In spring 1990, Absolute a Go Go released Hot Chocolate Massage by Tiny Lights, a likeable indie-pop band from New Jersey whose previous work had gotten buried on a major label. Phish’s Lawn Boy came out that fall. In 1991, Rough Trade America went bankrupt, taking Absolute a Go Go (and Lawn Boy) down with it. (Incidentally, Rough Trade was relaunched in 2000.)
During its brief window of opportunity, the original Lawn Boy sold well—“To the consternation of rock critics,” in Morrison’s words. Morrison elaborated on this turn of events: “Phish, in particular, were hated by the music-biz establishment, who all took time out of their busy days to phone the label and tell them the record was ‘shit.’ As the fall leaves turned, it became obvious that the Phish record was destined to become the label’s first hit. Suddenly, music impresarios all called to say that they had changed their mind. Lawn Boy was not ‘shit,’ it was now a ‘fluke.’”
In the wake of the label’s bankruptcy, the court seized Absolute a Go Go’s master tapes. Phish bought back the rights to Lawn Boy, which Elektra reissued in 1992. Despite its eventual reappearance, the album’s virtual vanishing act so soon after its initial release didn’t help the band’s momentum or inspire much faith in the music business. Incidentally, original compact discs of Lawn Boy on Absolute a Go Go (10,000 were made) now fetch modest collector’s figures on eBay. The rarer vinyl version, of which under a thousand were pressed, now changes hands for $250 to $500.
Meanwhile, Phish were beginning to garner some solid notices in newspapers and independent media. There would always be an element of snarky, patronizing commentary. In its preview of the band’s 1989 gig at a club in Poughkeepsie, for instance, the Bard College newspaper noted that “neo-hippy [sic] bands are trendy. . . . This is a band for Deadheads, fusion fans and light-hearted druggies.” At the same time, there were growing signs that writers who didn’t come bearing anti-Dead, anti-hippie, anti-jam agendas were starting to appreciate what they were hearing.
“As long as the songs are, the group never runs low on invention,” wrote John Wirt in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “Instead, a single song holds a rich cache of ideas.”
“Fun but skillful zaniness,” noted Phil Smith in a review for the Portland Oregonian. “The Phish style of virtuosity instinctively homes in on people’s musical pleasure zones in original and endless ways.”
Overseas, the Independent of London touted their “exuberant salad of styles.”
“The music defies categorization” was a frequently repeated line, but that didn’t keep writers from trying.
“We’ve been compared to more bands than any other band,” laughed McConnell.
“It all depends on what track was playing when they [heard us],” added Anastasio.
The Grateful Dead? Santana? Frank Zappa? King Crimson? Genesis?
The best answer might be all of the above—and none of the above.
By 1991, Phish were really starting to rage onstage. Kevin Shapiro, the Deadhead-turned-Phishhead who would become their archivist, caught his first Phish show in Cleveland on the fall 1991 tour and can vividly recall the experience. “I was totally blown away by the music. At the time I thought maybe it was one long song, because I didn’t fully grasp the definition from one song to the next. There were short breaks, if any, between songs, and it was pretty snappy. It seemed smooth and polished. I would’ve called it very rehearsed. I didn’t realize they played a different set every night.”
Phish did realize that what they were doing from night to night was pretty special, so they started taping every show—on cassettes and then, in 1992, on digital audio tape (DAT). Plenty of other fans were taping Phish as well, with the band’s blessing. The tapes were circulated and traded, and fans compared notes on shows any way they could, including an emerging online community. Phish’s audience was starting to discover one another and grow in size. Typically, Phish would play somewhere for the first time and draw a fair-to-decent crowd. When they’d return, word about the last show would have gotten around and the venue would be overrun or they’d have graduated to a much larger hall. In 1991, for instance, they played a club called Biddy Milligan’s in Chicago. A year later, they did two sold-out nights at the 1,400-seat Vic Theater. In 1992, they also played the prestigious Warfield Theater in San Francisco, as well as a free show in Palo Alto that drew a lot of curious Deadheads (foreshadowing a changing of the guard).
Because of the Lawn Boy debacle, Phish was wary of record companies. They nonetheless signed to Elektra Records in November 1991. Elektra had a long and storied history, making waves with folk artists during the early to mid-1960s (Judy Collins, Phil Ochs) and with its rock bands in the late 1960s (The Doors, Love). The label remained relevant in the New Wave era with acts like Television, Simply Red, and the Cars.
By the time Phish found their way to Elektra, the label had been absorbed into the Warner Communications conglomerate. It was still an “artist’s label” but with access to major-label resources, and it seemed like a decent fit for Phish. Phish were brought to Elektra by Sue Drew, a talent scout who recognized their potential when she saw them play New York’s Marquee club on December 27, 1990. By this time, the Phish phenomenon was in full effect, and it was clear she’d be signing not just a highly creative, road-tested band, but one with a presold audience.
After the Marquee gig, she gave Phish her card; they took it and said they’d call back. They were in no hurry. For one thing, Phish wasn’t entirely sure they wanted to surrender their autonomy or become bigger than they already were.
“I think we’ve really had that attitude since we quit our day jobs, and that’s what made us a little bit different,” Anastasio said in 1995. “We were just so content at that point. Never in our career have I felt this urge to get bigger. We didn’t even talk much about getting signed to a record label at all.”
“If anything, the talk was, we didn’t want to,” added Gordon. “I’d heard so many horror stories and everything,” said Anastasio. “Which didn’t turn out to be true. Not in our situation.”
The group self-produced and recorded A Picture of Nectar—their first album for Elektra, released in February 1992—without any interference from the label. This was uncustomary at a time when big labels still tried to insert themselves into many aspects of a band’s business: choosing producers, material, micromanaging tours, videos, marketing, and even the way a band or artist looked and dressed. But Phish were able to negotiate compromises on standard music-biz contract terms, mainly because they were completely willing not to sign if their demands were not met.
For example, a standard clause typically insisted that the songs submitted for an album be “commercially satisfactory” (whatever that means). Phish’s lawyer had that phrase amended to “technically satisfactory,” which only meant—so far as Phish construed it—that the songs had to be decently recorded.
Gordon described A Picture of Nectar, their Elektra debut, as “almost humorously diverse.” The fifteen songs done in nearly that many styles on this album go to lengths to showcase Phish’s diversity, eclecticism, and musicianship. The album also gives lie to those who claim, based more on preconceptions than actual listening, that they “know what Phish sounds like.” In any case, A Picture of Nectar is a solid place to start for neophytes or skeptics.
Phish recorded A Picture of Nectar at Burlington’s White Crow Studios in late spring and early summer of 1991. Earlier that year, over at Dan Archer’s studio in Winooski, they cut another album. For this one they provided musical backup for Anastasio’s old pal, the Dude of Life (né Steve Pollak). As mentioned before, he’d written lyrics for several of Phish’s key early compositions and joined them onstage from time to time, dressed in anything from a gas mask to a huge wig with a sparkly sequined jacket. Helping out on Crimes of the Mind, which was jointly credited to the Dude of Life and Phish, was a kind of thank-you for his early involvement and an attempt to help him launch a career of his own. It sat in the can until Phish’s mounting p
opularity finally justified its release on Elektra three years later. Crimes of the Mind would sell a respectable 90,000 copies. So far as Phish was concerned, one of Crimes’ songs (“Self ”) was musically recycled as one of the band’s most high-energy originals (“Chalk Dust Torture”).
Another key figure in Phish’s crew entered the picture in the pivotal year of 1991: Brad Sands, a high-school swimmer turned college dropout who was looking for his niche. Sands first caught Phish at a July 1991 gig in upstate New York. Then a Deadhead, he was skeptical but left a total convert. Sands followed Phish, helping out wherever he could on the road. The operation was still informal enough to welcome such assistance, and when an opening came up, he submitted his résumé and landed the job.
At first he was Chris Kuroda’s lighting assistant. In time, he became the band’s road manager, sounding board, confidant, and gatekeeper. Sands developed a sixth sense about whom to let in and whom to keep out of their dressing room.
Sands eventually added even more to his plate: “I was able to grow from being road manager to being a lot more involved in the festivals, in the creative process, in the planning of the tours, that kind of thing,” Sands noted. “My strength was being closest to the Phish fans. I knew what the fans liked.”
He played an instrumental role in various Phish “gags” and during their New Year’s Eve show in Boston on December 31, 1992, he became one of them: “The gag was me dressing up in a chicken suit for ‘(Fly) Famous Mockingbird’ and getting hoisted above the band by a motor,” he recalled, laughing.
The advent of a fan-based community in cyberspace was another turning point. It evolved along with technology, beginning as a published digest sent out to a mailing list and then an online newsgroup (the Phish.Net Usenet, whose address was rec.phish.net), and finally a Web site (www.phish.net). Now serious fans, scholars, and keepers of the keys could post set lists, analyze shows, and make plans to hook up on tour. It’s hard to recall the ’Net in its infancy, when these sorts of things were novel and, given today’s supersonic download speeds, almost excruciatingly slow. Yet it was an exciting new frontier, and Phish fans jumped on it. Matt Laurence, a computer designer and Phishhead living in Hamilton, Massachusetts, founded Phish.Net. Other Phishheads, such as Ellis Godard and Shelly Culbertson, found their way to it, as they began mastering computer tools and technology.
Then a student at the University of Virginia, Godard dove in head-first. “I remember getting a newsletter in the summer of ’91 that mentioned the rec.phish.net newsgroup,” he elaborated. “I didn’t know what that meant. I’d never heard of the Internet, and I’d never been in a computer lab on campus. So I went to the lab, and I was blown away and sucked into it immediately.”
Godard edited the site’s Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file, which then included only eleven questions and now has over six hundred. At one point, he also helped manage The Helping Phriendly Book, which tracks Phish’s set lists. It then had four years’ worth of known shows and now runs to well over twenty years of group and solo performances. By 1992, Phish.Net served a community of roughly 50,000 music-loving computer geeks.
As the site grew, so did its offshoots, as various pools of Phish fans with common interests stepped off to the side and set up their own Web sites. These included the Funky Bitches (female Phish fans) and The Fellowship (a support group of nondrinking, nondrugging Phish followers, patterned after the Grateful Dead’s Wharf Rats). While Phish and their music occupied the center of it all, social networks, worlds within worlds, were being created on the Internet.
The intersection of the information superhighway and the burgeoning world of Phishheads generated a tremendous amount of traffic in the early 1990s. It wasn’t long before Phish.Net was third in size among online music newsgroups, behind only Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead. In the 1990s, the Internet would further impact Phish and the music industry in an unforeseen way with the emergence of peer-to-peer sharing of music files via sites like Napster. The industry feared and fought the new technology and music fans’ use of it. Phish had a different attitude toward the taping and disseminating of their music by fans, whether via cassettes or over the ’Net. They were solidly behind it. In the fall of 1993, Phish even began selling “taper tickets” by mail-order, allowing access to a special area set aside for them to erect their equipment at concerts.
“We recently premiered six songs that didn’t make our new al - bum,” Anastasio told Paul A. Harris of the St. Louis Post Dispatch in 1992. “A bunch of people taped the show. That night, people put the titles and descriptions of those new songs on Phish.Net and how you could get a copy of the tape.
“So within days, you’ve got tapes of these new songs all over the country, which is exactly what we’d want. That way, we go out on this national tour, people are going to have heard of the new songs, and even heard the new songs, before we get to the different towns.”
What would horrify most groups and record labels, Phish found acceptable and even desirable. The philosophy was that by encouraging taping and trading, they were building a committed fan base that would pay to come to shows, buy merchandise, and maybe even ante up for the occasional studio CD. The more they gave it away, the more they got back. They disapproved of for-profit bootlegging of their shows, however.
In addition to word getting around via Phish.Net, the group set up its own mailing list—launched by Trey’s sister, Kristy—periodically sending out free newsletters to fans who signed up. By mid-1992, there were 14,000 Phishheads on that list. In 1994 it was renamed The Döniac Schvice and became a pretty big deal—especially to Jason Colton, who was given responsibility for it once he hired on with Phish’s management.
In fact, the newsletter was how he found his way into the band’s employ. Colton is a driven go-getter with a business head and a rock and roll heart. He heard Junta and was intrigued. A month later, on April 28, 1990, he attended his first Phish show, at the Strand Theater in Dorchester, Massachusetts. It just happened to be the band’s first theater show, and though it was only half-full, it made an impression on him.
“I was hooked instantly,” Colton recollected. “It was so unique and so cool, and after being used to seeing national touring bands, it seemed very life-sized to me. It definitely felt like a family affair in the sense that I could tell there were a lot of people who knew the band somehow.”
He saw several more Phish concerts around New England in the following months. Checking out the band’s newsletter, he realized that the band’s management offices were located just a mile from his family’s home in Newton, a Boston suburb. Before heading off to study English at the University of Wisconsin, Colton gave Paluska a call and went over to his office. He just wanted a Phish T-shirt, but the two wound up talking at length.
At the manager’s suggestion, Colton said he’d try to book Phish a gig at Wisconsin. He joined the school’s student concert committee on his first day and arranged for Phish to play on campus at the Great Hall on November 8, 1990. It was a sellout show that gave Phish another Midwestern beachhead, and Colton was ecstatic.
“I remember it just being a very defining moment of, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to be involved with bands,’” Colton recalled. Paluska realized that Colton was shrewd, competent, and industrious, and he helped set him up in the concert business, putting him in touch with other band managers. While still in college, Colton promoted shows in Madison, Wisconsin, for artists such as Blues Traveler, Widespread Panic, and Bela Fleck.
When Phish wanted to play Madison again the next spring, Paluska told him, “Find a theater, rent the theater, do the advertising, sell the tickets, and if you lose money we’ll cover you.” They, of course, did not lose money, and Colton thought, “This is easy. I can do this.”
He continued promoting shows in Madison, even after transferring to Stanford University, on the West Coast, where he finished his English degree. His dream had been to work for Bill Graham Presents, the concert empire built by the lege
ndary San Francisco-based promoter, but Paluska made him a job offer first. Colton was attending the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas, when the call came. With Colton’s hiring, Dionysian Productions now numbered three: Paluska, Colton, and Shelly Culbertson.
After graduating with a degree in Russian from Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, Culbertson moved to the hippie college town of Arcata, up in the wilds of Humboldt County in northern California. Before her second Phish show—at the International Beer Garden in Arcata, on October 15, 1991—she persuaded Page McConnell to sit for an interview that she posted on Phish.Net. Interviews with Anastasio and Gordon followed a month later. In 1993, she accepted a full-time management support position with the band. Culbertson went on to develop a mail-order ticket system for fans and helped create Phish’s official Web site. Colton, meanwhile, grew ever more involved with the business and marketing side of Phish’s affairs—as well as with the newsletter.
At its peak, the Phish office mailed out 180,000 free four-color copies of Döniac Schvice each quarter to fans on the mailing list. Unlike most bands, Phish never had an official fan club. The fans had their own elaborate lines of communication. The newsletter was just a way for the band to provide them with news, show dates, and tongue-in-cheek columns by Fishman (“Fish’s Forum”) and Gordon (“Mike’s Corner”). There was also a two-page merchandise spread that served to generate revenue through the sale of logo T-shirts and decals, compact discs, and other Phish-related swag. The Schvice continued publication until 2000, at which point the Internet proved a more efficient and cost-effective way to reach fans, especially since Phish had found themselves spending more than half a million dollars a year in the final years of the Schvice.
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