90's Guilty Pleasures #13: Phish "Down With Disease" (1994)

For a 15-month span which encompassed a decent portion of my sophmore and junior years of high school, Phish were my favorite band in the world. This is now by far the single most embarrassing skeleton in my awkward teenage closet. I never considered myself neo-hippie or white-college-cap-preppy-soccer-jock, so when I realized the kinds of people I was unintentionally associating myself with, I made the right decision to run away as fast as I could. In retrospect, a handful of Phish's attempts at standard 4-minute verse-chorus rock still sound surprisingly fresh, "Down With Disease" being one of them. And I may as well list the remainder of that handful here just so I can close this chapter once and for all.. Those would be "Lizards," "Maze," "Stash," "Waste," "Billy Breathes," "Free," "Fee," "If I Could," "Julius," "Gumbo," and their best song is probably "Llama." And despite what the unwashed burnouts have to say about it, all of these songs sound best when they're concise and sans noodling. ("Harry Hood" is one I would have included, but it unfortunately suffers from being about 7 minutes too long.) Out of 100+ songs of theirs I can recall, these are the only ones left I can still stomach. Their tendancy to lean toward lovely vocal harmonies accompanying distractingly horrendous lyrics remains their most frustrating paradox. ("Down With Disease" made the most sense for this list since it remains their only MTV video. Beavis and Butthead thought it was cool that they jumped into a fishtank.)