Phish

by Parke Puterbaugh

  After the Clifford Ball, Phish attempted their first arena tour in fall 1996, with mixed results. Many venues were packed but not every show sold out, and some arenas were only half full. That raised a question: If Phish could play to 70,000 people in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York, why couldn’t they consistently fill 15,000-seat arenas in populous urban markets around the country? The answer might have something to do with the fact that Phish still had not penetrated deeply beyond the world of Phishheads. They depended upon large numbers of fans following them from gig to gig to sell out or at least comfortably fill arenas every night. While there were enough transient Phishheads to pack large theaters and small arenas, there weren’t yet ample numbers of them to consistently sell out America’s enormo-domes.

  One reason may be that Phish never had “the hit” that would trigger widespread interest among the general populace. The Grateful Dead’s surprise Top Ten hit, “Touch of Grey,” in 1987 might’ve been the worst thing that ever happened to them. Phish took that example under advisement and deliberately avoided handing radio an obvious hit, even though they had songs in their arsenal—“Chalk Dust Torture,” “Suzy Greenberg,” and “Strange Design” among them—that would’ve made strong contenders. However, Anastasio’s vocal for the studio version of “Chalk Dust Torture” had been slowed down for some unfathomable reason, rendering it more weird than listenable on record, making it unsuitable for mass consumption. “Suzy Greenberg” went unrecorded, and “Strange Design,” released only as a foreign B-side, was seemingly sabotaged by a bizarre arrangement.

  There was, in fact, an intention on their part to subvert potential hits. This isn’t just a suspicion. In 1996, I asked Anastasio point-blank, “Are you guys ever going to get around to recording ‘Suzy Greenberg’? That sounds like your great lost Top 40 single.” He answered, “It’s funny. I wouldn’t do it, for that reason. We’ve had ample opportunity to record it because it was a good single, and we’ve chosen not to.”

  Perhaps they wouldn’t have had a hit in any case. The infectious rocker “Down With Disease,” released in 1995, failed to make Billboard ’s Top 100 Singles chart. In a sense, Phish fell between the cracks in the nineties: too unconventional for mainstream rock radio, yet perceived as too hippie-ish and old guard for those on the indie-rock side. Like other outcasts, they found a home on Adult Album Alternative (AAA or “Triple A,”) radio, a diverse, artist-driven format. You’d hear such artists as Wilco, Counting Crows, Barenaked Ladies, Indigo Girls—and Phish, for whom “Free” and “Heavy Things” fared well on the AAA charts, helping to drive album sales.

  Even as Phish were making their move into arenas, they were transitioning to a low-key jamming style that was less arena-friendly. It was the first time this band, whose audience had always grown with them in an organic way, seemed slightly out of sync in terms of career progression. Only a year earlier, in the midst of their third Red Rocks stand, Anastasio had cautioned against too much, too soon.

  “There’s so many things about climbing too fast,” he said. “It takes time . . . to learn how to control a bigger room on every level: production, performance, acoustics. The way you play at a place like Red Rocks—the clarity—comes from moving into it very slowly. Trial and error, trial and error. Just like life. How often does it work out when these people skyrocket to the top and all of a sudden they’re playing these arenas and it sounds like mud? Not a good thing.”

  Looking back, Phish professed that they felt some awkwardness on the fall 1996 arena tour. There was one unassailable peak, however: the Halloween show at Atlanta’s Omni, at which they covered Talking Heads’ Remain in Light during the second of three blazing sets. Bolstered by a two-man horn section and percussionist Karl Perazzo (on loan from Santana), Phish delved deeply into Remain in Light’s polyrhythmic sorcery, setting up a densely textured hailstorm of crosscutting rhythms. The groove was particularly wicked on “Crosseyed and Painless” and “The Great Curve.”

  Afterward, the mood backstage was triumphant and upbeat, and the band members proclaimed it their most satisfying Halloween venture to date. Still, I detected a subtle undercurrent of tension, coupled with fatigue. Anastasio, for instance, was wiped out. Slumping against a wall, he chatted amiably with well-wishers who filed past to congratulate him on a great show, but he was clearly distracted. For one thing, he clutched a golf club as if his life depended on it. When he wasn’t leaning on the seven-iron like a cane, he swung it as if lining up a tee shot. He was visibly trembling with nervous energy, profound relief, utter exhaustion, and whatever other emotions might run through one’s system after performing for five hours in front of 17,000 worshipful fans.

  “The Halloween show is the most high-stress event of the year for these guys, by far,” said Cynthia Brown, a Phish employee on the merchandise side who later married manager John Paluska.

  All the same, there were murmurings of issues that went beyond the rigors of preparing to cover another band’s album. The press of projects, mushrooming popularity, and loss of control that comes with getting bigger were all bearing down on them. Phish finally found itself on the media radar, and with that came an avalanche of interviews, photo sessions, and constant demands on their time. Meanwhile, the recently released Billy Breathes was riding a roller-coaster ride of wildly fluctuating chart numbers. It debuted at No. 7 on Billboard’s Top 200 album chart but dropped to No. 32 and No. 50 over the next few weeks.

  The ups and downs were particularly hard on Anastasio. After all, he was the one dubbed Trey “Leadership Qualities” Anastasio by Mike Gordon in the brief band bios he penned in the Halloween “Phish-bill” (a concert program designed to resemble a Broadway playbill). That had been another sore point, a subtle jab by Gordon that got under Anastasio’s skin. Everyone was reportedly stressed out in the days leading up to Halloween.

  “It’s peaks and valleys, like any of us,” said Beth Jacobson, their Elektra publicist, a few weeks after the Halloween show. “I don’t think it’s like, ‘Oh, no, the walls are caving in.’ They have their moments of getting kind of intense, but they always get their heads above water, eventually.”

  In Halloween’s aftermath, Phish had all of one day off to rest and regroup. How would they be spending their downtime? According to Anastasio, Phish had plans to go fishing off the Georgia coast.

  All the issues they had back in the States during the fall 1996 tour essentially sorted themselves out when they headed to Europe in early 1997 for their first headlining tour abroad. (They had played several headlining gigs in Europe on the July ’96 tour but mainly opened for Santana.) The overseas venues they played in ’97 were smaller and the crowds less adulatory. The more chilled-out vibe let them ease into the relaxed new style they were angling toward but hadn’t yet solidified. Soon after returning from the continent, Anastasio summarized what happened:

  “I think we were trying to change musically,” he said. “It’s easy to say this after the fact, but we were trying to break through to a different kind of jamming—slower, funkier, more group-oriented, and less guitar solo-oriented. We found it was a little harder to do that in the context of the American tour before that, which was our first full arena tour, ending with this big New Year’s show in Boston. When we went over to Europe, playing in these little clubs, that change occurred without us even really noticing it.”

  Phish’s European jaunts—they were there for the last half of February and returned for more dates in June—allowed them to rediscover the simple joy of playing music without worrying about how they were faring in Pollstar (the trade journal that tracks concert attendance and earnings) back home in the States. Phish was still largely unknown abroad. They had nothing to do with the current trends there (Britpop and electronica), and didn’t care one way or the other. They had a ton of fun on their European vacations, which took them to England, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Denmark.

  The night before a landmark gig in Hamburg, Germany, members o
f the group and crew got drunk at the hotel bar on a potent libation called Dr. Joe’s Knockout Punch. “It had like twelve different kinds of liquors and a flaming shot of Bacardi 151 on top,” Anastasio said, chuckling. “I mean, a couple of those things and you were just blind.”

  Anastasio ordered a round and when the drinks were placed on the table, tipsy merchandising maven Amy Skelton lifted the glass tabletop for no apparent reason, sending everything crashing to the floor in an explosion of shattering glass. The hotel manager raced over to evict them, crying, “This is a five-star hotel.” They settled the $485 bill, charging it to McConnell’s room (he wasn’t even present) and vacating the bar to continue partying on the tour bus.

  They blasted Rage Against the Machine as the bus’s back lounge became a mosh pit. They opened the skylights and climbed out of them. Then the entourage lit out to carry on at some Hamburg discos. The next day they were bruised from crashing into tables and each other. The bus was pretty wrecked, too, and the table in the back lounge had been broken.

  “It was just insane,” Anastasio recalled. “It was somewhat out of character, but it was a great night.” Moreover, it helped set the tone for the show in Hamburg by leaving them too loose and worn-out to overthink their playing. Touring Europe was a lot more low-key and depressurized anyway. Instead of five trucks and a forty-person crew, they had just one truck and a fifteen-person crew. On top of this, the group was consciously toning down its style of jamming.

  “During 1996, ending with New Year’s Eve, we were capping off an era of building things up to peaks a lot and blaring a lot—having there be a lot of sound and a lot of noise,” Anastasio reflected. “This year, especially since we were in clubs in Europe and the whole feeling was smaller and funkier, we just got into a lot of these sparse, funky jamming grooves. Playing slow and spacious, with each note really having a purpose.”

  The show in Hamburg also marked the concert debut of Gordon’s Modulus bass. His new ax was punchier and more penetrating, especially on the higher strings. This change in instruments would make him more of a factor in driving the jams through the end of the decade.

  For all these reasons, Phish’s show at the Markthalle in Hamburg on March 1, 1997, was a memorable one. They played for a crowd of 1,100, most of them Americans. This is how it went on the European tours. The audiences were largely fans from the States—exchange students or summer travelers who could afford the passage to see their heroes in smaller venues. By the group’s estimate, 75 percent of the audiences in Europe were American. Still, they’d made German acquaintances while reveling in Hamburg, and a decent number of them and other curious natives turned out to see them at the Markthalle. Of all the countries in Europe, Germany came closest to catching Phish fever. “I think that Germans got it more than the British,” observed management associate Jason Colton. “While they sold more tickets in the U.K. than elsewhere, the Phish culture seemed more present in Germany.”

  In Hamburg, they played cover songs—Talking Heads’ “Cities” and ZZ Top’s “Jesus Just Left Chicago”—dating back to their earliest shows as a band. They fell into funky, simmering, laid-back jams on “Taste” and “Wolfman’s Brother.” Humor was rampant throughout the night. They had some fun at the Doors’ expense, massacring Jim Morrison’s psychosexual rant in “The End.” “Mike’s Song” and “Weekapaug Groove” bookended the lounge-lizardly “Lawn Boy,” of all things.

  The group thought so highly of that evening that they culled the best parts for a CD titled Slip Stitch and Pass. Released in 1997, it was the follow-up to Billy Breathes. Unlike A Live One, their first concert compendium, this was a single disc extracted from just one gig. The title was a sewing term—Gordon’s then-fiancée, Cilla, was a seamstress—that effectively described the stealthy, deliberate way Phish had advanced its musical agenda while snaking its way across Europe.

  Even Robert Christgau, the rock critic at the Village Voice for many years, had some kind words for Slip Stitch and Pass. He had previously bestowed a bomb symbol (indicating “a bad record whose details rarely merit further thought”) upon Billy Breathes, without deigning to elaborate. But Slip Stitch and Pass earned a B+ and the headline “Look Who’s Stopped Sucking” from Christgau, who wrote: “Kinda restores your faith in humanity for these guys to make like they know the difference between intelligent and pretentious.”

  The jacket was designed by Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis, the company that rendered myriad mesmerizing album covers for Pink Floyd (including Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here), Led Zeppelin (Houses of the Holy), and other progressive bands. For Slip Stitch and Pass, Thorgerson came up with an image of a guy on a beach unspooling an enormous ball of string. Phish, Europe, Hipgnosis—it all made an odd kind of sense in 1997.

  In some ways, Slip Stitch and Pass brought Phish full circle back to their days in small clubs. Moreover, at a time when the crowds were expanding in America, the European tour and live album gave them some breathing room. In Anastasio’s words, Slip Stitch and Pass reflected their self-acceptance:

  “My realization is that you have to admit who you are. It’s like, ‘Be yourself, because nobody else can.’ We all grew up on a block in suburbia with twenty-five other kids, playing army and waiting for the Good Humor man. Going to the mall and hanging out at the pizza place. We’re these four suburban kids who grew up listening to classic-rock stations. You can hear it ’cause we’re always throwing in these little quotes: the Doors, the Stones, Pink Floyd, ZZ Top, Talking Heads.

  “You wonder, how did we get so popular? But it seems kind of obvious when you look at it that way, because our experiences are similar to many other people’s and our music speaks to them.”

  Gordon made the same point about Slip Stitch and Pass in simpler language. “A lot of it is really just sort of fun,” he said. “It’s kind of letting loose. I can imagine that if people wanted to play a Phish album at a party, this would be the one.”

  There were notable dates in Europe during the lengthier return jaunt in June and July as well. This leg opened up in Dublin on June 13, 1997. Phish debuted thirteen new songs over the course of two nights. This included half a dozen songs that would appear on Story of the Ghost (one of them, “Olivia’s Pool,” was reworked and retitled “Shafty”) and even a trio of tunes that wouldn’t show up on record until Farmhouse, which was three years down the road. They also broke out a memorable and never-repeated first-night encore combo of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Stand” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Izabella.” Incidentally, the whole pile of new originals and covers, and more as well, were first tried out at a private party called “Bradstock,” which was held at the home shared by crew members Brad Sands and Pete Carini.

  After the European tours, Phish’s approach to jamming continued to evolve, becoming more groove-oriented, ambient, and textural.

  “In the late nineties, we got more into jams that would stay on one chord and not modulate as much,” said Gordon. “I think there was an influence from seeing Neil Young jam in Europe and listening to James Brown a lot. Not changing so much became more important than changing a lot. Trey’s guitar playing also got a little bit different. Whereas he used to play a lot of notes and do some ferocious soloing, later on he got into being more subtle and riding on top of the groove by holding out more sustaining or looping notes.”

  Anastasio would even stop playing guitar and bang out rhythms on a percussion setup that had become part of his rig. This phase of live Phish had its adherents, but many fans missed the livelier, more propulsive and crescendo-oriented jamming. At the same time, this more even-keeled and groove-oriented approach proved alluring to some in the Dead camp who’d theretofore found Phish too frenetic.

  In the late nineties, Phish’s jams more often resembled glowing embers than blazing bonfires. Still, there were exceptional shows and tours, especially the summer tours of 1997 and 1998, and there was no dearth of deserving new material. “From 1997 to 2000 was a gloriuos outburst of creativ
e new Phish songs,” observed Brad Sands.

  “The summer ’98 tour was one of the best of all time,” said Eric Larson, a longtime fan and employee of the band. “They were playing very well, and every night they broke out some new cover. They had developed such a wide repertoire that you never really knew what they were going to play. That was definitely one of my favorite tours.” I would have to agree. At one show I attended—at Raleigh’s Walnut Creek Amphitheatre, August 7, 1998—a hellacious late-afternoon thunderstorm blew in from one side, bringing heavy winds and downpour. Ever attuned to their surroundings, they opened with “Water in the Sky” and the Who’s “Drowned” while the heavens opened up. On this same night, which later cleared up, there was also a lunar eclipse. Anastasio’s sister Kristine, who lived in nearby Chapel Hill, casually mentioned that celestial occurrence to him. A lightbulb went off in his head, inspiring surreal narration during the second-set “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent” that incorporated the moon’s vanishing into the Gamehendge saga.

  While the ambient grooves Phish fell into during the late nineties might sometimes become monotonous, the group often found power in repetition, tapping into the visceral, hypnotic buzz rave kids got from electronic rhythms and loops. Ecstasy, the drug of choice in that scene, was definitely on the rise at Phish shows during this time frame. When Phish played Salt Lake City’s E Center, Anastasio welcomed the audience to the “E-e-e-e-e-e-e Center,” and the druggy implication wasn’t lost on the crowd.

  “E” was one thing, but it was the arrival of white-powder drugs that started to affect their scene in troubling ways. If you were into Phish, you might have heard rumors on the fan-driven gossip mill as far back as 1997. Fishman and Gordon were reportedly just dabblers in the smorgasbord of substances that gradually became part of Phish’s backstage scene. Anastasio got hooked, cleaned up, and relapsed a few times before his well-documented bust in 2006. McConnell fell somewhere in the middle.