Less than two weeks after turning Phish into Seinfeld on his show Everybody’s Live, comedian John Mulaney expounded on his love for the band in a new interview with Rolling Stone.
In the article, Mulaney goes through all the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees and the nominees who didn’t make the cut. Mulaney did the same thing for Rolling Stone in 2018 for what was intended to be an annual tradition, though the comedian understated, “Covid and some personal problems got in the way.”
Despite resoundingly winning the fan vote, Phish was not chosen for induction into the Rock Hall, with Mulaney saying simply, “This is a crime.” Though Mulaney has long worn his love for Steely Dan on his sleeve, his admiration for the iconic jam band is decidedly less publicized.
“I come on board around 1997 at age 14, 15,” Mulaney said. “When I started listening to them, people at the shows told me, ‘You really missed it. It’s over now.’ I think it was after A Live One came out, people were like, ‘Well, you didn’t see the early years.'”
While Mulaney admits his show count isn’t terribly high, as a Chicago native he’s caught Phish runs at the various rights of passage like Deer Creek and Alpine Valley. The father of two young children concedes, “I’d go anytime, I just keep not being able to.” But Phish isn’t the only jam band in Mulaney’s Rolodex, as he rattled off fellow heavy hitters The String Cheese Incident, moe., The Disco Biscuits, and Leftover Salmon.
“On every level, this was hugely important music to us,” Mulaney said of jam bands. “It really kept bands alive. The idea of a band in 1999 playing fucking guitars, piano, and drums was not always easy to find. In that documentary [Between Me and My Mind about Trey Anastasio], Trey said that Tommy Lee saw them on the cover of Rolling Stone and went, ‘Finally, a fucking band,’ and the excitement of that.”
Continuing that thread, Mulaney went on to praise Phish for introducing younger audiences to classic bands that they otherwise may not have been exposed to.
“The music they introduced my generation to as well was hugely important,” he said. “I learned to be eclectic from them. They were always getting compared to the Grateful Dead, but they had this whole world of influences that was really fun to pick up on and cross-check … Getting back into the Talking Heads. Getting into Zappa. That was all them. They also made you want to go to concerts. They’re just good for music and they have been for decades.
Beyond the art itself, Mulaney also highlighted the hypocrisy of snubbing one of the best-selling live acts of this century, one that has been a consistent live draw for decades without any real support from the mainstream music industry.
“Now, on the business end, these people printed money,” Mulaney observed. “They are enormously successful. Most of my life being on the road, I have a real aversion to snubbing people that sell out football stadiums night after night but aren’t necessarily propped up by the industry.
“It’s not that the money’s important,” he continued, “but whenever the music business has gone up and down and up and down, they have just consistently brought their music to fans at a huge profit. People pay and travel to see Phish at a time when it’s hard to get people to click on Spotify. I wonder what it is [that didn’t get them inducted]. So many people like Phish; I’m sure so many people on the committee like Phish. I bet it’s oversight more than snobbery.”
Mulaney also confronted some of the popular notions that keep people from getting into Phish, and maybe even repelled some at the Rock Hall.
“People that keep it at arm’s length and didn’t want to get into it because they thought it was their friend with the hemp choker in high school or whatever, we’re not dumb. They fucking rock,” he said. “It’s not all Gamehendge [the fictional setting for numerous Phish songs], if that bothers you. I love it, but if that bothers you, it’s not all Gamehendge. It’s not all mythology and everyone in the crowd knows when to yell. The songs are great, we’re not stupid people.”
Recently, Mulaney was able to take a step beyond fandom and personally work with Phish in an artistic context. Late last month, the band appeared on Mulaney’s weekly Netflix talk show Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney, making a brief cameo portraying characters from Seinfeld. Mulaney says it was not hard to convince Trey Anastasio, Mike Gordon, Page McConnell, and Jon Fishman to dress up and do the bit.
“We talked about doing a variety of things on the show, but they were on tour and they had their time in Los Angeles and it was the greatest,” Mulaney recalled. “I thought of it originally as, ‘What if they did a play of Seinfeld?’ I didn’t know what this would be for and then I thought, ‘Oh, it would be through the telescope we’d see them living as Seinfeld.’ It was going to be an ad for a Broadway show of Seinfeld starring Phish. We made it more palatable, a little.”
Check out the full interview with John Mulaney here. Phish gets back on the road next month, kicking off its summer tour with a two-night run in New Hampshire on June 20th and 21st. Find tickets and a complete list of tour dates here.