It was a simple question, but one that had implications the musicians likely could not have imagined at the time. In June 1995, I asked the members of Phish, “How big do you want to get?” Here is some of the dialogue that ensued:FISH [laughing]: So big, the biggest ever!
PAGE: I think that for us, ’cause what we do is a little bit left of center, it’s not going to appeal to everybody. As long as we’re keeping true to ourselves, there are going to be people who love it, but it’s not going to be for everybody. So I don’t have a fear of [getting too big]. I really like the stage we’re at now. The sheds and some of the theaters and arenas we play, I really feel like we can play to the people in those rooms.
FISH: I like the size right now, too. I don’t think we’ve played in a room yet where we felt out of contact with everybody in the room. When we played at Madison Square Garden, Trey said, “Wow, that’s a huge room. I wonder if it’s gonna feel too big.” When we got there, it really didn’t. Because the show had this big, “all right, we’re all in this together” kind of vibe. I didn’t feel out of contact with people in the back, or that we couldn’t occupy that space, or that the sound couldn’t reach everybody well. But I do remember somebody saying that was like the edge. That was the biggest indoor room we’d ever played. That’s when I realized it’s just barely not too big. It’s pushing the envelope. Beyond that, it’s not about music anymore. It’s about production.
ANASTASIO: We just had a meeting with John [Paluska, Phish’s manager]. We talked about the fact we’re making a concerted effort to realize that this is our career, we’re going to enjoy every minute of it, and that’s it. If it’s not something that we enjoy, we’re not going to do it anymore, because how big do you need to get? We’re big enough.
At that point he cut an apple in half with a decisive snap of a knife.
What they couldn’t have anticipated was the sudden death of Jerry Garcia and disbanding of the Grateful Dead in August 1995. At that point, there was nowhere else for Deadheads to go but home, and the younger ones still had plenty of partying and noodle-dancing left in them. Phish inherited not only Deadheads who were sincerely devoted to the ideals of community and music, but also the gate-crashers and parking-lot opportunists who brought a rogue element to Phish’s scene. There’s little question that much of this would have happened to some degree anyway, but the Dead’s demise certainly accelerated the numbers and issues Phish faced after 1995.
Links between Phish and the Dead were certainly nothing new. Once Phish transitioned from an underground cult band to a story that the mainstream music press rather tardily decided was worth covering, it was the Grateful Dead to whom comparisons were reflexively drawn. The parallels were inescapable. Phish had their Jerry Garcia in Trey Anastasio, and they were a pied-piper jam band around whom a nomadic following formed. Both bands built their careers in an organic, grassroots way, flying beneath the pop-culture radar and keeping the industry from intruding as much as possible.
So was it fair to label Phish the “new Dead,” or was this a spurious association promulgated by lazy journalists? The bottom line is that while it’s impossible to imagine Phish without the Grateful Dead as forebears, many other musicians figured as influences upon them. Some of them—such as Carlos Santana and Frank Zappa—were arguably at least as significant as the Grateful Dead. In reality, the media certainly overplayed the Grateful Dead connection and Phish probably underplayed it, at least in their first decade.
During that first interview with Phish—two months before Garcia’s death, as it turned out—I bluntly asked Anastasio: “Do associations with the Grateful Dead have any validity for you?”
He answered without hesitation.
“Oh, definitely. The Grateful Dead paved the way for what we’re doing and what a lot of bands are doing now. I think even Pearl Jam wouldn’t be having the same career without the Grateful Dead.
“The Grateful Dead as an American live touring act are, I think, the forebears. And it’s not musical style I’m talking about, because style is style, and style is directly related to the lives that the band members have led. So whatever experiences you’ve had in your life are going to come out in your music.
“But conceptually, they put the music first, they put the fans first. It was a noncommercial kind of approach. And they were influenced by real American country and bluegrass bands, like Bill Monroe. That kind of thing.”
While Anastasio willingly admitted to conceptual influences, he was still not acknowledging a stylistic debt to the Grateful Dead at that point. Broaching the subject was a touchy issue, since Phish did not want to find themselves in the shadow of the Grateful Dead. That said, Mike Gordon was an unabashed Dead fan and even a Deadhead (as was, to a lesser degree, Fishman). During the same interview, Gordon said, “I’m probably the only one in the band that still tries to go to Dead concerts from time to time. . . . The fact that they’re so tapped into American tradition, and mixing tradition with a real philosophy of the unknown, that’s what I like.”
There was a lot of automatic rejection, if not outright hostility, directed at Phish by those who viewed their scene as an extension of the Grateful Dead phenomenon. Phish started attracting regional attention in the late eighties and the first stirrings of national scrutiny in the early nineties. At that time, the indie-rock bandwagon was bouncing along and grunge would soon make its mark. Anything that smacked of “classic rock” or “hippie music” was generally reviled by indie rock’s gatekeepers, and so Phish were often reflexively dismissed as the Grateful Dead redux. Phish fan Jeremy Goodwin recalled 1995 “as a time when it seemed among my friends that folks felt obliged to take a side on the Phish issue: Generally, you either loved Phish or you made fun of the people who did.”
The irony was that Phish were as independent as they came.
“I wish Phish had been able to connect with a more progressive audience—somewhere between Yes and Primus rather than Widespread Panic and Aquarium Rescue Unit or whatever,” said Ellis Godard of The Phish Companion. “We had friends who wouldn’t even go see Phish until Les Claypool played with them.”
Even in Burlington, in their early years, they had been the odd band out. The buzz bands on the Burlington scene, the ones expected to break out nationally, were of the New Wave or techno-pop variety. One of them, the Cuts, used a drum machine. There was a Burlington scene, but it was eclectic rather than cohesive. Phish’s closest confederates were fellow nutters Ninja Custodian, the Dead-loving Joneses, and the “newgrass” band Max Creek.
During the period when Phish were emerging and the Grateful Dead receding, both bands were at best ignored and at worst lambasted by critics. Unless you read Relix—a periodical for Deadheads and jam-band aficionados—you’d seldom find coverage of either band in the mainstream or alternative music press. A steady trickle of younger Deadheads did begin defecting to Phish’s scene in the early nineties. One of them was Kevin Shapiro, Phish’s archivist.
Shapiro’s Deadhead initiation came in 1989 at a show in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Next he threw in his lot for all three nights at Alpine Valley, near Milwaukee. The first night’s performance was stellar enough to be released on videotape as the prophetically titled Downhill from Here. Then it rained torrentially for the remainder of the stand. By the end of the Alpine Valley run, Shapiro was having difficulty breathing, and his friends rushed him to a hospital. He’d contracted bronchitis, which turned into chronic asthma. “My lungs have never been the same,” he noted ruefully.
This setback didn’t diminish his love for the Grateful Dead. In fact, Shapiro supported himself through college by playing drums in a Dead cover band. In the fall of 1991, however, he saw Phish for the first time—at Cleveland’s Agora Ballroom—and was hooked, transitioning instantly from the Grateful Dead’s world to Phish’s.
“When I saw Phish, it was all over for me, and I pretty much never looked back,” said Shapiro. “Something about Phish—what they did and the amount of creativity that went i
nto it—spoke to me on a deeper level.”
His experience was a common one. Tom Baggott stumbled onto Phish while attending the University of Massachusetts. Up until then he’d been a tenderfoot Deadhead, turned on to them as a young teen by a woman in his neighborhood. She’d seen them as far back as the 1972 Europe tour, and she passed the music and lore on to Baggott.
“The whole Grateful Dead thing was such a mystery to me, this esoteric cult kind of thing, the mythology and symbol and ritual of it,” Baggott explained. “They spoke of Jerry and everyone in the scene like it was family, but I knew it was never going to be my family because it was a whole other generation. I still went to Dead shows for the scene and the drugs and the music. It was a lot of fun and a rite of passage for me, but it was a hollow one because it was something I was hopping onto.
“When I saw Phish at Nectar’s and on the UVM campus, I realized that I had discovered my scene and my rite of passage. This was my band. I realized, ‘This is the nascent beginnings of something and I’m right here.’ It felt so amazing and magical.”
Baggott tried to turn fellow Deadheads on to Phish with mixed success.
“Phish was something we proselytized,” he said. “I remember being at Dead shows and cranking Phish from a big stereo on one of my father’s farm trucks. You could see the impact it was having, because people would stop and go, ‘Holy shit, what’s this?’ I’d give ’em a plum or an apple and be like, This is Phish! I was one of many people who spun bootlegs and passed them around and played their music at every opportunity for crowds and new people.
“At one Dead show I had a bootleg of Phish at Johnson State College. It was a rock-heavy set with a lot of covers, and people were flipping out. They were all tweaked up on whatever and dancing, and this party was evolving around my truck. But I could also see other Deadheads reacting just as strongly in the opposite way: ‘Whoa, what is this? This is just too heavy, man. I gotta go get some Jerry, brah.’ Phish polarized that scene in a lot of ways.”
Kevin Shapiro saw similar signs of resistance. “A lot of Deadheads felt Phish had a different kind of energy, that they were more frenetic and erratic,” he explained. “Irreverent, too, in some ways. Just a lot of odd time signatures and inside jokes. With Phish, you couldn’t settle into a groove and dance, particularly. Whereas at a lot of Dead shows, you really could. Sometimes the groove would stay fairly stable throughout the show. I think that their music came from a more unified place, whereas our guys had punk and reggae and New Wave and prog influences.”
In addition to Shapiro, serious Deadheads could be found in Phish’s crew. Lighting director Chris Kuroda, for instance, attended 252 Grateful Dead concerts. He knows the exact number, because he kept a running list of dates and venues on the inside of his copy of Steal Your Face, a live Dead album.
The Grateful Dead, it turns out, were indirectly responsible for introducing Kuroda to Phish. “The first time I ever saw Phish was at Goddard College on Halloween,” he recalled. “They were co-billing with a band called the Joneses, which was basically a Grateful Dead cover band. That’s who I went to see. I’d never heard of Phish.
“The Joneses played a Grateful Dead set, then here comes this thing Phish I’d never heard of and didn’t care about. But I’m in the room when they start playing. I remember being with another friend who had never seen them before, and about forty-five minutes in we’re looking at each other and going, ‘Who the fuck are these guys? This is insane. I’ve never heard anything like this in my life.’ And they were just being Phish. They were a lot wackier back then, just doing their thing. I definitely became a fan and latched on to them from the first time I saw them.”
The Deadheads in the Phish crew tried to convert soundman Paul Languedoc, a Dead skeptic, by taking him to a show at Shoreline Amphitheatre, in Palo Alto, California, in 1993. (Phish were playing the same venue a day later.) Paul and Chris related the story:PAUL: So they dragged me down and I was sitting there, and the band guys were all trying to explain to me what was happening and what was gonna happen next.
CHRIS: And it was just a horrible, horrible show, the worst Grateful Dead show I’d ever seen.
PAUL: One thing I did get was the scene. I was like, Okay, I see what this is. This is just like a house party, and this is the band that’s playing. People are just hanging out, and they could listen to the band or not, and the band doesn’t seem to care one way or another whether people are listening or not.
CHRIS: It was especially like that in California.
PAUL: The thing that I got from watching the Grateful Dead, the sense I got about their music, was that they’re all in a car going somewhere but nobody’s driving, you know, and that’s fine with them.
I suggested that by 1993, Jerry Garcia probably didn’t want to be there, was uninterested in driving the band, and didn’t particularly care whether anyone was listening.
“No, probably not,” Kuroda conceded with a sigh.
“I just didn’t get it,” added Languedoc. “And I still think they sucked, personally. Although I respect them in a certain way.”
Ellis Godard, of The Phish Companion, was typical of those who were enchanted by Phish’s eclecticism and found the Grateful Dead to be somewhat enervated.
“I only saw three Dead shows, and it wasn’t for me,” Godard stated. “It was Americana, it was fine, but it was a little slow. It was sort of melancholy and morose, and I wanted something fun and energetic. I didn’t wanna hear ‘He’s Gone’ at some funeral pace, you know? I’d rather hear Phish doing ‘Runaway Jim.’”
“For a lot of people, Phish was a post-Dead experience,” Shapiro explained. “But for many others, Phish didn’t draw on that history at all. A lot of people came to Phish from New Wave places—Talking Heads, R.E.M., more of an indie, college-music feel. I’m not saying Phish’s music wasn’t psychedelic. Just not in the way the Grateful Dead’s was.”
Jon Pareles, the New York Times’ veteran rock critic, wrote an essay in 1996 that weighed the ways in which Phish was and wasn’t like the Grateful Dead. “Its roots in the Grateful Dead are unmistakable,” he wrote, “but Phish is a next-generation jam band. Like be-boppers in the wake of Charlie Parker, Phish brings its own ideas to an idiom pioneered by others. Phish is more organized, less inclined to ramble or search audibly for its next maneuver than the Grateful Dead were.
“To yield something like a Dead concert without the Grateful Dead spots, Phish maps the territory between fixed songs and haphazard jamming,” he continued. “Its instrumental passages move purposefully from section to section. Though there’s room for spontaneity, there are also long, satisfying crescendos and carefully plotted moves from consonance to dissonance and back.”
Phish’s staff and crew actually consulted the Grateful Dead’s playbook and protocols. They contacted the Dead’s organization once they started encountering similar crowd-control issues: security, drugs, bootleg merchandise, parking-lot scenes that threatened to get out of hand. They’d reference the Grateful Dead’s security manual and see what they could glean from it.
“We had that mirror scene, so we had mirror issues,” said Chris Kuroda. “So our people would often get advice from the Grateful Dead: How did you deal with 4 million nitrous tanks? How did you deal with people selling copyrighted art? How did you deal with those types of things and who else do you ask for advice?”
In terms of revenue, Jason Colton pointed out that Phish never were as big as the Grateful Dead: “I remember being told in 1995 that the Grateful Dead had a $22 million operation. Just merchandise! They played stadiums. We never played stadiums. For sure, Phish’s touring business has been very strong, but it wasn’t quite on the scale of the Grateful Dead.”
The Grateful Dead played their last show July 9, 1995, at Chicago’s Soldier Field on a scorching summer day. Back in California, Garcia entered a drug-rehab facility, where he suffered a heart attack and was pronounced dead at 4:23 A.M. on August 9. He was only fifty-three.
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br /> Phish never directly hooked up with the Grateful Dead during the period—basically, from 1988 to 1995—when such a thing might have been possible. Phish was intent on carving their own niche, and the Grateful Dead were caught up in their world. Interestingly, once Phish became successful on its own terms and the Grateful Dead were defunct, they tipped their hat to them. At Virginia Beach on August 9, 1998—the third anniversary of Garcia’s death—Phish encored with “Terrapin Station.” How big was this moment? “They basically played Jerry’s anthem,” said Brad Sands. “It was a recognition moment, and from that point on, the Dead thing was put behind them. They could embrace it as opposed to run away from it. They could finally start to say, ‘Jerry was a big influence. He was great.’ All that stuff.”
There would be more. In April 1999, Anastasio and McConnell participated in a three-night Phil (Lesh) and Friends stand at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater, where they covered huge swaths of the Grateful Dead’s repertoire and some of Phish’s. Bassist Lesh and guitarist Bob Weir each sat in with Phish when they played Shoreline Amphitheatre in 1999 and 2000, respectively. Still, fans never got the ultimate thrill: a chance to see Anastasio and Garcia share a stage. Whether earthshaking music would’ve resulted from this historic union is a matter of conjecture. But what a photo opportunity Anastasio and Garcia onstage would’ve been: a dorm-room poster for the ages.
Only a few days after the fabled band meeting at which Anastasio announced his intention to break up Phish, he appeared on Charlie Rose’s talk show. Rose asked his guest about the Grateful Dead. Anastasio went further than ever in acknowledging the influence of the Grateful Dead—and especially Jerry Garcia.
ROSE: The Grateful Dead comparison. Where is it true and where is it not true?
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