08/14/09 Comcast Theatre, Hartford, CT
Set I Punch You in the Eye, AC/DC Bag, NICU, Colonel Forbin’s Ascent Fly>Famous Mockingbird, Birds of a Feather, Lawn Boy, Stash, I Didn’t Know, Middle of the Road, Character Zero
Set II Down With Disease>Wilson>Slave to the Traffic Light, Piper> Water in the Sky, Ghost>Psycho Killer>Catapult>Icculus>You Enjoy Myself
Encore While My Guitar Gently Weeps
08/15/09 Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia, MD
Set I Crowd Control, Kill Devil Falls, The Sloth, Beauty of a Broken Heart, Axilla I, Foam, Esther, Ha Ha Ha, Party Time, Tube, Stealing Time from the Faulty Plan, Strange Design, Time Turns Elastic
Set II Tweezer>Taste, Alaska, Let Me Lie, 46 Days, Oh! Sweet Nuthin’, Harry Hood
Encore Good Times Bad Times, Tweezer Reprise
08/16/09 Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Saratoga Springs, NY
Set I Llama, The Moma Dance, Guyute, Anything But Me, Cars Trucks Buses, Chalk Dust Torture, Golgi Apparatus, David Bowie, Cavern, Possum, Ocelot, Run Like an Antelope
Set II Backwards Down the Number Line>Twenty Years Later, Halley’s Comet>Rock & Roll, Harpua>I Kissed a Girl>Hold Your Head Up>Harpua, You Enjoy Myself
Encore Grind, I Been Around, Highway to Hell
APPENDIX 3
Phish On Record: From Studio to Stage
The conventional wisdom is that Phish are best experienced live and that the studio albums are frozen relics lacking the interaction and spontaneity that allow the group to soar in concert. That is the fans’ take, and this mind-set is peculiar to the jam-band world. Improv-oriented bands face a perpetual dilemma: How do you bottle the lightning of live performance in the studio? You can play live in the studio, which is kind of pointless without an audience to generate energy and feedback. Or you can take advantage of studio technology and craft a piece of music that lives and breathes on its own terms.
Phish took the latter tack, making records in different locations and with different producers (including several self-productions) in an effort to galvanize the typically static recording process. Billy Breathes is the acknowledged classic and must-own Phish studio album. But there are other non-live highlights in their catalog: Rift, their most ambitious and conceptually cohesive album; Hoist, a lively, extroverted endeavor featuring interesting guest musicians; and Farmhouse, the song-rich first Phish album recorded at the Barn, the studio that Trey Anastasio built outside Burlington.
For the full, uncut Phish experience, the double-disc A Live One is an essential acquisition. If you are now fully hooked on Phish, then backtrack and listen to where it all began (Junta, Lawn Boy, A Picture of Nectar). Finish up by fast-forwarding to see how it all ended (Round Room, Undermind)—that is, before it resumed again in 2009.
Incidentally, there’s lots more available in the way of live Phish: official (LivePhish CDs and downloads), unofficial (online downloads, fan-swapped tapes and CDs), and unacceptable (bootlegs).
Was Phish a disappointing chart act, as is widely assumed? Hardly. Phish has racked up nine gold albums (500,000 copies sold), two of which have been certified platinum (1 million copies sold). Only three of their ten major studio releases have failed (as of yet) to attain gold status. Somewhat amazingly, the first sixteen volumes in the LivePhish series all made Billboard’s Top 200 album chart—for exactly one week—from Live Phish 02 (No. 93) to Live Phish 08 (No. 154).
Charts don’t always tell an accurate tale. A slow but steady seller that “bubbles under” the Hot 200, in Billboard lingo, might surprise years later with a gold or platinum certification. This held true in Phish’s case, affirming their slow, steady, long-haul approach. Junta, Lawn Boy, and A Picture of Nectar were all certified gold long after their release (and in 2004, Junta went platinum), yet none of them ever appeared—even for a week—on Billboard ’s Top 200 album chart.
A few Phish albums did make impressive showings on the charts, due to strong initial sales in the SoundScan era, when album sales began to be tracked more accurately. Billy Breathes and The Story of the Ghost both went Top Ten. (Ironically, Ghost never reached the gold plateau—go figure.) Among Phish releases, Hoist, A Live One, and Billy Breathes hold the records for chart longevity, at thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen weeks, respectively.
Just as it’s clear that the industry underestimated the popularity of Phish’s studio recordings, it’s also true that their last two studio releases began to tell a different tale. Numbers don’t lie, and the relatively poor showings of Phish’s final studio albums—Round Room and Undermind— suggest that interest had begun waning by the time of their 2004 breakup.
Five years later, the regrouped Phish has released another studio album, Joy, not on Elektra but on their own JEMP label. Joy debuted at No. 13 on Billboard’s Top 200—ironically, the exact position that Undermind debuted at in 2004—and at No. 5 on Billboard’s Rock Chart.
Phish’s Studio Recordings
Phish’s Live Releases
Phish’s Live DVDs
APPENDIX 4
Deadheads and Phishheads: An Academic’s Perspective
Rebecca Adams has a unique overview of the relationship between the Grateful Dead and Phish, particularly as regards their respective followings and parking-lot scenes. She holds a PhD in sociology and is chair of the sociology department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A Deadhead from the beginning, she saw her first Dead show at New York’s Fillmore East in 1970. She continued seeing the Dead with some regularity through 1978, at which point negative aspects of the increasingly younger crowd’s behavior turned her off the scene.
She reconnected in 1986, when she attended a Dead concert in Hampton, Virginia. At that show she ran into Matt Russ, a student of hers (and a bona fide Deadhead) who suggested that she consider studying the Deadhead phenomenon from a sociological perspective. And so she did, offering a course for credit during which her students followed the band on tour, interviewing Deadheads at gigs and in the parking lots. What resulted was the first published academic study of the Deadhead phenomenon and community. She has written and edited a few books, including Deadhead Social Science , as well as numerous journal articles and a well-circulated video about the Deadheads. She’s become something of a celebrity in her own right within the Dead community. Garcia himself approached her backstage at a 1989 gig, saying, “Hey, you’re famous!”
Adams saw Phish for the first time in 1994 and began taking note of the Phishheads. A good number of them, she realized, were younger Deadheads who’d jumped to Phish, bringing with them elements of the Deadhead scene. Because most of these Phish newbies had been Dead newbies as well, they were never particularly well socialized into either camp, causing problems for both bands—but especially for Phish, in Adams’s opinion.
“For the Dead, after In the Dark and ‘Touch of Grey,’ there was this huge influx of new Deadheads, and the older Deadheads developed derogatory terms like ‘Touchhead’ and ‘In the Darker’ for these new people. So there was this problem with bunches of young people coming into the Dead scene and not enough old people to convince them they had to behave and take care of themselves. Not that there was ever any suggestion they should stop doing what they were doing, but they needed to contain it, not impose on other people and not create problems for the scene as a whole.
“From my perspective as an infrequent visitor to the Phish scene, I saw some of the fringe elements of the Dead community who hadn’t been totally integrated into the phenomenon moving over and establishing themselves in the Phish parking lots. I saw two problems in the Phish scene: (1) It was a very young crowd without much older wisdom to guide it from the beginning. (2) The fans tried to bring over what they remembered from the Dead parking lot and re-create it in a way that didn’t work if you didn’t have an age-mix crowd.”
As for hard-drug use—the infiltration of cocaine, heroin, and various other substances into Phish’s parking-lot scene in the mid nineties—Adams is less inclined to blame Deadheads who wa
ndered over.
“I know that Phish had a lot of trouble with hard-core drug users,” she said. “It may very well have been Deadheads who brought those drugs into the parking lots, but at that time if you look at white-powder drug use among young people in general, that’s when it went up nationally. Rather than it being necessarily attributable to a huge influx of Deadheads, I think that might have happened in the Phish scene anyhow.”
APPENDIX 5
A Talk With Brad Sands
Brad Sands was more than Phish’s road manager. He was their closest friend, confidante, and counselor. He kept them on schedule (as best he could). He oversaw access to them, instinctively learning who they did and didn’t need around them at any given moment. He came to understand their moods and idiosyncrasies, acting to adjust and defuse situations so they could focus on music. He was, as Mike Gordon told writer Randy Ray, “the innermost person of all of the people in our organization.” From the time he hopped aboard in 1991 as an unpaid roadie, Sands witnessed the unfolding of Phish history like no one else.
In the reunion era, Sands no longer works for Phish, as the group resumed with a clean slate. Subsequent to Phish’s breakup and Anastasio’s bust, Sands has worked for Gov’t Mule, Les Claypool, and the Police. In a sense, things have come full circle with Sands’ role as a consultant on Phish’s Festival 8—the Halloween festival that revived the group’s tradition of concert campouts in 2009. In this far-ranging interview, Sands looked back with humor and pride at his many years as chief aide-de-camp for Phish and for Trey Anastasio as a solo artist.
ME: I’d like to go back to the beginning and ask how you came onboard.
BRAD: I first heard of Phish in the summer of 1991. My friend Greg came home with the Lawn Boy album, and we were immediately drawn to it. We saw that they were playing at the Arrowhead Ranch in upstate New York and drove up there. They were passing out flyers for Amy’s Farm, which was eight days later. We were like, “Who’s gonna drive all the way to Maine to see these guys? Ha ha ha!” Arrowhead Ranch was great and we saw them the next night, too. Then we all decided, “Hey, let’s go to Maine! What the hell!”
Since I was collecting unemployment, we decided to drive across the country to see the Dead in Oakland on Halloween, which is my birthday. Along the way, we planned to see Phish in New Mexico and Arizona. At the Club West in Santa Fe, a friend of mine and I showed up early, hanging out with nothing to do. They didn’t have anybody to help load in their gear, so we asked Andrew Fischbeck, who was the tour manager at the time, “Hey, you guys want some help?” “Yeah, sure.” So we helped load in their stuff and I helped Chris Kuroda set up the lights. Chris and I got along immediately, because we were both huge New York Giants fans and loved the Grateful Dead.
They asked if I would sell T-shirts for them that night. Later that evening, they were like, “Do you think you’d be interested in doing something like this, ‘cause we’re hiring somebody,” I said, “Yeah, yeah,” and went to the next 15 shows. I always bought my ticket, never asked them for anything, and just basically kept my mouth shut and helped. I weaseled my way in there and wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip away. That’s how I got the job. I started helping Chris set up the lights, selling merch and driving the truck. I was 21 years old and making $250 per week. And I was as happy as shit. Those were the happiest days of my life.
ME: Moreover, you were now getting into the shows for free.
BRAD: Yeah, and as a bonus Paul Languedoc let me start taping the shows with my little tape recorder. I’d patch into the soundboard. If you notice, there are a lot of soundboards from ’93 and ’94 out there. Those are my tapes, the “Bradboards.”
ME: What were you hearing that would make you want to tape every show?
BRAD: I was immediately drawn to Trey’s playing, and he had this shit-eating grin on his face that was totally contagious. I just couldn’t believe what a good time it looked like they were having. They seemed totally weird but cute and funny. The drummer’s wearing a dress. A lot of it was the energy of the crowd as well. People were really psyched back then. I knew they were going to be big. Maybe not as big as they ended up getting, but I could tell there was a movement that was going to happen with these guys.
ME: I know there weren’t titles per se in the Phish organization, but when did you become “road manager”?
BRAD: In 1993 and 1994, we were getting bigger and starting to play some amphitheaters. They hired their first real production manager and tour manager/accountant. They made me production assistant because I wasn’t a very good guitar tech. Drums, I was okay. Guitars, no. What they found happening was that the tour manager job was the hot seat. They could never find a guy the band liked. As I was production assistant for two years, it got to the point where I was the one who was always around the band. I knew exactly what they needed, how they wanted it to be finessed, and the right time to say something and the right time to shutup. So eventually, in 1996, I became road manager.
ME: How would you define the job of road manager?
BRAD: The job of the road manager is basically to make sure the band feels like they’re looked after 24/7. I did a lot of travel planning and day-to-day logistics. And I’d take care of their guests. Make sure their people were having a good time. Make sure the band members were all in a good mood. Basically, my job was to make sure that all Phish had to think about was playing music. That was a big part of it. The thing about Phish is they’re four totally different people.
ME: I don’t think people realize how different they are, because they project so much unity and oneness of vision.
BRAD: People just know them as “the band.” But they’re all completely unique individuals and they all have their own patterns. For example, I might say, “Bus call is at four o’clock.” Everybody has to be on the bus at four, right? Well, here’s how it would break down. Page would come down early. He’d be down about 3:45. Trey would show up anywhere between 3:55 and 4:05. So Page and Trey are both there, and they’re asking, “Where’s Mike? Where’s Fish?” “They’re not here yet.” “Okay, we’re gonna go get coffee.” So they’re gone. Mike might roll down around 4:15, 4:20. Fishman’s still nowhere to be found. Then Mike’s gone because no one is there. Trey and Page come back. Then Fishman finally comes down. He sees that Trey and Page are there but Mike went back up to his room. Imagine trying to keep your sanity when you’re dealing with those guys on that kind of stuff [laughs].
ME: It’s like herding cats.
BRAD: Yeah, it is! You always had to build in a half-hour buffer. But to be honest, it was almost impossible to be mad at any of them. Fishman would be late all the time and I could never get mad at the guy. He just has that personality. He comes out, “Hey, man,” and he smiles, and you’d forget everything. “Hey, Fish, how’s it going?” All is forgiven all the time.
So it was really keeping those four people and their four different worlds aligned. Also I did the guest list and was in charge of backstage and not-really-but-kind-of personal security. They never traveled with a bodyguard. They had John Langenstein handling security in the parking lots and different guys over the years doing interior security, but they never had anybody traveling with them.
So basically the road manager’s job is to put out fires all day. And no matter what’s happening, you have to remain calm. Because if you’re freaking out, everybody will start to freak out. I prided myself on retaining at least some semblance of calmness amidst chaos.
ME: It sounds like there’s a significant psychological component to the job.
BRAD: Very much so. And for better or worse, you’re often the only person on tour they talk to. It’s very much a mind game all the time—what to say when, listening. You’re like their counselor for everything, for right or wrong. There’s always a lot of moral dilemmas involved with the job. If you see somebody doing something they shouldn’t be doing, then do you talk to them about it or do you say something to someone else? It’s all that kind of
stuff.
ME: Very complicated interpersonal dynamics, I’m sure.
BRAD: Exactly. You can almost get too close to it. For me, the hardest part was that Phish was so big that it became your identity. It became who you are. I used to find it was very hard to adjust to being off-tour, because when you’re out on the road, you’re part of this energy that’s churning. You’re at the center of it, and everything is just building around your world. Then you get home and you’re just another guy. It’s that high and low, the peaks and valleys, that kind of messed with your head. Being on the road is like summer camp. It’s so great, you’re with your friends, everything is provided for you. It’s like you’re in the World Series every day. Then you get home and it’s like, “What do I do now?”
ME: That may partly explain why they toured so heavily, because that life became their reality.
BRAD: I think that was part of it. In the beginning, there was a sense of purpose among all of us that we were trying to prove something. Even in the crew. Our crew—like the crews of Blues Traveler, the Spin Doctors, the Dave Matthews Band—always tried one-upping each other to be the best crew out there. The bands were like that, too. There was a sense of community, but the dedication the Phish guys put into stuff was crazy.
ME: I’ve never seen anything like their work ethic.
BRAD: When I first started, it was pretty intense. When I came up to work for them in Vermont, I stayed at Paul’s and Trey’s house. I slept on the couch. Those guys practiced for five hours every day in the livingroom. I was like, “Wow, those guys really do practice.”
ME: What were your favorite years for Phish?
BRAD: The year 1994 was a real turning point. I really thought they were hitting their stride that summer. There were just some great shows. The playing was a little different. That was the year Hoist came out, and that batch of songs was great in concert. I also thought 1997 and 1998 were great years.
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