Coventry almost didn’t happen at all. The Vermont State Police felt strongly that it should be canceled. Phish’s management puzzled over how to handle the situation as it worsened by the minute.
“It’s one of those events that when it’s happening in real time, it’s so surreal,” recalled manager Paluska. “It’s kind of like you’re in triage, doing the absolute best you can but it’s so far beyond controlling. It was like a mini Hurricane Katrina: Everything was happening too fast, coming apart at the seams and falling apart.”
Fortunately, Sgt. Bruce Melendy of the Vermont State Police—who was roused from bed and sent up to Coventry at 4 A.M. to help sort out the mess—could clearly see that canceling the festival on the day it was supposed to begin would have been the worst thing they could have done, stranding 30,000 people in a mudhole and possibly sparking a riot. In addition, though this didn’t figure into his thinking, shutting it down wouldn’t have been fair to the tens of thousands of people who’d traveled from all over the world and were already there.
The compromise solution was to let the festival go on with the 30,000 who were there and to close the highways, forcing the 30,000 who were still trying to get in to turn around and go home. It didn’t quite work out like that. The Phishheads marched down the highway to the festival site. The sun came out, and the show went on.
Acknowledging Gordon’s loyal opposition to their breakup, Phish opened the first set on the final night at Coventry with “Mike’s Song.” About the best thing you can say about the sets they played that weekend was that they got through them. The biggest buzz had to do with speculation over what song they’d finish with. Given that this was ostensibly a breakup and not a hiatus, it would be the last song these four musicians ever played together, for all the audience knew. The final number was, in fact, “The Curtain (With),” a compositionally and improvisationally inspiring early song and a fitting one with which to drop the curtain. Among its Trey-penned lyrics: “Please me have no regrets.”
In a conversation held almost exactly a year later, Anastasio recalled the experience of playing at Coventry: “Leading to it was so confusing and so dark, and Coventry itself was such a nightmare. It was emotional, but it was not like we were at our finest. I certainly wasn’t.”
As soon as the festival ended, his wife, Sue, spirited him and their daughters to the airport, where they jetted off for a recuperative ten-day family trip to Bermuda.
“I didn’t want to be around for the aftermath,” he said. “When we got to Bermuda, I slept for like a week. And that was it.”
“It was a very hard way to end,” acknowledged Paluska. “Really hard. It was tough for that to be our final act.”
Coventry was just one bad—well, disastrous—gig in the twenty-one-year lifespan of a group that had performed 1,400-plus shows that were good to great to off-the-charts. To put it all in perspective—and by “all,” I mean the scene in toto: the community of band, crew, staff, and fans—I’d like to relate a story about the quixotic journey of a Phishhead. If it were presented in song-lyric form, it might be titled “The Ballad of Mike Meanwell.” It was an amazing odyssey related by Beth Montuori Rowles, who has worked for Phish since 1995.
One day Phish’s office staff received an inquiry from the father of a Phishhead who had died in a fiery car crash close to home. The father knew how much Phish had meant to his son, whose name was Mike Meanwell. The father asked a favor of the organization in his memory: Could they put a tin with a few of his ashes onstage at a show?
Rowles picks up the story:I said, “Sure, I can do that, that’s pretty easy.” I was thinking, “I can put his ashes in my pocket and walk onto the side of the stage.” The father sent me one of those little stash tins that we sell—which was kind of funny, ’cause I don’t think he actually realized what it was used for—with some of the kid’s ashes in it. So I went to several shows on that last tour, and I basically told crew the guys I had this kid’s ashes with me. And we had them on the soundboard. We had them on the monitor board. At one show—I think it was Great Woods—Brian Brown [Anastasio’s guitar tech] took the ashes and touched them to each of Trey’s guitars. There were things like that that went on during that whole tour.
I had him in my backpack the whole time at Coventry, and every single time [pauses] . . . It was really difficult on a lot of levels for the people employed by the band, because they were about to move on. We knew people were going to move and exodus from Vermont like crazy. These were the people you spent every day with, so it was really hard. And every time I started thinking about how horrible it was, I would think about Mike Meanwell and think, “This really isn’t all that bad. This could be so much worse. This is just life moving on; this is what happens. It happens all the time. We’ll get through this. It could be so much worse, ’cause here’s Mike sitting in my backpack.” And it really helped me. I tell you, it really helped me.
After the whole thing was over, I got back in touch with his father, told him what we’d done, and asked, “Do you want me to send the ashes back?” He said, “No, you can dispose of them however you see fit.” So we went out one night—me and my husband, David; Kevin Shapiro; and Jared Slomoff, who works for the band—and we all read Phish lyrics that were meaningful to the situation. We had a little ceremony and cast the ashes into Lake Champlain, right off Burlington.
The machine was winding down, and Coventry was where it came to rest. In a sense, the ensuing breakup actually turned out to be the real hiatus, in terms of addressing unresolved issues of physical health, interpersonal relations, and business arrangements.
In the immediate aftermath of Coventry, virtually everyone was let go. Former Phish employees recall the frequent going-away parties over the next year as many of them found it necessary to leave Vermont to look for work. The organization that had taken two decades to build was now dismantled with haste, like the art tower that got torched at the Great Went.
Mike Gordon subsequently rethought his opinion of the breakup. “As most people know I was the one who was clearly against breaking up when we did it, and I even have a picture of Trey wearing the ‘Mike Says No’ T-shirt,” he said in April 2008. “The fans kind of liked me for that and at first were giving Trey a hard time for being the biggest instigator of the breakup. But I think over time they’ve seen that it had to see its course. And with me, I’ve found it in some ways the easiest, the breakup.
“My Phish career is incredibly—I can’t say enough about how rich a career it had been, in terms of the depth of experiences that I never imagined a human could even go through. I thought that I had the best job in America that a person could have because (a) to be a rock star, sort of, but (b) to be in a jam band where you can actually have fun with the music and improvise, and then (c) to be the bass player, where I can be subconscious about it and not have to do soloing and stuff just seemed incredible.”
At the end of 2004, even though the band had broken up and Dionysian Productions had dissolved, Phish held their annual Christmas party at a restaurant called The Waiting Room in Burlington. The band, management, and local crew guys all came.
“It was really fun,” recalled Megan Criss, the office manager. “And we all took a group picture. I don’t remember it feeling like a farewell party.”
Over the next few years, the Phish family scattered and found their way into other areas of the music industry. For instance, Chris Kuroda has been lighting director for artists as varied as the Black Crowes, R. Kelly, and Aerosmith, while Brad Sands has road-managed Gov’t Mule, The Police, Les Claypool, and Anastasio’s pre-bust solo tours. Meanwhile, Phish’s office dwindled to a skeleton staff and then just one skeleton. At one point, the only person whose checks read “Phish Inc.” was Kevin Shapiro, their archivist.
Manager John Paluska watched the end arrive with a mixture of sadness and acceptance.
“I learned a lesson in 1996, after the Clifford Ball,” he recollected. “It was such a high and such an amazing experi
ence. But as soon as it was over, it didn’t exist anymore, it was gone. I remember walking around the day after everybody was gone, and it was just a bunch of garbage and a lot of cleanup and petty hassles that had to get resolved, and that was such a downer after such an amazing event.
“Once I made my peace with all that, I realized, ‘You know what? It’s all about process.’ It was a great life lesson. The process of creating that festival was amazing, and then when it’s over you move on to the next thing. You don’t dwell on it, you don’t try to hold on to it. You just let it slip through, because it doesn’t exist anyway. I guess it’s a Buddhist perspective, which is very appealing to me these days.
“So by the time the office had closed, I’d reached a place of seeing things that way—that it had been an amazing ride, and everything has an end, and the end is a new beginning to something else. We had reached the point where people were tired. It was sad to see all the intangible value that the office collectively represented taken apart, because so much work went into creating the relationships and the way it functioned. But it was time for something new.”
Meanwhile, the larger jam-band scene went into remission as well. None of Phish’s musical peers—Widespread Panic, String Cheese Incident, Umphrey’s McGee, moe.—filled the void after their demise. String Cheese Incident disbanded, too. There were even deaths in the jam-band world. Widespread lost one of its founding members, guitarist Michael Hauser, to pancreatic cancer. Blues Traveler lost bassist Bobby Sheehan to a drug overdose. The commercial peak of the jam-band phenomenon, in terms of CD sales and airplay, came in 1994 when Blues Traveler’s “Run-Around” and the album it appeared on, Four, both reached No. 8 on the singles and album charts. Four wound up selling more than 6 million copies, making it the best-selling album by a second-generation jam band. That’s not to say success in the jam-band world was defined by CD sales and chart positions. Concert tickets were the bottom line, but even on the road there was stagnation and retrenchment. A dozen years after the first H.O.R.D.E. tour put the jam-band world on the map, the scene was starting to play itself out.
For one thing, there were too many festivals. Following in Phish’s wake, nearly every jam band had its own festival. Disco Biscuits had Camp Bisco, moe. had their annual “moedown,” and Yonder Mountain String Band (for whom Jon Fishman would guest on drums after Phish’s breakup) had the Northwest String Summit. It was simply too much.
Unlike the Grateful Dead (with “Touch of Grey”) or Blues Traveler (with “Run-Around”), Phish didn’t have the spike of a hit single that led to multi-platinum album sales. Their best-selling albums, Hoist and A Live One, sold around 650,000 copies. After the breakup, some in and around Phish felt that Elektra could have done better with the band.
Jon Fishman said as much in interviews, insinuating that Elektra didn’t really get the band or its audience. Jason Colton expressed mixed feelings: “Elektra had some people at the very top who never understood the band at all. Some of their ideas were so absurdly off-base we thought they were kidding. Fortunately, there were key people for the majority of the band’s time there that completely got it and made the process feel more like a partnership than a struggle.”
Mike Gordon took a charitable view of Elektra.
“I always felt good about that relationship,” he said. “We never sold 3 million copies of an album, and you could always argue that maybe some other record company would’ve found some way to do it. But probably not. We were doing our own thing.
“I don’t personally remember getting too much pressure,” he continued. “I don’t really ever remember Elektra saying ‘You have to be a certain way.’ If we had just said, ‘Well, we’re never going to get a major label because we’re afraid of what it might take away from our integrity’ and ‘Our path is on our own,’ then we would’ve missed out on our exposure. We were already so isolated that just to be tied in with the industry was good. I’m not a genius on any of this, but I would say Elektra was really good.”
After the breakup, the group founded their own label: JEMP Records (as in Jon, Ernest, Mike, and Page), named after the logo on their panel truck circa 1991-1993. Ernest, of course, is Ernest Joseph Anastasio III, better known as Trey. JEMP was registered in November 2005 and began appearing on LivePhish and other archival releases. Their latest album, Joy, appeared on JEMP, too.
After Anastasio posted his unequivocal breakup announcement in May 2004, he expressed second thoughts on a few occasions. After a stellar second set on June 19 at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (in Saratoga Springs, New York), he told Gordon, “If we could play like this every night, I would play forever!” In a Guitar World interview, he allowed that Phish could regroup as a new band with a new repertoire and a new name—like “Phowl.”
Eight months after Coventry, Anastasio and Gordon shared a stage in New Orleans, performing Hank Williams Jr.’s “Old Habits” (“old habits like you are hard to break”) and other songs. Half a year after that, in November 2005, McConnell sat in with Anastasio on some Phish songs at a solo-band show. (“Halfway there,” remarked Anastasio.) Later that same month, Anastasio, Gordon, and Fishman played “The Divided Sky” onstage. That one was “nearly there.”
In 2005, Anastasio released a new album (Shine) on a new label (Columbia). Everything about his situation seemed new. His career was now being handled by Coran Capshaw—manager of the Dave Matthews Band and others—whose Red Light Management is head-quartered in Charlottesville, Virginia. Capshaw has had his hands in all sorts of music-related ventures: Bonnaroo (which he started), ATO Records (whose artists included Gomez, My Morning Jacket, and Gov’t Mule), and the Music Today merchandise and fan-club company (which he sold to Live Nation). With his hands in all those kinds of pies and sterling track record with Dave Matthews, Capshaw seemed a logical choice as manager for Anastasio after the disbanding of Phish and dissolution of Dionysian Productions.
“I knew Coran when Dave Matthews was playing in clubs,” Anastasio elaborated. “Coran was at the Clifford Ball and Coventry. He’s been around the whole time. He’s a great guy but he’s also the only person who could’ve stepped in at this point in time with the sense of history.” Incidentally, Jason Colton—Paluska’s right-hand man at Dionysian Productions—moved to Red Light, where he works with Anastasio, Fishman, and Gordon as solo artists and is again involved with Phish.
The recording of Shine started out as a fiasco. Originally Anastasio was working with Bryce Goggin, a veteran of numerous Phish and Anastasio solo projects who had to drop out when his wife had a baby. That’s when he was paired with Rick Beato (who’s produced such acts as Shinedown and I-9). “I proceeded to spend about four months and piles of money and piles of time away from home working with a guy who essentially turned out to be, as far as I’m concerned, like a nut,” said Anastasio. “It was really bizarre.” Bento also assembled 70-Volt Parade, an ill-fated backing band for Anastasio.
On the second go-round, Shine came together smoothly under the direction of Brendan O’Brien, who is among the top producers in the country, having worked with everyone from Pearl Jam to Bruce Springsteen. But then this seemingly jinxed record wound up being saddled, as were half a dozen other albums released at the same time, with a draconian new form of “copyright protection.” It contained a dreaded “rootkit”—a program similar to viruses or spyware that creates security vulnerabilities. Rootkits can be used by hackers to take over a computer and use its resources (though this was not Sony’s intention). When a first-pressing CD of Shine was inserted into a home computer or laptop, Sony’s rootkit installed itself. There was a hue and cry in the national media when this came to light. Blasted with bad publicity, Columbia Records’ parent company, Sony, offered free online software that removed the offending program. The label also replaced consumers’ copies with new discs that were free of copyright control. Fallout from the rootkit controversy no doubt impacted sales of Shine, and even though the problem was fixed, the moment was lost.
For the first time in many years, Anastasio did not collaborate with Tom Marshall. He wrote all the lyrics on Shine himself. Why?
“I had a lot I wanted to say,” Anastasio explained, “’cause everybody around me was just acting like the fucking world was gonna come to an end. I can’t tell you how many Phish fans were saying, ‘I’m never gonna hear good music again.’”
Some of the songs came directly out of unpleasant encounters with disgruntled former employees.
“‘Black’ was actually a response to a particular conversation I had with one person,” Anastasio said. “I was having a lot of them at the time, ’cause people were mad so they were taking this chance, you know—‘Okay, now you’re letting me go. Well, I’ve been wanting to say this to you for the last ten years anyway, you fucking asshole’—stuff like that. A lot of people worked for us up in Burlington. I had this one conversation with somebody that was just really harsh. Something somebody was unloading on me, which I was getting about twenty of those a day. I just went home and it was just like boom, wrote the whole thing.”
His musings returned him to the band’s origins. “It was just some people from Burlington, but something started to happen that was really beautiful,” said Anastasio. “I loved to watch the expressions on people’s faces as they got really lit up. I saw there really is a connection to the light. It all sounds kinda New Agey or something, but I’ve experienced it enough times to believe that it’s actually true. Now as soon as you start thinking you can’t change because you’ve figured out a way to connect to that light, so you gotta keep doing that—that’s it, you’re dead.
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