For a long time on this blog, I’ve preached and preached that I would never want to see a Phish reunion for the same reasons that the band stopped touring and announced the breakup. They didn’t want to soil the legacy, and I didn’t want them to either. And I did half-suspect that they may have practiced a bit for the Jammys — who knows if that’s true — but they definitely did not play that night. They exchanged pleasantries, sure, but they didn’t play together.
I’m not sure that they have started playing together yet, but it’s definitely something that the band seems to be considering more and more these days. And by “the band,” I mean Trey. He’s always been the true leader of the band and the one driving the vision, and he expressed some concern about where his head has been recently while speaking with Rolling Stone…
“When Phish broke up, I made some comment about how I’m not gonna go around playing ‘You Enjoy Myself’ for the rest of my life,” Anastasio said with a laugh. “And it’s so funny because Fish and Mike and Page have been talking to each other a lot lately and now — it’s not that I can’t believe that I said that, but its symbolic of how much I lost my mind or how much I lost my bearings or something. Because at this point in time I would give my left nut to play that song five times in a row every day until I die. I certainly thought about that while I was in jail.”
Maybe it’s taken out of full context, but to me that is a sign and hope that the band could one day come back as strong as they were when they left. That’s not even when they were at their peak, though, and I believe Trey was probably deep into the problems that led him to jail in the first place. To say that he’s looking back and wondering what could have been is quite obvious, and it’ll be a truly inspirational sign of character for them to bring the band back to relive that feeling they may have, well, forgotten. I used to think it was a bad idea, but I’m not sure I believe that so much anymore.