The Rock Hall of Fame, Phish — and who cares?

We do, evidently. A humble defense of a much-maligned institution (the band, I mean)

Respect to this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, particularly Outkast and The White Stripes. The winners were announced last night.

But, please.

Phish — as much if not more than literally any band on the planet — deserves to be up in that building. And I’m barely a legitimate Phish fan.

They were nominated, but didn’t make the cut. They should’ve gotten in years ago.

I argued my case in Rolling Stone. It begins:

Driven by dubious metrics, fumbling with clearly baked-in blind spots and biases, in recurring corrective mode (see Sister Rosetta Tharpe) when it musters the will, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is always missing much of the real action in its attempts to canonize music that, if it sticks around long enough to be canonized, has often lost the fire if not the whole plot.

Yet somehow we still care about the Hall’s verdicts, shaking our fists, occasionally pumping them. Hell, even Lou Reed — a man with as finely-calibrated a bullshit detector as any rock musician ever, inducted with the Velvet Underground and again (posthumously) for his solo work — even he cared. (Full disclosure: I’ve never been part of the nominating cabal, but I have been a voter for years, proud to have disgruntledly scrawled “New York Dolls” in red Sharpie as a graffiti write-in candidate on more than one ballot.)

It’s a shame the Dolls have never been inducted either; they deserved it fiercely, too. RIP David Johansen.

Despite a history of getting things wrong, and with due respect to the 2025 inductees, I was still flabbergasted that Phish — finally nominated this year — were snubbed, dissed, left at the alter. Unrivaled in the jam-band realm, godfathers to multiple generations of black-hole-spelunking rock noodlers, they’ve filled arenas, sheds, stadiums, motorway racetracks, decommissioned military bases, and Native American reservations. As New Yorker writer Amanda Petrusich pointed out this month in an admiring, super-sized profile of the band, Phish’s 1999 New Year’s Eve show at the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation, on the precipice of a supposed Y2K apocalypse, was attended by more people than any concert in the world that night. They smoked Metallica, Eminem and Jimmy Buffet — all three Rock Hall of Famers — who also hosted premature end-times parties that night.

To judge by more criteria you’d think would signify to Rock Hall voters, the band has, depending on your math, roughly 16 studio albums (six gold, one platinum) and over 50 physical live albums, a largely meaningless number for a band that’s made every concert it's played since 2002 available online. Many of the studio LPs are good, some (Lawn Boy, Billy Breathes, Joy, Round Room) might even be called great. Trey Anastasio belongs on any list of the best rock guitarists; drummer Jon Fishman keeps it tight and plays a mean vacuum cleaner; Mike Gordon and Page McConnell are master craftsmen, and crucially, the collective is more than the sum of their parts. After a drug-related hiatus worthy of a Behind The Music (another industry benchmark they somehow never clocked), Phish arguably came back better than ever — and are still at it, full-tilt and by all reports in full bloom, 40-some years after they began playing bars in Burlington, Vermont.

I mean, seriously: last I checked, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland has Phish’s iconic hot-dog chariot — a stage prop as famous as the Rolling Stones’ inflatable mid-‘70s penis — hanging in their damn lobby. I thought dudes woulda been a shoe-in.

I’ve been to the Rock Hall in Cleveland, and it’s an awful lot of fun. They could, however, learn a lot from the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, which tbh is more impressive in a lot of ways, despite plenty of its own issues with inclusion and white-washed history, which it’s been addressing. They have more resources.

Anyway, I continued:

“But the music,” you say. Oh, it’s not good enough? It doesn’t “rock” enough? Take a look at the full list of the Rock Hall’s inductees, measure Phish’s music against everything you see represented there, and get back to me. Honestly, such measurement is impossible — because Phish’s kaleidoscope oeuvre, much of it invented in real time on stages, never to be repeated the same way, can’t really be quantified, even if most of the concert recordings exist. To understand it, as the old saying goes, you really had to be there.

Fun fact: that oeuvre, alongside all their original material, includes the band’s numerous, fairly letter-perfect re-creations of entire albums by other Rock Hall inductees over the years, many (but not all of them) part of an ongoing series of “musical costume sets” for their Halloween shows. They’ve done The Beatles’ White Album, Exile On Main Street, Quadrophenia, Ziggy Stardust, Dark Side of the Moon, Loaded. Talking Heads Remain In Light has been maybe my favorite so far. They also covered the classic live album Waiting For Columbus by Little Feat, another band shamefully never inducted into the Hall. Phish revere the traditions the Hall of Fame poobahs promote as much as they do, maybe more.

I go on in my rant about the community Phish have built, and some of the shows I’ve seen. I’ll write about them here another time, perhaps.

For now, here’s a taste of Phish’s recent run at the Sphere in Las Vegas, which I regretfully missed, plus some backstory, and a vintage song that, in my mind, has always been about being super-high at an arena rock show — although I guess you could describe a lot of their songs that way.

Be safe, kids, and rock on.