Phish

by Parke Puterbaugh

  “For us, the studio has not been the place where we have experiences like that. It’s a bit more of a headache in the studio, and the stage is where we have these incredible musical experiences. But at that moment, I felt I was having that experience with Barry.”

  A few years after Rift came out, Phish was touring the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The band’s flying hot dog—the supersized prop from their 1994 New Year’s Eve show—now hangs in the museum, hoisted high overhead in the lobby’s atrium. The French fries and drink are there, too, on the lower level. Acknowledging the group’s presence that day, the museum staff piped Rift over the speakers.

  “I was kind of embarrassed,” Anastasio confessed. “I remember walking through and thinking, ‘What the hell is this? It sure isn’t rock and roll. Oh, it’s me.’”

  Rift, however, was hardly something be ashamed of. To the contrary, it was a challenging yet listenable work that found Phish swimming into deeper waters, thematically. In 1994, Phish took ever bolder steps in their approach to jamming. Two of the biggest nights of their career occurred in Dallas (on May 7) and Rhode Island (on December 29).

  The Dallas show was highlighted by a legendary second-set performance of “Tweezer.” Originally appearing on A Picture of Nectar, the song was built upon a funky riff jammed into being by Gordon and Anastasio. The words—old-school Phish doggerel—were beside the point. The music provided one of the most open-ended points of entry for sustained jamming of any item in their catalog. Regarded as a concert milestone, the Dallas “Tweezerfest,” as it came to be called, incorporated songs (or teases of songs) by the Rolling Stones, the Who, the James Gang, Aerosmith, the Breeders, and Prince. They also threaded two originals (“Sparkle,” “Makisupa Policeman”) around the towering mainstay of “Tweezer” itself—one jammy stretch of which lasted twenty-five minutes. The entire symphony-length performance went on for nearly eighty uninterrupted minutes. For an encore, Phish performed “Amazing Grace” a cappella.

  “It was one of the first times we decided to blow off the set list and just keep playing through the whole set without stopping,” said Gordon. “That would more often happen at jam sessions or band practices in private than onstage, but the idea that we could do it onstage and just throw caution to the wind was a memorable one for us and a monumental one, too.”

  On this night, Phish realized there was no limit to how far they could carry out their jamming. The “Tweezerfest” raised the bar and set the tone for the future. In Providence, at year’s end, they scaled another peak, performing a free-form, half-hour-plus version of “David Bowie.” This one took them out even farther.

  “One thing that’s different between the long ‘David Bowie’ from Providence and the long ‘Tweezer’ in Dallas is that in ‘Tweezer’ there are a couple radio hit-type songs we went into,” Gordon explained. “A few of the really long early jams had a lot of those silly teases of radio songs or even old Phish songs, so there’s a kind of lightheartedness to it that later became uncool among the band.

  “But that ‘Bowie’ jam is different in that it doesn’t segue into songs at all. It just gets more abstract. There are fewer references. It’s more like songwriting on the spot, where we’re trying to get to defined places we had never played before, so that if we wanted, we could piece them apart and write songs from them.”

  For their fifth studio album, Hoist—recorded in the fall of 1993 and released in March 1994—Phish outlined a reverse sort of challenge. Coming on the heels of the intricate, conceptual Rift, the band attempted to simplify its approach.

  “The verbalized challenge was that we wanted to make a rock album,” Anastasio explained. “If you think about it, we hadn’t ever really tried to make a rock album. We all listen to music like that, we love music like that, so we asked each other, ‘What’s in your tape deck right now?’ For me it was Exile on Main St.”

  “With Hoist, we actually wanted record-company involvement,” Gordon allowed. “We encouraged them to come and listen. We wanted guest musicians, too, so we had Alison Krauss, Tower of Power, and Bela Fleck. It was the album where we let other people get involved.”

  Hoist featured a bluesy shuffle (“Julius”) and a pounding rocker (“Down With Disease”), with more exotic fare scattered throughout. As intended, Hoist turned out to be Phish’s most extroverted and accessible album. They worked with producer Paul Fox, who came from a modernist, New Wave perspective, having produced such bands as 10,000 Maniacs and XTC. Phish was gung-ho about embracing this opportunity, while their more possessive fans had reservations about any angling toward the mainstream, which could only mean a bigger audience. Phish even filmed a video for “Down With Disease.” It was a first—and a last.

  The video didn’t kick open the doors to the world of MTV or spear-head a sudden uptick in sales. In fact, its greatest exposure came from an airing on Beavis & Butt-Head, where the cartoon brats mocked Phish’s appearance in an aquarium with comments about swimming in your own toilet. Mike Gordon directed the video, employing underwater imagery the band had used at their 1993 holiday shows. It blew minds at the Worcester Centrum on New Year’s Eve but didn’t translate quite so effectively to a small-screen rock video. As Jon Fishman noted, that was the last time they allowed other people to override their instincts when it came to career moves.

  Gordon also filmed the Hoist sessions, editing them down to a twenty-five-minute videotape, titled Tracking, that was released commercially. It didn’t draw much more attention than the “Down With Disease” video, but his quirky home video did offer intriguing glimpses of Phish at work in the studio.

  The cover image was a photograph of one of Amy Skelton’s horses, Maggie, being hoisted in a sling, which is how equine veterinarians conduct certain kinds of examinations. The band had wanted to call the album Hung Like a Horse. In a way they did, albeit with a visual pun.

  For the back-cover photo shoot, the band donned costumes plucked from a Hollywood warehouse and posed in character by the Malibu Pier. Fishman was a muscleman, Gordon convincingly resembled Harpo Marx, McConnell appeared as a mustachioed cad, and Anastasio dressed like a barbershop singer in a straw boater.

  “We were like, ‘Fishman would look funny in one of those striped bathing suits,’ and it just went sort of Gay Nineties from there,” said McConnell, laughing.

  On the road, as if there wasn’t already enough to do, the band sometimes brought along musical trainers. For a week during their fall 1994 tour, it was banjoist Jeff Mosier, late of Bruce Hampton’s Aquarium Rescue Unit, who coached them in bluegrass. Gordon had long been a serious bluegrass aficionado, and Fishman had penned a bluegrass number (“My Sweet One”) that appeared on A Picture of Nectar. But apprenticing in earnest with “Reverend” Mosier gave them a well-rounded overview and provided some discipline.

  With Mosier’s assistance, they tackled such stalwart bluegrass numbers as Bill Monroe’s “I’m Blue, I’m Lonesome” and Flatt and Scruggs’s “Earl’s Breakdown,” not to mention Mosier’s own “Little Tiny Butter Biscuits.” The title of that last tune emerged out of the blue from the mouth of an Alzheimer’s patient Mosier worked with. From meaningless utterance to Phish’s concert stage to an audience of 10,000 and out into the universe—it wasn’t the first time it happened like that.

  Before that, Phish apprenticed with a master of barbershop quartet who just happened to be McConnell’s landlord. When McConnell said he played in a band, his landlord responded, “Oh, I’m kind of into music myself. I have a barbershop group.”

  Instead of chuckling to himself, as the average rock musician might have done, Page saw an opportunity for the band to further expand its horizons. “He was an international judge for barbershop for about thirty years,” said McConnell. “Turned out he was able to give us lessons, and we ordered a bunch of music.”

  Phish took their barbershop singing pretty seriously. For a while they tried to learn a new barbershop arrangement every tour. And they worked to master the
proper vocal elocution. They ordered posters from the Society for the Preservation of Barbershop Quartets in America that depicted geeky guys in sweaters and handlebar mustaches mouthing oohs, eees, and ahs.

  “People who know would say we do bad barbershop,” said McConnell. “But the fact we’re doing it at all . . . It’s just funny to see a band up there doing that sort of thing.”

  On the same fall 1994 tour where they broke into bluegrass in a big way, some of the subtle changes in Phish’s evolving audience makeup could be detected. Ellis Godard, who was involved early on with Phish’s online forums and went on to edit The Phish Companion: A Guide to the Band and Their Music, noticed something that gave him pause at a show in Alabama he attended with some friends in October 1994.

  “We saw about a half-dozen people, aging hippies with long beards, frying up grilled cheese or whatever with their lap grills,” said Godard. “They said they knew nothing about the band and didn’t care anything for the music. They preferred the Dead’s music, but they were there because the Dead scene had gotten ugly, competitive, drug-ridden, and dangerous, and this was a safer scene that had better clientele and more money. They were there to commercialize it, and they did.

  “So the first turn we saw in the parking lot scene was from a couple of people trying to pay for their gas to explicit commercialization of the market. And it grew from there. You had the influx of people who also cared less about the music, who were there because there was a market and because there were drugs and things being sold in the market.”

  Those kinds of issues would pose more serious challenges later in the decade, but the infiltration of the lot scene with elements from outside Phish’s fan base began to show at least a year before Jerry Garcia’s death. Throughout 1995 it was still a pretty mellow scene and one the band members kept tabs on, to varying degrees. By mingling with the fans, they’d get an instant fix on what was on their minds, pro and con.

  “Sometimes we’ll actually go into the parking lot before we play and talk to people,” Gordon said in 1995. “If people are thinking about something, if there’s a general problem with the concert experience, then we’ll know pretty quickly.”

  On May 16, 1995, Phish delivered on another self-imposed challenge: to debut a set of almost entirely new material. There were ten new songs (four of them covers), including the debuts of “Free” and “Theme from the Bottom.” Both would be highlights of Billy Breathes, whose release was still well over a year off. The event was a “Voters for Choice” benefit concert in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was the band’s first gig in four and a half months, and they wanted to do something special. Contrary to most artists, who would recoil at the notion of unreleased new songs circulating among fans, Phish was glad to have the tapers on hand.

  “It worked out perfectly,” said Anastasio, “’cause I thought we could play all these new songs and then give it a couple of weeks for the tapes to get out there.”

  By the time Phish kicked off its summer tour, the new songs were neither overly familiar nor completely unknown.

  “Our fans like to hear us play new stuff,” he noted. “I think it’s different from a situation where people come to hear the hits.”

  Fans at the benefit show in Lowell even got to choose the title for one new song. From among four options tendered after they played it, the crowd shouted most loudly for “Spock’s Brain.” Since some Phish fans could be a little Spock-like, which is to say brainy, obsessive music geeks, this seemed entirely fitting. Phish ushered the guest of honor, feminist icon Gloria Steinem, to the stage with a version of the garage-rock anthem “Gloria.”

  I met Phish for the first time shortly after the show in Lowell, which inaugurated an episodic series of contacts for a Rolling Stone article that was two years in the making. I was invited to Burlington to hang out with the group. Interviews would come later. I flew to Burlington’s small airport, grabbed a rental car, and followed an e-mailed set of directions to Paul Languedoc’s modest two-story home, buried deep in the Vermont countryside, a few miles from the nearest paved road. A detached building adjacent to the house was still under construction. Languedoc’s workshop occupied the first floor, where he built instruments for Phish and other clients. The upstairs alcove served as the group’s rehearsal space. They paid him rent for its use, which helped subsidize its construction.

  I pulled up on a crisp morning in late May to find the group gathered outside. A wiffle-ball bat rested on Gordon’s shoulder. The four of them studied me with the wary look of New Englanders sizing up a stranger. The group had thus far achieved considerable success without the mainstream media, which had made virtually no effort to investigate the Phish phenomenon. So there was a certain understandable cautiousness about playing ball with periodicals like Rolling Stone just because they’d suddenly shown some interest.

  After almost literally breaking the ice—snow was still visible atop nearby Mount Mansfield—we repaired to the rehearsal room. Cluttered and unfancy, this was where Phish spent five to seven hours a day working up material and practicing exercises of their own devising. In one corner stood a dry-erase board marked up with the set list for the “Voters for Choice” benefit they’d just played. This being a popular and prosperous rock band’s workspace, one might have expected a refrigerator stocked with Vermont home brews (like Magic Hat, made in Burlington) and other goodies, but there was nothing but a box of Wheat Thins making the rounds.

  They worked hard and laughed often. Phish’s insistence on pushing themselves was evident at these sessions, where they spent considerable time on self-devised listening exercises. The best known was called “Including Your Own Hey.” These exercises, which formed a large part of their practice regimen from 1990 through 1995, are not so easy to explain but important for understanding how Phish could maintain a seemingly telepathic chemistry in concert. The whole idea was to improve the level of collective improvisation by learning to listen to one another while jamming. They’d do this by conjuring riffs and patterns out of thin air, varying and embellishing them until they were “locked in,” individually announcing their arrival with the word “hey.” When they’d each included their own “hey,” it was onto another round.

  “‘Hey’ means we’re locked in,” explained Anastasio. “The idea is don’t play anything complicated; just pick a hole and fill it.” They explored different elements of music—tempo, timbre, dynamics, harmonics—within the “hey” regimen. A variation on “Including Your Own Hey,” which they called “Get Out of My Hey Hole,” had the cardinal rule that one musician’s note could not sustain over anyone else’s.

  “Get the hell out of my hey hole,” Anastasio barked to Fishman, and the drummer evacuated the hey hole, so far as I could tell.

  “Mimicry is the lowest, most basic level of communication,” explained Anastasio. “These are anti-mimicry exercises—listening to each other, hearing each other, staying out of each other’s way.”

  Another exercise found them inversely varying tempo with volume. “The faster we go, the quieter we’ll play,” instructed McConnell. “The slower we go, the louder we’ll play.”

  The group set up a monstrous wail on one loud, slow passage that would have frightened a Black Sabbath fan.

  Yet another was “Two Plus Two,” in which one musician picked another person in the band to hook up with while still listening to the other two.

  They went at it like this for hours.

  “This is what we spend our time doing,” Anastasio said matter-of-factly. “This is our job.” Years later, after the breakup, he would admit that what he missed most about Phish was band practice. I could see why; there was a tangible sense of concentration mingled with camaraderie present in the room.

  In terms of concert dividends, “It doesn’t always work 100 percent of the time,” Fishman noted. “But I still think those exercises really pay off, because it puts you in a state of mind where even if you are making a lot of noise and stepping on each other’s toes, you’r
e still aware of it. At least it’s not like you’re just blindly forging ahead.”

  At that point in the afternoon, Phish ran through a new song for an audience of two—a captivated journalist and Languedoc’s disinterested cat. Titled “Taste,” it was a complex piece of music in which they all played asymmetrical parts in different meters. The song, in a somewhat different arrangement, wound up on their next album, Billy Breathes. At a later point, they changed its title and lyrics, renaming it “The Fog That Surrounds” before reverting to “Taste.” It was a good example of Phish’s inveterate tinkering. Every song was always in the act of becoming, subject to amendment and revision.

  As they worked on “Taste,” it fell to Fishman to juggle four rhythms—the three other musicians’, plus one of his own in 6/8 time. Afterward, Anastasio wandered over to the drums, excited because he thought he heard another implied counter-rhythm. He picked up a drumstick and tapped out the elusive fifth rhythm on a snare for Fishman, who attempted to incorporate it. They knew what they were aiming at but couldn’t quite nail it.

  This tangent was abandoned, but the very fact they pursued it demonstrated the group’s insatiable drive to push further. They’d constantly ask themselves, explicitly or implicitly, Is there something else we can do? And so they’d add, subtract, and rework parts, tinkering until they were satisfied a piece was as good as they could make it. Even then, it might change at the next rehearsal, and would certainly evolve onstage. This process of continuous evolution explained why no two Phish concerts were alike.