Phish

by Parke Puterbaugh

  The group, at their best, also knew how to quickly enter a creative mind-set, almost a dreamlike state of consciousness. Mostly this would start with Anastasio. As Fishman noted, “One great thing about Trey is that he always goes into that non-thinking mode, even when he’s working on an intense composition. Kind of jumping up and down, walking around the room and letting it flow.”

  Getting out of one’s own way was the idea. This goal of tapping into right-brained mode is echoed throughout music and literature. Neil Young and his producer, David Briggs, had a favorite saying: “You think, you stink.” Jack Kerouac described his writing style as “spontaneous bop prosody,” and he let his pencil fly without self-correction, saving any editing he might do until later. Unselfconscious expression was also the point of Ken Kesey’s mid-sixties Acid Tests—a lesson learned well by the Grateful Dead, who provided the music for those unscripted happenings in their earliest days as a band.

  Phish likewise aimed to create in the moment and cultivate a group mind. They also realized when it was time to stop doing the exercises.

  “Early on, we did those ‘Including Your Own Hey’ exercises in rehearsal,” said Gordon. “We were doing an ‘Including Your Own Hey’ exercise in sound check every day, too. And then we started to find that our jams sounded too much like the exercises, especially in the sense they were repeating patterns in two-bar or four-bar clumps. So all of our jams were starting to sound like these repeating patterns.

  “I remember a point where Trey said, ‘I think we should try to break out of this.’ We even stopped doing the exercises and began making an effort to have the jams not be repetitive, where there was a specific lack of repetition.”

  After a full day given over to listening exercises and working out “Taste,” a group dinner followed. It was a bit like My Dinner with Andre (or with four Andres). There was not a lot of idle chatter. I found them all to be lively, well-read, and serious conversationalists. Topics included the origins of myths and their place in culture throughout history; the declining role of organized religion in modern society; the work of writers and thinkers ranging from Joseph Campbell to Oswald Spengler; and the latest schools of psychological thought concerning the development of human personality from cradle to grave. Environmental issues were also discussed, with the band professing their dismay about all the nonrenewable fossil fuel that gets burned in the course of a tour by them and their fans.

  “I lay awake nights wondering about things like that,” confessed Anastasio.

  In the annals of Phish concerts, which are dissected, analyzed, and rated by hard-core fans at Phish.Net, the Halloween ’94 show in Glen Falls, New York, merited a 9.9. The only reason not to give it a perfect ten was that it started late. They didn’t crank it up until 10 P.M., and because it was a three-set show, the event concluded around 3 A.M. In addition to their usual two hours-plus of original material, Phish performed the Beatles’ White Album—all thirty-two songs, in order, without a break.

  For Phish, the motivation for undertaking such projects simply came down to “liking a challenge,” Gordon explained with a shrug. Phish’s Halloween shows had always been special, dating back to the Goddard College years. (Think psychedelic drugs, a gaggle of Vermont heads turned loose on a deserted college campus on All Hallows Eve . . . and Phish.) In 1994, however, they decided to up the Halloween ante by performing an album by another act in its entirety. Moreover, they let fans pick the album. The band solicited votes in their newsletter. The White Album won; Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band placed a close second.

  Phish mastered the bulky double album while on tour, rehearsing whenever they could steal a few hours. “We tried to learn the actual arrangements as deeply as we could get into them without doing the overdubs,” Anastasio said in 1995, when Phish were getting material together for their next album, Billy Breathes.

  “We improved as a band by it,” Anastasio continued. “Several people actually said our new songs have more of a Beatles vibe. It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s true, because the last thing we did before writing them was to learn thirty-two Beatles songs. My philosophy is, how can you lose? It can only make you better.”

  Phish lived by such challenges. It was this same philosophy that inspired Phish to take musical tutors on the road, invent arcane practice exercises, and start throwing their otherworldly outdoor festivals. For much of their career, each concert was approached in the hopes of breaking new ground. Even if the end result occasionally fell short, one had to applaud the effort because the intention was always pure.

  The Halloween experiment went so well they did it again a year later with a different album. In 1995, the Who’s Quadrophenia garnered the most votes. Again, it was a double album, but with “only” seventeen songs. The performances were strong (except, perhaps, for Fishman’s earnest but strained singing on “Love Reign O’er Me,” a vocally demanding tune). More songs than usual were sung by McConnell, and “Drowned” lingered thereafter in Phish’s live repertoire. Four years later, at a 1999 show, they jammed on “Drowned” for a half-hour. It was a rare cover tune that could launch a jam of such duration.

  Phish performed the Halloween ritual twice more. On both those occasions they—not the fans—picked the albums. They chose Talking Heads’ Remain in Light (in 1996, at Atlanta’s Omni) and Velvet Underground’s Loaded (in 1998, at Las Vegas’s Thomas & Mack Center). In every case, learning another band’s album influenced Phish’s songwriting and jamming to some degree. This was especially true of Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, whose minimalist, polyrhythmic approach became embedded into Phish’s musical language.

  Phish spent much time reviewing tapes of their fall 1994 concert tour to assemble something fans had been clamoring for. Many a tape-trading Phishhead desirous of soundboard fidelity had asked, “When are you going to put out a live one?” The group responded by putting out A Live One.

  I was interviewing them at the very moment finished copies of A Live One were delivered to the hotel room. I mention this only because it was reminiscent of a scene in This Is Spinal Tap—a fact instantly noticed by Anastasio—where the group was handed copies of Smell the Glove, with its all-black cover. The difference was that Phish very much liked the cover of their new album. They liked everything inside the booklet for A Live One, too. There were tons of live shots from ’94, including one of a nude Fishman onstage at the White Album Halloween show. Fishman’s privates were just barely concealed by a flourish in the second “h” in Phish. One thing they didn’t do, though they’d talked about it, was put a fishhook on the cover—a symbol that would have signified “The Band Formerly Known as Phish” (a sly riff on Prince’s then-recent change from name to symbol).

  The four of them laughed and bantered about the photo spread.

  GORDON: Did you show him the hot dog?

  MCCONNELL: That was last New Year’s Eve in Boston Garden.

  GORDON: Playing, mind you.

  ANASTASIO: Wireless instruments.

  FISHMAN: Kosher hot dog.

  MCCONNELL: That is a funny picture, Fish.

  GORDON: Trampoline shot’s great.

  Every song on A Live One came from a different show, with one minor exception: McConnell’s extended piano coda on “The Squirming Coil” was plucked from the same October 23 concert as “Harry Hood.” (The main part of “The Squirming Coil,” however, was taken from an October 9 performance.) The entire fall 1994 tour had been taped. After each show they’d make notes about songs to consider for inclusion. By tour’s end, the list was well over five hundred songs long. They also polled fans online for their favorite performances. Honing it down required much listening, and at group meetings songs were crossed out or left on the master list. This process took two months, by which point they’d reduced the list to thirty. The final lineup was settled over plates of mushroom caps (baked and stuffed, not the hallucinogenic variety) during a group confab at a restaurant.

  Among other things, the album revealed the
extent to which Phish and their fans had bonded. The audience went beyond energizing the band with sold-out houses and applause. Now they provided cameos in key places. They chanted “Wilson” at the appropriate spot in that song, clapped three times rapidly during the pauses in “Stash,” and sang while bouncing up and down to “Bouncing Around the Room.” The audience had grown large but retained a group identity by means of in-jokes, knowledge of details, secret language, and concert rituals. Going to see Phish at this juncture was a bit like attending a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

  It could be argued that A Live One was the ultimate Phish album. Whereas the group willingly courted a larger audience with Hoist, there were no such concessions on A Live One. This was not Phish’s attempt at a Frampton Comes Alive-type breakthrough. It was a concert compendium for hard-core fans.

  Who else, pray tell, would sit through thirty-three minutes of “Tweezer”? Not only did it run longer than the typical TV sitcom, but it was also a knotty, demanding listen, even for some fans. Little about it was satisfying in a conventional sense, but it did rise to a crescendo, during which dissonant tension gave way to cathartic release. The recording came from their first concert following the White Album Halloween show, and the band speculated it might have been their subconscious response to the rigors of learning all those songs—a good, unstructured jam to help clean out the pipes.

  Though it drew from a dozen concerts, A Live One was constructed to play through like an idealized evening with Phish. The two discs represented a typical show’s first and second sets. Anastasio announced intermission at the end of disc one, and disc two commenced with a few seconds of typically tasty set-break music (Miles Davis’s “Right Off,” from Jack Johnson) as the band reappeared onstage to an ovation.

  There was no studio-mandated succinctness here, either. The album’s dozen tracks clocked in at 125 minutes. If you excluded “Montana,” a two-minute excerpt from a much longer jam, the average track length was over 11 minutes. This was just as Phish fans liked it, and tough luck for mainstream listeners who’d been seduced by Hoist’s relative accessibility.

  “That was definitely a fan-oriented album,” affirmed Anastasio. “If you were really into the band, you knew what was going on. There was nothing on there for radio.”

  At the same time, Anastasio still held out hope that radio might someday evolve in Phish’s direction. He spoke wistfully about radio when it used to be free from the constraints of outside consultants and corporate overseers like Clear Channel.

  “When I grew up, I remember sitting by the radio, waiting for them to play some song I was into and waiting for hours, listening,” he recalled. “So now I have this dream, and I believe it can happen. Maybe we can be part of it. That would be something I would be happy to be part of—the rebirth of radio.”

  In a sense, the rebirth of more organic, free-form radio did happen with the introduction of satellite radio, and there is a place for Phish on there. In fact, there’s a jam-band channel on XM/Sirius. Commercial rock radio still remains out of reach, but with alternatives like satellite radio and stations that stream on the ’Net, who needs it anymore?

  Apparently, there was nothing on A Live One for mainstream rock critics, either. A Live One was Phish’s sixth official full-length release (not counting The White Tape) but only the first to be reviewed in Rolling Stone. Tom Moon damned the two-hour extravaganza with faint praise, hanging a tepid three stars (of a possible five) upon it. No fewer than fourteen variations on the word noodle appeared in the review. He called noodling “the province of spring-water hippies” and Phish “the most self-indulgent act ever to sell out Madison Square Garden.”

  There’s an interesting technical footnote regarding A Live One. As Anastasio explained, “We mixed it with this new piece of gear that let us create the image of the sound coming from behind you through phase cancellation. If you sit right between the speakers on that album, you should be able to hear it. I know most people don’t, but we put it on there anyway.”

  After Hoist’s failure to catch fire, Phish decided not to do anything they found disagreeable. When Elektra asked the group to make a few in-studio appearances at key radio stations to promote A Live One, they thought about it and replied, “We don’t want to,” according to Anastasio.

  Gordon picked up the story: “Our manager said, ‘You’re right, you’re making a good point. We probably would sell more records. But we don’t want to do that, so we’ll just have to sell less records.’”

  The above-quoted conversation occurred during the second day of Phish’s weekend stand at Red Rocks in June 1995. This outdoor venue, located west of Denver, was the setting for U2’s 1983 Under a Blood-Red Sky concert video. Towering walls of ruddy sandstone surround and enfold the amphitheater. Musically, it’s tailor-made for more organic and improv-oriented acts—the Allman Brothers, the Dead, Neil Young, and, of course, Phish—since the transcendent setting inspires and enhances risk-taking music. Moreover, the air is really thin, making fans a little giddy even without nitrous tanks.

  Phish sold out both nights in twenty minutes. It was the third stop of their summer 1995 tour, and the mounting army of Phishheads turned out in force. Whooping. Smiling. Inhaling. Chugging. Highfiving. Exclaiming: “Man, you can practically see Kansas from here.” Holding index fingers in the air—the Dead-derived plea for a single “miracle ticket”—or trying a more direct approach: “At the sound of the tone, you will give me your ticket. Ding!”

  The little town of Morrison lies at the foot of Red Rocks. It has seen plenty of concert traffic, but Phish’s traveling road show was more along the lines of an occupation. Cars, vans, and Merry Prankster- style buses claimed every available inch alongside the road. Phishheads roamed the streets or fraternized in clumps around a music source. Most didn’t have the money to patronize local restaurants, even the inexpensive Mexican ones. One hapless longhair was trying to hock a pocket calculator for gas money.

  Some in the milling crowd were hygienically challenged—hair matted in dreadlocks, bodies splashed with musk and patchouli to disguise the fact that it’s hard to take a shower on the road when you can’t afford motels. The knotty-haired tour rats you’d see scurrying around were tagged “wookies” because of their resemblance to the amusing alien hairballs in George Lucas’s Star Wars epics. Wookies were into the total experience—the music, the travel, the drugs, and all the rituals and challenges posed by their combination—and were completely ensconced in their own world, like an army of genetically altered, if basically harmless, mutants.

  Their antithesis (and nemesis) were the “custies”—coddled trust-fund recipients. They tended to be well-educated achievers from good backgrounds who didn’t lack for means. They were preppy in attire and had much in common with the baseball cap-wearing frat boys commonly spotted at Dave Matthews Band concerts. (Inside the world of Deadheads, they were disparaged as “trustafarians.”) Each camp abided the other with varying degrees of amusement and antipathy, and at the end of a concert each group went its separate way, the wooks to their tents and raggedy vehicles, the custies to their nice hotel rooms.

  Over the course of their ’95 stand at Red Rocks—my introduction and initiation into the Phish concert experience—they gave their audience ample reason for ecstasy. They performed short songs, long jams, and all manner of things in between. There were bluegrass breakdowns. Atonal fugues. Barbershop quartets. Punchy rock songs like “Suzy Greenberg.” Long, dynamic pieces such as “Run Like an Antelope” and “Split Open and Melt,” which built to peaks of tension and release. They played wonderfully weird covers and conducted humorous bits of onstage business.

  During the second set, Fishman bounded out from behind his drum kit to sing Velvet Underground’s “Lonesome Cowboy Bill,” also providing a vacuum cleaner solo. As an intro and outro to his moment in the spotlight, the band instrumentally lit into the chorus of the old Argent hit “Hold Your Head Up.” Why? Because Fishman particular
ly despised that song, and the others (especially Anastasio) loved to tease him. (“I hate that song,” he said at a 1992 show. “A hateful song, indeed.”) Introduced by Anastasio as “Henrietta,” Fishman triumphantly received the crowd’s applause.

  Fishman wore his doughnut dress and goggles, which was about all there was in terms of the group’s attention to wardrobe. Anastasio and Gordon dressed as casually as they would have for a band rehearsal or trip to the grocery store. Gordon’s signature stage look involved rolling his pant legs halfway to his knees. Aside from that, only McConnell, with his Banana Republic-type shirts, accorded onstage attire (as opposed to costuming) the least bit of consideration. As with Pink Floyd, the real visuals were provided by the light show, and the band members were the antithesis of preening rock-star fashion plates.

  I had never seen anything like this before, certainly not by a band performing to a sold-out audience at a venue the size of Red Rocks. I had never heard anything like the music they played those two nights, either. The interlude with Fishman demonstrated that the band didn’t take themselves too seriously. However, they obviously took the music very seriously.

  The shows at Red Rocks had ample musical highlights. They blazed on “Maze,” with its blistering, focused solo passages, and “David Bowie” rose to a blizzard of ecstatic triplets from Anastasio’s guitar. On the second night, a fine drizzle hung in the air, creating a sublime psychedelic spectacle as green and purple spotlights were absorbed into the billowy mist while the band played.

  In June 1996, Phish performed for the fourth consecutive year at the scenic amphitheater. They sold out four nights in record time. The run was not without problems, however, as a purported “riot” in downtown Morrison was triggered when a car collided with a Phish fan, with the resulting brouhaha making national news. Phish would not play Red Rocks again until their reunion tour in 2009.