Phish Page 2

  There was one hitch. For a few nervous hours, McLean worried that the group wasn’t going to show. There’d been a van breakdown somewhere on the rural highway between Burlington and Hebron, and in that time before widespread cell phone usage, Phish couldn’t call the farm to explain the delay.

  “I was a little freaked out, like, ‘Oh my God, my boys aren’t gonna be here,’” McLean said. But they made it in time to fire up their first set with the sun still in the sky, initiate the second as it was setting, and perform a raucous final set after nightfall. At the end of the first set, Phish relayed the hosts’ pleas for a sober driver to make a beer run. This dialogue between band members and partygoers is a nonmusical highlight of tapes from Ian’s Farm. Phish’s loose, danceable final set included ZZ Top covers (“La Grange” and “Jesus Just Left Chicago”), the funky New Orleans groove of Robert Palmer’s “Sneaking Sally Through the Alley,” and the jaunty Caribbean calypso of the Mustangs’ “Ya Mar.”

  Even after three sets and four hours of music, the revelers at Ian’s Farm weren’t ready to let go of Phish.

  “The music was pretty killer, it really was,” McLean recalled. “I remember at the end we were like, ‘C’mon, a hundred bucks a song, keep on going!’ And they were like, ‘No, we’re fucking done. We’re going home.’ The show’s gotta end sometime, but they definitely played a long time at that one.”

  The cost of hiring Phish to play all day at a private party in 1989? According to McLean, the band got paid $600—a hundred bucks for each member and their crew guys, Chris Kuroda and Paul Languedoc. Those were the days, in more ways than one.

  “America was a different place back then,” McLean mused. “I think if you throw a party like that anymore, you’re gonna have problems. Now there’s all sorts of liability issues and the rest of it.”

  Another thing he recalled of Phish in that time frame was their intense dedication to the music they were creating, almost to the exclusion of everything else.

  “They were all pretty straight,” McLean said of Phish. “We were always trying to corrupt those guys, and they would never play along with our little tricks and games.

  “We tried to be a bad influence as hard as we could,” he added, laughing, “but they were really focused at that point. They were really committed to what they were doing.”

  II

  August 1991: A Perfect Day on Amy’s Farm

  Amy Skelton was Phish’s first fan. She attended their first show (and was among the few paying attention) and, in fact, befriended drummer Jon Fishman before there even was a band. She can recall sitting in on an early rehearsal: “I remember Jon saying he had just met Trey and those guys and was starting to jam with them, and I remember going to one of those practices at somebody’s house. So I was at all of those first gigs because my buddy Fish was playing.”

  Amy and Jon shared an interest in dropping acid that pretty much deep-sixed the academic side of their second semester at the University of Vermont. Skelton went on to excel at UVM as an animal science major, while Fishman ultimately found his niche at Goddard College, where he and Anastasio joined keyboardist Page McConnell. (Of the four of them, only bassist Mike Gordon started and finished his studies at UVM.) All the while, Skelton’s fandom and friendship with Phish remained at a high level. In 1992, she began working tours for the band on the merchandise side, and signed on in 1997 as a full-time salaried employee.

  The reason Skelton didn’t hire on earlier, despite the fact they implored her to do so, was that she took a job running a horse farm in Maine shortly after graduating from UVM in 1989. On August 3, 1991, Phish played a legendary show on the farm that served as a precursor or blueprint for the outdoor festivals that would become a significant part of their legacy. In Phish-fan lore, the event was forever branded as “Amy’s Farm.”

  The official name of this equine enterprise was Larrabee Farm, and it was located in Auburn, Maine, where Skelton grew up. Skelton boarded thirty-five horses, including thirteen of her own, and gave riding lessons. To save money in the cash-poor early days, the band would bunk down at the farm whenever they played in the area—in Portland or at Bates College in Lewiston, for instance. In 1991, Phish were beginning to break out into bigger venues on a more national level. They hatched the idea of playing a free gig to thank their New England fans, who’d sustained them with enthusiastic support from the beginning.

  “They were doing well in Boston, and it just grew from there,” Skelton recalled. “There was this groundswell of kids who were telling other kids, and it was spreading by word of mouth. That was a really cool thing, and by ’91, they really wanted to say thank you. It was as much a thank-you as the big gigs were in the later years. Give it back to the fans.”

  Amy offered the farm, and on one of Phish’s visits she saddled them up and rode them out to look at the field she had in mind. “They were like, ‘Wow, this is amazing! We could have a great gig out here! It’d be so cool!’”

  On the way back, the horses carrying Mike Gordon and Jon Fishman bolted for the barn. “I was terrified that I’d be the cause of one of their deaths,” Skelton said, laughing. “But they survived it.”

  Skelton subsequently sorted out the “mass gathering” regulations with the Auburn city council, widened a tractor road and bridge to make the fire department happy, and hired a water truck to placate the health department. They built a stage, rented a generator, and mailed a postcard to fans containing a map, date and time, and instructions on what to bring (e.g., “It’s a hay field, so it will be stubbly, and your feet will hurt if you come barefoot, so bring shoes”).

  Skelton and Phish had no idea how many people would show up. Previously, the biggest crowd they’d played for hadn’t been much more than a thousand or so. Amy’s Farm drew three thousand Phish fans. It was a strong three-set cavalcade with a “Harry Hood” encore and guest spots from the Dude of Life and Sofi Dillof (Page’s then-girlfriend and future wife). Every bit as impressive as the music was the sense of community. Amy’s Farm marked the moment when Phish fans began to come together and revel in their swelling numbers.

  A swimming hole on the property gave the horde a place to take a dip when the band wasn’t playing. There was a keg behind the stage, where Phish hung out with their girlfriends and pals from Burlington. Skelton informally patrolled the fields on her horse. They’d erected chicken-wire bins where people could deposit garbage and recyclables. When the show ran long and night fell, Chris Kuroda fired up the one light he’d brought along and manually changed colors with gels he carried in his pocket. “It was a great day,” Skelton recalled. “The show went off without a hitch.”

  Afterward, the band and entourage repaired to the farmhouse and partied till three in the morning. A few hours later, after they’d crashed, it started to rain. It dawned on someone that Phish’s gear was still sitting onstage, exposed to the elements. “We all went, ‘Oh, shit!’” Skelton recalled with a laugh, and they scrambled outside to rescue it.

  In the big picture, Amy’s Farm opened the door for further adventures on a grander scale. “I think it gave them the can-do attitude,” she continued. “You know, that they could do things their own way and do things themselves.”

  III

  August 1996: Peaking in Plattsburgh

  This was surreal.

  I was gazing across an endless runway at the heart of a decommissioned U.S. Air Force base three miles south of Plattsburgh, New York. The runway could accommodate the Space Shuttle, and indeed Plattsburgh AFB still rated fifth on NASA’s list of contingency shuttle landing sites, despite the fact the base had been decommissioned the previous year. With its closing went 10,000 jobs and the small city’s largest employer. As a result, there had been nothing but ghostly quietude on the vast concrete expanse.

  However, in late summer, Plattsburgh AFB sprang to life again as a tie-died multitude of 70,000 flew high to the music of Phish at their rock-festival-in-the-middle-of-nowhere, the Clifford Ball.

  I
piloted a rented car down the runway. After about a mile or so, clumps of wandering bodies and parked cars came into view like a mirage. Instead of warplanes streaking in from practice runs, the flight line was overrun with a civilian army of beatific Phishheads who had amassed for Phish’s summer tour finale and first multiday concert and campout. Cars and vans parked in endless orderly rows on the runway, while acres of green-domed tents were pitched tightly together on the broad, grassy strip between the runway and the forest’s edge.

  The community that materialized almost overnight became the ninth largest city in New York. It wasn’t Woodstock, the original rock festival, which at half a million strong could boast of being the second largest city in the state. But the Clifford Ball was pretty damn big—and they all came to see just one band. There was, in fact, an uncanny Woodstock connection. The timing of the Clifford Ball coincided with the dates of the original Woodstock Festival in 1969. All in the Phish camp professed surprise when they later learned of this. It was just one of these serendipitous, synergistic things that routinely happened to this band.

  As a live-music event, the Clifford Ball was a late-summer bonanza that blew the other warm-weather tours—H.O.R.D.E., Lollapalooza, and Perry Ferrell’s doomed Enit Festival—out of the water in the summer of ’96. Unlike those other festivals, however, only Phish played at the Clifford Ball. They performed three sets per day, each lasting around ninety minutes. The afternoon sets commenced at 3:30 P.M., and the group was still jamming away at midnight.

  The impetus for playing at different hours of the day came from Jimi Hendrix. “A lot of his monumental concerts—Monterey, Woodstock, Rainbow Bridge, Isle of Wight—were at different times of day,” explained Trey Anastasio, Phish’s guitarist and nominal leader. “I wanted us to be able to play at all different times of the day at one concert to capture all those different moods.”

  He likened Phish’s Saturday afternoon opening set to his daily wake-up ritual of putting on a pot of coffee and a bluegrass record. And so, on Saturday, the members of Phish got up, drank their coffee, and began picking a bluegrass tune, “The Old Home Place.” A happy, howling crowd fanned outward from the stage to the distant campground as far as the eye could see.

  Over the course of the weekend, Phish performed for roughly nine hours without repeating a song. As if that weren’t enough, Phish literally went the extra mile and played an unannounced jam at 4 A.M. on Saturday. For this, they were drawn through the campground on a flatbed truck. Astonished Phishheads bolted out of their tents and wordlessly joined the swelling, Pied Piper-like procession. This side trip was the musical highlight of the Clifford Ball for Gordon, who felt he’d approach his goal of “bridging the gap between playing music and dreaming.”

  The festival was named after Clifford Ball, the man who pioneered the idea of air-mail delivery. While passing through the Pittsburgh airport some years earlier, Phish had noticed a commemorative plaque describing Ball as “A Beacon of Light in the World of Flight.” They first used the phrase on A Live One, their 1994 double-disc concert compendium, which bore the notation “Recorded live at the Clifford Ball.” Phish even suggested Clifford Ball as a festival name to Blues Traveler’s John Popper, who instead went with H.O.R.D.E. (“Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere”) for the jam-band tour he organized. So the Clifford Ball went from A Live One’s make-believe ballroom to Phish’s (sur)real-life festival, the first of a eight weekend campouts they have hosted in isolated places.

  As befits an event named for an aviation pioneer and held on an Air Force base, planes and aeronautics were a recurring motif. During the festival Phish arranged for flybys from F-14s, biplanes, and stunt planes. Prop planes trailed banners like those you’d see at the beach or ballpark, but the messages ran to Dadaist philosophy (“Hopeless Has Exceptions”) and bizarro-world humor (“Running Low on Fuel—No Joke,” with a stunt pilot sputtering his plane in the sky).

  There was even more to see in the sky at the Clifford Ball. An acrobat did gymnastic flips and twirled on circus ropes while Phish played “Run Like an Antelope.” On Friday, they launched into “The Divided Sky” as the setting late-summer sun colored half the sky a rosy orange and the other a darkening indigo. They dusted off a faithful version of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars”—a timely nod to headline-making revelations from NASA’s Mariner spacecraft that there might indeed be life on the red planet. A fireworks display painted the heavens as Phish played “Harpua” at the close of Friday night’s set.

  Leaving no stone unturned, Phish even invited a relative of Clifford Ball—a grandson of the old gent—to attend as their guest. I spoke to him for a while, and he professed awe both at the event and his invitation to participate. Ben and Jerry—who are to ice cream as Phish is to music, with both entities calling Burlington, Vermont, home—made a cameo appearance onstage. “Phish Food” would soon be introduced as Ben and Jerry’s newest flavor, joining Cherry Garcia in the realm of frozen musical tributes.

  The only other musical act that appeared onstage at the Clifford Ball was the Plattsburgh Community Orchestra. They played soothing, impressionistic works by Debussy and Ravel late Saturday afternoon. While the orchestra cooled the crowd with Debussy’s “Nocturnes,” a glider accompanied the orchestra with an aerial ballet.

  Phish even operated a completely licensed, fully functioning, FCCLICENSED radio station (“Clifford Ball Radio,” 88.9 FM) twenty-four hours a day during the festival. Deejays played everything from hip-hop to Iggy Pop and conducted off-the-wall interviews with characters like Fred Tuttler, a retired dairy farmer from Vermont. (Q: “Which is better, Jersey milk or Holstein milk?”) Anastasio dropped by to cue up favorite discs by Pavement and bands that had influenced them. Kevin Shapiro delved into Phish’s live vault for his “From the Archives” radio show.

  The massive audience for Phish’s sets fanned outward toward the runway. They throbbed to the music like a single organism. Onstage, Phish was arrayed in a straight line—from left to right, McConnell, Anastasio, Gordon, and Fishman—the customary formation for much of their existence. From a platform on the scaffolding to the side of the stage, I could clearly see the expressions on the musicians’ faces, somewhere between concentration and rapture. Anastasio flashed smiles at the others as he counted off each number with rhythmic downstrokes on his guitar.

  The Clifford Ball represented a mid-career peak for Phish. At the end of what had been an atypically abbreviated summer tour of the States—owing to the fact they had been touring in Europe—attendance at their first festival was twice the size of the largest audience for whom they’d previously played. That prior milestone had occurred barely a week earlier, when 35,000 turned out to see Phish at Wisconsin’s Alpine Valley outdoor venue on August 10, 1996. According to Pollstar, the Clifford Ball was the largest concert in North America in 1996.

  More than a triumph of numbers, the Clifford Ball stood as a feat of imagination and logistics, driven by a desire to entertain and inspire fans that almost seemed antiquarian in its total indifference to the bottom line. In fact, the idea was to provide an experience that money couldn’t buy. The band members themselves emerged from the event as agog as the audience. That was because the denizens of Phish Nation, much like the throng at the original Woodstock Festival, behaved as a relaxed, peaceable, and self-regulating body. There was one wedding, one death (by drug overdose), and just a handful of arrests among the blissed-out crowd. The only complaints weren’t about brown acid but green grasshoppers, which infested the campground.

  “It felt like so much more than just a big concert with 70,000 people,” Anastasio reflected a few weeks later. “It felt like some kind of exciting new thing. We did as much of it as we could, but most of the feeling came from the way people were. That’s the part I couldn’t have anticipated and that just kept blowing me away.”

  It was all about peaceful coexistence and phenomenal music, and it was Phish that imagined it into being. Those three days at the Clifford Ball were unlike
anything I’d ever seen. It was as close to an Edenic scene of peace, love, and musical bliss as I’ve ever experienced, and many who were on hand echo that sentiment. The memory of that weekend remains as hopeful evidence that even in this politically muddied, corporately hog-tied, culturally degraded, and violence-wracked world, something approaching utopia still is possible.

  No one who was there will ever forget it.

  IV

  August 2004: Bottoming Out in Coventry

  This was surreal, too, albeit for very different reasons than the Clifford Ball.

  For one thing, this was the end. Phish’s last hurrah. They’d announced that they were breaking up, and the village of Coventry, Vermont, was the site of their final concerts.

  It had been raining for days. Rain fell in relentless sheets that turned the land in and around the sylvan village of Coventry into the world’s biggest mud puddle. In Vermont, they call this time of year “mud season.” The timing couldn’t have been worse, as an army of Phishheads—estimated with remarkable imprecision between 25,000 and 70,000—were descending upon a small state airport bordered by farmers’ fields outside of Coventry. This was supposed to be a grand finale. Instead, it turned out to be a waterlogged disaster, dampening already disillusioned spirits within Phish Nation. There was no joy in Mudville.