Princeton Phish
There are so many things to recommend Princeton as a city worth visiting. It’s been ranked in the top 20 for the country’s most livable cities, and the fact that it’s home to Princeton University plays a big part in that. The University draws some rather interesting characters, including the reclusive author Joyce Carroll Oates, and was home to Einstein for a time. It also has some pretty colorful characters who can name Princeton as their own home town, and perhaps it even seems unlikely that it would be the birthplace of Trey Anastasion , one of the founding members of Phish.
But perhaps it’s not so unlikely after all. Princeton is a city that fosters intense creativity, and specializes in thinking out of the box. There might not be a place further from the box than the great band that’s famous for its long riffs and excursions into musical tangents that can make up the bulk of their concerts. The band formed in the early 80s at the University of Vermont, and had a long and strange career until they broke up in 2004. The breakup only lasted a few years, until 2009, and in 2010 Phish is once again on the road, playing a wild montage of concerts to the delight of their hardcore fans.
Because of their enormously dedicated fan base, they’ve earned many comparisons to the Grateful Dead. The even began by calling themselves a cover band for the Dead, but have gone on to develop their own very distinctive music style, that’s still very much under construction to this day. They seem to reinvent it at every concert, and that’s one of the big appeals for fans, because they’ve never played the same show twice, and rarely play songs the same way. In a city that’s famous for its intellects and the hospitality of its hotels, Princeton really is a perfect birthplace for a phenomenon that succeeds only be refusing to succeed in the usual ways.
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