Things were slowly threatening to get out of control, both within and without. As their scene mushroomed, Phish started to lose a grip on what was transpiring backstage and in the parking lots. By the latter half of the nineties, the lots at Phish shows were similar to the “Shakedown Street” scenes that had become institutions at Grateful Dead concerts for so many years, with vendors dealing the typical assortment of T-shirts, jewelry, food, and, of course, drugs. In fact, Phish fans also called these zones of unlicensed commerce Shakedown Street.
In terms of drugs, all the old hallucinogenic standbys (pot, acid, mushrooms) were joined by plenty of harder stuff: cocaine, heroin, Ketamine (“Special K”), methadone, and newer knockout pharmaceuticals like Oxycontin. Plenty of nitrous oxide (“hippie crack”), too. The snake-like hissing of tanks filling balloons with nitrous was a common sound in the lot. Sucking gas from a balloon produced a brain-busting high to fans looking to get spun out of their gourds on the cheap. Ecstasy became prevalent, too, and that—combined with Phish’s turn to a steadier, more grooving style of jamming—fueled the dance-party vibe.
Meanwhile, Phish’s backstage scenes were starting to look more like standard rock-star bacchanals. In 1997 they set up an inner sanctum for which special passes were required. It was, unfortunately—in light of subsequent events—dubbed “the Betty Ford Clinic.” It started out as a joke, with an “Alcoholic Clinic” sign hung on a backstage door at the Worcester Centrum over Thanksgiving 1997 (whose second night, incidentally, featured an hourlong “Runaway Jim,” the longest song performance of Phish’s career). The idea was institutionalized, so to speak, on the fall 1998 tour, when special “Betty Ford Clinic” passes were issued. The impetus was innocent enough. As Anastasio explained, the band wanted easy access to friends and loved ones like they’d had back in their club days, when all they’d had to do was step offstage and mingle.
“The Betty Ford Clinic was the party right next to the band room, which was a conscious decision,” he said. “You see, once we went into arenas, we were isolated from everyone for the first time. When we were in bars, we’d come offstage and all our friends would be hanging out. In 1996 we switched into full-time arenas, and it was a really odd tour for us, because suddenly we were back there all alone. We felt like we were losing a sense of the fact we were in the middle of a huge party. We actually thought for the sake of the music, it would be much better for us to be partying, hanging around that energy, and remembering what kind of vibe was going on so we could play appropriate music to fill that void. So we started the Betty Ford Clinic. All our friends would be there, and we could come offstage—boom!—hang out and have a good time.”
In other words, it was intended as a way of keeping them grounded in these larger new environs. However, as the partying accelerated, some friends and hangers-on wouldn’t even leave the clinic to catch the show, which was another sign of shifting priorities.
One observer described it: “The focus changed. There was more interest in partying, famous guests at shows, and rich people making the scene. Post-show gatherings started to include more party drugs, booze, pills, and girls in tight dresses. Issues of access—passes, parking, private suites, poser platforms, roped-off seating—exploded into a new pecking order.
“The band carried it well, for the most part. But it was digging at them. When you start to run into and butt up against idolatry, it cuts up against what feels natural for a human being to experience. The amount of energy that is created and exchanged can become too much to handle.”
Tequila, cocaine, groupies—it all sounds a lot like the mid-seventies Eagles, but it was late-nineties Phish, too. It’s the stock script for practically every episode of VH1’s Behind the Music. In 2000 Jason Colton was discussing possible ways to promote Phish’s Farmhouse album with Anastasio and suggested doing something on the cable music channel.
“Behind the Music!” Anastasio cracked, only half-jokingly. “When you really think about it, we’ve had just about everything go on with us that goes on in every one of those Behind the Music things. We’re just not as melodramatic about it, and no one ever notices.”
Colton could see his point.
“It’s not like they haven’t had serious things to wrestle with over the last few years,” he noted.
If there’s anything disappointing about this aspect of Phish’s story, it’s that they walked into the minefield of sex, drugs, and rock and roll clichés knowing better. For many years, they seemed sufficiently idealistic, intelligent, well-bred, and on guard to avoid the pitfalls. But they eventually succumbed, although no one will ever confuse Phish with Van Halen or Mötley Crüe, because they didn’t wear misbehavior as a badge of honor. Besides, setting aside puritanical ethics, a certain degree of misbehavior is understandable. If ever a bunch of musical workaholics was entitled to blow off steam, it was Phish. But when all the raging started affecting health and welfare, and the forward progress of their music suffered to the extent that the band stopped practicing, one could argue that a line had been crossed. Perhaps the moral of the story is that the lure of drugs and debauchery is irresistible and that the lid to Pandora’s box will pop open, as if springloaded, once the spoils of rock celebrity insistently present themselves.
Anastasio could see all this clearly after the fact. In an unpublished article by journalist Jesse Jarnow written well after the breakup—and just before Anastasio’s 2006 drug bust—he said, “In 1996 we were all talking about how huge the scene had become, and the sense of entitlement around Phish. It’s virtually impossible not to get sucked up into it yourself. I’m completely guilty of that. It never stopped. It just kept going and going and going. Same old story. It just got so big—so many people, so much money, so many expectations—that we just lost our bearings.”
For more on this, listen to Anastasio’s Shine and Bar 17 solo albums. The lyrics aren’t as overt as remarks made in interviews, but similar messages can be discerned between the lines.
Fueling the fire was the growing gaggle of hangers-on backstage and at the soundboard. Employees of Phish were allotted concert tickets and backstage passes. The newer hires especially took advantage of this perk, and the backstage areas became flooded with unfamiliar faces.
As Tom Marshall noted, “It used to be friends, family, and music geeks standing around and chatting about music or whatever. Then it became rich kids with drugs who were disappearing with the band members into the bathroom to turn them on.”
As a result, “You might have two hundred, three hundred, four hundred people backstage,” recalled Amy Skelton. “Not all in the band’s area, but flitting about with some amount of access, and that started happening. The office got big enough in 1998, 1999, and 2000 that this crew of hangers-on got really big. They were also becoming older and more affluent, and they came packing. And that really affected everybody.
“That’s when the drugs started getting bad. It was just sort of everywhere. ’Cause now you’ve got a hundred people backstage who’ve got plenty of money and plenty of ability to get it, whatever it is.”
Beyond the problems drugs were causing, some of the interlopers would station themselves on the soundboard riser during the shows, causing fits for soundman Paul Languedoc, lighting director Chris Kuroda, and their assistants. They would dance, chatter, giggle, drink, and drive the crew members to distraction.
“I don’t want to dwell on the negative,” said Languedoc, “but there is some bitterness about this stuff, because it affected us directly. People loved to work for the band, and they’d get paid hardly anything but they could get a backstage pass and come to the shows. And that evolved into masses of people crowding everywhere and literally getting in your space during a show.”
“Somebody works for Phish, and now they have a laminated access pass,” added Kuroda. “Their friends are all fans of Phish. Now they have this friend who works for Phish and wants to look good in their eyes and goes, ‘Yeah, I can take you on the riser. I have power now in th
is world.’ And people really tried to push and push to get anything they could to benefit themselves. It was the give-an-inch-and-take-a-mile philosophy. It’s human nature, so you can’t really put people down, but there was a lot of that going on.”
“For a two-or three-year period, how to deal with this problem was almost my number-one concern,” said Languedoc. “It was an endless struggle.”
“I remember going to office meetings when we were off tour and just pleading with people to try to be respectful,” Kuroda noted. “It never worked. Just crazy.” (For the record, management contests those claims. “To say that we paid people poorly is not true at all,” said Jason Colton. He added that the numbers who wound up backstage or on the soundboard riser as a result of staff ticketing policy were exaggerated.)
The same sort of thing was happening backstage, and the Phish crew found it necessary to erect walls out of road cases to keep crowds from straying into equipment areas with their drinks. Certain elements in the crew itself were becoming part of the problem, as crew members hired from outside brought their drugs (and drug habits) with them from whatever other tours they’d done.
Toward the end of the decade, the casual drugging became more compulsive, turning into what one former employee called “survival partying”:
“A lot of blow, just a lot of blow, and it started to become rampant. And a lot of other stuff—pills and whatever else people had. I was concerned that somebody was going to do something really stupid on a big night out—some drug combo or whatever—and wind up dead. Either one of our dear crew members or one of the band members. At that stage, I didn’t really fear for the band members. It was more crew guys. Although later, I feared for Trey.”
Anastasio noted after the fact that it’s difficult to cut back on partying when your employees are friends who are doing the same thing. Beyond the enabling factor, he was having to deal with employees desiring raises, money, or favors of some kind, which added stress to his already full plate. For whatever reason—most likely the close-knit family vibe within Phish’s organization—he was not insulated from these pleas, and it got to be too much. Tom Marshall witnessed the toll it was taking on his friend.
“What head of what company can the lowliest person call with his personal problems?” Marshall asked. “None. Except for Phish. And Trey’s the kind of guy that every single problem you put on his plate—and I’m guilty of this—every single problem, he has to solve. He’s that kind of guy. And everyone knows it: ‘Call Trey. Trey’s gonna solve it for you.’ And that’s bullshit.
“Take Dave Matthews. When he’s off tour, people aren’t calling him saying, ‘You know, I really need $15,000 more to keep my family alive. I’m not making enough and look, this guy’s making this salary, and blah-blah-blah.’ Dave Matthews would never get that call. Trey would get that call. He got it all the time. So this shit was weighing on him while he was trying to be a creative guy. How do you do that? How do you balance the two? I know: drugs.
“You wonder, why are these rock stars killing themselves with drugs? There’s a lot of escaping that’s needed when you’re that big. I saw firsthand how it happened with Trey. How does the happiest guy in the world all of a sudden just be under the weather all the time and really moody and fucking touchy and not smiling and really bummed out? I guess they were smart enough to realize something needed to change and radically.”
In some ways, Phish and their audience were moving in different directions. Phish had simplified and toned down their style of playing; the words “sparse” and “ambient” were often heard in conversation with the group members in 1997 and 1998. At the same time, much of the ever younger and wilder audience longed to be hosed by music and dosed by drugs as intensely as possible. But the buildups and crescendos, the displays of speed and virtuosity, weren’t forthcoming from Phish as routinely in the late nineties. Between the abbreviated domestic tour schedules and escapes to Europe in 1997 and 1998, coupled with the turn to more low-key textural jamming and bass-driven “cow funk,” one might infer that Phish was on some level endeavoring to tame the crowd scene.
But the scene had a momentum that wouldn’t be denied. The band and their posse partied backstage while the audience raged in the parking lots. They would all come together for the music, which was probably the sanest and most rewarding part of both factions’ days. As Anastasio admitted in The Phish Book, the stage became his sanctuary, the one place he could get away from every complicating problem or issue.
What were the parking lots like in the late nineties? Burlington-based writer Sean Gibbon described the scene in his gonzo tour diary, Run Like an Antelope. Disparaged by Phishheads, the book has moments of droll, objective reporting from the front lines. Perhaps Gibbon got closer to the hard truth about the ragged, itinerant lifestyles and increasingly out-of-hand lot scenes than the fans wanted to hear. Tracking the band’s summer 1999 tour, he candidly unveiled the wild and sometimes seedy side of life on the road in Phish Nation.
After a gig in Camden, New Jersey, he described the late-night lot scene: “This place is out of control. Bottle rockets whizzing by, people skipping along with a balloon in each hand, screaming into the night, taking a hit of nitrous, screaming some more. Every other person looks completely crazy. Drums everywhere, people dancing on broken glass.”
A week later Phish played at Oswego County Airport, outside Volney, New York. Some called the nameless two-day affair Camp Oswego. There was a second stage on which guest acts played. One aspect of Oswego that stuck in fans’ minds was the heat: It was merciless and taxing, hitting a hundred degrees during the day. Even the usually unflappable Anastasio looked wiped out onstage. In the lot, nighttime offered respite from the pulverizing sun. But even though the heat was less intense, a different kind of hell manifested itself.
Sean Gibbon again: “It’s ten times dirtier, nastier, meaner, scarier than your average Phish show. . . . It truly does look like a collapsed civilization—trash all around, scruffy people selling their wares and stepping over bodies as they go. . . . Some of the older Phishheads are genuinely surprised by this new wave of young kids spinning on all sorts of nasty drugs.”
Most of those who were causing problems by indulging and/or trafficking in hard drugs—heroin, meth, the large-animal tranquilizer Ketamine, and various prescription painkillers—were not real Phishheads but parasites and predators looking to make money or join the party for all the wrong reasons. One benefit of staging their festivals in places so out of the way—such as remote Limestone, Maine—was that the non-fan riff-raff might be discouraged from making the trip. But there wasn’t much Phish could do about this aspect of the scene on a routine run around the country except tour less or not at all (which very well may have been another point of the hiatus).
Pot, acid, and ’shrooms had long been the holy trinity of party drugs among Phishheads and Deadheads. Ecstasy and nitrous oxide raised the bar in terms of highs and health hazards. Then came the drugs that could seriously impact a user’s health or even kill the rare imbiber. (There always seem to be one or two drug casualties found dead in their sleeping bags at the latter-day rock festivals.) This smorgasbord of substances, ironically, existed amid a healthy vegetarian food scene in which tour rats earned gas and ticket money by vending grilled-cheese sandwiches and veggie burritos. They also sold beer and water by the bottle and peddled homemade jewelry—whatever they could do to scrape a few bucks together.
Tom Baggott, the first-generation Phish fan who’d helped spread the word since the beginning, saw what was happening in the parking lots. By 1998 he noticed a disconnect between the drug-crazed younger kids’ musical wants and Phish’s less crescendo-filled jams. Baggott was working as a development agent, helping bands hone their act and find a grassroots following. One of his bands was a group out of Philadelphia whose music, he realized, would appeal to those who weren’t getting spun to the extreme at Phish shows like they wanted.
“I had identified at this point an el
ement in the Phish scene, most frequently observed in the parking lot, for whom Phish wasn’t intense enough anymore,” Baggott said. “This was an element that just wanted to go higher. They wanted to take the Phish crescendo and hear that the whole show. They didn’t want to hear the nuances, they didn’t want to hear the dynamics. They wanted to hear intensity the whole way through the show, and they wanted their drugs served sunny-side up—‘Supersize me, please’—and when I heard the Disco Biscuits, I was like, ‘Wow, this is a band that would appeal to that part of the Phish base.’”
A “disco biscuit” is street slang for a hit of Ecstasy or quaaludes.
“That scene was all about drugs,” Baggott continued. “That’s what that ‘Bisco’ scene is all about. I didn’t really fully appreciate their music until the first Camp Bisco [the Disco Biscuits’ equivalent of Phish’s festival campouts], when I had the opportunity to take Ecstasy and see the band for four hours, late night, a headlining set with lights. They were awesome that night.”
Baggott laughed. “Not to take anything away from the Biscuits, but my grandmother would’ve been awesome that night on a ukulele, probably.”
So there were shared or shifting allegiances happening on the jam-band scene. Some of the more restless revelers moved from Phish to Disco Biscuits, Sound Tribe Sector 9, or others in the expanding universe of trippy, trance-fusion jam bands.
Incidentally, for those who are wont to blame rock bands like Phish and Disco Biscuits for leading kids to drugs, Baggott made an interesting point: “Drugs were definitely a part of the scene,” he allowed, “but that was a rite of passage that kids were going through anyway. With Phish, it wasn’t that they brought people to drugs. They just gave people something to do when they were on drugs, because they were gonna do drugs anyway.”
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