Phish

by Parke Puterbaugh

  “I just loved that line as the mantra for the festival,” said Jason Colton. “It’s like, ‘We are creating this magic for you.’ Trey often talked about the concept of completely reimagining a concert environment, thinking about everything through the eyes of a fan. What can you do, how can you create a space for the fans’ sake? That stuck with me because it really was a philosophy to go by—to check everything you’re doing and think about how it’s going to affect the fans and their experience. That overlying philosophy was an exciting goal to shoot for.”

  There was much at It to delight, confound, and blow the minds of festivalgoers. Burlington artists Lars Fisk and Scott Campbell designed an installation called Sunk City, filling a recessed spot in the landscape with a partially submerged skyline. The installation looked like a future archaeological site filled with the listing remnants of a collapsed urban civilization. Ten thousand rolls of masking tape were used to wrap trees in a patch of forest, like some project that artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude might’ve dreamed up on a bad trip. Roaming through the masking-tape forest were performance artists attired as squirrels and other bizarre characters (imagine perambulating the masking-tape forest while tripping). The water tower bore Groucho Marx’s likeness, and a giant statue of a burger-toting Big Boy—the fast-food icon whose uplifted arm held aloft a plate, which one could stand on—perched at the edge of Sunk City. It was an extreme recontextualization of familiar cultural icons, delightfully disorienting and appropriately surreal.

  Even with the wealth of sideshows, sights, and displays, nothing was more mind-blowing than the Tower Jam, which started at 2 A.M. For the next hour, Phish jammed free-form in a shimmering, ambient-techno fusion style on the roof of the control tower. That wasn’t the half of it. Chris Kuroda lit the structure with his phantasmagoric palette. Strobe lights encircled the tower, which was also bathed in green and red spotlights. Pink fireworks and circling blue lights lit up an adjoining field. A trio of dancer-gymnasts rappelled along the sides of the tower like giant gravity-defying spiders as Phish played and lights danced.

  “The coolest manmade psychedelic installation of all time,” ventured archivist Kevin Shapiro.

  “One of the most creative, over-the-top ‘gags’ ever devised by the band and crew,” agreed promoter Dave Werlin.

  Even fans who thought they’d seen it all rated the Tower Jam as a special moment. Overall, it and It were something of a last hurrah—the undisputed high points of the rather brief reunion that followed Phish’s hiatus.

  After staging Big Cypress, Phish spent much of the first decade of the twenty-first century out of commission. To summarize, they went on hiatus in 2000, regrouped in 2002, toured heavily in 2003, and broke up “for good” in 2004.

  But the members of Phish did not rest on their laurels. The amount of musical output from them actually multiplied because instead of one band, there were now several bands and side projects.

  During the hiatus, Trey Anastasio ramped up the activities of his solo band and also formed Oysterhead, a supergroup of sorts, with Primus’s Les Claypool and the Police’s Stewart Copeland. In an inspired pairing of two like minds, Mike Gordon formed a duo with guitarist Leo Kottke. He also released his first solo album (Inside In) and second film (Rising Low). Page McConnell became a bandleader, forming Vida Blue with a sterling rhythm section. Jon Fishman drummed for the Burlington-based outfits Pork Tornado and the Jazz Mandolin Project.

  After two years apart, Phish regrouped. They quickly cut a new studio album (Round Room) and returned to the stage with a New Year’s Eve show at Madison Square Garden. They toured throughout 2003, a year that included a lot of ups (an amazing summer tour, climaxing with the It festival) and a few downs (more of the problems that had caused them to declare a hiatus).

  Barely fifteen months after the New Year’s Eve reunion show, Anastasio declared “we’re through” with a note on the band’s Web site. There was a final album (Undermind), a short summer tour, and Phish’s muddy, messy farewell festival outside Coventry, Vermont, which wrapped things up on a sour note in August 2004. In its wake, Phish disbanded, Dionysian Productions dissolved, and virtually all crew, staff, and employees were dismissed.

  Then it was back to solo careers for Anastasio, Gordon, McConnell, and Fishman, and an acceleration of archival concert releases. The Phish family dispersed professionally and geographically, moving on to other careers or absorbed elsewhere in the music industry. Certain key figures—Brad Sands, Chris Kuroda, Paul Languedoc—kept working intermittently with Anastasio, though things weren’t quite the same as his personal situation fluctuated and, ultimately, deteriorated.

  No one saw any of this coming when Phish entered their hiatus in October 2000. The dictionary definition of hiatus is “any gap or interruption,” and in this sense there was discontinuity in the career of Phish. But the hiatus did not mean there was any sort of musical stoppage or lightening of the workload at the Phish office. To the contrary, the staff found themselves attending to four careers, each of which involved albums, tours, and detailed planning. “We were super busy during hiatus because they started doing their side stuff and we downsized in staff at the same time,” said Beth Montuori Rowles. “So instead of one band we had four or even five bands, depending on what day it was and what Trey was doing.”

  She laughed at the notion that Phish’s staff had nothing to do for two years. “People were like, ‘You work for the band, but what do you do? I thought they broke up. How can you still have a job?’ I would say, ‘You have no idea how much these guys put out and how much caretaking it takes and how much administration it requires.’”

  In other words, it may have been a hiatus, but it was hardly a vacation. The band members were as busy as ever. As soon as the hiatus commenced, Anastasio—for whom “downtime” is not part of his vocabulary—got right to work on a long-cherished project: a symphonic version of “Guyute,” the ambitious, extended centerpiece of Story of the Ghost. Parts of it sound like a Celtic jig, and no wonder: Anastasio composed it in Ireland. “The first day of the hiatus, I started working on orchestrating ‘Guyute,’” he said. “I came home from that Shoreline Amphitheatre show, woke up the next morning, pulled out the manuscript paper, sat down at the piano, and started writing. And I was pretty much working all day for months. At least four months.”

  “Guyute” would take on a life of its own in this decade. First it was scored for and performed by the Vermont Youth Orchestra. Then Anastasio recorded it with an orchestra in Seattle. That version became the highlight of Seis de Mayo, his all-instrumental solo album (released in April 2004). Finally, he conducted the Nashville Symphony Orchestra in a live performance of “Guyute” on the final night of the 2004 Bonnaroo festival.

  That was just the beginning. Anastasio maintained a grueling workload from the hiatus to the reunion and on through the breakup right up until his 2006 drug bust. His recorded output in that six-year period included seven solo albums (Trey Anastasio, Plasma, Seis de Mayo, Shine, Bar 17, 18 Steps, and Horseshoe Curve), two Phish studio albums (Round Room, Undermind), and a studio album with Oysterhead (The Grand Pecking Order). There were tours with Phish, Oysterhead, and his ever-evolving solo band (“Trey Band,” in fan parlance), which grew from three to eleven pieces. He played on Dave Matthews’s 2004 solo album (Some Devil) and tour, which was the hardworking singer-guitarist’s own version of a hiatus from the ridiculously popular jam band that bore his name.

  Early in the hiatus, Anastasio cast his lot with Oysterhead. The Oysterhead story began when Claypool was approached in 2000 by New Orleans-based Superfly Productions to organize one of their “Super-jams”—interesting and even improbable combinations of musicians brought together for a night of jamming. Claypool recruited Anastasio, with whom he’d played a few times—most memorably at a 1996 Phish gig in Las Vegas, where he and Primus guitarist Larry LaLonde sat in for a wild, extended “Harpua” encore—and Stewart Copeland, the former drummer for the Police who’d been doin
g film sound-tracks in Los Angeles since that band’s breakup. They played a single sold-out show at New Orleans’ Saenger Theater on May 4, 2000. That was supposed to be all there was to it, but they got the bug to pursue their promising chemistry, and Oysterhead took on a life of its own, leading to an album and tour.

  “I play with a lot of people, as does Trey, and I’ve never felt that kind of chemistry before,” said Claypool.

  This trio represented the convergence of, as Anastasio put it, “three alpha dogs.” Their neo-psychedelic album, The Grand Pecking Order, mushroomed (pun intended) at Anastasio’s Barn Studio (or “tree fort,” as Claypool called it). Anastasio and Claypool knocked around song ideas. They had a big jar of ’shrooms, which contributed to the trippy, black-humored vibe of an album that, thematically, examines how the world works in a time of military-industrial complexes, global terrorism, and tyrants who subjugate the masses. Anastasio and Claypool must have had their ears to the ground, because they tapped into this unsettling zeitgeist mere months before the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

  It was during the Oysterhead sessions that Claypool nicknamed Anastasio “Johnny Flip-Flop.” It was a kind of backhanded compliment that recognized his willingness to compromise or change course to placate people. A seemingly admirable character trait, Anastasio’s accommodating nature ultimately drove him over the edge. Even he owned up to it. Speaking to Rolling Stone’s Will Dana about the Phish organization in 2001, Anastasio allowed, “I always feel like, because of my role in this thing, a kind of responsibility. I want everybody to be happy.”

  Shortly after recording The Grand Pecking Order, Claypool had this to say about working with Anastasio: “He’s a very well-rounded player. He’s very intuitive. He’s Mr. Happy Pants, too. His personality, he’s just a good positive-energy kind of guy. He’s got a good sense of humor, and he’s a pleasure to play with.”

  Tony Markellis, who played bass on Anastasio’s solo projects from 1998 through 2004, also saw this side of Anastasio.

  “He’s a very generous friend and employer,” said Markellis. “As long as I’ve known him, he’s gone out of his way to help those around him. If you need something, he’ll give it to you. I’d call him up or he’d call me up, and he’d say, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, kinda sitting around trying to figure out how to pay the bills.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, let’s go on a tour.’ I mean, literally it would go from maybe I couldn’t figure out how to pay this month’s bills to a week from then there’d be a tour planned, just because the spark of, ‘Someone I play with needs some money. Let’s do something.’”

  A groove-oriented bassist with a long résumé, Markellis also got a bird’s-eye view of Anastasio’s relentless creativity. He confirmed the perception of Anastasio as someone whose brain is in constant motion.

  “As far as I can tell, his mind never stops working,” said Markellis. “It never stops creating. And it just seems to be sparking at all times. I really don’t know if he ever has a moment’s relaxation. I certainly saw it when we were onstage. We’d even be backstage waiting to go out for an encore and he would say, ‘Here, I want to teach you a new song.’ And he would teach us a new song for the encore, as we’re waiting to go onstage! I don’t know how he does it. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be inside his head.”

  The barrage of work from Anastasio during the hiatus included his first major-label solo album, the self-titled Trey Anastasio (released in 2002). It was a way for him to score for horns, to explore aspects of harmony more deeply in a larger group setting, and to delve into African, Cuban, and Caribbean rhythms. He even incorporated a seventeen-piece orchestra into a few of the numbers. He spoke of the band with an excitement that he hadn’t exhibited about Phish in quite a while.

  “I’m trying to make music that uses what’s good about improvisation—which is the spontaneous moments—while getting to a point where not even ten seconds go by that there isn’t some elegant or unique moment happening,” said Anastasio. “This band is an idea I’ve been carrying around in my head since before I did Surrender to the Air. If you look at it, interestingly, it’s virtually the same band. Not the same people, but the same array of instruments: two drummers, organ, bass, guitar, and a horn section with flute, alto sax, trombone. And now, with these tours and this album, this is a much more fully realized version of that, I would say.”

  Markellis saw how Anastasio’s work with the solo bands, in which he was the unquestioned leader, gave him some freedom from Phish’s sometimes stifling group democracy.

  “Trey was one of four nominally equal partners in Phish, although that could be argued,” said Markellis. “Most of the decision-making really was more him than any of the others, probably because of the nature of his personality and the way his brain works. Where another person might come up with an idea or a suggestion a week, he’s got a hundred of them a day, and of those hundred, at least fifty of them are probably pretty good.

  “So just by sheer volume of output, he’s gonna be the leader of a group like that by default. But in the case of the trio and all those other groups I was involved with, there was no question that it wasn’t a democracy. Yes, he wanted our input, but he was the boss and we were there to do what he wanted us to do. So I think for him it was an opportunity to mentally breathe in a way that he hadn’t been able to in the context of Phish.”

  “He’s a very sentimental guy,” Markellis added. “One funny thing I noticed was that he’s not good at goodbyes. At the end of a tour, everyone would be saying, ‘See you next time’ or whatever, and he was nowhere to be found. He doesn’t care for saying goodbye to people, even temporarily.”

  Mike Gordon was also productive during the hiatus, making a documentary film, Rising Low, about bassists and bass playing.

  Rising Low had a threefold purpose. First, it was an homage to Allen Woody, bassist with the Allman Brothers Band and Gov’t Mule, which he co-founded with Allman’s guitarist Warren Haynes. Woody was found dead of heart failure—with drug use a contributing cause—in a hotel room near New York’s LaGuardia Airport on August 25, 2000. Second, the film documented recording sessions during which Gov’t Mule’s surviving members—Haynes and drummer Matt Abts—cut two albums’ worth of new music using twenty-five guest bassists from across the musical spectrum. Released in two volumes as The Deep End, the albums and Gordon’s accompanying documentary were a sendoff to Woody and a way for Gov’t Mule to carry on without him.

  Finally, Gordon delved into the roles, styles, and psychologies of those players who hold down the low end. He covered a lot of ground in what is probably the “straightest” project he’s ever undertaken. Yet in his inimitable way, Rising Low managed to combine documentary insight with offbeat perspective. Gordon even managed to incorporate a fictional bassist, Joey Arkenstat, into the narrative, getting well-known bass players to cite him as an influence.

  In those years, Gordon also struck up a productive musical partnership with a fellow eccentric, twelve-string guitarist extraordinaire Leo Kottke, which resulted in two albums of subtly twisted musical genius, Clone and Sixty Six Steps. They were Kottke’s first collaborations with another musician on full-length albums. Gordon had sent the guitarist a tape of one of Kottke’s songs (“The Driving of the Year Nail”), over which Gordon had dubbed a bass line. Kottke could see the potential for collaboration, and they clicked.

  Kottke described their improbable fit: “By the arranging rules, Mike and I shouldn’t be able to play together because he plays the bass more like a lead instrument, especially with me, and when I play the guitar, I hog the bass job. I’m playing a lot of the twos and the threes and roots and stuff, and I’m always stepping on bass players’ toes. I drive ’em nuts, and they drive me nuts.

  “So you get a guy who plays the bass like a horn, who’s much busier than most bass players, and it should just be a collision, but it’s not at all. It continues to startle me how much we can play without getting in each other’s way.
”

  Page McConnell, who was “the quiet Phish” much like George Harrison had been “the quiet Beatle,” surprised everyone by also forming a band. He called it Vida Blue, after a major-league hall-of-fame pitcher. He recruited an A+ rhythm section: bassist Oteil Burbridge (of the Aquarium Rescue Unit and the Allman Brothers Band) and drummer Russell Batiste (who joined a reformed Meters in the 1980s and hails from one of New Orleans’s great musical families).

  “I saw the Allman Brothers and the Meters within about two weeks of each other,” said McConnell. “It just all came together for me then, and I started making calls.”

  Vida Blue’s self-titled first album was, in fact, cut in New Orleans, with sessions commencing just three days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

  The second Vida Blue album, The Illustrated Band—whose title punned off novelist Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction classic The Illustrated Man—appeared two years later. This one was made in Miami with the Spam All-Stars—a five-piece band with a deejay and a Latin, dance-oriented groove. It was almost completely improvised and pushed into areas both contemporary and experimental, making it the hippest and most urbane of all of Phish’s side projects.

  Another project that might seem unlikely from the soft-spoken keyboardist: he sponsored a demolition-derby team, for which longtime friend and Phish fan Ian McLean was the driver. They called it Team Vida Blue.

  “Not that many people know that side of Page,” said McLean, laughing. “He was the financier. We would find a car and fix it all up, and then I would drive it in the local demolition derby. That was wicked fun. We had great bonding and a huge time doing that. Maybe at some point we’ll do it again, fire up Team Vida Blue and smash more cars up.”