Phish

by Parke Puterbaugh

  In defense of working musicians, too little attention has been paid to the use of cocaine and similar drugs not only as a recreational high but also as a practical tool in a demanding and oftentimes exhausting occupation. The touring side of rock and roll is a grinding routine of traveling from city to city, setting up and sound checking, performing and breaking down, all the while grabbing whatever rest and sustenance one can manage while being constantly on the move. Cocaine serves an especially utilitarian function among road crews, who erect stages and equipment by day and load it all out in the dead of night. It’s tough physical labor, and the hours are brutal. As rockers and roadies lose youthful resilience, cocaine combats the fatigue of their nocturnal, nomadic lifestyles. It’s surely no accident that harder drugs didn’t become an issue until they were in their thirties.

  Humor has always figured in Phish’s cosmology. In the mid to late nineties, that started to change, at least onstage. As they drew more attention, they became more self-conscious about the gags and gag songs, lest they be portrayed by the media as some kind of novelty act.

  Fishman elaborated on this more serious mindset in a 2004 interview: “Trey’s been on this crusade, ‘I don’t wanna write nonsensical stuff that’s just an excuse to have singing to go with the instrumental stuff. I’m gonna get up there and sing lyrics, I want them to say something.’ The biggest change is that nonsensical stuff is unacceptable. He’s really turned off about singing a lot of our older things, even if there is some great music that goes with it that people wanna hear.”

  There was a growing sentiment that bouncing on trampolines, tossing boxes of macaroni and cheese to the audience, and having a dress-wearing drummer who played vacuum-cleaner solos might be detracting from their stature as serious musicians. Thus, in 1997, there were fewer gags, and Fishman even gave up the dress for a spell, opting for a utilitarian T-shirt and ball cap. Classy became the by-word, while quirky was out of vogue. Since 1994, the band had also been elongating jams to unheard-of lengths, and by the later years of the decade all the musical exploration was crowding out the humorous bits. In some respects, life was becoming less amusing to them as growing popularity and media scrutiny brought pressures they’d not had to contend with before. And they were simply getting older, too.

  “I certainly liked bringing people to shows in the early to mid nineties more than I did in the latter years,” said Amy Skelton. “Because somewhere between 1995 and 1997, they started to jam more than play the funny stuff. I think they started to tire of the gags. They weren’t so humorous themselves, and they were much more into playing, improv, stretching it out, going new places, and writing new music. The Big Ball Jam, the secret language, all that stuff—they got sick of it. They got sick of doing it, and they got sick of people clamoring for it, people talking about it, and articles being written about it. The focus wasn’t on the music. I felt that they always kept their focus on the music, but that wasn’t true of outsiders.”

  After returning home from Europe in early March 1997, Phish headed from Burlington back to Bearsville, where they’d recorded Billy Breathes, to begin work on their next record, which would eventually be called Story of the Ghost. They hoped to capture the new style they’d forged on the continent while their fingers were still warm.

  “We’d always wanted to tape ourselves jamming and coming up with stuff, because a lot of times it feels like that’s when it’s most connected,” said McConnell. “So we pushed the ‘record’ button and improvised for four days.”

  They repeated the scenario half a year later, holing up at Bearsville for four more days of jamming. What they took away from those sessions were forty hours of tape. McConnell volunteered to winnow the reels down to highlights, and the group used the most inspired passages as unaltered templates for songs that wound up on Story of the Ghost.

  “We believed in the process and decided to have faith that we would make the right decisions along the way,” he said.

  “What you’re hearing on Story of the Ghost is first takes, first creation, first everything,” Anastasio noted at the time.

  “Because it was largely recorded at the point of conception, I really do think the album sounds more like us than any album we’ve ever made,” McConnell continued. “Parts of it are a little quieter and pull you in acoustically and introspectively, but it also has the funk and the rock stuff we’re doing, and it’s not overly produced.”

  Indeed, parts of Story of the Ghost weren’t produced in any conventional sense at all, and it would turn out to be their most experimental album. The writing and recording of the album occurred in several bursts over the course of a year using methodologies that were unorthodox even for Phish.

  Anastasio and Marshall had ensconced themselves for three-day songwriting and demoing sessions at farmhouses in the Stowe area, which yielded upward of thirty songs. Then Phish as a whole tried to get into the act of writing material together, so that the album—or at least a major portion of it—would be a true collaboration. During their working retreat with an eight-track recorder at a rented farmhouse in Stowe, Vermont, Phish added words and vocal melodies to the instrumentals McConnell had excerpted. Working from a book of lyrics by Tom Marshall, band members sang along to the instrumental tracks as inspiration struck. These farmhouse vocals, originally conceived as demos to be later recut in the studio, were preserved largely intact on the finished disc. In this fashion, the group worked up ten songs from the jam tapes. When it came time to pick songs for the album, they devised elaborate voting schemes to accommodate all four viewpoints. As a result, certain Anastasio-Marshall songs that would’ve made Story of the Ghost stronger and more cohesive, such as “Dirt,” didn’t make the cut. (It turned up on the next album, Farmhouse.)

  “Some of the songs that I thought should’ve been on that album were voted off,” said Anastasio. “Not because they weren’t good songs but because it was getting weird that I was bringing so much music.”

  This presented a conundrum. Should the de facto bandleader, who was also a compulsive songwriter, willingly sacrifice some of his output to keep everyone happy? Or should the others, who had their own reasonable desires to be creatively involved in the music’s conception, willingly step aside and be content to play songs and even parts that were almost completely mapped out on demos?

  In order to exercise some of the cool stuff they were writing in front of a live audience, Phish performed a series of four shows—April 2-5, 1998—dubbed the Island Tour. The islands they played on were Long and Rhode, where they performed two shows apiece at Nassau Coliseum (in Uniondale, New York) and the Providence Civic Center. They were eager to generate some electricity and rekindle some live energy that might carry over to the studio. Ultimately, the Island Tour fired them up to finish Story of the Ghost.

  In a few furious days later that month at Bearsville, Phish laid down twenty-nine Anastasio-Marshall songs with producer Andy Wallace. When they took stock of what they’d created, Phish found themselves with a surfeit of material: thirty-nine songs in all, from which a single disc had to be culled. It was “a necessarily painful process,” noted Marshall, who initially suggested that Phish issue a double CD.

  Thematically, Story of the Ghost hinged upon the haunting opening track, wherein Marshall confided about a friend he felt was an intermediary between him and the spirit world. Anastasio saw it in more universal terms. “Everybody’s got their own ghosts,” he said before the album’s release. “I know what it’s about for me.”

  The album also included “Guyute,” the eight-minute epic that was the only older song on the album, having made its live debut in 1994. It was the last time one of Anastasio’s intricate, multipart compositions would enter the repertoire for many years—really not until “Time Turns Elastic” turned up during the 2009 reunion. One dissonant, slalom-style passage in “Guyute” is as challenging as anything in Phish’s catalog. So why did they wait four years to record it?

  “The time was right,” said A
nastasio. “We were playing it a lot on tour, and it got to the point where it was flowing and we were inside of it. We had moved beyond the notes.” Also notable was “Birds of a Feather.” Spliced together by McConnell from three jam excerpts, it clearly nodded at the urgent, jittery funk of Talking Heads—not surprising, since they’d covered Remain in Light the previous Halloween.

  “Sometimes I think the album sounds so different for us that it’s about shedding the old Phish and moving on to the new Phish. I think it goes back to a line in ‘Meat’: ‘I need a different life, I think.’ It’s some kind of metamorphosis, changing into something new, which has been kind of the theme for the last year. 1996 was a question-mark year—like, what is going on? Something’s gotta change, gotta give. Story of the Ghost has something to do with the past and making it through that transition.”

  Was the experiment a success? The answer is yes, no, and maybe, depending on whom you talk to.

  Gordon thought particularly highly of Story of the Ghost and the process that went into its creation. “The feeling was so collaborative and I like the way that album sounds so much that under ‘Phish’ on my Web site—sort of as a joke or minimizing—I only list Story of the Ghost,” he said in 2008.

  He was also quick to add, “Trey came up with all kinds of great experiments to include other people in the creativity, so I wouldn’t blame him or anyone if I ended up shying away from some of it [on other albums] in the end.”

  A few years after Ghost’s release, Anastasio reflected on the process. “By the time we got to Story of the Ghost it started to get weird,” he said in 2001. “Mike was getting a little frustrated, because I was bringing all these tunes and they were done. So then there was a feeling of, ‘Well, we want to write together.’ So I was like, ‘All right, let’s write together.’ We got together in the same farmhouse me and Tom had [laughing], and we tried really hard to write together. It was somewhat successful and somewhat not. But it’s like the point was getting lost. I got really upset, and so did Page, because I had come in with all these demos and we were like, ‘We could make a great album. This is our chance.’”

  Instead they wound up with an album whose whole was compromised by its various parts, which didn’t mix well: the “Tom/Trey songs” (as Anastasio called them), the band-written pieces (with lyrics by Marshall), and the lengthy “Guyute” extravaganza. In hindsight, perhaps it would have been best to place the band-written songs on one album and the best of the Anastasio-Marshall copyrights on another, issuing them either as a double disc or two single ones (like Bruce Springsteen did with the simultaneously released Human Touch and Lucky Town CDs).

  All the same, every song on the album turned up in Phish’s concert repertoire, and many of them—particularly “Ghost,” “Birds of a Feather,” “The Moma Dance,” and “Limb by Limb” became live staples. With its moody, undulating groove, “Ghost” proved to be a highlight of Phish concerts for years to come.

  Nine months after the release of Story of the Ghost came The Siket Disc, an instrumental album culled from their jamming sessions at Bearsville. It was issued as a Phish album, albeit with limited release, through their merchandising division. McConnell listened to, selected, and digitally edited the album’s nine pieces, which bore such titles as “Quadrophonic Toppling,” “Insects,” and “Fish Bass.” Named for engineer John Siket, The Siket Disc has a trance-like, Pink Floyd-meets- Brian Eno flow. There are no “songs” and it is all too brief (thirty-five minutes), but its late-night ambience is eerily captivating.

  The Great Went and Lemonwheel—Phish’s weekend festivals in 1997 and 1998, respectively—had much in common. Both were held in far northern Maine, in remote Aroostic County. Like the Clifford Ball, they were sited on a decommissioned Air Force base (Loring AFB, near Limestone). Though they lacked that festival’s shock-of-the-new aura, both offered the uniquely surreal down-the-rabbit-hole experience Phish provided. Moreover, the art installations were even more innovative—Lemonwheel’s theme, for instance, was Asian—and the sense of a community apart from the mainstream thrived in the wilds of upstate Maine.

  That community ethos extended all the way to the site clean-up afterward. One of Phish employee Beth Montuori Rowles’s self-assigned tasks was to go through boxes of lost-and-found materials after the festivals. The security team would send boxes of lost items to Phish’s office in Burlington. Beth would don gloves and, with the help of others in the office, pick through the boxes, separating items and trying to identify their owners. They tracked down the owners of lost credit cards through the issuing bank and cell phones through the service providers. They returned as much as they could, even seemingly insignificant items with personal value, such as journals and diaries, by sleuthing for addresses, phone numbers, and other clues.

  They tended to go that extra mile because that was the tone of the whole operation, from Phish’s music to Dionysian Productions’ management style. This attitude carried over to their work with various charities, too. In 1997, Phish established the WaterWheel Foundation. Motivated by the philosophy to “think globally, act locally,” they helped out a host of Vermont-based charities. The primary beneficiary has been Lake Champlain, the hundred-mile body of water that touches Burlington and divides Vermont from upstate New York. Over the past century, the lake has been polluted by sewage discharge and agricultural and urban runoff. Through Water - Wheel, Phish has donated significant sums of money to raise public awareness, fund studies, and buy land and equipment to help control environmental degradation. Through their linkup with Ben and Jerry’s via Phish Food, over $1 million in royalties has gone to the WaterWheel Foundation’s Lake Champlain initiative. The foundation has also given money to Vermont nonprofits—mostly arts-related causes—and collected money on tour for designated charities in various communities.

  In 1998 Phish released Bittersweet Motel, a band documentary about Phish, directed and produced by Todd Phillips (whose films include Hated, Frat House, and Road Trip). He and his crew were given carte blanche to follow Phish around for about a year. The resulting eighty-four-minute film was a musical travelogue that tracked Phish in the U.S. from Maine (Great Went, August 1997) to Rochester, New York (December 11, 1997). Filming carried over to 1998 for the summer tour of Europe.

  Twenty-three songs are performed in whole or in part, including everything from fan favorites like “Wilson” and “The Squirming Coil” to covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Loving Cup” and Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.” The title Bittersweet Motel refers to an original song Anastasio and McConnell sing in the final scene. The film falls squarely in the rockumentary tradition of the Who’s The Kids Are Alright , the Clash’s Rude Boy, Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back, and—given the rock-festival footage—Woodstock.

  It all started when Phish decided to document the Great Went. The project grew in scope from there. John Paluska called Phillips and invited him to Chicago to see a show and to meet the band. Phillips recalled thinking to himself, “‘Who the fuck are these guys? How do they have money to make a movie and fly me out to Chicago?’ I literally didn’t know, I mean, I’d heard the name Phish but I didn’t know—”

  Phillips was mostly left to his own devices. “Phish told me, ‘Just make the movie. Put in what you want, don’t put in what you don’t want.’ There was never any of this thing you fear in situations with people who can exert control. You know, ‘I don’t look good in that shot’ or ‘I look weird here.’ None of that bullshit. They’re so open and understanding of the creative process, I guess because of the freedoms they’ve had.

  “In a way, I think they liked the fact they were working with someone who was not a fan, because they thought, ‘Oh, this guy will be a fan by the end of it.’ And when I spent some time listening to the musicianship and heard how good these guys are, I became a fan. I’ve since been to shows we weren’t filming, and I’ll continue to go to them. And it’s not because I’m buddies with them now but that I have a real appreciation for what t
hey do creatively: how they don’t have a set list, they’re playing something different every night, and you don’t know what you’re going to get when you show up.”

  Phillips interspersed concert footage with interview snippets, backstage scenes, and other comical or illuminating glimpses of life on the road with Phish. Among other things, they discussed (and dissed) critics, made up songs on the spot, hung out on the beach, and bartered for weapons at a shop in Barcelona. During the bartering scene, Anastasio literally held a gun to Gordon’s head and haggled with the shopkeeper over a whip. In one backstage scene while strumming the guitar, he made up a little funny song about McConnell on the spot.

  Even when Anastasio got caught up in potentially problematic or embarrassing situations, he didn’t harbor any illusions about what he was doing or hide it from the world. With the filming of Bittersweet Motel, perhaps he wanted the world to see exactly what was going on with the band during this period.

  “It’s hard having a movie made about yourselves,” noted Phillips. “It can stir up weird feelings of ‘What are we doing this for? Does this make sense?’ The other guys were more self-conscious about it than Trey, who said, ‘This is going to work. We’re just going to go for it and let it go.’ There’s a lot of Trey in the movie because that was his attitude—you know, see what happens as opposed to avoiding it. Not that the other guys were tough to work with, but the more accessible one is, the better it’s going to be. I wasn’t doing an exposé, and I didn’t want to bang down their doors. I wanted them to feel comfortable about it, and in that regard I would say Trey was the most comfortable.”