My girlfriend and I have a running bit where we try and prove that the other one is a hippie. Christine is a hippie because she went to school in Eugene, makes skirts out of pillow cases she bought at the Salvation Army, and has more Grateful Dead songs on her iPod than I do. She says I'm a hippie because of my widely eclectic and vastly superior tastes in music -- most notably, my affinity for a small handful of "jam bands." I hate the expression "jam bands" almost as much as I hate hippies.
And no, I'm not talking about the 60's hippie. This is a discussion about music and not politics. I've got no beef with the 60's hippie's preference in music. Instead, I want to discuss the modern hippie and how they've managed to tarnish the reputations of a few bands that I love. Whether they're cynical, elitist, naive, apathetic, and/or just plain smelly, the modern hippie is the worst.
(Note: I need to set politics aside when I discuss the modern hippie -- otherwise I'll become enraged. While I generally side with leftists, the modern hippie's plan for changing the world constitutes: smoking copious amounts of weed and from what I can tell, little else. Having knowledge of society's ills and the means to change them, but doing nothing about it, is almost as repugnant as moving out to LA to pursue sitcom writing as a profession.)
The modern hippie loves "jam bands." For modern hippies, the draw of the jam band is a unique live experience every time you see a band. That, in of itself, sounds like a wonderful thing. In practice, it has created a market for bands that seemingly can only be enjoyed if the people who see them are high. Here's a good general rule: (The Acid Tests aside) if you need to be fucked up to enjoy a band, what they're playing probably isn't very good. I'm not saying the musicians playing the music are lousy, rather, their product seems to be either cliché, boring, and/or exhausting. The ability to play a song for fifteen minutes or more does not make the song or the band worth seeing live. Over the past couple days I forced myself to listen to the "jam on" station on my Sirius radio and not change the channel, in an attempt to do some research for this blog. In the eight months prior, I have never successfully gotten through a song by the following bands: Moe, Widespread Panic, Umphry's McGee, Tea Leaf Green, Railroad Earth, The Breakfast, and a handful of other jam bands that seem to be beloved by the modern hippie.
So what's the problem? Why not let the modern hippie have their stoner music in peace? Well, the problem is, the modern hippie also loves some really good bands and their association with these bands, seems to ruin the band's reputation and dissuade non-hippies from giving them a chance. Take Robert Randolph. He's the best steel petal guitar player in the world; his concerts, something like a gospel show on speed, are so good they make this Jew want to convert. Yet, his hippie following seems to immediately delegitimize his reputation as a great musician.
The same is true with two jazz/fusion trios, The Bad Plus and Medeski, Martin, and Wood. The Bad Plus is doing some revolutionary stuff in jazz with their melodic in your face piano and accessibility of their contemporary pop covers. MMW, perhaps the opposite of accessible, has infused Afro rhythms and electronica into the classic jazz trio structure. Innovators in a musical genre of innovation, these two groups have the jam band stigma attached because far too many of the people attending their shows are stoned out of their gourd. It's almost as if, people outside the hippie community see the correlation between drugs and music and assume it must be crap if the bulk of the people enjoying the show are high.
The ultimate example of this seems to be Phish. I still love Phish and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Now, I hear them shit upon (by hipsters in particular... but that's part 2) more often than other "jam band." Why? People can no longer separate the music from the modern hippie twirling to it.
Top 3 things I hate about Phish heads:
1. They think there's some deep meaning to the songs. In reality, the lyrics, written by Tom Marshall, are generally bits and pieces of poems Marshall has written, cut and pasted together by the band to fit the song.
2. Their belief that Phish is start of and end all of great music. Come on! They're a great band, but really?! You don't want to expand your horizons a little (and no, the String Cheese Incident doesn't count as expanding your horizons).
3.There's an old joke I like, "How do you starve a Phish Head? Hide their parent's credit card underneath a bar of soap." That sums up number 3 pretty well.
Top 3 things that make me not ashamed to love Phish:
1. The band was composed of four incredibly versatile and talented musicians. Innovators, the band was prolific in a variety of genres including: rock, funk, jazz, blues, folk, bluegrass, heavy metal, acoustic, and even classical (Trey Anastatio wrote and conducted a symphony a few years ago).
2. The band developed their sound in the eighties. They seemingly rejected all of the trends in music of the time. Comparisons to the Grateful Dead fall flat -- their sound had more in common with Traffic. As they developed their chops, experimented, and meshed, the band created a distinctive sound, often imitated (by other jam bands) but never recreated. It was something totally original.
3. Having been to a good number of shows, I can safely say that every show was a unique and enjoyable live experience.
Now that being said, I won't go so far to say everyone should enjoy Phish. Obviously that's not the case. They're lousy singers, they have weak lyrics, some of their songs are painfully boring and/or annoying, and the patience to appreciate a band improvise for fifteen minutes is not something everyone possesses. So, not liking Phish is fine, but saying they're a shitty band is silly and demonstrates some serious musical ignorance. If you don't like jam bands, okay, but please, I implore you to withhold judgment on bands until you actually listen to the music. Don't let the fact that hippies like the music discourage you from giving it a shot. Don't be that stuck up hipster who turns up their nose at the very mention of a "jam band." (more on hipsters in part 2)
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3 comments:
It's certainly true that dirty, politically apathetic (despite some vague and self-professed from of "communitarianism") hippies ruin some decent music. I feel confident saying that if it weren't for an intolerable fan base, I would think Phish was a decent band. They're good musicians, yes, but also very boring. Technical virtuosity only goes so far, and when a band subsitutes it for any genuine musical innovation, they rely on the boring ol' strategy of trying to turn quantity into quality. This wouldn't be unforgivable if the majority of their fans didn't suck.
As for Robert Randolph, he's damn good, but not the best. I would argue the best petal and lap steel guitar players are the Campbell Brothers from my wonderful hometown of Rochester, NY. Their record, produced by John Medeski, is the only really convincing proof for God. Moreover, they gave Robert Randolph his first guitar.
[x] excitedly anticipating hipster mockery.
Cousteau introduced me to MMW in college, and for about a year I developed an awkward man-crush on Billy Martin and believed that I would drum like him if I just watched him perform at shows. It did not work. He also introduced me to The Roots and, really, to all hip hop in general. My taste in music owes a lot to his influence.
That said, we were also pretty stoked watching Jon Fishman suck on a vacum cleaner and call it music. My point is that sometimes drugs rule.
Phish's main fault was that, like many successful and passionate relationships, the first break up did not take. By all accounts, the peak Phish years were in the mid-1990s. By the end of that decade, Phish entered the mainstream - no pun intended - and in doing so made Jam Bands as mainstream as they could get without actually appearing on MTV.
Go back to 2000, Big Cypress, a celebration of Hippie-dom. Phish actually appeared on ABC and probably played "Back on the Train" or something. And to counter this mainstream attention, Trey made the crowd chant "cheesecake" after the song, like that was some rebellious act that would freak the home audience and re-establish Phish as a counter-culture icon. Why didn't Fishman jump out naked? Where was the flying hot dog, or some huge balloons or something?
Anyway, that's all for pop culture nerds and not music lovers. But Phish's music was also watered-down at that point(listen to Farmhouse, Round Room or Undermind...sad), which is why they should have stayed down after the first break-up. Musical innovation is indeed the key to longevity, but Phish had become musically AND culturally boring - a killer combination.
So Phish sucks. Caveat to the reader: personally, I am a black-white person and I like two kinds of music: unique, complex music that makes me think (Mars Volta) and stripped-down, fun music that entertains (Bruce Springsteen - I know, I know, but listen to him perform "The Seeger Sessions" and you might change your mind).
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