You could use Apache to serve PHP scripts rather than spawn-fcgi/php-cgi. Apache's handling of PHP has been time tested, and performs as well or better than fcgi in my experience on a high traffic Wordpress blog.

We use:

[code]
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8008;
[/code]

Apache can listen on several ports.

I had a lot of headaches with fcgi, which made me question why I even needed it when I had Apache. On a single server Apache handled PHP and static files for 35 million visitors in a month before we started using Nginx, so using Apache only for PHP on the backend made sense.