Pioneer of a Beat Is Still Riffing for His Due

Every morning at 4 a.m., Bo Diddley walks into a ramshackle studio on his 76-acre property outside Gainesville to write music. Several electric guitars are scattered on the floor. The studio, a double-wide trailer, is crammed with recording equipment, a synthesizer and electronic gadgets of obscure types. Piled in every corner are boxes of tapes of Bo Diddley songs never released.

Phish Resurface
The inside story of why they walked away from it all two years ago, why they came back and where they're going

The four members of Phish face each other, ready to jam. But they cannot see one another, because they are all blindfolded. Guitarist Trey Anastasio, keyboard player Page McConnell and the band's namesake, drummer Jon Fishman, wear rolled-up dish towels over their eyes. Bassist Mike Gordon settles for a blue wool scarf. They look like prisoners awaiting a firing squad. It is early December, and Phish should be rehearsing for their first concerts in two years: four New Year's-week dates in New York and Virginia and a U.S. tour opening on February 14th in Inglewood, California. The shows, along with a new studio album, Round Room, mark the end of a long break from the road and from recording. Instead, up at the Barn -- a 100-year-old farm building on a snowy hillside near Burlington, Vermont, that Anastasio bought for $1,000 in 1996 and turned into a cozy studio and practice space -- Phish are playing a game called Zen Language Ball. Someone improvises a lick, and the others grab it as inspiration strikes, adding notes, bending the beat. But there is no speaking or eye contact. The idea is to write new music together from thin air, in total darkness. Anastasio calls it "throwing the ball around." He's right. The music bounces all over the room, from player to player, as it grows: a hot Gordon bass run quickly fattened with funky drums and organ glaze; a guitar drone slowly turning into a spooky bit of ballad. It is the sound of Phish doing what they love best: playing without a net, in the psychedelic-dance-party tradition of the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band; making new music out of nothing but friendship and telepathy. And it is the reason why Phish split up in October 2000.