[9] Phish was formed at the University of Vermont (UVM) in 1983 by guitarists Trey Anastasio and Jeff Holdsworth, bassist Mike Gordon, and drummer Jon Fishman.

[11] The new group performed their first concert at Harris Millis Cafeteria at the University of Vermont on December 2, 1983, where they played a set of classic rock covers, including two songs by the Grateful Dead.

[14] Anastasio returned to his hometown of Princeton, New Jersey following the prank, and reconnected with his childhood friend Tom Marshall; The duo began a songwriting collaboration and recorded material that would appear on the Bivouac Jaun demo tape.

[25] Keyboardist Page McConnell met Phish in early 1985, when he arranged for them to play a spring concert at Goddard College, the small university he attended in Plainfield, Vermont.

[27] In the summer of 1985, Phish went on a short hiatus while Anastasio and Fishman vacationed in Europe; during this time, McConnell offered to join the band permanently, and moved to Burlington to learn their repertoire from Gordon.

[28][29] Phish performed with a five-piece lineup for about six months after McConnell joined, a period which ended when Holdsworth quit the group in March 1986 following a religious conversion.

[37] As his senior project for Goddard College, Anastasio penned The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday, a nine-song progressive rock concept album that would become Phish's second studio experiment.

[39] The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday has never received an official release, but a bootleg tape has circulated for decades, and songs such as "Wilson" and "The Lizards" remain concert staples for the band.

[50] A profile on Phish appeared in the October 1989 issue of the Deadhead magazine Relix, which marked the first time the band had been covered in a major national music periodical.

[61] In August of that year, Phish played an outdoor concert at their friend Amy Skelton's horse farm in Auburn, Maine that acted as a prototype for their later all-day festival events.

[83] Following the death of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia in the summer of 1995 and the appearance of "Down with Disease" on Beavis and Butt-Head, the band experienced a surge in the growth of their fan base and an increased awareness in popular culture.

[115] To promote The Story of the Ghost, Phish performed several songs from the album on the public television music show Sessions at West 54th in October 1998, and were interviewed for the program by its host David Byrne of Talking Heads.

[128] "Heavy Things", which was released as the album's first single, became the band's only song to appear on a mainstream pop radio format, reaching #29 on Billboard's Adult Top 40 chart that July.

[133] During the tour's last concert on October 7, at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, the band made no reference to the hiatus, and left the stage without saying a word following their encore performance of "You Enjoy Myself", as The Beatles' "Let It Be" played over the venue's sound system.

[136] Phish were nominated in two categories at the 43rd Annual Grammy Awards in 2001: Best Boxed Recording Package for Hampton Comes Alive and Best Instrumental Rock Performance for "First Tube" from Farmhouse.

[139] These multi-disc sets featured complete soundboard recordings of concerts that were particularly popular with the band and their fanbase, similar to the Grateful Dead's Dick's Picks archival series.

[142] In August 2002, Phish's manager John Paluska announced the band planned to end their hiatus that December with a New Year's Eve concert at Madison Square Garden.

[85] Four days after the release of Round Room, the band appeared as a musical guest on the December 14 episode of Saturday Night Live, hosted by former Vice President of the United States Al Gore.

The December 1 show at Pepsi Arena featured a guest appearance by former member Jeff Holdsworth, who sat in with the band on five songs, including his compositions "Possum" and "Camel Walk".

[154][155] Later that summer, the band appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman and performed a seven-song set from atop the marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theater for fans who had gathered on the street.

[181][182] The Fenway show was followed by a 25-date tour which included performances at the 2009 edition of the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Tennessee and a four date stand at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado.

[193] During their 2013 Halloween concert at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the band played twelve new songs from their upcoming album, which at the time had the working title Wingsuit and would later be renamed Fuego.

[223] In January 2021, Anastasio told Pollstar that the band was unable to perform or rehearse together due to COVID-19 restrictions and quarantine rules currently in place in the New England states, but said "As soon as it's feasible, we'll be back.

[230] Due to an increase of cases of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 in New York City, Phish postponed their 2021 New Year's Eve concerts at Madison Square Garden from December 2021 to April 2022.

"[263] The band has a number of celebrity fans, including: Sean Avery,[264] Rocco Baldelli,[265] Drew Carey,[266] Tucker Carlson,[267] Joseph Gordon-Levitt,[268] Abbi Jacobson,[269] Katy Tur,[270] Aron Ralston,[271] and Bill Walton.

"[291] In his 2018 book Twilight of the Gods, music critic Steven Hyden wrote that he found the Grateful Dead and Phish to have "significantly different reference points" in terms of influence and style.

"[292] Hyden observed that "If the Dead encompasses American music from roughly 1900 to 1967, Phish picks up the story right through the AOR era, from '68 to around the time Stop Making Sense debuted in theaters in the mid-eighties.

[299][300] Justin Taylor of The Baffler wrote, "You could hate this music with every fiber of your being and still be ready to give Chris Kuroda a MacArthur "genius" grant for what he achieves with his light rig.

[301] Since Phish fans began to discuss the band's live performances on the internet in the late 1990s, they have developed a widely used framework for analyzing the varied forms of improvisation that would regularly occur during a given show.

[318] In November 2019, the Osiris Podcasting Network premiered After Midnight, a five-episode documentary series exploring the creation, execution, and aftermath of Phish's 1999 Big Cypress festival.