>.

Do you have a particular goal or agenda with your art?  Anything specific you
want to achieve?

     I've always tended away from the literal.  For me, that whole question
brings up my philosophy of my favorite music not being art, or not liking it
for its artistic values but for its religious values, or some other
ritualistic sense.  I'm not an expert on the subject, but I've been thinking
for a few years about trying to define it for myself -- what's the criterion
for art, what makes art good.  For example, its sense of timelessness, or the
fact that the viewer can objectify it...things like that make me think that
I like music which isn't art <laughs>.  Not that I don't like music that is
art, but there are other qualities that are more important to me.  That's why
I like some cover bands a lot, Urban Blight, for example.  They're a dance
band.  They play probably mostly originals, but there's nothing unique about
their style.  If anything, they're ten or fifteen years behind; so they're
not cutting edge.  They don't represent the times (which is another criterion
of art), they represent some other time.  I like it just because they're
really good at making a beat that you can dance to, and the beat is more
solid; they're more studious in terms of rhythms and funk and a bunch of
different styles, moreso than other bands that are artistic and cutting
edge.  I find myself being the only one I know that likes some of these
bands.  
     Bass players often think in terms of function and being pragmatic. 
They're often into equipment. In bands, the bass player often owns the sound
system.  Bass players are often EE majors, like I was and some other bass
players that I know.  It makes sense because the bass is this thing that is
right in the middle of the structure of the music.  It's the bridge between
the harmony and the rhythm; it's this backbone kind of thing that is involved
with the nuts and bolts of running the music, as opposed to the melody that's
sitting on top, or the chords that are filling in the harmony.  It's kind of
a skeleton of what's going on in the music.  So I often think in terms of
function, which is a fourth thing now -- art is supposed to be for art's
sake, I think.  Once you start to get into having a purpose -- like graphic
arts are considered to be less artistic, by art critics and philosophers,
than the fine arts.  And there we're getting into function -- for me, I think
about function.  I think about -- like the music is coming through a sound
system and we're vibrating people; there's one function, to vibrate people,
to actually have beats of drums vibrate their chests, you know.  The guys in
my band think in terms of art a lot more than me; and jazz is often...well,
I don't want to make too many gross generalizations; jazz can be artistic or
it can be ritualistic, like I'm describing.  I was just thinking in terms of
Fish's drumming, that it's really interesting, and I think that when it's at
its best, which is a lot of the time, it's both interesting and has the
effect of moving people, which is what I'm talking about.  Well, my stance is
sort of about moving people without any emphasis on the interesting side.  Of
course, I can get bored too, by things that aren't interesting.  I've talked
myself a little bit into a corner.  

It seemed like you had something to say when you were talking about jazz --
were you going to contrast that with another style of music?

     I could.  The thing about jazz is that jazz musicians are called artists
more than others, and I think in a bad way.  A solo is something that they
construct and that you can evaluate; and for me, with great music, you can't
separate the musician from the thing being created or from the audience. 
It's all just this thing that's inevitable.  Whereas a solo is an artistic
thing, it's a craft that you learn.  In terms of a function, which is what I
think in terms of, I would say, what are you doing to the person?  Are you
moving them emotionally or intellectually or in some primal way?  Are you
making them want to dance?  Jazz is a lot of solos, and those solos would
have to do some of those things for me to like them, rather than to just be
cool and interesting on their own, art for art's sake.  I was just thinking
about jazz drummers as opposed to rock drummers.  I like hearing a rock
drumbeat which is just the same beat all night sometimes, if it's done well
and if that beat is a beat that moves people, I would rather hear that all
night than trial and error of a whole bunch of different beats that are
"interesting".  In terms of what the functions are, I think there are
different kinds.  You can help people expand their consciousness and reach
nirvana and that sort of thing, that would be one; or two would be to make
them feel this primal sense of motion, to make them want to dance, or to feel
like they're moving whether they are or not; and three would be sort of an
intellectual enhancement, which is more on the interesting side, more towards
the art side; and four would be an emotional reaction, if a love song makes
you think of an old experience or a girlfriend, that sort of thing.  Those
would be four big examples of what the function of music can be.  It's like
thinking of the ends rather than the means, or the means rather than the
ends, you know.  An artist would really get into the process of creating from
the beginning, and think of the creating as being the essence of what's going
on, the songwriting, for example; whereas the pragmatist would think about
the end product, and how the sound system was set up, the listening
environment, would be just as important as the songwriting, because they both
are part of that final cause and effect that goes on.  So that's my ongoing
internal discussion / debate about art in music.  Now I forget what your
question was.  

You answered it -- it was whether you have any goals with your art, meaning
your music...

     Against all that I just said, it's been a goal of mine to write more
music and to become more of an artist <laughs>.  But maybe that's just
because I've been thinking about the other side so much.  I think it's good
for these different philosophies to coexist.  Trey and I, I think, have had
opposing philosophies about some of these issues, some that we might not have
realized and discussed.  An old example would be me wanting to improvise more
on stage and him wanting to have more written music and planned out songlists
and that sort of thing; and he writes a lot of music and plans out a lot of
songlists.  But he improvises too so there's a crossover; and I like to do
the planned out stuff too.  
     A recent example is, we were deciding which song would be the single for
the album, and there are a few possibilities; but the two biggest
possibilities are Fast Enough For You which is a slow song and which we all
like; I had an emotional reaction to it myself, one night in particular I was
sitting there listening while they were editing the pedal steel part together
and I was just completely blown away by it.  I was thinking, people are
really going to be moved by this.  And then the other song that was being
talked about was The Wedge, or The Great Divide, which was written right
before we went into the mixing session.  We recorded that because it would be
a good single and because, well, Trey and Barry, the producer, liked the
song.  It was catchy and we thought it would be a good thing to add to the
album, with having it be a single in mind.  I really liked the process of
recording it.  This sort of confuses my previous statements about the process
versus the product.  I really got into making it and later those guys decided
not to use it because it sounded too much like the Grateful Dead, mainly. 
That's one reason, there were some other reasons too, but that was one. 
Actually the record company ended up calling, the General Manager of Elektra
and the promotion guy, while we were debating about how we were going to
convince them to use Fast Enough or a different song as the first single, and
not The Wedge, we were talking about that and I was the only one that liked
The Wedge as well as Fast Enough, I like both.  Those guys from the record
company called up and said, "If this [The Wedge] is your first single, you
sure are going to sell a lot of Grateful Dead albums!" <laughs>.  That's what
they said.  And everyone was psyched, because that's what the other three
guys in the band thought too.  I admit it, it definitely sounds more like a
Dead song.  I put it on my stereo at the same time with Scarlet Begonias and
flipped back and forth, and they sounded extremely similar.  I could give you
a list of reasons why they sound similar, the beat especially.  Trey was
saying that one thing that makes it sound too much like the Dead is that it
starts with a drumbeat and then everyone comes in -- it sounds like we're
going to go into Not Fade or something <laughs>.  Which isn't the beat that
it is, but...so anyway, I've been having a lot of debates me against the
three of them.  It seemed like there was a whole month of just me arguing
against the three of them about everything, like this video issue and some
other issues, and this was one of them.  In the middle of all this, Trey
said, Mike, I think you have this problem where you can't separate yourself
from the experience, of recording a song for example.  He was saying, now
we're listening to it, and now it sounds bad to us.  He said, when we were in
Nashville, I liked making it too, and it was a great experience, we all had
a lot of fun.  But now we think it sounds bad, but you can't separate
yourself from the experience of making it.  I thought about what he had said
and I came to the conclusion that maybe he has a point, but that I didn't
think that it was just a problem that I couldn't separate myself from the
experience; I also thought that it's an asset of mine to be able to stay
attached to the experience.  If I have a good time recording something and
then listening to it now brings back that emotion of recording it, then I
think that it's inherently got some magic to it that came about in the
process and that is maintained on the tape.  Trey might have more of this
artistic view that you should be able to evaluate something and objectify it. 
I talked about this sort of thing -- I was in an eastern-religion-type group
and my teacher was Rajneesh and I was telling him about these experiences
that I've had, musical experiences, and he said, yeah, the interesting thing
is that as you get closer towards nirvana, the experience and the experiencer
become very much the same thing.  So for me, I'm extending that philosophy to
the experiencer, the experience and the thing experienced.  They're all the
same to me, I don't choose to separate them, necessarily.
     I brought that up because I think it's good that there are opposing
philosphies existing in the same unit.  I think it makes it more interesting. 
In reality we share a lot of common ground in our philosophies.

As you spoke about recording The Wedge, I was wondering if you could compare
the experience of recording something that you've been playing live for a
long time with recording a new song that you haven't played for an audience
yet.

     There's a whole range of different ways -- we talk about that.  John is
really encouraging us to have a writing session before the next album, and
have a lot of the stuff be fresh for the album.  Nancy Jefferies said that
our album still sounds like a live band playing in the studio, and she would
like it to sound more like making use of the studio for what it is, even
more.  I kind of agree with her in a way.  There are pros and cons of going
out and playing a song for a year before we record it.  The pros are that we
refine it and we change around parts to make them work, we get used to
playing them and we find ways to play our own parts in the songs; it just
sort of gels, and we get audience feedback.  So by the time it gets on the
album it's more of a thing on its own.  
     It's for better or worse, you could look at it either way, because some
songs -- like with Fast Enough For You we didn't do that, and as a result it
got changed in the studio for the better.  We gave the producer free rein on
it to tell us to add another chorus, which we physically copied and cut out
and put in <laughs> -- we didn't re-record it, we just copied the first
chorus and changed some instruments on it.  Even to the point, actually, when
we were mixing it where the mixer took some crash cymbals out of his sampling
computer and added them at the beginning of the second chorus to enhance it
and stuff like that.  In ways, the afterthought might have made it sound
better than if we had just played it like that.  But the good thing about
that is that it allows the song to become its own thing in the studio, and
the studio is a different situation than the stage.  If an album comes out of
the studio, it's good for the songs to have this malleability from the
beginning.  Different artists have different opinions.  Some people just go
in and write in the studio.  Other people don't.
     So I would say both -- we've had a few songs that have been on album
before we played them live, but it's been mostly the other way around.  

Having already talked about the concept of Rift with Trey and Fish, I'd like
to hear your thoughts concerning it compared with A Picture of Nectar.

     Oh, between the two albums?  I think that there's just more of a concept
-- I think that Picture of Nectar didn't have much cohesiveness.  There were
a lot of different thoughts, different styles; it was just sort of all over
the place, whereas this really has a flow to it more and sort of a concept
you know, a guy sleeping at night, which is tied in by the cover painting and
different sound effects here and there.  Between that and the fact that the
songwriting moved into a more focused direction by itself, between Tom's
lyrics being more focused and the music being more integrated, the different
styles.  I think that's what it is, Picture of Nectar was a lot of different
styles and each song is a different style, whereas on this album the styles
are integrated within the songs so that they become our own style more.  I
would just say more focus altogether.
     I think it's better for some other reasons too, having Barry work us
hard emotionally while we were playing was one thing that I think helped. 
Having a mixer who knew how to create a spaciousness -- all the different
things that have changed between the two albums, and just putting more time
into it I think it's better.  But I still think we have some things to learn.
     About your last question -- I could give you examples; Fast Enough For
You, Trey ended up saying, this is the first song that I hope we can play
live as well as we got it on the album.  Now that we've played it a couple
times he changed his mind, he said, I think it's going to be great live, it's
not going to be any problem.  But it was something that was really conceived
in the studio, or right before we went into the studio.  Also on that
subject, The Wedge we actually recorded one instrument at a time -- we always
sing at different times than we're playing, but for that -- Fish did each
drum; first he started out with the hi-hat, because he couldn't even play the
whole drumbeat yet altogether.  The song was written on a drum machine, with
Trey singing onto a four-track with a drum machine.  A lot of the process was
trying to get it to be as good as it was on the machine, and it was hard,
because you can make different accents on the drums on the machine and for
Fish to be able to do the whole drumbeat and then accent all the different
drums at the right time, it was too hard for him.  I mean, he learned the
beat, he just couldn't execute it with that kind of precision.  So he did one
drum at a time.  And for me, just between singing and bass playing it's
sometimes a difficult thing with different syncopations going and now I'm
having a little bit of a hard time with it.  So it's an example of a song
that we could put on an album and we can't even play live yet <laughs>, as
well as the album.  It'll be good, I think, but it's hard.
Newsgroups: rec.music.phish