Film + TV

Star Trek's Commander Riker played trombone with Phish

by Jesse Locke

Phish phans and Star Trek: The Next Generation stans rejoice – Burlington, Vermont’s phinest are releasing a deluxe reissue of their 1994 album Hoist featuring Jonathan Frakes (a.k.a. the actor who played Commander Riker).

According to an announcement on Phish’s website, the band’s fifth full-length studio album will be re-released on Record Store Day 2016 (Saturday, April 16th) as a “limited, individually numbered, 180g 2LP orange splatter coloured vinyl set.”

Hoist features guest appearances from the Tower of Power Horns, Alison Krauss, and Béla Fleck, plus Frakes’ manic trombone playing on an aptly titled sound collage interlude called “Riker’s Mailbox.”

In a interview for the A/V Club‘s ‘Random Roles’ feature from 2013, Frakes explained the song’s genesis:

“My next-door neighbor at the time was a guy named Paul Fox, who produced R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs, Jakob Dylan, Björk, and Phish. And the guys from Phish were huge Trekkers, and they used to come to his house to rehearse. Actually, I think they may have rehearsed in my guest house! This was up in Lookout Mountain, in L.A. But they got wind that I played trombone, and they didn’t know I wasn’t that good, but they asked me to the studio, so I came out to the studio to play trombone on Hoist. I played some music; I didn’t do it so well, but all of the outtakes from my trombone playing became a song called “Riker’s Mailbox,” because at the time, my mailbox vaguely looked like a cow, with black and white spots, only this one had been beaten up many times by cars running into it and people running by and smacking it. So my outtakes were named after the mutilated cow mailbox that was the identification of the front of our house, the Hoist album went platinum, and, as a result, I am the proud keeper of a platinum record. So there you go.”

Revisit some of Riker’s most ‘boned out moments below: