Phish Read online

  The only thing worse than being there was not being there. Traffic had backed up for thirty-five miles along Interstate 91. And yet the festival site could not accommodate another car, because the fields were too saturated for parking. Many among the army of pilgrims who’d come from every corner of the country—and from other countries, too—couldn’t get to the festival because of the interstate gridlock and untenable parking situation at the festival site. The police, promoters, and Phish saw a calamity in the making and called on fans to go home, promising reparations at a later date. Gordon broke the bad news on the radio.

  And then something remarkable happened: In a mass act of civil disobedience, they didn’t go home. They parked their vehicles on the interstate’s breakdown lane and walked, like a ragtag army of refugees, toward the festival site. Some walked twenty miles or more. They were not going to be denied a final chance to see their band, rain and mud and discomfort and inconvenience be damned. If ever there were a demonstration of loyalty to a rock band that went above and beyond the call of duty, the determined mass march to the Newport State Airport at Coventry to see Phish was it.

  Musically, Phish made a disappointing exit. Their relatively dis - pirited and untogether playing—so atypical of a band that had always operated on principles of musical tightness, infectious joie de vivre, mind-boggling concentration, and continuous improvement—appeared to jibe with rumors of drugs and disarray within the Phish camp.

  The stage was rumored to be sinking in the mud. Truckloads of wood chips, gravel, hay, and plywood rolled in to stabilize the grounds. This was the inspiration for some lines from “Invisible,” a song from Anastasio’s first post-breakup solo album, Shine: “Fall down good, sink in the water / But you’re walking on wood.” It was a reference both to the state of the band during Coventry and the state of the land as the musicians trod the boards to navigate the sodden site.

  Fortunately, the rain stopped falling on Saturday, when the music was set to begin. But the damage was done. The sea of mud had taken days to form, had been worked over and stirred up by all the vehicles and human feet, and would not vanish as quickly as had the clouds.

  “I want to welcome all of you to this incredibly special night and weekend,” Anastasio told the crowd as Phish took the stage on Saturday night.

  “In twenty-one years, I’ve never ever been nervous going onstage before a Phish concert—ever, ever, ever,” he said a few songs later. “Tonight, I’m a little nervous.”

  It sometimes showed in his playing. Coventry was not his, or Phish’s, finest hour. Clearly, he was a man in pain. Combining the long-simmering issues that led him to break up the band, guilt and uncertainty over that decision, and the use of drugs to numb those emotions with the meteorological mayhem that wreaked havoc and dampened spirits, Coventry in a sense became Phish’s Perfect Storm.

  Even loyal friends had a hard time coming to the group’s defense at Coventry, though they stopped short of outright criticism. What, for instance, did Ian McLean—a veteran fan of “Ian’s Farm” fame who saw at least one show on virtually every tour—have to say about Phish’s performance that weekend?

  “No comment.”

  Phish subsequently refunded unused tickets to those 10,000 ticket-holders who hadn’t gotten in to Coventry. In addition, each was sent a limited-edition photo book hand-signed by every member of Phish.

  “I hope people appreciate the gesture, because it was heartfelt,” manager John Paluska told Billboard magazine. “The band put a lot into it, and I think it was therapeutic.”

  That was an example of Phish at their finest, going the extra mile for their fans even after they’d broken up.

  Between the ecstasy of the Clifford Ball and the agony of Coventry, something slowly started going wrong. There is some irony in this. First of all, Phish were in many ways at the top of their game, playing some of their best tours and individual shows in those later years, especially, 1997, 1998, and 2003. Second, although Anastasio’s bust in 2006 seemed to affirm long-held perceptions by outsiders about Phish and their following as degenerate druggies, the group—aside from occasional recreational use of soft drugs like pot and mushrooms—had been longtime innocents in the world of hard drugs. Cocaine didn’t even enter their scene until sessions for Billy Breathes in 1996, and the drug didn’t take hold as a backstage staple for another year or two after that. Even then, it wasn’t a problem for the entire band and crew, some of whom were merely dabblers or even nonusers. Through it all, Phish still played solidly, with only a handful of obvious exceptions.

  Summarizing the overall impact of drugs, there were a handful of years in which they insinuated themselves into Phish’s scene, without apparent ill effect on the music, and a handful of years beyond that in which the drugging became internally problematic, to the music’s occasional detriment. If the jams were sometimes less consistently inspired in later years—well, even the greatest careers and most creative endeavors experience their share of bumps and complications over time. And as Anastasio pointed out after it was all over, “We had a great run. It was amazing, everybody is okay, and nobody died.”

  With regard to Coventry and everything leading up to it, if Phish’s career were a baseball game, then you might say they played eight great innings and a bad final one, which didn’t change the game’s outcome. They won decisively, building a legacy that made them heirs to the jamming legacy of groups like the Grateful Dead, Santana, and the Allman Brothers and purveyors of a whole new paradigm all their own. Moreover, the game has now gone into extra innings, with Phish’s well-received reunion in 2009. As if to affirm that metaphor, they kicked off their Summer 2009 tour at Boston’s Fenway Park, home of Major League Baseball’s Red Sox.

  Throughout their career, regardless of phase, stage, or size of crowd, the key question that Phish asked and answered is this one, articulated by Anastasio onstage at Coventry. He was recalling his goal in writing “David Bowie,” one of his earliest and most challenging compositions for Phish: “How far can you push it in the harmonic and rhythmic language and still have people dancing?”

  That question carried with it an assumption that became a truism among those who follow Phish—namely, that Phish is a live band. Creating collectively in the moment is Phish’s forte, and it is why they matter. It explains why fans follow them around the country, even to out-of-the-way locales like far northern Maine and a Seminole Indian reservation on the Florida Panhandle. It’s also why tens of thousands trekked to an unforgiving mudhole outside the village of Coventry to witness what they believed at the time was Phish’s final show.

  Phish’s strength has always been the stage, the live situation, where they could improvise with fire, purpose, and a risk-taking group mind-set. Every show is a musical adventure, supported and urged on by Phish’s devoted following. Unlike the typical rock concert, you don’t go to a Phish show expecting a fixed set list of greatest hits and radio favorites. For one thing, there were no greatest hits or radio favorites, since Phish’s singles never dented the Top Forty (or even the lousy Hot Hundred), and they didn’t exactly conquer mainstream FM rock radio, either. For another, the notion of a recurring clump of favorites performed night after night was anathema to both the band and its fans. You’d go to see Phish expecting them to introduce new material, rearrange old songs in fresh ways, or break out something that hadn’t been played in a multitude of shows.

  “Nobody ever comes just to hear a single,” Trey Anastasio told Spin in 1995. “Everybody is there for the same reason, including us: to get to that point where you’d kind of step through the membrane or something, and all of a sudden you’re in this wwwusshhht—and it’s so much fun to be there.”

  If certain songs did show up on set lists with some regularity—say, “You Enjoy Myself ” and “Tweezer”—they were never performed the same way twice. In fact, such compositions served as launching pads for adventurous jams that would go on for ten or fifteen minutes or even half an hour. “Runaway Jim” an
d “Tweezer” have each lasted nearly an hour. Phish themselves didn’t know what would happen when they set off on these expeditions, trusting the mood and the muse to guide them. Songs might also be strung together or snippets of tunes woven in and out of a central piece, making for a continuous, free-flowing set. It was all about spontaneous creation and deep exploration. The Phish experience, in its purest terms, stems from the symbiotic energy between band and audience. Performing without a net in real time, Phish in concert yields visceral peaks that can’t be matched by sound waves emanating from a CD player. In other words, you have to be there to really “get it.”

  “The times I most treasure are jamming onstage,” said bassist Mike Gordon.

  “To me, Phish is a live band,” agrees Kevin Shapiro, the band’s archivist since 1996. He’s seen upward of three hundred Phish concerts, by his reckoning.

  “A peak show for me is New Year’s Eve 1991,” he continues, referencing a three-set extravaganza in Worcester, Massachusetts. “That was the first show where I hopped into a car and drove that far. The ‘Tweezer’ they played at that show changed me pretty much for good. At that point I realized seventeen hours was not too far to drive, and I would do that each way, anytime.”

  Many others felt similarly, running down their gas gauges while chasing Phish from gig to gig.

  Between December 2, 1983 (Phish’s debut), and August 15, 2004 (the final night at Coventry), the group performed 1,435 concerts. That is the most accurate figure to date, though it is always subject to revision as new information emerges about forgotten gigs played in the less well-documented early years. Given that the average Phish show runs for about three hours—two seventy-five-minute sets plus an encore—that’s a lot of hours spent onstage. Added up, it is the equivalent of 175 full days, or six entire months. In other words, Phish has spent at least half a year of their lives onstage—and that’s before they reunited in 2009.

  They’ve spent more time than that rehearsing, too. This was the real secret to Phish’s success as a jam band: For years, they assiduously practiced four-way improvisation using self-devised exercises. They learned how to listen to one another and how to play as a unit. Phish is ideally a musical conversation, not a monologue. That conversation began way back in 1983 in the college town of Burlington, Vermont.

  TWO

  Getting Their Feet Wet, 1983-1987

  October 1983. Room 210, Patterson Dorm, on the campus of the University of Vermont. You might call this dorm room ground zero for Phish, the point at which all of the fun and games began.

  The occupant of the second-floor room was Jon “Fish” Fishman, a drum-playing freshman with a minimal commitment to classwork. His roommate, by contrast, was a studious engineering major named John Thomas. They used to joke that if you added Thomas’s 3.6 grade-point average to Fishman’s 0.36, you’d almost have a perfect 4.0.

  Fishman was studious in his own way, although as more of an autodidact than a traditional student. His preferred area of study was drumming, and he practiced in the dorm room for much of the day. You might think that a drumming dormmate would be a nightmare, but because most everyone else attended classes while he practiced, the disturbance was minimal. Often he’d take acid and drum all day long.

  One day Fishman was having a particularly good time banging away when a stranger barged into the room. It was Trey Anastasio, a long-haired, red-headed sophomore philosophy major from Princeton, New Jersey. Anastasio lived on the fourth floor of Wing Dorm, also on the UVM campus, and his musical obsession also took precedence over academic pursuits.

  Eric Larson, a fellow dormmate (and future Phish employee), recalled his first impressions of Anastasio as a newly arrived freshman. “Literally, within the first two weeks of school he was up in his dorm room with a guitar and amplifier, and he’s got either Zeppelin or Hendrix cranked up and is playing along with it,” said Larson. “And so I go and knock on the door—who are you?

  “He was definitely a wild young college student, long hair, that kind of thing. We liked the same music, so I was attracted to that. Our whole dorm floor had a great vibe to it. So I stayed friendly with him the whole year, and it wasn’t long after that he rounded up the rest of the band members.”

  He started with Fishman. Always on the lookout for kindred musical spirits, Anastasio had followed the sound of drumming to its source in Room 210. His expression turned incredulous when he saw the determined-looking troll behind the drum kit.

  “Oh my God, it’s you?!” Anastasio exclaimed. “You’re the one playing the drums up here? I’ll be right back!”

  Fishman’s face was not unfamiliar to Anastasio. He’d seen him before on campus. One day Anastasio and his friend Steve Pollak had stationed themselves outside the UVM library, where they amused themselves by observing passing students and deciding who did and didn’t look like they belonged on campus. When Fishman approached, both of them fell down laughing.

  “They pegged me from a hundred yards away in a crowd of people, going, ‘He doesn’t look like he belongs here,’” Fishman recalled with a giggle.

  Neither Fishman nor Anastasio really belonged at UVM, as it turned out. It is an outstanding state university with a storied history, but a regimented approach to learning cramped their idiosyncratic styles. Anastasio was more interested in learning music composition than becoming a music teacher, which was the department’s strength. While he learned from individual teachers, including guitar instructor Paul Asbell and classical music instructor Jane Ambrose, he generally recoiled from the detached, clinical approach of academia, which was antithetical to the barnstorming enthusiasm with which he pursued every musical endeavor. As for Fishman, well, the only thing he really wanted to study was drumming, in his own way and on his own time.

  Fishman started playing drums at the age of five, and his lifelong aspiration was to be in a rock band. He grew up in Syracuse, where his father, Len Fishman, worked as an orthodontist. His mother, Mimi, was one of Phish’s biggest boosters, playing mother hen to hordes of parking-lot kids. She was the Phish parent most likely to be spotted on tour. Toward the end of her life, she organized fund-raising concerts in Syracuse involving other noted jam bands. Her charitable organization, the Mimi Fishman Foundation, remains active.

  At his parents’ insistence, Fishman briefly took piano lessons, but drumming was his destiny. At age seven he acquired his first drum kit—oddly, a gift from the family’s plumber—and retired to the basement, where he worked at becoming Syracuse’s answer to John Bonham. During his senior year in high school, Fishman was in a band called Frodo “for like five minutes,” he recalled. “It was all cover tunes and stuff. Most bands I saw around campus at UVM were all covers, too. Here was this guy, Trey, who right off the bat was writing originals, and the covers we did do were things we had in common, so that was fine, too.”

  By the time he arrived at UVM, Fishman was a self-taught drumming addict who’d assimilated elements of style from rock (power), Motown (groove), and jazz (polyrhythmic complexity). Like every member of Phish, he listened deeply, remaining open to outside influences while cultivating a singular, recognizable style. In addition to Bonham, Fishman has sung the praises of Bill Bruford (drummer for Yes and King Crimson) and virtually everyone who drummed with Frank Zappa. Fishman’s enthusiasm for Zappa led to his recruitment by the Rykodisc label to compile a Zappa anthology in 2002. Primus’s Larry LaLonde did one as well; each was titled Zappa Picks.

  In 1986, both Anastasio and Fishman transferred to Goddard College, a small, experimental school located an hour east of Burlington near Plainfield, Vermont. There they would finish their educations in a self-directed environment more suited to their nontraditional temperaments. But UVM was where Phish came together, and the small city of Burlington served as the band’s home base for many years. Even Phish’s management company, Dionysian Productions, would relocate there from suburban Boston in 1995. And though Dionysian itself dissolved shortly after Phish’s breakup in 2004, the
band’s archive remains in Vermont, as does a care team of employees who oversee archival releases and work closely with Phish’s new management on current projects and other business.

  For reasons that would become clear as Phish progressed, Burlington made for a perfect crucible. It had much do with the fact that Burlington was a college town and therefore provided the right combination of affordable housing, places to play, and a potential fan base among the student population. Beyond that, Burlington’s relative isolation gave Phish the ability to develop at their own pace. They could experiment on the stages of Burlington’s clubs without having to worry about competition from more commercial-minded acts. Moreover, they weren’t prematurely “discovered” and hustled down a crash-and-burn trajectory by prying music-industry types, as might have happened in a locale that registered on their radar. For many years, Phish remained Vermont’s best-kept secret. The cat really didn’t get out of the bag until the early nineties—a decade after their formation.

  “The luckiest thing that ever happened to them was that they played a lot of shows and practiced a lot of hours before anybody really paid any attention to them,” said manager John Paluska. “That might not have happened somewhere else, New York or wherever, where people would’ve caught on to them sooner. They put in an extraordinary amount of time compared to the average band, especially by the time they got noticed. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of bands who’d worked as hard and played as much together as those guys have.”

  In a broader sense, everything about Vermont nurtured their creativity. The stoic New England temperament values intellectual rigor and self-discipline, while its countervailing hippie subculture exhibits vestiges of sixties open-mindedness and musical obsession. Anastasio, McConnell, and Mike Gordon found tutors and teachers who kept them challenged and focused.