It’s not often I can make it through entire Atlantic articles considering that nearly none seem to be less than 10,000 words. However, Charlie Warzel recently penned an interesting piece about Goose titled THE IMPROBABLE, UNSTOPPABLE RISE OF GOOSE. He starts with what he considers to be the real turning point for the band, discusses the “scene” writ large, and delves into some history. I suggest you read it all there but I’m going to break out some of the more interesting parts with my emphasis and comments added.
For the sake of brevity, let’s skip the first verse and the chorus. Let’s jump over some ambient noodling and the gradual building of musical tension. Let’s begin, in jam-band parlance, on a peak, a moment of sonic culmination. Let’s begin at Radio City Music Hall on June 25, 2022. Specifically, we’re two hours and 12 minutes into the evening when the house lights come up, a red-haired 57-year-old man with a guitar walks onstage, and all 6,000 people in attendance collectively lose their minds as they realize what they are witnessing.
The redhead is the Phish front man Trey Anastasio. But this isn’t a Phish show. The headliner tonight is Goose, a band of five 30-somethings in the midst of a meteoric rise. This is Goose’s second-straight sold-out show at Radio City; just three years and three days earlier, the band was playing at Kenny’s Westside Pub, in Peoria, Illinois.
In his first song with the band, Anastasio, one of the best guitarists of his or any era, holds back, letting Goose’s guitarist, Rick Mitarotonda, lead complex improvisations. As the pair continue to trade riffs, a grin appears on Anastasio’s face. Typically, a visitor of his stature would play just a couple of songs before taking a bow. But after two, he leans into Mitarotonda to whisper a few words the audience can’t hear. When the huddle breaks, Mitarotonda smiles wryly. “He’s gonna stay,” he tells the ecstatic crowd. They play together for another hour.
If you don’t know much about Phish, Goose, or the jam scene, the significance of Anastasio’s presence might be hard to parse. The Radio City show was a landmark moment for Goose—a signal to anyone with a passing interest in the genre that it was time to take the band seriously.
I’ll say that this was indeed huge for me. It is only because of this that I heard of Goose (while at a Phish show weeks later). I’m someone who is heavily into Phish but not the rest of the jam-band scene so the Trey sit-in was what catalyzed a conversation about Goose in my circles.
Goose has been especially well positioned to benefit from a newfound openness to the jam scene. Whereas the Dead is a band with decades of esoteric lore and a sound forged in the ’60s, Goose is accessible and modern. The band’s influences are rooted in the indie and rock acts its members grew up admiring: the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Radiohead, and, yes, Phish.
As my cousin posited recently to me, Goose indeed is more accessible than, in his example, Phish. Rick has a voice which sounds…much better than Trey’s. They have wacky songs but not that wacky. We love Phish for their wackiness but, let’s face it, some of their stuff can catch a newcomer off guard and make them really scratch their head. Charlie also makes a good point about the influences. You can hear the 90’s bands in their playing; an era in which I grew up. Even Rick’s autotune, while typically regarded as an oft-ridiculed vocal crutch in pop music, is just a stylistic product of the 90’s and aughts. Sometimes people protest that a given Goose jam sounds too Phishy as if they are attempting to copy them; of course some of their music will sound like Phish, they were partially formed by them. If I was a musician and played music, I’d imagine that half of what I played would sound like Phish since their music is permanently imprinted on my brain.
Jerry Garcia’s death tore a hole in the jam-band scene, creating a vacuum no one was ready to fill. Former members of the Grateful Dead played on, as did Phish and bands such as Widespread Panic, but no rightful heir had been named. The result was an immense pressure, especially on Phish and Anastasio, to absorb the audience and legacy of the Dead while preserving their own sound. In championing Goose, Anastasio was perhaps attempting to point a way forward, not just for the band, but for the now-resurgent genre. Dead & Company, too, has collaborated with Goose, offering the group its own imprimatur.
For all their recent success, Phish and Dead & Company are the past and present, not the future, of the scene. It may fall to Goose to be the group that escapes the confines of the old tie-dyed traveling circus, reimagines what a modern jam band can be, and awakens a wider audience to the endless possibilities and pleasures of improvised rock.
A few comments needs to be made here:
The Grateful Dead was not part of a jam-band scene because the “scene” came after them by only standing on their shoulders of what is possible.
I don’t know if Trey really felt that much pressure from the passing of Jerry Garcia. Phish’s music is far more different from the Grateful Dead’s than Goose’s is from Phish’s. Sure, some deadheads enjoyed Phish and hopped on tour with them but Phish was growing exponentially already at the time of Jerry’s passing in 1995. I don’t feel like there was any pressure on Trey to absorb Jerry’s fans or legacy because they already had so much of their own. That being said, if there were any heir to the improvisational rock kingship, it would be Phish without a doubt just due to influence, size, and longevity.
It’s true that Phish captures the best of the past and present of the “scene” but to lump them in with Dead & Company is offensive. First of all, Dead & Co. is basically a cover band at this point with only two of six original members and the whole endeavor reeks of a cash grab. Phish may not be the future but they are solidly in the present. Dead & Co is living off the fumes of schwag from the 80’s.
Even when Goose was playing the smaller festival circuit, it maintained a prolific online presence, posting concert clips on YouTube, livestreaming almost daily via a subscription service, and making soundboard recordings of shows available, many of them for free, on platforms such as Bandcamp. Much of this was originally Anspach’s doing: He mastered the soundboard audio from shows and dutifully posted it to Bandcamp not long after coming offstage. As it’s grown, Goose has built out a team of videographers and directors who continue to livestream most shows—a concert film released nearly every night the band is on tour. In its own way, the band is updating a tradition started by the Dead, of making the band’s central output—live music—as available as possible.
Goose has indeed been awesome at providing everyone with free opportunities to enjoy their music. I do wonder how long their streams will be free for Nugs subscribers though. The bandcamp catalog is generous and so is the nearly one-song-per-show releases on Youtube.
Over time, the demands of the road exact a toll, as the band becomes so focused on performing that it has no time to work toward something new. Mitarotonda refers to touring and performing as creative outputs, and to writing and practicing as creative inputs. There have been times, he said, when the band was putting out much more than it was taking in.
It was at a moment when road life had started to weigh a little heavier on Mitarotonda that Anastasio took an interest in the band. After the Radio City show, he invited Goose to co-headline a fall tour with the Trey Anastasio Band. A childhood friend of Mitarotonda’s told me that during a Phish show in 2009, Mitarotonda, then about 18 years old, turned to him mid-jam, pointed to the stage, and said, I think I want to do that. Thirteen years later, he was on tour with Anastasio.
I’d imagine the two-month break they have following this June tour would be for focusing on writing, they seriously need new material available for their heavy touring considering they are already, technically, ten years into being a band. Perhaps it’s me unfairly comparing them to Phish, but think of how many albums (and songs not on albums) Phish had by 1994. Most of Goose’s big songs seem to be on a four-show rotation currently.
Further, Trey inviting Goose to go on tour with him can basically be viewed as a coronation. These are the shows which first introduced me, and many others, to the band. At the time, I was imagining all the other jam-bands which have been around for decades—talented, but never really was able to contend for the dominance Phish enjoyed such as String Cheese Incident, Umphrey’s McGee, Disco Biscuits—as jealously scoffing at these new kids on the block who all of a sudden receive the imprimatur no one else ever received from Phish in nearly 40 years.
The collaboration helped Mitarotonda figure out some things as a musician. In their free time backstage, Mitarotonda and Anastasio geeked out on the craft of making live music. In one video the band released on YouTube, Anastasio enthusiastically describes his amp settings. But Anastasio bestowed nontechnical advice too. Minutes after their first show of the tour, he asked Mitarotonda how he thought Goose’s set went. “I told him it was fine and that we eased into the evening,” Mitarotonda recounted. “And Trey was like, That’s interesting. I don’t ease into it.” The offhand remark was a revelation. “It’s like, Oh, of course you should go out there and just punch the audience in the face with it,” Mitarotonda said. “I feel like I’ve been both living life and playing guitar so defensively for so long. And now I am thinking about how to go on the offensive.”
Trey, if you’re reading, this would definitely describe you between 1984 and 2004, but lately? Are you really coming out of the gates regularly punching the crowd in the face? Whatever, good advice nevertheless.
The article goes on to discuss Ben’s departure, Cotter joining, and the period of silence in between. It’s all pretty interesting. It’s definitely hard to imagine, with the venues they are playing right now and the fact publications like the Atlantic are writing long pieces about them, that they are not going to continue this meteoric rise which no other “jam-band” has been able to capture since Phish.
