13! “Phish Has Become an Estimable Influence to a Broad Swath of Its Peers and Many Others Peering up at the Most Celebrated
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“Phish has become an estimable influence to a broad swath of its peers and many others peering up at the most celebrated of jambands” (p. 166). In Rolling Stone alone, it has been noted that Phish enjoyed “a career as the hottest cult band in America: an object of apostolic devotion from a young, neohippie congregation small enough to party happily at the fringes of the mainstream music industry but large enough to fill arenas nationwide” (Fricke, 1999, p. 62). Their most-played live song, “You Enjoy Myself” has been ranked 85 on the list of top 100 guitar songs in history (Hiatt, 2008) and the band’s guitarist Trey Anastasio is considered 73rd among the top 100 greatest guitarists of all time (Edmonds et al., 2003, p. 49). They have also repeatedly been given majestic titles like “apt heir to the Grateful Dead’s legacy as the world’s greatest jam band” (Eliscu, 2000, pp. 35, 42), “kings of the Nineties jam-band scene” (O’Donnell, 2008, p. 129), and “jam-band kings in the mid-Nineties” (Fricke, 2009, ¶ 3). Others (Puterbaugh, 1997) claimed, “Phish are probably the ultimate college band” (p. 45) and concluded that “on the concert front, the band has become the left-field success story of the ‘90s” (p. 44). Echoing this, Hendrickson (1998) proclaimed that “given their sense of community, their ambition and their challenging, generous performances, Phish have become the most important band of the Nineties” (p. 22), a statement that has since reverberated throughout assorted media. Such titles should come as no surprise, considering Phish feats such as staging the largest North American concert in 1996 with about 70,000 in attendance according to Pollstar (as cited in Puterbaugh, 2009, p. 11), or being the sole headliner to a crowd of 80,000 fans at the largest paid concert event in the world on New Year’s Eve 1999 to celebrate the new millennium with a show lasting from midnight until dawn (“Phish Band History 1999,” n.d.; Puterbaugh, 2009, p. ! 13!.