For instance, Steve Pollak provided surreal comic relief on occasion as the Dude of Life, sporting bizarre outfits and props that included a shower curtain, pool goggles, and rubber chickens. In some way, large or small, Phish would try something new every time they played Nectar’s.
The group taped some of the early gigs but, preoccupied with the shows and their execution, eventually relegated that task to various friends and fans. Many of the Nectar’s sets, for instance, were taped by Del Martin, a friend of the band. Phish hasn’t yet come to terms with him or others who want money and/or an assurance of their release, and therefore none of the Nectar’s shows have turned up as official LivePhish releases or downloads.
“We would have picked more shows from the eighties, if more were available,” said Gordon. “A couple of ones that were on my list of favorites, the early ones, just weren’t taped at all.”
Phish started taping every show, or nearly so, in an organized way starting in the fall of 1991. Prior to that, taping was much more sporadic and haphazard, which leaves about seven years of Phish history that is incompletely documented. Band archivist Kevin Shapiro has this to say about the years for which Phish possesses relatively few tapes:
“In some situations, people they trusted to make tapes at the time won’t give us what they made and want big payoffs or promises to release certain things. So far Phish hasn’t been willing to do that. To this day, we haven’t bought out any collections. There are a few we should buy out, in my opinion. But so far, as a matter of principle and financial reality, they haven’t done that.”
Nectar’s figured so prominently in Phish’s development that the band put its owner on the cover of their third album and cited him in the title, A Picture of Nectar—a phrase from the song “Cavern” that can be taken two ways: “a pitcher of nectar” or a photograph of the mustachioed Greek club owner. The group also appended a note to the CD jacket paying tribute to the man who let them develop as a band on his stage. In part, they wrote: “Eight and a half years ago, we played our first bar gig at Nectar’s in Burlington. Nectar . . . was happy to give us a gig despite our lack of experience, organization or a song list long enough to last two sets. . . . Those nights at Burlington taught us how to play.”
Anastasio unequivocally stated, “There wouldn’t be a Phish without Nectar’s.”
The group later granted Rorris permission to print up and sell T-shirts that read: “Nectar’s—Home of Phish.” He told the band, “You wouldn’t believe, these things are selling like pancakes!”
What’s curious about all this attention given to Nectar’s is that Phish actually played more gigs—or at least more documented gigs—at another Burlington club called The Front, a larger venue where they moved after outgrowing Nectar’s. Phish played The Front fifty-six times, compared to forty-three known gigs at Nectar’s. McConnell ventured that “we must’ve played Nectar’s a hundred times,” and Chris Kuroda guessed there were upward of seventy-five shows. Either McConnell and Kuroda, who were in a position to know, are both way off in their count or there are many more than the known number of Nectar’s gigs. Perhaps they were so eventful that it seemed like there were a hundred of them.
The emphasis on Nectar’s has to do with the fact it was Phish’s laboratory and playpen. There was no compulsion to be “professional,” just entertaining, and that came naturally. They treated the Nectar’s shows like open band rehearsals, with false starts, abandoned tangents, between-song chatter about what to do next, good-natured banter with the audience, gags and laughter, and ever more adventurous jams. This freedom gave Phish confidence to experiment and progress as they learned what did and didn’t work before a crowd. What they found out was surprising: The more risks they took, the more people liked them. While honing their act at Nectar’s and other local venues, they discovered a sizable audience in Burlington with an appetite for musical adventure. What they couldn’t have imagined was how widespread that hunger would turn out to be.
During the mid-1980s, before Phish began recording as a band, Anastasio and Gordon had been recording on their four-tracks at school and at home, and the fruits of these labors saw casual release as Phish (aka The White Tape). It was something they could send out as a calling card to get gigs, and they also sold it at shows and gave it away to friends. Depending on your point of view, this is or isn’t Phish’s first release. Only three of its sixteen songs—“Alumni Blues,” “AC/DC Bag,” and “Dog Gone Dog”—have all four members playing on them. Four of them are Gordon’s songs, and nine are by Anastasio, cut alone or with his Princeton comrades. This low-fi assemblage doesn’t really cohere as an album and, despite its charm as an embryonic glimpse at the band and its repertoire at an early stage, is hard to regard as a finished release.
On the other hand, The White Tape was distributed as a Phish release, and those three group endeavors do mark the spot at which Phish debuted on record (or, rather, tape). Moreover, five of Anastasio’s endeavors, cut alone or with his Princeton co-conspirators, went on to become key items in Phish’s repertoire. These numbers—“You Enjoy Myself,” “The Divided Sky,” “Slave to the Traffic Light,” “Fluff ’s Travels,” and “Run Like an Antelope”—appear here in rough form. “Slave to the Traffic Light” is the most developed, in terms of a band arrangement. “Run Like an Antelope” was a straggler from Anastasio’s Taft School days with Steve Pollak in Space Antelope that had been re-recorded by Anastasio with Tom Marshall on a tape they called Bivouac Jaun before showing up on The White Tape. Drawn out to nearly seven minutes, it is an impressive one-man show and would become one of Phish’s longest-lived and most beloved numbers. In fact, its key lines were practically a rallying cry for Phishheads: “Set the gearshift for the high gear of your soul/You’ve got to run like an antelope, out of control.”
As for the rest, they’re mere snippets, with “You Enjoy Myself,” “The Divided Sky,” and “Fluff’s Travels” running only for a brief, skeletal minute or so. Gordon’s four numbers aren’t so much songs as experiments in sound, such as the audio-vérité dentist-chair torture chamber of “NO2,” or surreal spoken-word tracks with musical accompaniment, like “Minkin” (about his mother’s art) and “He Ent to the Bog” (a disorienting narrative that includes recited jokes about hamburgers). In a more hardcore vein, Gordon is solely responsible for the rock-music-as-middle-finger message of “Fuck Your Face.” His tongue was in his cheek, but there’s evident venom in his rebellion, too.
The White Tape was released on compact disc in 1998, coinciding with a ramping up of the band’s merchandise arm. It still sounds like the equivalent of a very weird bunch of baby pictures. And while it is hardly essential listening, one can hear the groundwork of a band that was unafraid to break with convention and follow their own path.
Meanwhile, Phish were improving with every gig and gaining new fans as a result. Their fans turned friends on to live tapes and dragged them to gigs, where Phish made good on all the word-of-mouth that preceded them. Converts became proselytizers themselves, and the audience grew in an organic way. The band worked on their weaknesses—which were mostly vocal in nature—and tightened up instrumentally through incessant practice and regular gigging.
“They sort of sucked when we first started seeing them,” admitted Tom Baggott, a Phish fan and acquaintance. “They were getting it together. They were sort of sloppy, you know, but that was the fun of it. That was the magic of it. It was like there was a big joke going on and all the early Phish fans knew the punch line—which was that this was gonna be something big.”
“I thought they needed to work on the vocals,” noted Ian McLean, “but as far as the musicianship and the songs they wrote, I was like, ‘If they’re this small and people are that into it, then there’s no limit to how big it could get.”
“I was noting increasing dexterity, polish,” Amy Skelton recalled of Phish circa 1986-1987. “They rounded out the rocky edges.”
Skelton spent her final year of college att
ending the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Bitten by the Phish bug, she’d commute back to Burlington for their gigs, packing her pickup truck with fresh converts from UNH.
“I brought lots of live tapes with me to UNH, and Phish was good enough by that point that people who’d never heard them could be caught by the music. That’s saying a lot. You’re talking about crappy audience recordings of somebody’s friend’s band, so there’s no real reason for people to listen. But they were listening. I was making tapes for lots of people in New Hampshire who were asking for them.”
“They were my friends,” Skelton conceded, “but they were getting darn good. It was really danceable, you could get a good groove going, and the musical changes—even by 1985—were pretty right on. The whole band moved together and moved well. And they practiced hard.”
From the beginning, Eric Larson would tell anyone who’d listen, “These guys are going to be famous. These guys are going to make it.”
You could argue that it was miraculous that four musicians from four states, each possessing unconventional passion, talent, and vision, found each other in Vermont. McConnell has noted that he was within a hair of leaving the state when he finally connected with the others, and Anastasio’s misadventure with anatomical parts easily could have scuttled Phish, as well. This much is true, however: They made the most of the opportunities their unique chemistry offered them.
Having gained momentum on the local scene, Phish next turned their attention to the world beyond Burlington.
THREE
Phish’s Lost Masterpiece: The Legend of Gamehendge
Trey Anastasio, Page McConnell, and Jon Fishman all graduated from Goddard College’s performing-arts program after submitting their senior study projects to their faculty advisers. McConnell—the group’s original Goddard enrollee—titled his paper The Art of Improvisation. Fishman wrote a manual called The Self-Teaching of Drumming.
Anastasio titled his project The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday. It was a musical fable set in a fictional land called Gamehendge. Many Phish fans simply refer to the suite of songs as Gamehendge. Though the piece was rarely performed in its entirety, various individual songs became highlights of Phish’s live repertoire. A few other Gamehendge-related tunes were added along the way, and the story line got fleshed out onstage, as Anastasio would elaborate about Gamehendge’s inhabitants and power struggles.
Gamehendge defies easy description or categorization. Being that Phish is a rock band and Gamehendge unfolds as a series of songs that tell a story involving various characters, the first inclination would be to label it a “rock opera.” But Anastasio had been exposed to the Broadway theater by his mother while growing up, so Gamehendge might just as easily be considered a musical. In framing its main conceit, Anastasio drew from C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and the abundance of spoken narration takes it further into the realm of theater and literature. Because it was never officially released on CD—although it has been bootlegged—you can’t exactly call it a “concept album.” Maybe a “concept tape”? That’s the form in which Anastasio submitted it. The prized cassette is stored in the Goddard College archives.
So just what is it? Gamehendge might best be described as a rock musical in which challenging, multipart compositions are interspersed with expository narration. The songs, eight of them on the original tape, were preceded by spoken sections that set the scene and moved the story forward.
The inspirations for Gamehendge ran the musical gamut. Phish made discernible nods in their early music to various prog-rock and New Wave precursors, so it’s not surprising to hear echoes of these informing Gamehendge and other early work. For instance, “The Squirming Coil”—from Phish’s second album, Lawn Boy—could have easily passed for a track from one of Genesis’s weird and whimsical albums, such as Nursery Cryme or Foxtrot.
By Anastasio’s own admission, Gamehendge took some cues from Genesis’s magnum opus, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, released in 1975, particularly the scene-setting “Chamber of 32 Doors.” Genesis’s musically ambitious and lyrically elliptical double album told of the spiritual transformation of Rael, a Puerto Rican street kid. Gamehendge was likewise a kind of prog-rock conception with cinematic musical passages and a fanciful libretto.
There were nonmusical points of reference, as well. Such literary and theatrical inspirations as The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and the aforementioned Chronicles of Narnia offered surreal means for its protagonists to enter other, more fantastical worlds wherein they learn life lessons. The name Icculus in Gamehendge closely resembles Icarus—the character from Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun, singing his wings and falling to earth. And the name Gamehendge itself suggested Stonehenge, the ring of standing stones assembled in England by prehistoric Druids who were ritually bound to the earth, sun, and change in seasons.
As regards the Gamehendge story line, Anastasio himself offered this succinct but trenchant summary:There are officially eight or nine songs, maybe ten songs. Colonel Forbin, the main character, is a retired army colonel out walking his dog. He finds this imaginary door or Alice in Wonderland kind of thing. He falls through the door and ends up in this other world, Gamehendge.
Gamehendge was originally a beautiful, serene landscape where these people were living in harmony with nature. They had this book, The Helping Friendly Book, that they used to guide their way of life and rituals—“The Divided Sky” and all that stuff—until this guy Wilson enters the scene. He sees how naive they are, and so he enslaves them, cuts down the trees, builds a big castle, and hides the book.
The story is basically that there’s a revolution brewing. They’re trying to get the book back and go back to their state of peace and tranquility. There are all these characters: Tela and the Unit Monster and Errand Woolf, which is actually the name of a friend of mine, Aaron Woolf. The song “Wilson,” which was the basis for a lot of this stuff, was written by him, so I characterized him and put him in Gamehendge.
There’s also an accountant, Mr. Palmer, who’s part of the revolution. He’s transferring money to the revolutionaries. Wilson catches him and hangs him in the public square. There’s all this stuff that goes on. Eventually they get the book back, but of course by this time they’ve been perverted by the concept of power. So you can never go back in the end, and the guy who led the revolution just becomes the next Wilson. That’s the general story.
“Wilson” was the first song written for Gamehendge. With its ominous two-beat low-E intro and crowd-participation chant of “Wilson . . . Wilson,” it became a concert fixture. It rises to a boil when Errand Woolfe, the hotheaded organizer behind the revolution, shouts: “Wilson, can you still have fun?”
A seemingly juvenile query, it actually suggests something deeper and more relevant to our time. That is to say, those who wield power and amass wealth but still are desperately unhappy typically do their best to make everyone else miserable and subjugate them to lives of virtual slavery, as Wilson did to the denizens of Gamehendge.
“Wilson” opened disc two of Phish’s A Live One, culled from their fall 1994 tour. Through the breakup, they played it 203 times, more than any other Gamehendge song except “The Lizards.” Gamehendge was never far from Phish’s minds or set lists. Anastasio even referenced the musical at Coventry, joking before the encore that the grand finale would be a complete performance of Gamehendge with full orchestra.
“Wilson” was obviously an important song to Phish and especially Anastasio. Its creation predated his move to Vermont. In fact, it went all the way back to the musical clique in his Princeton schooldays. “Wilson” was originally written by Tom Marshall and Aaron Woolf. “Our whole object was to make someone laugh with music,” Marshall recalled. And they wrote prolifically, drawing Anastasio into their orbit, whereupon things really got interesting.
“Aaron and I wrote ‘Wilson’ on a piece of paper in Latin class,” Marshall recalled. “It was this bizarre set of words, and we were
laughing so hard. We started singing it to all of our friends, and Aaron, almost as part of the song, would go up to people afterward and ask, ‘Do you get it?’
“Everyone would smile as we sang it, but as soon as they were faced with a question like that—‘Do you get it?’—the smiles would dis - appear and they’d go, ‘Well, no, not really.’ But when we sang it for Trey, he was entranced and asked us to sing it again. And when Aaron asked the inevitable, ‘Do you get it?’ Trey went, ‘Oh yeah, I get it.’ And sure enough, he did. Phish was built upon it and Gamehendge was built upon it. It was the seed of the whole thing.”
Anastasio made “Wilson” the centerpiece of the Gamehendge fable, which thematically boils down to the notion of paradise lost, with Wilson as the archetypal power-mad villain. He is overthrown by Errand Woolfe, who turns out not to be the beneficent savior the Gamehendge dwellers were hoping for but a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The Who’s anti-authoritarian anthem, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”—“Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss”—could serve as a capsule summary of Gamehendge’s resigned political denouement.
And so Gamehendge does not have a happy ending, and instead reveals a cynicism or realism (take your pick) that put off at least one other member of Phish. Bassist Mike Gordon found the Gamehendge finale too hopeless, and that and other reservations—mainly that he felt it belonged more to Anastasio than the entire band—ultimately relegated Gamehendge to the back burner.
“Trey was all excited about Gamehendge, and I remember there were discussions about taking it on tour,” recalled soundman Paul Languedoc. “I think he wanted to do something with theatrical parts in it, too. Of course, Fish would be up for anything, but I don’t think the idea went over that great with the rest of the band.
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