Chris Kuroda elaborated on how consuming life working for Phish had become. “Phish was 365 days a year whether you were on tour or not,” said Kuroda. “It became all-consuming of all of us. We were just living this Phish thing day in and day out, being consumed by it in an unhealthy way. Personally, I came to realize I’d lost my identity. I thought my identity was there when my identity as an individual was something completely different.”
Anastasio felt especially weighted down, rightly or wrongly, by the organization. In a far-ranging interview that ran in Guitar World in August 2004—the month of Coventry and Phish’s breakup—he identified “owning a merchandise company” as being among the things that most bugged him.
“I love the people who work on it,” he elaborated, “but every time I walk in there, I really get kind of ill. There’s boxes and boxes of posters, and a feeling of the selling of us. I’m not going to be sad when that goes away.”
Of course, there was another side to the story.
“When the band reflects on the beast that the office became, half of that weight was mail-order, although it was the easiest half to farm out,” noted Amy Skelton. “You can always farm out merchandising. There are lots of merchandise companies in the country. But they’d been down that road, and they didn’t like it. It wasn’t smart, it wasn’t responsive to their needs, it wasn’t necessarily respectful of their artistic taste. So that’s why everything slowly went in-house and stayed there.”
“My feeling was that Phish could have had the best of both worlds with a better plan after they broke up the first time,” noted Brad Sands, referring to their failure to resolve in-house staffing issues to their satisfaction during the 2000-2002 hiatus.
Leaving the band members out of it for a moment, the crew and the office staff each thought the other had gotten too big. The crew-office dynamic can be contentious in any band organization, and Phish’s situation was no different.
Paul Languedoc, for instance, had much to say about the office staff:
“I was the equipment manager for what eventually became a four thousand-square-foot warehouse of equipment. I had Pete Carini as an assistant, although he eventually became the guy at the Barn [Anastasio’s studio]. I’ve always felt like if I did things the way the office did things, I’d have a staff of twelve people and we’d have to get a bigger space because we’d be creating more stuff.
“I’ve always personally liked things to be small and efficient. But what happened at the office was that it was John [Paluska] and Shelly [Culbertson] at first, and then John hired his girlfriend [Cynthia] to take care of the merchandise. So she was in charge of the merchandise department, and then she’d hire somebody else. They’d hire friends, and then they’d hire their friends to be assistants, and eventually they’d split off this little department. They just kept hiring people, and they kept hiring their friends.”
Skelton made a counterargument in defense of the office:
“There was never any dead weight,” she said. “Everybody who ever worked at the office wore a lot of hats and produced a lot of work. There weren’t that many full-time employees. The only dead weight was that Phish still had to pay a lot of crew. In most of the rest of the rock world there are some crew that get paid year-round, of course, but many of them are road crew—you hire them [temporarily] for a tour, and you’re done. That’s why they’re called road crew.
“So that was the only dead weight. But we never hired one person, one-half a person, more than we needed to get the job done. We were exceptionally frugal with people in mail-order, and the Dionysian Productions side stayed pretty static through the whole time. Once it got to a certain size, it stayed right there. And that was the size we needed to get the job done. It couldn’t have been any smaller.
“We had tickets in-house, merch in-house. Doing all of our own management. It was all in-house, and you just couldn’t do it with any less people.”
Phish themselves created and nurtured this monster, which perhaps wasn’t really such a monster. Had the organization, in fact, grown too big?
If Phish were annually playing half as many shows as before, maybe yes. But if they were now adding four (or five) solo and side-band careers to the mix, maybe no. Moreover, if one or more members was looking for something to blame escalating drug use and intergroup tensions on . . . well, the office made a convenient scapegoat.
“It was something to fixate on when there were a lot of other problems,” Skelton noted. “It was kind of a scapegoat, an issue that was easy to point at, while the other ones were a little harder to talk about.”
It’s an old story: Drugs are used to escape problems, and then they become the main problem. Anastasio knew this to be true, and he’d discuss it with Skelton, who by 2000 was walking a straighter path while watching, with growing concern, what was going on all around her.
“Trey and I had a lot of heart-to-hearts in those years,” said Skelton, “and we had them because he was hooked and he wanted to talk to somebody about it.”
Eric Larson, among the earliest Phish fans, was on the band’s payroll as a massage therapist and chiropractor. When asked how he, as a health-care professional, approached Phish about substance-abuse issues, he had this to say:
“As the health-care guy I have to make suggestions,” he said. “You can’t make demands of anybody. So I tried to intervene where I thought it was reasonable to intervene and make suggestions, knowing full well that people are going to do what they’re going to do. I think I had some limited effect. Certainly, overall, in terms of diet and posture and exercise and fasting and all those things, I think I gave them much over the years.
“When you get into a scene where there’s drugs and alcohol, everybody’s got to make their own decisions. It really has to come from the person. No one else can dictate or tell you how to behave. So I think for all of us it got disturbing, and that certainly contributed to them wanting to take a break. I did the best that I could and tried not to be involved in the whole situation anyway. Just being on tour, the whole thing was a big party. Moderation’s a tough thing on the road. And if you last, you eventually learn some degree of moderation. That’s the only way it can last, right?”
Larson left the Phish organization in 2003, while Skelton moved to Nova Scotia with her family after the breakup.
“It was a different time for Phish at that point,” said Skelton. “There was a lot less energy trickling down, and the writing was kind of on the wall.”
So why do groups break up?
For one thing, talent, creativity, and leadership are not equally allocated. Within any musical group there will inevitably be imbalances, leading to bruised egos, factionalism, and disproportionate compensation to he (or she) who is prolific and also writes the songs that resonate most with the audience and best represent the band.
Phish wrestled with this dilemma as rationally as they could, allowing deep friendship, good intentions, and institutional democracy to smooth over the rough spots as much as possible. But it was still an issue that simmered beneath the surface.
Inevitably, somebody’s got to lead. Back in 1972, David Bowie took Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople aside when that group was foundering and told him, “Somebody’s gotta play God.” Within Phish, Anastasio was the undeniable leader, by virtue of his inexhaustible store of energy, enthusiasm, and ideas. He naturally has a “take control” type of personality—not in a heavy-handed way but as a consequence of the music that continually flows from him. He can’t help himself and shouldn’t have to try. Trey Anastasio is a force of nature, pure and simple.
Yet the other members are abundantly gifted and have been band-leaders in their own right. Within Phish, however, none of the other musicians generated the type or profusion or type of material that defined the group from day one. That has always been Anastasio’s role, and it made him the driving force in the band.
To use a metaphor, think of a band as a car. Cars may have four tires (which make contact with the r
oad, per a beloved Mike Gordon song), but they do not have four steering wheels. There is only one wheel and can be only one driver. That’s not to say the others are just along for the ride. They can be navigators, too. They can even spell the driver and take the wheel themselves from time to time.
To extend the metaphor, Anastasio willingly relinquished the wheel at various points to keep his fellow travelers happy. He did it during Story of the Ghost and the more ambient, sparse, and funky phases of live Phish in the late nineties. In terms of administrative decision-making, Phish outwardly functioned as a democracy, with each member getting a vote and each capable of nixing any decision. The four of them had to be in unanimous agreement before moving forward on such things as producers, tour plans, big events, album covers, and whatever else came up in their increasingly complex career.
Even management had a say in the voting, as the Phish organization bent over backward not to be a typical top-down hierarchy. This was an office that didn’t even assign formal job titles. Eventually, this led to what they called the “democracy bureaucracy.” At that point, Anastasio declared “enough” and assumed a unilateral role in recording Farmhouse in 1999. After the breakup, Anastasio claimed that twenty-four band members and employees had to be polled about the minor design issue of enclosing the band’s name in a box for the cover of their 2004 album, Undermind.
Phish brought a lot of the headaches that plagued them in later years upon themselves. They wanted in-house management, merchandising, ticketing, etc. It’s a key reason they operated so effectively outside of the mainstream and were able to imprint their personality upon every aspect of their career. But it did involve them in micromanaging everything from T-shirt designs to staff salaries—matters the average musician does not have to contend with all or even any of the time. And that took its toll.
Phish’s concern about staff size—combined with mounting drug issues and the simple fact that Phish needed a break from each other after seventeen years of constant work—led to their two-year hiatus. However, those unresolved issues came back to haunt them post-hiatus. In addition, tensions between McConnell and Anastasio intensified—especially on McConnell’s side, when he perceived that Anastasio’s drug use affected his playing and, therefore, their shows.
McConnell outwardly maintained professionalism and self-discipline. Anastasio’s less responsible behavior, coupled with his oversight of the band, caused McConnell’s resentment to simmer. McConnell’s issues with management went so far that he actually had Dionysian Productions audited.
Despite his reserved manner—no one in the band quite comported himself with McConnell’s well-heeled politesse—he could exhibit a steely, unsentimental resolve when push came to shove. Some thought of him as the “ice man,” and even he referred (in The Phish Book) to “the dreaded ‘call from Page’ you don’t want to get when you’re in the Phish organization.”
After Anastasio’s performance and condition at Coventry, McConnell didn’t speak to him for over a year. “He holds a lot inside, and he was bitter about things for a long time,” said former Phish employee Amy Skelton. “I think he’s come to terms with a lot of that. It took him some time to decompress and relax and see everything for what it was. But he was steaming mad for quite some time—at the office, at John [Paluska], at Trey, at Mike. He was unhappy. And towards the end, particularly with Trey, those two butted heads a lot.”
After the breakup, Anastasio made a curious remark that set Phishheads’ antennas waving: “The truth of the matter is, somebody should call Page and talk to him,” he told Tim Donnelly in a Relix interview. “He wanted to stop as much as I did. He had serious issues that date back to Billy Breathes.”
There is some ambiguity in the remark. Phishheads, rightly or wrongly, took “serious issues” to mean drugs, while in the context of the interview, Anastasio might well have been referring to Page’s problems with the organization.
Mike Gordon also had his issues, which he dealt with in a more passive-aggressive manner. Once he realized his contributions wouldn’t be accorded equal time, he quietly redirected his songwriting energies into other endeavors.
“When I started to see that my songs weren’t going to be used on albums or when I didn’t have the confidence to bring songs to band practice and push them through,” Gordon reflected in 2008, “I decided I would start making movies, which was another thing I wanted to do anyway. I spent four years on my first movie when I could’ve been writing songs for Phish. The point being that I found a creative outlet where I could work fourteen hours a day, which I like to do. Whereas with Phish I couldn’t really do that.
“Phish was an incredible collaboration,” he allowed. “It was a collaboration with a clear leader and a lot of intelligence and creativity with all the people involved. For me, in a way, I haven’t always been mature enough to use my incredible creative drive in the collaboration.”
He noted that jamming, the live experience, was inherently more participatory and satisfying. In terms of generating new material at rehearsals or putting the albums together, Gordon felt less involved in the process.
“We were great at making decisions and steering our career and talking openly and being disciplined and having a sense of vision to see it to incredible heights,” he continued. “But for me the piece that was missing was sort of a creative—not indulgence, but when you’re fully immersed in something. So my task now is to try to mature to the point where I can be as creative in collaboration [with Phish] as I’ve been on my own,” he concluded.
The point is not to blame McConnell for rocking the boat or Gordon for finding other boats to sail, because their issues were largely valid ones. McConnell, for instance, had some understandable frustrations about being in a group that was fronted by an increasingly dysfunctional leader in its later years.
It’s a familiar story: mounting drug use, natural imbalances in power, and years of living in close quarters fuel grievances to the breaking point. There’s also simply a natural cycle, a rise and fall, in the lifespan of every organic entity, including (and especially) rock groups. After twenty years, it wasn’t surprising that internal issues would tear the fabric binding Phish together.
In contemplating the career arc of musical entities—especially dynamic and gifted ones like Phish—I’m reminded of passages from Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, in which he employs biological metaphors to describe the life cycles of great cultures throughout history. A rock band like Phish, which attracted an entire community to it, giving rise to a unique set of beliefs and lifestyle, is a subculture to which the same principles apply. Spengler wrote of the “majestic wave cycles” by which cultures swell and swamp the ordinary with their creative power. He also foretells their inevitable demise:A culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless. . . . It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities. . . . But its living existence . . . is an inner passionate struggle to maintain the idea against the powers of chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep down within. It is not only the artist who struggles against the existence of the material and the stifling of the idea within him. Every culture stands in a deeply symbolical, almost in a mystical, relationship to the Extended, the space, in which and through it strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained—the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual—the culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down.
Ergo, Phish at Coventry, if you want to apply the theories of a controversial German historian to a troubled twenty-first-century rock festival. And why not? The inevitability of Spengler’s worldview is not incompatible with Trey Anastasio’s outcome in the make-believe world of Gamehendge.
To this day, the mere mention of Coventry is enough to strike fear in the hearts of Phish fans. It was the finale from hell. Anastasio was in poor sha
pe, and this mud- and muck-filled weekend did not make an ideal exit scenario for spirits already dampened by the knowledge that this was the last hurrah. Among some Phishheads, Anastasio had become a villain for bringing an end to the good times and community that had formed around Phish. Some at Coventry wore T-shirts that read “BeTREYed” and “Trey Is Wilson” (Wilson being the evil overlord of Gamehendge who confiscates and withholds the source of the protagonists’ way of life).
One of the art installations inadvertently expressed the out-of-kilter aspect of the scene within and without in its topsy-turvy later stages. Trees had been dug up and replanted upside-down, with their roots in the air. They looked kind of cool, with the root-system canopies resembling the tops of palm trees. But it was a bit like karma stood on its head: the opposite of the way things ought to be, upside-down, out of sync, and unhealthy. One fan posted this note on the Phantasy Tour Web site: “At Coventry, I don’t know how many times I heard, ‘Got your coke . . . got your meth . . . got your Oxys.’”
Summing up the scene, another disgruntled blogger described Coventry as “a mass of 70,000 screaming fans getting their final look at a bunch of dorks who took about half of their disposable incomes.”
If the rain-soaked and mud-caked Phishheads were having a hard time at Coventry, it wasn’t much more comfortable in the areas set aside for friends, family, and hangers-on, either. The thousands or so of them on Phish’s VIP guest list couldn’t be accommodated in the VIP parking and camping area, which had flooded. Between the rain and bad vibes, many guests left early or bagged Coventry altogether. Much of the planning had been designed to accommodate the small city of guests in the pampered manner to which they’d grown accustomed. Afterward, Anastasio estimated the bloated guest list at 3,500. Others say less. Some say it was more.
Phish Page 27