Phish - Junta (1992)

Dan:

Steve had a 2-CD set of a recording called Junta with weird cover art, played by a band called Phish. He told me that the album was first self-released on a cassette tape in 1989 but finally Elektra had put it out on both cassette and CD. Technically, then, all but the original cassettes are considered reissues. It didn't take long for the fan base to widen and Phish became a touring phenom - a jam band, if you will.

For my personal use, I recorded the CDs on a C-90 cassette, which nicely restored the original format. (I chose not to record the three bonus tracks on the CD "reissue"). I mostly remember playing it in my car on my way back and forth to work. I enjoyed all of the songs and leader Trey Anastasio's guitar adventures. So I played it frequently.

On August 24, 1992, Miami was hit by Hurricane Andrew. Although our house was not breached, our neighbor's mango tree crashed through the screen over our pool and into the water. Mango tea, anyone? While our damage was nothing like the devastation a few miles to the south of us, fallen trees filled the roads and we lost electricity for 17 days. Repairs took another year to complete.

The university shut down for more than a week. When it finally reopened, I would try to find backroads to work because many roads were impassable. Traffic lights were basically inoperable, so drivers had to be self-regulating; sometimes that worked but other times it didn't. 

One of my most emotional moments (of many) during the hurricane's aftermath was approaching a busy intersection at rush hour, with Junta playing in the car. I think the song playing was either "The Divided Sky" or "David Bowie," which were together on one side of the 90-minute tape. I could see the traffic light was gone, but a young woman was standing in the intersection directing cars with a huge smile on her face. I was overwhelmed by her selflessness and her beaming face - the perfect embodiment of the spirit of "neighbor helping neighbor," which had become something of a mantra during the long recovery. 

We all experienced positive and negative emotions in the ensuing years, and I recall being unable to talk with colleagues about the hurricane for 5 full months. I'll forever associate Junta with Hurricane Andrew's aftermath. 

I later attended two Phish concerts, one at the Cameo Theater on Miami Beach and the other at an outdoor venue on Biscayne Bay. I convinced my friend Christos to go with me to the Cameo because he also liked prog rock. We were certainly an odd-looking couple - aging statistical outliers in a room full of 20-somethings. 

Coming to Junta fresh was a fascinating experience. I love the guitar jams, and Trey Anastasio has amazing technique and inexhaustible ideas worthy of long solos. I like the jams better than what I consider to be novelty numbers (e.g., Fluffhead or "Dinner and a Movie"), but they're also a big part of the Phish experience. I also like the fables like "Esther" and "Fee," which may seem ridiculous on first hearing, but after a while you find yourself humming the tune and remembering the lyrics. "Esther" also ends with a sublime series of guitar choruses that glide beautifully across a new set of chord changes.

I went on to collect the next four Phish albums (up through Hoist), and lost interest after that. I also did not gain much from the vast number of live shows that began appearing on CD. To me, Phish are not like The Grateful Dead even though they're often compared to them. 

Steve:

As I was getting heavily into the early 90s prog renaissance, which saw the appearance of new 70's oriented bands as well as the reissue of hundreds of previously obscure international prog releases from the 70s, Phish became my favorite band. I was living in Chapel Hill NC at the time, bumming around for a year after graduating college, when my friend Rob visited with an exciting discovery. In the car he put on "The Squirming Coil", the first track on Phish's Lawn Boy album. It sounded to me like a lost track from Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Then "Reba" started, and it called to mind the goofy Canterbury tracks like Caravan's "Golf Girl" before moving into an extended guitar solo over two chords (reminiscent of Frank Zappa's wonderful "Inca Roads" solo), reaching a climax before going back to the goofy verses. My introduction to Lawn Boy was a pivotal moment in my young life, and my fixation on Phish lasted the better part of the next decade.  

As with other "jam bands" (a term often used pejoratively nowadays), Phish encouraged tapings of their live shows, and before long I had several tapes of early shows that introduced me to key songs in the band's early repertoire: "The Divided Sky", "David Bowie", "Esther", "Golgi Apparatus", "You Enjoy Myself", and others. By this time, in addition to Lawn Boy, I had acquired the band's current studio album (and first on Elektra Records) A Picture of Nectar, a breakthrough that heralded the band's exposure to the general public.

One of the by-products of signing with Elektra was the official issue of Junta, the band's early cassette first distributed in 1988. Here, to my delight, were studio versions of many of the songs that formed the heart of the band's set list on early shows, and to this day most of these songs still constitute highlights of their shows. My favorites include "You Enjoy Myself", a song so iconic in Phish lore that it became the most frequently played song in concert (563 shows and counting, according to a quick Internet search). The strange, repeated lyric in the middle of the song was such a mystery amongst fans that "What are they saying in "You Enjoy Myself"?" became the Phish fandom's most frequently asked question. Even the question itself begat a frequently used anagram ("WATSIYEM?") frequently seen in discussion groups. Such are the whimsical joys of online life. Another favorite, the 10-minute "The Divided Sky", is entirely instrumental except for a brief recitation of the title near the beginning. The track has enough tension and excitement to keep a theater of kids on the edge of their seats throughout the entire song.

I can easily recommend Junta to any progressive rock fan curious as to what the fuss is about with Phish. Many of their most classic songs are here, from a time when they were most heavily influenced by classic progressive rock.