That skepticism carried over to the music they were hearing.
“I can remember way back in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades always feeling like there was something better out there,” Anastasio recalled. “Yet still you go to parties, you listen to the radio, you hear it. You can’t help but hear it. I grew up going to hundreds of parties where people put on Fly Like an Eagle, Pink Floyd, Meat Loaf, and stuff like that.
“That was the soundtrack to my youth, regardless of how much I wanted to be like my idols, like Jimi Hendrix or something. But the experiences are different, and you just aren’t Jimi Hendrix. So all those different experiences add up to who you are. And all the while you’re striving for some kind of meaning, and we found that meaning in music.”
Life in Princeton wasn’t all soul-sapping suburban sterility. This leafy, attractive college town with its venerable tradition of education and culture actually had much to offer. The Princeton University campus was an oasis of ivy-covered Gothic buildings and bikeable brick walkways. Anastasio and his pals made Princeton part of their playground.
“We were always on the Princeton campus, and we knew it like the back of our hand,” said Marshall. “We biked on it, we walked on it, we were there all the time. That was our thing. We’d also always break into the Princeton parties at an extremely young age. Back then, it felt like one big community, and a lot of us even thought we were going to go to Princeton eventually, just stay here and go.”
Amid all the partying, they took their music quite seriously. Anastasio was the drummer in an eighth-grade band called Falling Rock. They had one of those diamond-shaped yellow road signs with the words “Falling Rock” printed in block letters. The band played hard rock by the likes of Deep Purple (“Space Truckin’”) and others in that vein. Toward the end of ninth grade, Anastasio picked up the guitar. He had a natural aptitude for the instrument and before long he quietly shut down a lot of the six-string hotshots in the vicinity.
“I went to a party,” recalled Marshall, “and a bunch of the regular guitarists were sitting around in a circle trying to decipher ‘Skronk’ by Genesis. Over in a corner I heard this little amp plugged in, and I went over to see who was playing, and it was Trey. He was playing guitar by himself, and it sounded like Duane Allman. And I didn’t even know he could play!
“I said, ‘Trey, what’s going on? You play guitar?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’m picking it up.’ ‘Picking it up? You’re playing better than anyone over there.’ He was by far better than anyone in our grade. They were struggling note by note with an easy song, and he was improvising on ‘Rambling Man’ or something and just nailing it. And I asked, ‘How long have you known how to play guitar?’ And he said, ‘Tom, I’ve just always sort of known.’”
The social life of Anastasio, Marshall, and their pals at that time sounds like a collage of scenes from Dazed and Confused, That 70’s Show, and various smoke-filled Cheech and Chong farces.
“I remember a party at Trey’s house,” said Tom. “Of course, there’s some drug stuff, and it’s my first exposure. But I was just drinking beer, which was bad enough for me. It was like the standard ending to all movie high-school parties. The headlights swept across the yard, someone yelled, ‘Your dad’s home,’ and people just began piling out the back door, sprinting across the yard, hiding in closets, and crazy shit.”
Having become a handful for his parents, Anastasio was sent to the Taft School, a prep school in Watertown, Connecticut. Founded in 1890, Taft has a motto of “Not to be served but to serve,” though it’s hard to imagine many of the troubled kids from good homes there taking it seriously. At Taft, Anastasio befriended Steve Pollak. He was christened “the Dude of Life” by his pals after uttering a series of mock profundities while they were all under the influence of mushrooms. They formed a short-lived band named Space Antelope, for which Anastasio was the drummer. Pollak, like Anastasio, wound up attending UVM and finishing elsewhere. He was on the scene during Phish’s germinal years, and several songs he wrote with Anastasio—“Slave to the Traffic Light,” “Fluffhead,” and “Run Like an Antelope” (an amended Space Antelope leftover)—became standards in the group’s repertoire.
Anastasio was also at Taft when Talking Heads’ Remain in Light was released in 1980. It was the New Wave quartet’s fourth album—and the third in a row produced by Brian Eno, who had become a de facto member.
“It was a really influential record for me,” Anastasio said a few weeks before Phish played Remain in Light in its entirety at their 1996 Halloween show in Atlanta. “When I think about it, I may have listened to this album more than any other album, ever. I practically learned how to play guitar listening to this record. It was literally my guitar-practicing album. Anytime I wanted to learn something new and practice it, I would put on Remain in Light and kind of jam to it. I used to use it instead of a metronome.”
Knowing this deflates the exaggerated notion that the Grateful Dead figured prominently in his musical upbringing. In 1980 he knew how to play a Talking Heads album, but it would be two more years before he even attended his first Dead show. He didn’t get into them the first time around, either. But, as was the case with a generation of concertgoers, everything became perfectly clear when he saw them again after dropping acid.
“It was just incredible,” he recalled. “Blew my mind. It was just surreal, you know: improv. Hooked up. I had never really seen anything like it before. That’s what I mean when I say different musicians have validated different aspects of music for me.”
Beyond the obvious, noted procession of influences—Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, Frank Zappa, Robert Fripp, David Byrne, and Jerry Garcia—Anastasio absorbed and refracted elements of style from others who crossed his radar. These included another classic-rock guitar hero, Queen’s Brian May, with his fat, multitracked midrange sound; musical brigands like Miles Davis and Bob Dylan, who stuck to their guns when the audience revolted; jazz guitarists Joe Pass, Django Reinhardt, and Pat Metheny; and Igor Stravinsky (“who simply had it all”).
Anastasio also understood that the ultimate goal of any artist is to discover his own voice. From amid the welter of guiding lights that set him on his musical path, he would do so fairly rapidly in Phish.
Meanwhile, back in Princeton, Marshall, Dave Abrahams, and Marc Daubert had their own high-school band, And Back. An enlarged version of that group included the aforementioned Pete Cottone and Roger Halloway. Marshall and Aaron Woolf also had a group, A Dot Tom, which is where “Wilson”—the inspiration for Anastasio’s Gamehendge saga—originated. “Wilson” makes passing mention of “Pete and Rog” in yet another name-check of Princeton friends.
Though Anastasio and his pals back home were playing in different bands, there was still much informal collaboration. “They were my jamming buddies in high school,” he recalled in 1996. “All we ever did on Friday and Saturday nights was get together and jam and make four-tracks. That was it.
“Tom and I made a couple of four-track albums starting in high school and have been writing ever since, and he always sang and played as much as I did. That’s why I’m such a big fan of Ween, because it reminds me so much of all these hundreds of four-track tapes we’ve made.”
Ween, incidentally, comes from Hopewell, New Jersey, the next town over from Princeton. Matthew Sweet and Mary Chapin Carpenter hail from the area as well. More relevantly, Blues Traveler and the Spin Doctors—jam-band mainstays, friends of Phish, and core acts on the H.O.R.D.E. tours—have solid roots in Princeton, too. All four members of Blues Traveler and Chris Barron of the Spin Doctors attended Princeton High, a public school. There must be something in the water or, more likely, in the schools’ music departments. In any case, the solid push those budding musicians got in high school did not go unnoticed. When Phish’s A Live One received gold certification (500,000 copies sold) from the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), Anastasio sent a gold album to Princeton Day School’s music department.
“Yeah, I’m looking at ’em right now. I’m in my studio and there are stacks of them,” he said. “It’s hilarious stuff, from five o’clock in the morning when we were up all night.”
“It started out to be about making people laugh,” affirmed Marshall. “That was almost the whole point of getting together, because we would just laugh our asses off when we were writing this shit. If the tape recorder was rolling, then we’d stop it, play it again, and play it fifty more times, laughing harder each time.”
Anastasio also had another collaborator: his mother, Dina. They wrote songs together, selling them for $250 a pop, and several of them wound up on kids’ albums. In 1995, he could still sing them from memory:Well, there was a little frog and his name was Joe
The frog jumped up and then he crashed down low
He jumped a little higher and a little higher, oh
And he stopped and he said, “Hi, my name is Joe!”
The mother and son would be given a theme, such as “self-esteem,” and write accordingly: “I like me, I like me, I like me.” Their most adventurous effort was a musical called Gus, the Christmas Dog. They envisioned it becoming a made-for-TV Christmas special, but there were no takers. That’s not to say the songs went to waste. The main theme from Gus, the Christmas Dog became the final section in “The Divided Sky.” Other parts of Gus were appropriated for Phish songs as well. One of its numbers, “No Dogs Allowed,” became part of Phish’s early repertoire and their first stab at barbershop quartet. A cadre of early fans used to follow Phish around and scream for them to do “No Dogs Allowed,” and occasionally they’d oblige. The song tells the tale of a lost puppy who enters a New York subway station and is turned back:No dogs allowed, no dogs allowed, no dogs allowed on the subway
So climb up the stairs and be on your way
’Cause there’s no dogs allowed on the subway.
Thump-thump-thump-thump.
With his fists, Tom Marshall pounds out a deep, reverberant rhythm atop a giant hunk of metal in the shape of a rhomboid solid. In 1966 an artist named Tony Smith designed this metal sculpture, giving it the generic name “New Piece.” Marshall, Anastasio, and their friends simply called it “the Rhombus.” It figures heavily in Phish lore.
The Rhombus sits in a grassy field behind the Institute for Advanced Studies, where some of the great minds of our age have come to puzzle out the world’s mysteries. Albert Einstein, who clearly understood the wages of fame in ways that Phish would eventually appreciate—“It certainly gets in the way of your work,” declared the genius—was among them. To one side of the Rhombus is a pond, and pathways meander through the peaceful, shady surroundings, designed to provide a serene, inspirational setting for all the brains at the institute.
A pack of Princeton schoolkids—mainly Marshall, Anastasio, Dave Abrahams, and Marc Daubert—had different designs on the Rhombus. They went there to drink beer, smoke dope, make music, and commune with the cosmos. Hanging out at the Rhombus became a kind of pagan ritual that allowed them to tap into a primordial energy source and get a good buzz in the process. For one thing, it was far enough from the main road to escape the prying eyes of the authorities. Out by the road, the local cops would periodically sweep the former battlefield with their lights, rounding up all the potheads who were in the grass, so to speak. If they did smoke dope there, their little group learned to hide behind the columns of the memorial so the cops’ sweeping lights wouldn’t expose them.
Back then, mounting the Rhombus was part of the ritual. On a warm afternoon in May 2008, at Marshall’s suggestion, we scaled the metal sculpture and talked atop its summit for hours, as he and Anastasio had so many times in years past. Of course, ascending the eight-foot-tall Rhombus in middle age was not as easy as it had been in junior high and high school. Marshall tried to ascend its slanting side with a running start, letting his momentum skip him to the top, as they’d done effortlessly way back when. He succeeded on the third attempt, a testament to his athleticism and height. (He’s a rangy six foot four.) Before doing so, he gave me a leg up so I could grab a corner and hoist myself to the top.
“So this is the magical Rhombus,” said Marshall. “A lot of the energy of the Rhombus came out when you hit it, and we’d ruin our hands by slamming into the late hours. But when you’re laying back on it, it feels like it’s echoing up into the solar system. It’s an incredible feeling. It’s definitely a power source. There’s enough room to get four or five people up here, and you all chant and sing, and there has to be a guitar and a six-pack to do it right.”
In my notes from that day, I wrote, “Birds twittering, Rhombus rumbling, geese honking, wind howling.”
There was something alive about the Rhombus. The steel skeleton seemed to vibrate with an elemental energy. The Rhombus is where the chant for “The Divided Sky” originated, inspired by a phenomenon Marshall and Anastasio witnessed one night.
“We’d always lay on our backs and start with a drum pulse,” Marshall recounted. “This one night, we noticed that half the sky was dark and half was light. It was an effect that came from the clouds being really low and the institute tower being lit in such a way that one-half of the lighting appeared to be off. It cast this incredible beam of light right over our heads. Half of the sky was fully lit and the other half was completely black. And we began chanting, ‘Divided sky, the wind blows high.’”
Marshall got married in 1992, and he held his bachelor party at the Rhombus. Phish were almost nine years into their career at that point, and it was a pivotal time. That year saw the release of their first album on a major label (A Picture of Nectar, Elektra Records); the re-release of their prior indie-label albums (Junta and Lawn Boy), and the recording of the concept album Rift—which, in part, addressed Marshall’s marital jitters. (Just listen to “Fast Enough for You.”) Phish also gigged 112 times in 1992. Amid this bustle, Anastasio returned to Princeton for Marshall’s marriage. At the wedding ceremony, Anastasio and Dave Abrahams performed a Bach processional on acoustic guitars. The bachelor party was somewhat less sacrosanct, ending with a fiery, heavy-metal exclamation by the Rhombus.
“There were six or seven of us,” Marshall recalled. “Trey had his guitar, and we played and drummed and smoked and drank. At the end of the night, we had quite a lot of garbage—six-packs and bags and shit. My resourceful friend John Sprow opened the hatch of the Rhombus. It has since been welded shut, but back then it was just held down by gravity and we knew how to open it. He threw all the bags and stuff into it, which was blasphemy for us since we’d always treated the Rhombus nicely. Here’s a guy who didn’t know our ceremony and just figured, ‘Oh, wow, what a nice garbage can.’ Then he threw a lighted match on top of it, and before long our butts were getting hot.
“This is a quarter-inch or more of solid steel, and the heat was becoming an issue, so we threw the door back down on top of it. All of a sudden we heard a howling, and it really was howling. Each screw hole began making this jet-like sound and shooting flame about a foot high. The Rhombus became a blast furnace. It really was the night the Rhombus came to life. It was either saying ‘thank you’ or ‘get the hell out.’ We’d like to think it was saying thank you for all the years of fun.”
Every so often during Phish concerts, Anastasio would provide what the fans called “Rhombus narration” from the stage. Seeking out the Rhombus became a kind of holy grail for serious Phishheads. It’s hard to understand why the Phish following had such difficulty finding the Rhombus, since this unmistakable metal icon sits in plain view in a park behind a well-known building in Anastasio’s hometown of Princeton.
No doubt part of the reason is that Anastasio offered clues from the stage that actually threw them off the track. For instance, during “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent” at a 1995 show in Hershey Park, Pennsylvania, he purported to reveal that the Rhombus was located in King of Prussia. And so the Rhombus large
ly remained a mystery well into the nineties.
Anastasio returned to the University of Vermont for the fall 1984 semester. During his absence, Mike Gordon and Jon Fishman played in a group called the Dangerous Grapes—another two-guitar outfit that mined an unoriginal but satisfying blues-rock groove, drawing from the usual suspects: the Allman Brothers Band, the Grateful Dead, Stevie Ray Vaughan. If nothing else, their afternoon jam sessions entertained the members of the UVM fraternity at whose house they rehearsed. The return of Anastasio, however, promised fresh challenges and original material, and Fishman unhesitatingly threw in his lot with the prodigal guitarist.
Gordon also came around, but with a proviso: He wanted the band to continue to include covers in their sets. In this he had an ally in Jeff Holdsworth, who was also still in the fold, though his role would diminish as original material and musical charts increasingly entered the repertoire. That said, Holdsworth provided Phish with two original songs—“Camel Walk” and “Possum”—which they continued to perform long after he left. In fact, “Possum”—a catchy, finger-popping country-blues shuffle—became a live favorite. Anastasio even made it part of his original Gamehendge song cycle.
As for the covers, Gordon had an interesting point to make, as he usually does: “We always talk about getting away from our egos,” he told Richard Gehr in The Phish Book, “but there’s a certain egotism about who wrote whatever song you happen to be playing, so that’s another part of the ego to do away with. The source of what you’re playing shouldn’t make any difference if you’re attempting to be true to the moment.”
The foursome finally settled on Phish as a name. Amy Skelton, who was around for Phish’s birthing, doesn’t remember exactly when or how it emerged. They first mused about calling themselves Phshhhh (without a vowel), based on the sound that brushes make on a snare drum. Someone even came up with a poster that had Phshhhh on it, but the lack of a vowel ultimately presented problems. (Imagine a promoter’s confusion: “You call yourself what? How do you spell that?”) And so Phshhhh became Phish, the decision made the afternoon before they played a Halloween party in 1984. This was also their first gig since resuming the band after Anastasio’s one-semester suspension from UVM.
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