I spend a lot of time alone, working in my studio, with a radio and nothing else — making art. I didn’t have much experience or interest collaborating on creative endeavors with anyone until I started making things with James. I appreciate his zest and drive to work on many things at once and at all times, 24/7. It is inspiring and it is good. Art and more art. Working with James creatively continues to be a special experience for me. I tried erasing him but it looks like I used the wrong side of the pencil. I’ll keep trying. – Carter

James Franco, Carter and I met in room 407 at the Bowery Hotel in lower Manhattan. The building is rumored to be haunted and over the course of our conversation we used a glow-in-the-dark Ouija board to contact spirits and answer interview questions. We wore formal attire, wigs and sunglasses. The curtains were drawn for a dim seance.

I. I Be Your Mum

I was talking to one of the bellboys about people’s experiences with hauntings in this hotel, and he told me about all this footage he’d seen from cameras here. Things moving on their own.

James Franco: Oh, right. Yeah.

Carter: Surveillance cameras?

Surveillance cameras.

JF: Well, I have to say, I stayed here when we were doing press for “Pineapple Express,” and I was feeling fine, and then I got into the room, and — didn’t you visit? That was that night!

C: Yeah. We were up at the corner…

JF: I just felt so depressed that night. Everything was good, going well —

C: And then I showed up. [Laughs.]

JF: No, but after you left I felt so bad to the point where I was calling Seth Rogen, and I never call him. He wasn’t answering, and I was calling him to get some support or something because I was feeling so bad about myself. And I was like, What is going on? And then I went down in the morning and was like, Does anyone ever complain about this place being haunted? And I don’t even think that way, but I woke up in the morning thinking I was just haunted. And then I went down and they were like, Yeah, there’s that graveyard in the back. This is built on the one of the oldest graveyards in Manhattan.

C: That was possession, it sounds like.

JF: Then I have another haunted hotel story. Do you have any?

C: I don’t have a haunted story, but when I was a kid, I was missing for a few hours, and my parents were freaking out. It was the middle of the summer, and I went outside — I was probably about seven or eight — and I was in the yard, and I remember being really tired in the afternoon. I never take naps, even to this day, but for some reason I must’ve fallen asleep on the lawn, right next to the house. My parents were looking for me for like three or four hours. I woke up, and I’m right there, and I see my mom and she’s crying, and she’s like, “Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you everywhere!” I’m like, right here. I was like right there the whole time. Apparently they couldn’t find me. It was just like missing time.

JF: Where’d you go?

C: I don’t know. I wish I could tell you.

Let’s ask the Ouija board.

JF: Is that what we’re going to ask? We’re going to ask the board?

Yeah. Where did you go?

JF: Okay. So how do we do it?

You’re supposed to ask very clear questions, it says.

C: Okay, I’ll ask the very clear question. Very queer question.

A very queer one.

C: So you put your hands here.

JF: Both hands or one hand?

C: Both.

I think both, yeah. Let me light one of the — [lights a candle]

JF: Okay, I’ll ask the question. Where did Carter go in 1978 for those few hours in that afternoon? [Pauses, speaks in a whisper] Then what do we do?

We’re supposed to wait a few minutes.

C: [Whispering] If we put too much weight on it …

JF: [Whispering] You just touch lightly?

[Whispering] Maybe ask it a yes or no question first.

C: Is there anyone here that can answer us? Yes or no?

JF: [Whispering] Are we doing this right? Because the board’s moving.

C: Oh my God, it is.

JF: The board’s moving. Are we doing this right?

C: No, the board is moving.

JF: I think we gotta stick the board down.

Yeah, do we have some tape?

C: You’re not pressing on it, are you? Because if you have too much weight on it, it’s gonna slide.

You have to be very gentle, I think.

JF: Put some wet toilet paper under it? Right?

The table’s gonna be disgusting.

C: Okay, let’s try it again.

JF: Oh, do we do one finger?

I think you do two each.

JF: Are there instructions? Can somebody read the instructions?

C: I think you’re just supposed to do what you feel.

[Laughs.] That’s what it says in the instructions.

C: Okay. Is there anyone here that can answer our questions?

JF: Then we touch really lightly.

I don’t think it’s working…

C: W?

JF: W. E.

That’s an E?

C: H?

JF: H.

C: WEHS.

WEHSU

C: WEHSU. Well, ask WEHSU a question.

JF: Wehsu is listening. Alright. I’ll ask that question again, and then we’ll go to something else. Where did Carter go when he was a kid in that yard in the mid-seventies?

JF: I. B. R. Holy cow. M. IBRM?

[still moving] IBRMUM

JF: I be your mum!

Does that mean anything to you?

C: No.

II. Very Boring and Conceptual

So what was the other haunted hotel experience?

JF: Okay, so I was getting ready to do this movie down in New Orleans that Nicholas Cage was going to direct, called Sonny. And we were just out there getting ready to prepare. We weren’t shooting yet. Eventually Nick bought a huge house and that’s where we shot and he lived, but this was just preparation, so we all stayed in a Hotel called the Bourbon Orleans right on Bourbon Street. And he was getting ready to do this movie that eventually Keanu Reaves did, but for a while Nick Cage was signed on, called Constantine, about this character that just talks to dead people, or something. He was getting ready to do Constantine, and he heard that this hotel was haunted and had once been this nunnery. There were two rooms that were supposed to be especially haunted. So Nick took one, because he wanted it — he wanted an encounter with a spirit. And so I was like, screw it, I’ll take the other one. Supposedly my room had belonged to a nun that had killed herself — had, I think, hanged herself. So it was in the day. I went in, and it was a tiny little room and the bed filled half the room, and then there was a bathroom and a closet. I went in, put my bag on the bed, and it was completely quiet. And then a minute later I hear whoosh, like this rushing water in the bathroom. And I go in there and the sink is on full blast, and it hadn’t been that way when I walked in. And I knew I asked for a haunted room, so I was like — just in case — “Hi, if there are any spirits here, I’m on your side, and I don’t mean any harm.” And I tried the faucet to see if it was loose, if it would get that way by accident, and it wasn’t like that. And then I thought, Oh, maybe it’s a tourist thing — like the haunted hotel. Like they have some switch that will turn the faucet on. But it wasn’t. I asked some of the maids and they really didn’t know anything about that room, but they were like, oh, there’s a confederate soldier that haunts the halls. And he likes blondes. He bothers the blondes.

C: Nice.

How’d they know it was a confederate soldier?

JF: I guess he’d been decapitated there, or something. Or maybe people had seen him or something. Nothing ever happened again in that room, but the funny thing about New Orleans is that people just talk about ghosts differently there.

C: Like it’s normal.

JF: You go into any restaurant, and they’ll be like, yeah, this place is just haunted. There’s a ghost in the attic, or whatever.

Voodoo floats around down there.

C:  Were you scared in the room?

JF: No, not really. I remember watching a documentary about Heidi Fleiss in that room.

C: That’ll switch the mood.

JF: Well, because I was playing a male prostitute.

C: I remember. It was a good movie. I liked it. Thumbs up.Let’s talk about “Erased James Franco.” What were you trying to erase in that film?

C: Did you see it?

No, I never got to see it.

C: No one’s seen it.

I don’t know where to see it.

C: You can’t really see it anywhere.

JF: How are you going to show it again, Carter?

C: It’s actually showing right now in Vienna. But you can only see it if it’s showing in a gallery or a theater.

JF: Do you ever want to release it?

C: I think at some point, because a lot of people ask about it, but I like that it’s like a Warhol film that you can’t really find. No one ever sees Warhol films. They just talk about them.

Yeah. It’s the idea of the film that’s important.

C: Because they have this knowledge of them, and most people haven’t seen half of them, unless you really, really seek them out. A lot of people think they know a lot about them, and then they see them and it’s completely different than you expected.

C: I think your question about “Erased James Franco”—

JF: It changed me.

C: I always tell you that it’s going to be the film that people remember you by.

JF: I don’t know if that’s true. [Laughs] But it changed me.

C: Fifty years. Mark my words.

What are you erasing? Are you erasing the old roles?

JF: Originally, I think the “erased” thing comes from the very early concept that changed a bit. That it was based on Erased de Kooning by Rauschenberg, and it was going to be a truly erased performance, that I would sit there in a chair, and give a full feature length performance in my head, but only ten percent would come to the surface.

C: We did a test, and the test is fucking awesome. It was like two little tests that I did on my tiny camera — I think I probably sent it to you. It’s James in my studio doing what he just described  —reliving scenes that he had done already, in previous films, but not allowing him to move at all — his body. Or his voice. It’s so great when I think of it, because it is boring as shit — nothing’s happening. But when you talk about what is happening and then you watch it again, it’s exhilarating.

So the idea was, in the same way that Erased de Kooning had little remnants of the original showing through,  remnants from James’ previous performances are showing through?

C: Yeah.

JF: But what Carter was talking about was — I think this is how it went down — I was like, conceptually, that’s really interesting. I like that. But you were talking about how you wanted to show it, in a gallery, but you want people to watch the whole thing.

C: I want people to sit and watch it.

JF: And I said, well, this seems more like a video that you put on the wall and then people would watch 30 seconds of.

C: I didn’t want that. I still don’t.

JF: Right. So then we started thinking about, Okay, how do you expand it, that’s when it expanded to multiple films, but also on particular things in those films. Like, you wanted to focus on parts of a performance that normally don’t get emphasis, so things like eating, or drinking.

C: Picking up the phone. Walking.

JF: Yeah, talking on the phone is just expositional stuff. Walking through doors. Reading. Writing. So you looked through all those films I did and looked for all those—

C: Those really boring parts. Very boring and conceptual. And then that’s what we redid; just the boring parts.

JF: But then you brought in some emotional scenes, too.

C: Some, yeah. I made you sit up a little bit. But at some point we have to go back and make the true original.

JF: It was kind of like the character I was playing was suffering some unnamed thing in a way. And if you want to read a narrative into it, it has a lot, and it made me realize the narratives of all of the films that I’ve done, when they’re mixed up they kind of make sense, or they’re kind of the things that would recur. I did a lot of films where the character had issues with his father or is struggling to be creative, or that kind of thing. Carter said you should allow 10 percent of the acting to come to the surface. This is the way he described it: you want to give a good performance — it’s as if you’re trying to give the best performance—

C: But you’re not allowed to.

JF: So it kind of seems that the character is a little drugged or something, or a little out of it.  But because we know we’re redoing films that I’ve done before, it’s like the character’s aware that it’s a performance, and we know it’s a recreation, but he’s also kind of engaged with it and into it. And so that awareness makes these cliché subject matters kind of alive again, because of that awareness. Like how many movies have you seen where the son’s like, “Dad, you don’t understand me!” But if the character’s aware that he’s doing a kind of cliché scene, then it becomes something different.

III. Shit Gets Cut.

A lot of artists talk about art as a form of channeling. I feel like most artists, especially as they get older, get to a point and they think something more than themselves is happening. It’s not just discursive thinking or preparation. So I wonder if, with the ghost metaphor, if you ever think that that’s going on in your work. This kind of possession.

C: It just kind of steers itself? I think all art is different. There’s so many different kinds of art. You’d ask some artists that, they’d have no idea what you’re talking about — they don’t care about that kind of thing. But I do. I feel that. I feel there’s always been this one long line of what I’ve been doing, whether it’s painting or drawing or film or sculpture, and they’re all very related. What those lines are I couldn’t tell you. I could probably hit on some, but they’re for me to discover over my lifetime.

JF: Well also in “Maladies” there’s some of that, right? A lot of talk about predecessors and Melville, and you gave me—

C: That sketch?

JF: You gave me that sketch, and you said, This is the character, this big whale.

C: Yeah. I think that note was really helpful.

JF: It was.

Did you feel like you needed to steer the performance in a direction it wasn’t going?

C: No, I wouldn’t say that. I just felt it was partly my fault. I’m very unclear directing someone.

JF: So you thought saying I was a whale would clear it up? [Laughs.]

C: Yeah, I thought it would. It did the trick. It just adds more smoke to the room.

Is there any other way to articulate what the whale was about?

C: The character in the beginning was supposed to have in the very beginning — and we did — have an unknown ailment, a malady. And I never told you what that was, and I never knew myself, and I still don’t, but I knew it was a conglomeration of all these mental ailments rolled up into one, manifested in your character in your film. And that’s what you portrayed.

JF: Right. But when you said you were a whale, it was like he’s got all this inside him, and he’s traveling around, and nobody really understands him. And then I was like, Oh, I see. He’s trying to communicate. And his art is a way of trying to communicate, it’s just that nobody can really understand.

C: Right. There’s like a haze in front of trying to communicate with other people.

JF: But it’s crazy how long that thing was being developed, though. Remember, we started talking about it after “Erased James Franco,” and for a while it was called Gay Rapist.

C: No, it was called GR for Gay Rapist, because we didn’t want to offend anyone.

JF: Because Gawker had done this headline that I was a gay rapist. And actually in the early stages it had a lot of the elements. It was going to be two artists of different types. And that’s how we got talking about soap operas. That’s how I went on “General Hospital,” is we were talking about” Maladies,” and we were like, Oh yeah, maybe there’s a Soap Opera thing. And then you were like, What if you really went on a soap opera?

As preparation for the role?

JF: No, it was just kind of an idea at that point.

C: Yeah, and then it just kind of happened.

JF: And then I was like, You know what, my manager represents Steve Burton, who is like, the biggest soap star on “General Hospital.” Maybe I could get on a soap opera. And they were really excited about it.

And you’re going on again, right?

JF: Yeah, I’m going to go back. I have big plans.

Is the Franco character on “General Hospital” a collaborative creation between you two?

C: I didn’t have anything to do with it. I think it was just a conversation that I started that just sort of turned into — I think you at one point you asked about the role?

JF: Yeah! You helped with that and were like, what should the role be? And then the character in GR was supposed to be a little crazy. And I told them, make him an artist and make him a little crazy.

C: And they did.

JF: And then we used, as the character’s soap opera, we used episodes from “General Hospital” on the TV in Maladies. Right?

C: For a split second. Because what was hard is that “Maladies” takes place sometime in the early ’60s. The footage from “General Hospital” obviously looks very contemporary, so we tried to find a piece that didn’t look like it was just shot this year. I think we pulled it off. But I liked that shifting of time; the film takes place in the ’60s, but it’s also referencing a real character that lives now.

It would really seem from an outsider’s perspective that you guys are working with several levels of stuff, but it also sounds like it’s all accidental, the way it came together, the way you talk about it.

JF: No, I think with those projects it was like, oh, here’s an idea. Let’s followup on that. And then the projects built on each other in cool ways.

C: And little things stay. Like if you’re talking about an idea, it doesn’t mean that you do one hundred percent of the idea. A vestige of it sticks. “Maladies” is very much like that. It’s just all these things that we’re talking about. There’s always a vestige of something in all these notes that sticks, even though it doesn’t look like it’s all really hardcore planned out.

JF: And then when I was on the “General Hospital” set, you came one time and we shot some stuff there. I did a scene where basically Gena Rowlands in—

C: Woman Under the Influence.

JF: We couldn’t use it because the script changed. Why did that change?

C: Who the fuck knows at this point? Shit gets cut. Shit gets cut! You want to be realistic, and you want to be able to step outside of yourself for a second, and you want people to go into a theater and sit down and watch this. Let’s be realistic and whittle it down to an hour and a half.

JF: Now, why did you want to do it that way?

C: What way?

JF: Why did you want it to be in theaters where some people would buy tickets for it, rather than be it a piece that people would play in the gallery?

C: Because, first of all, it’s a challenge to make a narrative film like that that people will watch. It’s really, really, really hard to do. So it was a challenge for me. Secondly, I just wanted an audience. I wanted more people to be able to see it, but also have an audience come see something that’s a little more challenging for them, too.

When you say challenging, what do you mean?

C: Well, the narrative isn’t…

Linear?

C: Yeah, well, it is. Because we worked really hard at getting it to that point. Really hard. The challenge is for people to sit down and watch something that’s a little more loose and wide open.

This divide, too, is something I wanted to ask you about, because both of you now are coming at it from different approaches – art and film. I wonder if there’s some imaginary line, if not just in your heads, between making art and what you might call entertainment. And the way you’re talking about it, it sounds like there is, like you’re pushing yourself toward entertainment.

C: Well any art you’re making to entertain people if you want to show it to them, whether it’s in a gallery or a movie theater. There’s always some level of entertainment. I mean there has to be. But, certainly, if you have “Erase James Franco” on one end of the spectrum, and then you have something on the other end, which is “Maladies.”

JF: Like Carter says it’s always got to be a little bit entertaining. Like, I want stuff that’s gonna be intriguing. Even if you don’t want to make boring art, there’s something still interesting about Andy Warhol’s boring films. You’re still like, Oh, that’s great. Conceptually, it’s exciting. And a lot of the art I do is derived from film, it’s just that I’m not trying to sell tickets with the work. To me, that is one of the big divides — the way the work is distributed and seen and recoups its costs. With film there is more of a responsibility to entertain. If people are actually going to buy tickets, it’s just a different kind of thing. There’s a different kind of expectation. You can set it up as an “art film,” but I really have to prepare them for what they’re going to watch. When we showed “Erase James Franco” at MoMA, it was perfect because it’s a theater, but it’s at MoMA, so if it doesn’t have a super strong narrative, it’s okay. The audience wasn’t going there to watch “Jaws.”

Right, the context is—

JF: A lot of the work I do with the art world is photography or videos or film that do also have narratives, but it’s a change to tell things and to break the rules — break narrative rules, break the rules that your art needs to look great. It actually can be more about the concept, and you can do things in such a way that you shoot on video, and it doesn’t necessarily look the best, and maybe that’s kind of the point — that it doesn’t. Whereas if I direct a film that I know is going to go to theaters, you usually want the technical aspects of it to be of a certain level. Then again, I’ve done two feature films since NYU, one based on a poet, Hart Crane — an obscure poet — and then one about the late actor Sal Mineo. Now, I know those subjects are not going to be blockbusters, but we made it for a responsible price, and we did it in such a way so it didn’t cost a lot of money. They’re both period pieces — you know Hart Crane lived in ’20s New York — but there are plenty of buildings with facades here that are of that period or earlier that you just go and frame, and you frame everything else out. And it looks great.

So you would say the main difference, then, is money, between the two.

JF: That’s one of the differences. I think one of the things you have to think about is people say, Oh, most mainstream movies are so dumb, and they do the same thing over and over again. Yeah, they do. Partly because they don’t have any imagination, but partly also because they’re investing tons of money and so they want to recoup their investments. So they play it on the safer side. They play it to what has worked. That’s why somebody like Danny Boyle — yeah, he’s playing in the world of entertainment, but he also likes to do movies that challenge you, so he doesn’t accept a $100-million dollar budget movie. He’ll do $20-million dollar movies, even though he could do the biggest movies around, because he wants a little bit more of the freedom to make challenging movies.

C: Even 20′s a lot.

Did you feel that kind of pressure on “Maladies”?

C: You mean to get something in to make money?  No. I just felt really lucky to have people that supported the project that just really wanted us and me to do what we wanted to do. I mean, really lucky. I don’t know what’s going to happen with “Maladies,” but if we’re lucky, people will see it and we’ll make money back.

IV. Set-up, Set-up, Punchline

How did the “Three’s Company” video piece come about?

JF: I want to ask this thing a question, though.

We’ve been neglecting it.

C: Ouija?

JF: Can we ask it a question about John Ritter?

C: First of all, we should thank him for being a great actor and really funny on “Three’s Company.” Thanks, John Ritter.

All: Thanks, John Ritter.

C: I don’t know. How old was he when he died? Forty-seven? Forty-eight? Fifty?

JF: Okay. I got one. John, did you sleep with Suzanne Somers?

[Pause as they wait.]

C: Oh, he’s going to “No.”

JF: No! Holy cow! All right.

C: Alright, let’s see if he slept with Don Knotts.

JF: [Laughs.] Okay.

C: Okay, John, with no disrespect, did you sleep with Don Knotts? He’s attractive, though.

[Pause.]

JF: I think it’s going to “no.”

John didn’t have a very active sex life.

JF: John, did you feel fulfilled as a performer?

[Pause.]

JF: Dude, I’m not even touching it.

I’m not, either.

C: Yes.

JF: Yes!

That’s good to hear.

JF: Alright. John is a nice spirit…. anyway, somehow we got the idea that, what if “Three’s Company” was a feature? And then we were like, What if we just take three episodes and put them together and redo them and that’s an hour and a half? We had that idea in the car.  And then last summer I was in Vancouver, and the Sundance new frontier section called and they asked, do you want to bring something?

And we did two things. We used the first six episodes — and maybe they still do this, I don’t know —  they did a super abbreviated season in the first season just to see if it would work, so they only did six episodes. The first episode is where they’ve just thrown a party because their old roommate that you’d never met just got married and is leaving them, and they need a new roommate, so they just threw her a goodbye party, and then they go in the bathroom in the morning, and they’re all hungover, and the Jack’s in there. And they’re like, [In shrill falsetto.] Who are you? And Jack’s like, What’s going on? I fell asleep in the bath, and they’re like, Alright, get out of here. And then he’s like, Okay, but I’ll make you guys breakfast to say thanks, or something like that. And he goes and makes breakfast and he’s training to be a chef.

C: Oh, that’s right. He’s a chef.

JF: He’s in cooking school. And then they’re like, Wow, you’re such a good cook — I wish you could be our roommate. But I guess it’s back in the days when the landlord wouldn’t allow a man to be a roommate living with women. And they didn’t like any of the prospects that were coming, and they were like, All right, I have an idea. Just pretend you’re gay, and then you can be our roommate. Then there are all these horrible, dated gay jokes that Mr. Roper would say. Like really not funny. Like really bad. Those were the first six episodes that  establish the format of the show, and Larry wasn’t even in there yet, and so we took those first six episodes and we projected them on a big screen at NYU and then took four cameras and shot it like it was a documentary. One camera would follow one character, and then another would follow another character, and one was going all over the place, and then one did a weird frame shot of crotches. And then we took all that stuff and then rerecorded all of the dialogue. So then I played Jack and Mrs. Roper, and then somebody else played Chrissy, and then we augmented the voices and then turned it into a drama. Because that was the idea — that we were going to always do it as a drama.

C: With the exact lines, but not as comic.

JF: It was really hard, because you realize that the show is set up like, Set-up, set-up, punchline. Set-up, set-up, punchline. It’s just always that. So it’s hard to work against that, but we did. And then we thought, maybe we’ll do an additional piece and we’ll take three episodes from the height of the show, right before Suzanne Somers started fighting over her contract. I think the fourth season was the best. Larry was in full swing. Suzanne was still there. So we took three episodes from the height of the show and then filmed them in a hotel in Vancouver, because it strangely looked like their set. The thought was it will be an installation. We’ll build a space at Sundance where it’s the living room set, because that’s where most of the show takes place. And back in the day, when the show was on, nobody had internet, so most people would be sitting with their families watching the show in their own living rooms, watching these characters in their living rooms. It was this weird mirror. So we thought, let’s pull the mirror through the screen, and we’ll make the set their living room, and the audience will come and sit in their living room and watch the show. And so we projected on all four walls, and the audience would be sitting there between all the characters. And it wasn’t like just the show projected on the four walls — because we had filmed different characters, it’s like, Chrissy’s on one side, Janet’s on the other, and the audience is truly in the middle of the set. I think it worked out well, and we’re presenting it at Terence Koh’s Asian Song Society.

How did you two meet?

C: Through art. Through painting.

JF: Yeah. I bought one of Carter’s paintings.  I went and visited your studio. And then soon after that—

C: “Erased James Franco.”

JF: Yeah. You asked if I would do the piece with you.

C: I remember meeting you and asking if I could do the piece with you and I remember thinking, this guy’s going to think I’m insane. I remember you coming in and talking really loud. You were just sitting right next to me talking really loud.

JF: Shut up.

C: And I remember thinking, why is he talking so loud? I was thinking about it the next day, and I thought actually it worked pretty good. He got my attention, and I was listening to him. Why was he talking so loud? There must be something I don’t know about. And then I tried doing to people, and it worked pretty well. You just go like this: [Loudly] Yeah, so, we’re going to use the Ouija board, and we’re going to get some stuff out of it. And then we’ll work further on it.

JF: That’s not like me at all. I really did that? In your studio?

C: In my studio.

JF: Wow.

Do you buy a lot of artwork?

JF: I did, but I don’t anymore because I go to school. I work less, and I need to spend my money on school and supplies.

What kind of art did you buy?

JF: Yeah. Yeah.  Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha. I got a Chris Burden thing. A Glenn Ligon, and a coupler Carters.

So you both work in a lot of mediums, but what’s interesting is that coming from your position, James, people are surprised to hear that you’re interested in art and writing, and maybe resistant to the idea that that could be possible — that someone could be successful and artistically fulfilled doing all these different things. Whereas I think in the art world that’s been going on for a long time. I mean, you had artists in the ’70s making paintings and videos and sculpture, but even now, there’s still this resistance in the general world to a person being a Jack of all trades.

JF: Well, I think you get it from both sides, at least initially. I mean, people get used to it. The people that I care about, like certain galleries, they’re going to show my work, so what do I care if Gawker doesn’t like it, Perez Hilton doesn’t like it. Because I come from the film world, which has a lot more commentary from cheap blogs, they’re only going to read it on the surface level; they’re not going to put any effort into investigating what I’m trying to do, or the fact that I’ve had as much training, and I’m at RISD, and I’ve had as much training as any artist that’s established. You can’t say that I’m just moonlighting or cashing in on celebrity. I’ve done the work. But those people that comment on just the surface level of things are not going to make any effort. Then there will be people in the art world who also feel like, What that fuck is this guy doing here? So I get it from both sides, a little bit.  It’s not like I’m not doing it to make more money, I’m not doing it to improve my career. I’m doing it because it’s the only outlet where I can do certain kinds of things that I want to do. And then over time, it won’t be anymore the actor that’s trying to be whatever — they’ll just get used to it.

I think that’s what my dissertation will be about. The way that different mediums and disciplines can be translated into each other, and what can be translated, what can’t be translated, what the boundaries are, how they blend. There are certain traditions of Ekphrasis, or film adaptations of a novel, so in some ways there’s a long tradition of it. We get things from so many sources now. I’m interested in works that blend a lot of different mediums and disciplines. And for me, that’s one of the fruitful things about working with Carter. “Maladies” is a film, but it involves writing novels, acting — not only with actors playing characters, but one of the characters is also an actor — and it involves painting. I’m interested in how they can all be tied up or frame each other.

Or maybe disprove each other in some ways, too.

JF: Yeah. Certainly. Certainly. And there are things that they each do better than the others. Movies are always going to be more visual — it’s always going to be more vivid than what somebody can write in a novel, but in a novel you can also suggest multiple readings, where in a movie, it’s a little harder because it’s images and it’s a little more concrete. Poetry is never gonna do narrative better than a novel, but it can do lyrical moments better than a novel. So, it’s just looking for those differences.

C: Martin Mull — the actor who was in “Roseanne”? You know, he was a painter.

This interview originally appeared in The Believer. To read more Believer stories, or to subscribe, visit www.believermag.com.

Trey Anastasio, the singer, guitarist and sometimes composer for the band, is one of the revered, old-fashioned rock guitarists from the last two decades, playing the type of soaring, lyrical guitar melodies that have been all but banished from pop music since the early ’90s. Phish — and Anastasio in particular — is often cited as the musical heir to the Grateful Dead and leader of the new generation of so-called jam bands, but while the audiences may overlap, the band’s music bears little similarity to the bluegrass rock of the Dead or the electro-psychedelic “livetronica” style that dominates the current jam-band culture.

Over the last decade, Phish has gone on hiatus, disbanded, dispersed into solo projects, and reunited. During breaks, Anastasio performed solo acoustic sets, founded a new band with a full horn section, and composed a lengthy composition, “Time Turns Elastic,” which has been performed by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. Currently, Phish is finishing its summer tour; Anastasio and his band will tour starting in October.

I met with Anastasio in New York at Soho House for a conversation over soup. He talked about his long-standing interest in the art of improvisation, playing seven-hour-long shows, set lists and the problems of conjoining art with daily life. After we spoke, I attended a Phish show at Madison Square Garden at which the audience was at full, standing applause for 45 minutes before the band even stepped onstage.

I. ANYTHING BUT YOURSELF

Do you remember when you first cared about improvisation as an art form?

I started listening to improvisational music when I was in high school. Before that, I was more interested in composition. I listened to “West Side Story” and Sly & the Family Stone — really listening to their arrangements and how they laid all the melodies. But, in that way, good improvisation has a structure. It has a form. I remember, like many guitarists, being obsessed with Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys. It was the record.

I listened to that solo on “Machine Gun” a million times.

With that one amazing note.

Yeah, the note! And I started noticing that, in his playing, it was almost like he was speaking in paragraphs. His solo has a thinking, or vocal, quality to it. It starts off thin, and then he rolls off the tone, pauses and starts another paragraph. Maybe I’m thinking about it too hard, but, you know, from everything I’ve read, Hendrix used to sleep with his guitar and practice 20,000 hours a day. So I think that’s what it takes. It doesn’t just happen. There’s a certain level of elegance that I only hear in a great improviser like that.

Would you say that with improvisation you’re trying to get to a place where it’s as fluent as speech?

More fluent. I feel a lot more bound up in a conversation than when I’m playing the guitar. I don’t necessarily sit there and practice scales every day, but I do get up and start making some form of music from the second I wake up.

Who were the important improvisers for you?

I liked Clapton, Jimmy Page. But there was this one year that changed me. It was when I saw Pat Metheny. He came to Richardson Auditorium, and he was playing with a jazz, harmonic vocabulary but with a pop sensibility. I saw King Crimson around that time, too. Robert Fripp was playing these crazy mathematical patterns. He’d be playing in a time signature of 7/4 while the other guy, Adrian Belew, played in 5/4, and they’d meet up 35 notes later. This kind of thing. But you have to put yourself in 1978. I was born in ’64. So I was 14. I saw Stanley Jordan in that same place. And Wynton Marsalis. All those concerts were in one year, and that’s the year I got into improvisation. That was the year before I left Princeton, N.J.

In what ways do you work with Phish on improvisation? Like, improvising as a full band, rather than as four individual soloists.

We had this series of exercises that we developed, called “Including Your Own Hey.” It sounds weird, but we did them a lot. They start off with a pulse. [Snaps in time] The first level is, I play a four-note phrase [sings "do-do-do-do"]; Page [McConnell] is on my right, and he imitates it on the piano; Fish [Jon Fishman] does his best to play it on the drums; then Mike [Gordon] does it on the bass. Now everyone goes around the room in a circle and everyone starts one.

It’s a copycat listening exercise.

Yeah, and then there were more levels. The next level is, I start a pattern and then Page harmonizes with it. We make a jigsaw-puzzle pattern. Then Mike finds his place in the pattern, and Fish finds his place in it. And we’re all listening to each other. Now, only when you hear that all the other musicians have stopped searching, once you hear they’ve locked in with what you’re playing, you say, “Hey!” So, since we’re still listening so intently to each other, we should all say “Hey” at the same time, but if we don’t — if someone says “Hey” when you’re still searching, they’ve basically just told you, “I’m not listening to you.” So we found, very quickly that it meant you had to always be listening to three people other than yourself. And the music, we found, improved immensely by not navel-gazing. So now the idea is, I’m not paying any attention to myself at all. I’m just responding to what they’re playing.

Then there were other levels, where you’d leave a hole in a musical phrase, and the other person could only play in that hole. That was called “Including Your Own Hey Hole.” [Laughs] So the bass lands, then the cymbal, then the guitar. [Sings, "Ba-bo-da-bing, ba-bo-da-bing."]

And this helped solidify you as a band?

Oh, yeah. We should do it again, though. We haven’t done that stuff in years. Then, in the early ’90s, we started realizing we were having tempo battles onstage. Fish would decide he’d lay back, and I’d want to rush. Every band who’s ever improvised goes through this. Then someone gives the angry glare. What are you doing? Oh my god! The gig is falling apart because you’re rushing! So one day we went into the practice room and we decided, we’re never doing that again. We did “Tempo Heys” for a week. So we’d play one note. I’d slow down. Everyone follows me. I’d speed up. Everyone follows me. I can’t lose them. And there’s no fear. That’s the important thing. Slowing down is cool. Speeding up is cool. Then we say, “Hey.” Now it’s Page’s turn. Page is speeding up and slowing down. Within two days, it stopped being a problem. When we were onstage and someone sped up or slowed down, instead of glaring, we all looked over at each other and followed them.

This is all a pretty analytical approach to improvisation, where I think a lot of people consider Phish’s music to be just “made up on the spot.”

We’re the most analytical band, in some ways. We’d talk and talk for hours about this stuff. I see improvisation as a craft and as an art. The craft part is important. There’s a lot of preparation and discipline that goes into it just so that, when you’re in the moment, you’re not supposed to be thinking at all.

I’ve heard you guys had a no-analyzing rule for a while. You wouldn’t talk to each other about how the show went.

That was for about a year. You come offstage and no one can say anything. At all. At all. Because everyone’s got their own perspective.

Someone might think it’s a horrible show and another person could think it’s a great show.

Today what I do is — I do this every night we play — I have a little quiet moment where I picture some guy having a fight with his girlfriend, getting into his car — the battery’s dead — then he gets to the parking lot and it’s full. Meets up with his friends. Comes into the show. I try to picture this one person having their own experience, and I picture them way in the back of the room. And I try to remember how insignificant my experience is, and how people’s experiences with music are their own thing. We put it out there, and if it’s of service to someone, great, but I try to get away from the idea that it’s even starting from us. And when you do that listening-exercise stuff, when I actually get into a moment where I’m only listening, I find that the music gets so much … beyond us. And I can tell that from the reaction I hear from the audience. It always feels more resonant if I can get my hands off it. If all four of us were here, they’d all be saying the same thing. It’s great as long as you listen to anybody but yourself. Anything but yourself.

Seems to be true of life, just walking around.

Right. It’s when I start applying my own fucked-up perspective to a show — so I had a bad day, whatever — that I start adding judgment to it. Or I play something and start judging what I’m playing. It’s just like that, walking around in life, that’s true! How often do I find myself walking around and being aware of my surroundings and not having some fucked-up internal dialogue in my head that never ends?

II. FREE

You put out a free-improvisation record ["Surrender to the Air"] a while back. What does free mean to you in that context?

I’d been studying with a composer and writing a lot of fugues. Fugues are very disciplined. It’s one theme and all development. You’re never allowed to bring in fresh ideas. So there may have been an element of rebellion to that record for me, because I knew my teacher absolutely loathed that kind of music. During the recording, people were just walking in and out of the room, picking up instruments. It was great.

Did you ever learn anything about improvisation through a book?

A lot. A lot. I studied with a guy named Ted Dunbar at the UMass jazz summer workshop. He taught me the system of tonal convergence. When I give guitar lessons, I recommend his book. There are 28 scales that converge or bombard the tonal center. They are all tension scales, and they all come with a series of chords. If you listen to the great improvisers — Pat Martino, Sonny Rollins, someone on that level — these guys all studied this stuff. Yusef Lateef. All those ’60s jazz guys. They’re not playing the diatonic notes of the chord. They’re playing outside the chord, but it’s a very natural thing to do.

Natural how?

Let me see if I can explain this. There are only three chords in music, period. Minor, major and dominant. A dominant chord wants to go somewhere because it has a tritone in it. A G dominant chord wants to go to C. That principle is physics. That’s not something that was assigned to music by theorists. When two strings are vibrating together a tritone apart, there are so many overtones that all you feel is tense, and the notes want to squish together into the home chord.

Stewie sings about it on Family Guy. [Sings, "You've got your G chord right here / It's like your cozy house where you live / That's where you start your journey / Here I am in my house nice and cozy / and then you poke your head out the door with a C chord / And everything looks OK out here / Maybe I'll take a walk outside to the D chord / Walkin' around outside, look at all the stuff out here / And then we go to an A-minor, gettin' a little cloudy out here / lookin' like we might get some weather / Then we go to E-minor, oh definitely got some weather / Things are a little more complicated than they seemed at first / And then we go back to my house."] It’s great. The 12-bar blues are based on this, too. But the jazz guys from the ’60s took this concept to Mars. They came up with 28 scales, all of which were basically substitutions for that dominant chord. The music is still simple: Major is happy. Minor is sad. Dominant is tense. That’s all there is. It never goes further than that with chords.

And you’re working with these sorts of “tonal convergence” theories when you improv onstage?

If you’re going to be doing a long improvisation, it’s boring to sit on one scale and just go up and down. There’s a lot of jam music like this, and that’s why people don’t like it. It never goes beyond that. Sonny Rollins isn’t doing that, even though he’s playing over a G-major chord for 18 minutes. It’s not just a G-major when Sonny Rollins plays it.

Herbie Hancock has this thing about an informed vocabulary but a childlike approach. He plays simple, simple, catchy melodies, but all his chord voicings have 40 or 50 years of this theory in them. So when he gets onstage it can be all childlike. Not childish. But if you ever stopped a Hancock recording and looked at a few measures of what he’s playing, you’d be floored. The voice leadings are filled with all these ideas. It doesn’t sound complicated, but it’s a more mature, elegant palette of emotions. These guys can hit an emotional chord that a lesser player couldn’t. It’s the same way a great writer with a great vocabulary can bring out subtler emotions.

And you’re still practicing this type of thing at home?

Yesterday. It takes forever, because once I learn one of these scales, I can just play it from my brain. It doesn’t sound right — if I’m playing it from my brain. I have to play it so much — until it sounds tossed off, until it is tossed off.

There’s that Charlie Parker quote: “You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.”

That’s what he did. It sounds like water when you hear him play.

It’s impossible to think that fast.

You couldn’t. They were all doing this. Coltrane. All those jazz guys. I heard that Ted Dunbar’s theory of convergence is like the Holy Grail. There’s stories about this legendary dinner these guys had where they wrote it on a tablecloth, and nobody knows where.

There’s actually a Coltrane quote I wanted to ask you about. He says, “I’d like to get to the point where I can capture the essence of a precise moment in a given place, compose the work, and perform it immediately in a natural way.”

I love that. I love that he said “compose the work.”

Right. And I wanted to ask you, do you think composition and improvisation are the same thing? Or are they inherently different?

I think they’re the same thing. The struggle is not giving up the best element of composition, which is the time to figure out that it’s all right, and also to not give up the best element of improvisation, which is that it’s happening in real time, so you can’t stop to ruin it. You don’t have any time to screw up.

So you think in the best instances, improvisation and composition would produce the same results?

Yes. Yes. I’ll give you an example. On the song “Billy Breathes,” there’s a guitar solo I like a lot. That’s a composed solo. I didn’t labor over it. What I did is, I walked around the kitchen — my daughter had just been born and we were living out in the woods in Vermont. I was in my union suit, chopping wood. I was not thinking about anything, and then I just started singing [sings melody] the first four notes of the solo. I had a cassette player and I’d run over and get it recorded. Then I’d forget about it. And then the next part came. It was a lot of wearing headphones while walking around. Cassette player in my pocket. Change a diaper, go to the store, and whenever I can disconnect from whoever I’m talking to in the room, I’d put on my headphones. So the point I’m making is that it still felt like improv.

You were just capturing moments out of your daily life.

I would just wait for the moment to come. It didn’t feel any different than what happens on stages. I was busying myself with other things. I wasn’t sitting there working, like capital-W work, but, in the end, it took days and days.

You write a lot that way?

Yeah. And since you’re feeding the cat and you’re not paying attention and then you listen to what you just recorded, you can really hear when it’s wrong. If it’s wrong, it’s like when you put on bad music in the background. But going back to Coltrane, it sounds like he just wants to be doing that in an immediate way when he’s onstage. I’m starting to think that patience is the biggest part of the whole thing. And, you know, another thing that just popped into my head, and I’m not sure if this answers your question, but like a week ago, I was writing this thing. Single lines and chords moving and blah, blah.

I was going for about four days, and I wasn’t really thinking about it. I had six minutes’ worth of music, and then all of a sudden it just stopped. And I didn’t really realize that it stopped until I put all the pieces together. It’s everywhere: on my cassette recorder, on my phone, on a 4-track recorder, on the laptop. It just stopped. All of a sudden. It’s the concept of being a channel.

You’ve said that before.

A lot of people end up saying it.

Otherwise you point at yourself and it becomes an ego-y thing. That’s dangerous.

I mean, it’s still craft. It’s still work. I got to play with these orchestras recently, at Carnegie Hall. One of the best musical experiences of my life. You go in, and there are all the walls covered in photos of great conductors. A picture of Mark Twain standing on the stage. This is what you walk by before you go onstage, in case anyone ever wants to try and have an ego in that room. But so I get a two-hour rehearsal with these musicians, with the New York Philharmonic — maybe the top orchestra in the world — and every single musician on the stage is so far beyond anyone I’ve ever played with. All 90 of them. They were the top in their school and then the top at Juilliard and now they’re playing second cello. And the humility is as high as the musicianship. Let’s say you’re playing a Beethoven piece in a room where the same piece was played 100 years ago. They’re sitting in the same chairs, wearing the same shoes and suits, playing instruments that are 100 years old, playing the same sounds with the best conductor of their time, who is standing under photos of 20 of the greatest conductors. And when the music started playing, I had this idea that the music was coming through this little channel — for lack of a better word — for years and years. Musicians come and go and they’re stewards of the music for a brief period of time. But once the music plays — it’s really between Beethoven and the listener at that point. The musicians are there to get their goddamn hands off of it. All that training! Thousands of hours! Sight-reading every day! All so they can get the hell out of the way because nobody gives a crap about them at all. The less you notice them, the better it sounds. I mean, it was the highest level of art in music that I’d ever seen, and it was performed by people who had spent countless hours of work just to be invisible.

In music, you never notice that quality anywhere more than in the orchestra.

And the challenge of getting 90 people to play together! Try getting four people to play together.

III. TALKING TO COPS

Your early music sounds orchestral in a way, or at least compositional. But you’ve since moved further toward the tradition of songwriting.

I’m starting to go back to the compositional side a little more. Recently, I just wanted to sing more songs. That’s a simple answer. But Tom [Marshall, Anastasio's co-writer] and I went through a period in the ’90s where we started going on these songwriting junkets. They were just a lot of fun because we would turn off the world. It’s been a long time since we’ve done that, what with cell phones and everything. We would lock ourselves in a farmhouse. A lot of the songs off of “Undermind” and “The Story of the Ghost” and “Farmhouse” were written during that period.

And a piece like “Time Turns Elastic,” the one you played at Carnegie Hall: how does that get written?

I wrote that over the period of a year. It was supposed to be an orchestral piece, and it was first recorded and released that way. But then Phish got back together and our producer, Steve Lillywhite, said, “You know, this wouldn’t be a Phish record without a big, long thing,” so we put it together and played it. There was a lot of process skipped when it went to the Phish version. The orchestral version is the real version, to me. It took a real long time for a piece like “You Enjoy Myself” to work. It needed tender love and care. This one didn’t get that. If you want to hear what that piece is supposed to sound like, listen to the orchestral version.

How did that process work?

I wrote the form. Don [Hart] did the orchestration. But that’s a bit of an oversimplification, because the guy who did the orchestration is a close friend of mine, and we were on the phone for a year, working on it. He would fly up, and we’d spend three days on it, sketching it out.

I orchestrated a couple of Phish pieces, like “Guyute,” and basically found out that I’m a crappy orchestrator, but I knew enough to know it would be cool if, say, the brass took off in this spot. We would have conversations like, How are we going to keep the rhythm going here? And we’d go online and listen to some Afro-Cuban bands — because an orchestra has three percussionists. So we’d try to comp that kind of a vibe and then go home and work on it.

And that’s pretty different from the way the song-y music is created.

Yeah. Tom and I just have a blast writing the songs. It’s our social life. We go out and by the end of the night we have three new songs. We basically talk to each other in song. This is how it’s been since eighth grade. I text him songs.

You guys have interwoven music into social life.

I have. I think that’s the truest thing that has been said in this interview so far.

There’s no off and on switch.

Yeah, but that can be dangerous. People in my immediate family think I’m losing my mind, because I don’t know how to turn it off. I really don’t. As a matter of fact, I’ve been encouraged by my wife and those around me to, on New Year’s Eve, hand over my phone for a month. This is actually something I’ve never talked about before. This is what I’ve done to my life. Anybody who comes into my life, I start collaborating with. It’s not just Tom. It’s Steve, the Dude of Life, who wrote “Fluffhead” and “Suzy Greenberg”– a lot of good songs. And then it’s my first pal [Suzannah Goodman], who wrote “Bathtub Gin” with me, and then my friend Dave [Abrahams], who wrote “Runaway Jim” with me. It’s my daughter, who I wrote “Goodbye Head” with. It’s like it’s always happening. The only problem became when we started employing all our friends. That kind of thinking got out of control. I didn’t know where life began and music ended.

Is that bad?

There shouldn’t have to be a separation, but sometimes reality sets in. So I’m writing songs with friends all the time, and then you start getting phone calls, years later, like “I need more money to write songs.” I mean, anybody in the room gets a songwriting credit. That’s how I do it. You open up this door, and all of sudden people are calling and saying, “Let’s do more.” What starts out as a sort of gift turns into a situation where you’re on the phone all day, fielding these kinds of issues, and you’re not walking down the street, looking at architecture, thinking about music. I just say yes too much. I’m working on a Broadway musical and a Phish record and a solo record and a quintet thing.

My family recently made me change my phone ringer to a barking dog so it sounds like no. No no no. The problem is, if I don’t learn to have boundaries, which, historically, I don’t, then a lot of moments become, well, talking to cops or whatever. You can get a little crazy. It’s a blessing, but there’s a certain point at which you have to go to bed.

Right. You have to stay healthy, I guess.

I’ll sleep when I die!

IV. MUSIC AND ENDURANCE

Your set lists are analyzed by fans and published in books. What is your thinking about the art of the set list?

In the mid-’90s I was incredibly obsessed with it. I’d always be thinking about key changes between songs. So you’d put one song in D, and then the next one in E, and then rise up to it. Then there was an attempt to make everyone onstage sing. Much of the songwriting was written to the set list, not the album. We’d say, “We need a set-closer. We need a big whopping set-closer.” Or we’d need a song for Page to sing. Or we’d write a song for a piano solo. But then later in the ’90s it became more organic, spur-of-the-moment. We’d just let it rip. The problem is, there are so many songs now.

I heard you don’t use set lists at all, sometimes.

Yeah, since Phish came back, I’ll just walk around backstage and ask everybody, “What do you want to play?” and people will say, “Oh, I want to sing this or that,” until I have 30 or 40 songs on a piece of paper. It’s like the writing. The set lists are all over the place. A mess. Then we go out onstage and just forget about it. We give a set list to Chris every night and he just laughs and rips it up. We never even play the first song.

Do you call it out?

I’ll lean over and ask Mike or Page. It’s kind of like a big therapy group up there. I’ll yell out, “Is everyone cool with this?” But, yeah, usually, I just scream something out.

For every song?

Yeah, you never know until you get up there. It’s a sort of controlled chaos. Meaning, there’s a lot of walking around and asking questions. Like, I’ll walk into the venue and — I remember at Alpine Valley there was a girl standing by the fence, and I asked her, “What should we play tonight?” and she yelled, “Play ‘What’s the Use?’ ” And so I’ll write that down. The problem is that some of the songs are so complicated that, if we don’t run it beforehand, then it sucks and there’s lots of self-flagellation. Like, “Oh my god, I messed up ‘Peaches en Regalia.’ ” You know? Which is exactly what happened when we played it last time. I felt terrible.

You guys have played some seven-hour shows, right?

We played on New Year’s Eve ’99 all night. We played from 11 that night till about 7:30 a.m.

What thoughts are you having at 7:29 a.m., when you’ve been playing all night long?

Oh, that was one of the best nights of my life.

Does the music get better or worse when you play that long?

I don’t know. That night felt like a big dream. Have you ever stood in a field with a buddy and hung around until the sun came up? Well, it was that, times 80,000 people. It was winter and we were outside. It was at Big Cypress. It wasn’t even a venue. We built it. It was a small city. One of the great nights on earth, for me. But I’ve never listened to it or anything. I don’t want to. The sun came up. It was all pink.

I’ve heard you want to play even longer shows.

We want to do the LG, which is some random gig, in the middle of some tour, in some random venue in Ohio. We’d shut the doors and say, “The only rule is, if you leave you can’t come back in.” And all your cell phones have to be handed over, and if you have to make a phone call, there’s a pay phone, and you’re only allowed to say, “I’m not going to be there.” There’s a big burly guard by the phone and he’s got his finger on the thing. There’d be food and everything. And then we’d play for two days, at least. So you’d go in when the sun was setting, and then you’d come out two mornings later. So it’d feel like you were up all night, but really you were in there for two days. I wonder how many people would stay? Ten?

What’s the interest in music and endurance about?

We used to do long practices. Really long. It’s another way to get away from the ego. You stop thinking. All this stuff all sounds so silly when you talk about it. But it happens. It also happens over the course of a tour. The first show, you walk onstage and you’re thinking about the shirt you’re wearing. By the end, it’s completely different.

You have such a large community of people surrounding Phish, and I wonder what your thinking is about music as a social tool. Can music change society?

That sounds like which came first, the chicken or the egg. Because I always think society changes music. In a big way. Think about the ’40s. My teacher was 15 when Woody Herman was touring around the country. It was one of those ripping big bands, with four trombones. If you were there, it was like the rock ‘n’ roll of the time. People were dancing and sneaking drinks in flasks and going out to the parking lots with their girlfriends. And then World War II came, and all those guys got drafted, there was rationing on rubber. Overnight, it ended, as soon as World War II hit. So society changed music there.

That was a time when improvisation was actually a form of pop music.

Yeah. If you look at the ’40s, it was the last time when rock — for lack of a better word — and high art and pop music were all one thing. They had the best singers and arrangers and drummers all in a three-and-a-half-minute song. My teacher would always talk about this. He’d go with his girlfriend, ditch her, and then run up with his guy friends to the front row. They all knew who the best trumpet player was. This was at Roseland. Same place we’re playing. So then World War II comes and then everyone’s sad for a while — a simplification of history — and then everyone wants to be cheered up, so along came the Beatles, just in time. “Whooo! Let’s have a party. I’m sick of these grownups talking about war all the time.”

So you never consider your music to be a tool? You’re in a position where you have such a large community mobilized around you. And yet, you never seem to try to use your music to directly shape the community.

No, but I feel like we’re a part of something that’s bigger than ourselves. When those first four Phish festivals happened, there were 70,000 people in Maine. It was crazy. It’s like 10 hours north of Portland. We didn’t know what the hell was going on. But then, look at what’s going on in culture. The Internet wasn’t quite invented yet. MTV was still huge. Pop music had become, in the ’80s, this horrible plastic thing where you had to make a video before you made music. It was a terrible time in music, for me, other than some of the great punk bands like Bad Brains. I mean, there’s always good stuff going on — Prince, Talking Heads — but in pop culture, it was horrendous. And when we started doing these festivals, it just exploded. This whole community popped up. It was weird. Today, you couldn’t do a festival in Maine with every band in the world playing and get 70,000 people to go up there. Think about it. A lot of these new festivals draw just 8 or 10 thousand people. It’s almost in Canada. It’s really far away. But was that us? I don’t think so. Again, if World War II didn’t end, you wouldn’t have the Beatles. You need a cultural landscape. Something just happened with those festivals — for about four years there, everyone wanted to be gathering.

Ross Simonini is the interviews editor of The Believer, where this article first appeared.  To read more from The Believer, or to subscribe, visit www.believermag.com.