“The Divided Sky” contains some of Anastasio’s most lyrical guitar work, especially a passage of thoughtful, clear-toned exposition that follows the mid-song pause. Junta also gave McConnell space to solo on acoustic piano on “Esther” and “Foam”—a refreshing sound on a rock album at the tail end of the synth-drenched 1980s.
Anastasio considers “You Enjoy Myself” the Phish song. It is by far the most-performed Phish song. For a band whose appeal had much to do with how rarely they repeated themselves, “YEM” turned up on 40 percent of their set lists. It was also the last song they played at the October 7, 2000, show that inaugurated a two-year hiatus.
As with so many early Phish songs, the words were hardly the point. In concert, “YEM” consisted of intricately composed sections that expanded into open-ended jams. A precise reading of the fixed compositional parts prepared the band members for the jams that followed, providing a kind of focus that would help ensure they wouldn’t aimlessly meander. As counterintuitive as it might sound, Phish’s most raging jams began with an orderly rendering of the composed sections that preceded it. This is why early compositions like “You Enjoy Myself,” which followed this form, proved to be the most jam-worthy vehicles.
“‘You Enjoy Myself ’ was the first long, written-out piece of music where there’s a jam at the end,” Anastasio said. “It was the first time that kind of became the thing. You’re so linked up in the worked-out stuff, you’re such a unit, that it gets you lined up as you’re leading up to the jam.”
“To get so tight in a preplanned way makes the looseness juxtapose even more,” added Gordon. “I look at it that the written-out stuff is a sort of ritual, almost like a prayer session that gets my mind in gear for what’s to come. Sort of like a Hassidic Jew doing a bunch of prayers and moving until he starts to reach God. There’s like this leg-work that has to be done, something where the prayers are already written.”
There were other highlights on Junta, such as the playfully surreal “Fee”; the nightmarishly psychedelic “Foam”; and Mike Gordon’s “Contact,” the most unconventional rock song ever written about a car. The amused hosts of NPR’s Car Talk laughingly called it the worst car song ever written.
In this period, before Tom Marshall became Anastasio’s full-time writing partner, there was a rift between words and music in Phish. The lyrics might have seemed nonsensical while the music was grandly ambitious. Still, even when the playful surrealism of the words existed mainly to set the table for the music, there were shards of wisdom to be extracted here and there. Consider these cautionary lines from “Fee”—a song about an ill-fated love triangle involving a weasel, a chimpanzee, and a gospel singer—which in hindsight seem eerily predictive:Oh, Fee, you’re trying to live a life
That’s completely free
You’re racing with the wind,
You’re flirting with death
So have a cup of coffee
And catch your breath.
In a nutshell, these two aspects made Phish especially unique: (1) Anastasio’s compositional acumen, developed under Ernie Stires and carried forward with Phish, and (2) the listening exercises Phish practiced for hours in rehearsal. They had inventive composed material to play and were also able to improvise smartly and as a collective.
Looking back on this early period Anastasio noted, “I think what made Phish unique is that there was so much composed music at the beginning. If you go back to Junta, it’s ‘Foam,’ ‘Divided Sky,’ ‘You Enjoy Myself,’ ‘Fluffhead.’ These are long, heavily composed atonal fugues. We would play these very complicated pieces and then improvise. What I found was that the improvisation was bent because we had just coexisted in music that was very tightly composed.
“If we play a four-part fugue, with two hands on the piano playing the inner lines, me playing the melody and Mike playing the bass line, where everything’s interwoven, then when we improvised, the improvisation was changing keys and going together like a snake.
“It made it unique to my ear from other bands I had jammed with. Usually you have a band kind of strumming along and one guy playing a solo. This was not really solos at all, and it really went far. At which point we liked it so much we began to do exercises and rehearse improvisation for hours. That was incredible . . . and fun.”
Initially, Junta didn’t travel much beyond Phish’s immediate world as a limited cassette-only release in ’89. It received its day in the sun, however, in 1992 after Phish signed to Elektra and the album was reissued as a double CD. The original work was too long to fit on a single disc but left considerable room on a second disc, so forty minutes of bonus material were added: two bits of madness taped at Nectar’s (“Icculus” and “Sanity”) and a lengthy extract of home jamming, dubbed “Union Federal,” pulled from one of Phish’s Oh Kee Pa ceremonies. This particular one occurred in August 1989.
The Oh Kee Pa ceremony was a Native American test of endurance, and for Phish it represented immersion into the realm of jamming that itself tested their temporal limits as musicians. There were three Oh Kee Pa ceremonies, at which they played for hours without stopping. Marijuana figured into the bonding ritual, and these endless jams can be seen as precursors to the listening exercises that would become part of band practices for a number of years. Mike Gordon elaborated:
“Trey used to take fresh chocolate and vanilla and maple syrup and all these natural ingredients and make four small cups of hot chocolate that had a half-ounce of pot in them. This one time, he was living on the river in Plainfield, Vermont, and we used to practice in his apartment. I would do the commute to Goddard a couple times a week. His neighbor around the corner was this Hungarian girl, and she was cooking us this big meal—Hungarian mushroom soup and all that.
“She said it would be ready in about two hours, so we started this jam session and it ended up going for eight hours. She wrapped it up for us. We never had dinner with her. We started at 3 and went to 11 at night. One of things that came up was the bass riff and the guitar riff to ‘Weekapaug Groove.’”
Over time, this means of finding riffs for songs in fragments of jams would become commonplace for Phish. It was how much of the music for their 1998 album, The Story of the Ghost, got written. The Oh Kee Pa ceremonies and the listening exercises they’d do in band practices are where Phish learned not just how to jam but how to compose in the moment (and there is a difference).
Not to confuse matters (though they are confusing), but Anastasio wrote a brief instrumental that he titled “The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony.” It appeared on Lawn Boy and had nothing to do with their ceremonial jamming rituals. In fact, he wrote this springy little number on guitar while riding shotgun as Chris Kuroda drove Phish back from a gig. Anastasio would look up and ask Kuroda, “How does this sound?” each time he’d come up with a new lick or section.
In the late eighties, Phish began incorporating “secret language” into their performances. These were musical cues they could play that would trigger a preplanned response. Phish’s secret language was somewhat similar to Frank Zappa’s hand signals in that they cued some change in the music without the audience’s knowledge. One cue involved playing the chorus riff from “Up, Up and Away” (the late-1960s sunshine-pop hit by the 5th Dimension) and then hitting either a low or high note, at which point they’d ascend from the lowest notes or descend from the highest ones, respectively. A tritone down meant play at half-speed. A brief reference to the Beatles’ “Get Back” meant return to the first song in a series. And so on.
At a 1992 show in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Phish clued their audience in on the secret language and taught them cues created specifically for the fans. The best-known of these involved a snatch of The Simpsons theme song, at which point the crowd loudly responded “d’oh!” like Homer Simpson. Upon hearing a riff from the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” the crowd members were expected to turn around. The point of all this seeming nonsense was to deepen the band’s relationship with the audience and confound the unini
tiated. The sharing of secret language encouraged audience members to become more than casual fans. They were now band-schooled and ritually involved in the enterprise, conferring a certain element of “membership” upon them while confusing newbies and non-initiates who popped into shows out of curiosity. As Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters used to say back in the sixties, you were either on the bus or off the bus.
Phish didn’t receive its first notice in the national music media until the fall of 1989, when they were accorded brief mention in Relix. Founded in 1973, this retro-minded fanzine existed largely to keep tabs on the activities of the Grateful Dead and other “relix” of the sixties San Francisco scene. In the nineties it would closely track the contemporary jam-band scene, too. But in 1989 there was no such scene, just a handful of bands making waves close to their respective home bases. Phish were accorded several paragraphs in the September/ October 1989 issue of Relix.
With half a dozen years and several hundred gigs under their belt, Phish were, almost insultingly, the subject of that issue’s “Too New to Be Known” column. Writer William Ruhlmann had his ear to the ground, though, observing, “The band possesses a musical flair almost beyond belief.” Praising Junta, which had been released a half year earlier, he noted, “The underlying strength of all the material is the virtuosic musicianship and wry sense of humor that runs through it.”
Indeed, humor figured heavily, especially in Phish’s first decade. At a later point, when Anastasio began to worry that the gags were overshadowing the music—especially in the minds of writers and critics, who played up the jokey elements—the humor receded and the jams got longer. But making themselves and others laugh was always part of the Phish experience.
Discussing the themes that ran through Phish’s career, Tom Marshall felt that “humor through music” was a key one. “’Cause it started out about making people laugh,” he said. “All of the band members are incredible comedians, they really are. They’re really fucking funny. I mean, I’m fairly funny, I can make people laugh, but everything out of their mouths would be worthy of writing down. And once Brad Sands [Phish’s road manager] was in that mix, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise and didn’t want to. That’s another guy who thinks on his feet.
“Those five people on one bus together were kind of overwhelming, and they loved new blood to prey on. I quickly found out anything I said that they could latch onto became fodder. Don’t give them material, I guess, is the lesson I came away with. Or let them feed on someone else. It was brutal but funny as hell.”
The most obvious card in the band is Jon Fishman, who’s worn a dress onstage for most of the band’s career (including the current reunion) and, on various occasions, would get completely naked. On the cover of Lawn Boy, he’s shown in greenish-gray makeup—presumably caked with the filthy spew from his other instrument, the vacuum cleaner, with which he is pictured. He frequently claimed a front-and-center comic-relief spot in the set for a vacuum-cleaner solo.
Fishman’s “doughnut dress” is a ghastly garment with large orange-pink circles on a bluish-purple background. In 1995, he recalled how the dress became part of the act: “I was at my friend’s house and there was this pile of material they were making bags out of. There was this dress in the pile, and I was just joking around and put it on. It looked really funny and I thought, ‘I’ll wear this onstage tonight,’ and I’ve ended up wearing it for like six years now.”
“Without a washing,” quipped McConnell.
“Now it gets washed pretty regularly,” Fishman noted. Dry-cleaned, even, and neatly returned on a hanger.
At a party, Fishman was challenged to play a vacuum cleaner after claiming to have taught everyone in the band how to play their instruments. He made some ersatz squonks and bleats through the activated appliance’s suction tube, and a few nights later he tried it out onstage at Nectar’s. The vacuum cleaner solo became a recurring comic interlude on stages small and large across the band’s career.
There were other gags: the giant hot dog that sailed the band across the Boston Garden at their New Year’s Eve show in 1994; the trampolines, found at a yard sale, that Gordon and Anastasio hopped up and down on while playing at points during “You Enjoy Myself,” “Mike’s Song,” and others; the “Big Ball Jam,” during which the audience’s bouncing of four huge rubber balls (each color representing a band member) directed the band’s performance. Even some of the songs they covered, from Fishman’s warbling of charmingly acid-damaged Syd Barrett tunes and the group’s faithfully hammy renditions of Deodato’s “2001 (Also Sprach Zarathustra)” and the Edgar Winter Group’s “Frankenstein” had comic intent.
“I think it’s refreshing to see people onstage who aren’t taking themselves too seriously,” offered McConnell.
“The dress allows me to actually never take myself too seriously,” Fishman said with a chuckle.
“It’s a fine line between something that’s funny and something that’s so silly that it detracts,” concluded McConnell. “I think we’re always trying to push that envelope.”
Pushing it to the limit was all part of the Phish experience. The recurring stage gags, the always-varying set lists, and the inventive, unpredictable jams marked Phish as a virtually unclassifiable entity on the music scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“When they came up with an idea, whenever they found a new direction to go in, 100 percent focus would go that way,” Chris Kuroda said of Phish’s creative mind-set.
“That’s Trey’s personality,” added Paul Languedoc. “He’s very excited about what he’s working on at that particular point in time. The other guys, too, but Trey’s obviously a very ambitious, enthusiastic guy.”
Determined to stamp themselves uniquely, Phish even began carrying their own sound and lighting equipment at a very early stage in their career. They’d always bring their own gear, and sometimes club owners would say, “Why are you bringing that crap in here? Why don’t you just use what we have?”
That was the whole point: It was their stuff.
“We stamped ourselves with a certain uniqueness that any other band on any given night in any other club just didn’t seem to have,” Chris Kuroda pointed out. “Those things became incredibly important.”
For instance, Phish’s stage backdrops, created by Gordon’s mom, were completely unique, “We always had to put the backdrop up,” Languedoc recalled. “The band was insistent. They’d walk in for sound check and go, ‘Where’s the backdrop?’ ‘There’s nowhere to hang it in this place.’ ‘Oh yeah there is.’ There’d be a huddle and a meeting, and next thing you know, it was up. They’d find some way to get at least part of it up, by folding it or something, ’cause it had to be up.”
Even some of Phish’s instruments were homemade. Languedoc, in addition to being Phish’s soundman and equipment manager, built guitars and basses for Anastasio and, up to a point, Gordon. Onstage, Anastasio has always held fast to a single Languedoc custom guitar, using effects pedals, rack-mounted gear, and pure technique—rather than a bunch of different guitars—to get the sounds he wants. Anastasio is, as Paul Languedoc put it, a “one-guitar man.”
It’s hard to overstate how important Languedoc was to Phish. Anastasio met Languedoc when he brought his Ibanez electric to Time Guitars, the Burlington shop where Languedoc worked, for repair. Anastasio sold that instrument and bought a guitar made by Languedoc, which he played for a few years. Once Languedoc began working full time for the band, he made Anastasio the first custom-built guitar to bear his own name, a prototype Languedoc hollowbody, which Anastasio played from 1987 to 1996. (Another guitar that Languedoc built for him in 1991 never saw much action.) Anastasio switched to a new Languedoc hollowbody in 1996 and played it through 2002. After Phish’s hiatus, another new Languedoc model, called Alcoa, became Anastasio’s preferred ax. He’s held fast to his Languedocs throughout the 2009 reunion shows, too.
Over the years, Phish practiced whenever and wherever they could at their various
Vermont domiciles—at the house Languedoc shared with Anastasio and Fishman on Weaver Street in Winooski, in Anastasio’s apartment on the river in Plainfield, in the big livingroom at McConnell’s place in Burlington. When Languedoc bought a house in Underhill, Phish claimed the loft above the workshop he built next to it as their ultimate rehearsal space.
Phish recorded Lawn Boy, the follow-up to Junta, at Dan Archer’s new studio outside Burlington. As with Junta, Phish packed Lawn Boy with songs that had become staples of their concert repertoire. These include “Reba” (the uber Phish song, in many a fan’s mind), “Split Open and Melt,” and “Bathtub Gin.” For the Phish connoisseur, “Reba” had it all: zany lyrics that didn’t make sense but tickled the imagination; a multipart composed section, with plenty of twists and turns; and an ending jam that carried the piece to climax with a single screaming note. Tom Marshall wrote the lyrics for three songs on Lawn Boy—“The Squirming Coil,” “Bouncing Around the Room,” and the lounge lizard-like title track—signaling the increasing role he would play as Anastasio’s cowriter in the coming years.
Lawn Boy was released on the Absolute a Go Go label. Phish received a tough lesson in small-label economics after signing with the New Jersey-based outfit. There was nothing wrong with Absolute a Go Go itself, whose signings reflected the good taste of founder Brad Morrison. He created the label in 1986 and two years later signed an exclusive distribution deal with Rough Trade America, the U.S. affiliate of the upstart U.K.-based label. Throughout the 1980s, Rough Trade had been among Britain’s most respected independents, launching the career of the Smiths and others on the U.K. scene’s cutting edge.
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