Grateful Dead Comparison
Particularly in lengthy jams and in less thoroughly-composed and more lyrically-styled material, the dynamic interplay and collective improvisation between all four members was certainly as much a calling card for the band as were Anastasio's kaleidoscopic compositions and guitar work. It is in this respect that Phish has often been musically compared to the Grateful Dead, and this aesthetic is really at the heart of all jam bands by connotation.
Neither Anastasio nor the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia ever definitively acknowledged themselves as figureheads of their respective collectives, though widely perceived as such among their fans; this is indicative of the community spirit and sense of partnership evoked by much music, with each musician viewing himself as an equal part of a whole.
Read more about this topic: Music Of Phish
Famous quotes containing the words grateful dead, grateful, dead and/or comparison:
“What a long strange trip it’s been.”
—Robert Hunter, U.S. rock lyricist. “Truckin’,” on the Grateful Dead album American Beauty (1971)
“Here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.... The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)