Great article!! Such an emotional time. Forgive this repost but apparently I saved my Coventry review from 2004, 95% of which is copied below. There was a rager of a debate about the cause of the breakup at the time. Alas, I am happy to be wrong so far about Trey.s

Its been a while since I've posted here on rmp. Over time, I've seen ~80 shows and posted dozens of reviews and no doubt phish's music will cause me great joy as long as I live. But I couldn't sustain 2 traveling tours a year and before long, career realities and changing priorities gradually took me out of the mix. I lived the phishy lifestyle and I loved it, and I'm going to miss it, but after a month or two of annoyance I have come to agree that Trey made a wise choice this year.

For a long time, I kept a password based on a lyric in Chalkdust in honor of the "Can't I live while I'm young" attitude. The answer used to be yes. But neither I, nor our favorite band, is young anymore. All the emotions on display at Coventry, sadness, anger, confusion, the temporary joy of a jam, the resignation, all of these seem to me to be the somewhat overdue death knoll of Trey's youth.

Trey is a serious drug addict. That is an assertion I wish wasn't true but it is, and if you doubt it, read on, I think there is enough evidence to put that to rest. I hope he can get healthy, but he's got a hard road ahead if he wants to get clean. Given that he has growing children, Phish as a band, Phish as a creative entity, and whatever it means to the immediate phish family, well all that is going to have to be 2nd place and for us to feel otherwise is selfish and shitty. I don't know to what extent health issues lie behind the end of phish, but one way or another, the end could not wait any longer. Either Trey has to make a break and get healthy or he had to end the band before it devolved musically into a long, pathetic decline.

There are enough great moments and strong shows 2000-2004 that there is little doubt that I would still enjoy seeing and hearing the band knowing that skipping shows could mean missing a SPAC or Nassau or Big Cypress. Having said that, the flub situation was on wicked display at Coventry and it causes me to cringe. Sobriety will raise your standards and expectations. It will also cause you to become far less willing to accept the tourscum. Lots of drugs in the scene in 93-94-95. Not too much tourscum until after Jerry died. Phish sold out 2 shows at Great Woods in 94, don't believe the nonsense history that phish "got big" after the demise of the Dead. People with the musical interest and desire for a fresh scene had made the switch early and the paranoia, theft, and meanness seen on recent tours simply didn't exist. That accounts for at least some of the nostalgia for those days, that and months like Aug 93.

I've seen rumours floated on rmp about the band's various drug habits for a decade, and much of it has been somewhat meanspirited speculation. However, the collective anecdotal evidence is beginning to weigh. I saw Trey from the best seat at Shoreline last summer and on the movie screen thrice this summer, and he looks like shit. His eyes, especially. Moreover, the sniffling and touching his face that has been commented on before is much more striking up close. The rubbing of his nose and face is the dead giveaway. Sorry phans. Trey's face taking up half a giant movie screen was an "Oh My" they've been right all along sort of moment.

Consider the flubs. I'd like to think that the composed sections would be tighter with more practice, but I don't know. Mike's playing has gotten better and better and better and he alone is worth a ticket, and the moments of him and Trey playing together this weekend (e.g. Free) were amazing. Mike's improvement in contrast to Trey's degredation is a powerful contrast of sobriety to inebrieation.

Consider the recent Vegas shows. What a disgrace. Really. Usually a "bad" phish show is better than a good anything else. Not with Vegas.

Consider Trey's final Makisupa filler -- you know, the part after "I woke up this morning..." that at Clifford Ball was followed by "Dank" and whatnot. Last week, Trey said "poured myself a tall, cool soymilk" Hmm.

Consider the acknowledged heavy use of LSD and other drugs by Trey and the band. These drugs do not automatically lead to harder drugs, but they sometimes do. Look around the lot scene. Lots of phamily, for lack of a better word, made that leap even though they knew better, and I'm sure the band attracted its fair share of negative attention with their money and history. Remember that Bisco were once phans. They and their ilk are not the only ones with enough money, time, and desire to find their way into blow or whatever is on Trey (and quite possibly Page's) mind.

Musically, the band's sound went from something very stony to something I could play for tweaked out gay dance club lunatics. TAB even more so ("Push on Till the Day" . I'd like to think that this was a band that forced themselves to change styles, but the patience with a groove thing, which could be totally brilliant, could also lead to "OK, get on with it" moments in the music. When I can hear that something isn't working and can see Trey lost in la la land, well, I have to assume that he is higher than I. I like the groove thing as a baseline more than the spacy 95 era guitar loop stuff but I have to wonder if the choice of chemicals had an affect there.

I'm fairly sure that Trey and maybe Page use some sort of snortable drug on stage, from what I've seen, they wave off the cameras at certain times and Trey is visibly altered in any case.

The point of this is not to assert that the music was crappy in recent years, most of the time it wasn't. When high, one's coordination and memory does not go to hell. It is the crash. Trey didn't crash out on stage -- although he was pretty close at times during Coventry -- but I think it is a safe assumption that less creative work was done between shows than in earlier tours and an overall sense of exhaustion revealed itself at times.

I'm also not buying the we don't tour much because of our families argument. First off, they can travel first class so the family can come along if that's what people wanted, and sometimes they did, but I would suggest that the family vs. tour thing is a little more complicated than time away from home. Lots of parents have to spend far, far more time away from their kids for professional reasons and you can't bring a 5 year old on a business trip, period. You -can- fly your family out to a week's worth of tour combined with a visit to family. Then again, if any number of people on tour are wacked out on a regular basis, you probably don't want to bring kids within a mile of the place. When Kid Rock shows up, maybe chilling in Vermont is the lesser of two evils.

Now let's look at the lyrics. What do YOU think "Two Versions of Me" is about? Check out these lines:

"One more bottle is dry
One less reason to try

Six feet underneath..."

What about the Dog Faced Boy breakout? There are plenty of ambiguous lyrics out there that could relate to a party gone awry. Most of them are probably not about drugs, but then again, the celebration of getting high that crept into a number of older phish tunes has gone away. "Taste" has an interesting line: "I can see through the lines" I first thought this was "I can see through the lies" but that's not the lyric, even if it might be an intentional wordplay. I can see through the -lines-. The lines of fans? Sure. Plenty of lyrics about stardom and success out there. The lines of music? The lines of drugs? Read all the lyrics through once. He's up, he's down, he wants a taste for free (Can't have it, there is no such thing as a free taste of hard drugs, eh), the fog surrounds. Hmm.

Even without the speculative circumstantial evidence, something is wrong here, we've known it all along but been in collective denial, those of us who didn't figure this out years ago. It isn't just with Trey. The 90s ended but the diehards couldn't give it up. Phish fans should know and love the band Gomez, a totally underrated and genius group, their most recent album's lyrics, esp. "Nothing is Wrong" stand in contrast to earlier ones celebrating a party. Rufus Wainwright has a party album (Poses) and a recovery album (Want). Its a little bit of a coincidence that several of my favorite artists are singing about the same things in the last year or two, but then again, these same people are about my age and it is possible that the arc of their party lasted a little longer than mine before hitting the brick wall.

Can't this wait till I'm Old? No, I'm afraid not. Being young at heart, being fresh and open to new ideas, taking risks, trying things out, hopefully these traits never go away. But this can't wait. YOU CAN STILL HAVE FUN!! Right, Trey? I hope so for his sake. I can have fun without phish. Can Trey have fun without whatever he's doing? It seems like he can't.

Trey's decision at first seemed to me to be a selfish act that made little sense. I understand wanting total control, going solo, wanting to work with other musicians, not wanting the expectation of tour and a good amount of employees twisting in the wind, but combined with the guitar-heavy jam style of recent years it all seemed to add up to something like Trey being a prima donna. That may or may not also be true, but it is also possible that the end of phish was an act of self-preservation. Going out while the jams were still generally great was a classy move. I wish phish was ready to be consistently great again. But I can't see that happening unless Trey cleans up, so I'm ready to Let It Be. Phish is a great band with a great creative legacy and I wish those guys the absolute best. After seeing Trey's face this weekend I know he made a wise choice to end phish. Let's hope his wisdom leaves him in Vermont for a while, but you fans that wish for a recovery followed by a reunion, you have to be real, most people do not really fully recover.

Sad, but true.

Goodbye, phish!

love,
Scott
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Vegas is going to be weird for Trey. Glass tables and the 5 star rooms. Expect all the Joy era recovery pieces to be in the setlists somewhere or another. So glad they are back and better than ever.