Phish (13 page)

“I’ve always thought of that show as a microcosm of what their thing became, in every sense, with a certain intensity and locked-in rapport between them and the audience. There was nothing casual about what was going on there. People were really into it, and I felt like probably a lot of people felt like over the years when they went to their first Phish show, which was that there was a lot of already established understanding that I didn’t know anything about.”

That night he approached Mike Gordon, who was their de facto business manager, and hired Phish to play a party at the co-op house, known as “The Zoo,” where he was social director. It was Phish’s first paying gig outside of Vermont (they made $600), and it kicked off Paluska’s longtime professional relationship with them.

A childhood friend of Paluska’s, Ben “Junta” Hunter, was similarly smitten when he saw Phish for the first time. Junta—pronounced phonetically, not like the word meaning military crew—was a music addict and small-gig organizer who attended Boston University. While Paluska arranged some dates for Phish in western Massachusetts, Hunter booked a couple of wildly successful Boston shows in late 1988 at a college hangout called Molly’s. He was also instrumental in arranging their breakthrough gig at Boston’s premier showcase club, the Paradise.

Paluska recalled receiving a call from Page McConnell, who asked him to be their manager. He didn’t know what exactly a manager did and still had a semester of college to complete, but since he was already getting them successful gigs, he said “sure.” Paluska and Hunter took over Phish’s business affairs, which the group had previously handled themselves. They shared an apartment in Boston and christened their management company Dionysian Productions. Hunter, who still had a year of school to finish and plans to travel afterward, eventually moved on, but Paluska helped steer their career and manage their affairs for the duration. Dionysian migrated from one Boston bedroom community to another—from Brookline to Watertown, Waltham, and Lexington—before settling down in the band’s home base of Burlington in August 1995.

“He was not the stereotypical old-school manager you always hear about,” said Beth Montuori Rowles, whom Paluska hired to work in the Phish office shortly after moving it to Burlington. Prior to that, Rowles worked for promoter Don Law in Boston.

Paluska guided Phish to success without making all the seemingly necessary compromises. Phish were very much a self-made band, and they negotiated their way through the music business without a screaming, heavy-handed manager having to play bad cop for them. Paluska had a quiet elegance in his demeanor, and the way he comported himself was disarming to those used to arm-twisting and raised voices.

“I guess that’s just how I’m wired,” said Paluska, looking back in 2009. “We just pursued a different approach. We built trust and long-term relationships with people we worked with and always had that silly, naive idea that we could actually craft arrangements with people where everybody was satisfied and felt good about things. My goal in any business dealing was not to beat somebody up or get the upper hand but to have a spirit of fairness and mutual respect.”

Paluska was extremely hands-on in certain areas—routing tours, negotiating deals, working out decisions and details with the band members. Some feel that Phish’s success had much to do with the
working relationship between Anastasio and Paluska, who bounced around ideas all the time. The combination of the guitarist’s ceaseless imagination and the manager’s pragmatic execution made for a productive chemistry.

“Trey has always been extraordinarily driven and is constantly scheming,” Paluska said. “He’s the kind of person who’s always turning ideas over in his head. That’s not to say the other band members aren’t as well. But I would say Trey was the catalyst, the one most actively pushing things forward and suggesting things.

“So, yeah, we spent a lot of time talking through the endless cascade of ideas that ushered forth out of him,” he acknowledged with a laugh.

By all accounts, Paluska was good about delegating responsibilities to others, too, and the atmosphere in the Phish office was generally youthful, relaxed, and fun. One day his parents dropped by and joked, “Where are the adults around here?”

 

One of the most significant shows in Phish’s career came the next year, in early 1989, when they sold out the Paradise Theater, Boston’s key showcase club. The Paradise is where U2, Oasis, a post-Stooges Iggy Pop, and countless others played breakthrough gigs on their way up. The Paradise could hold 650 people, and Phish packed the club to capacity with a little help from their friends.

Much has been said about early fans’ desire to spread the word by dragging friends to shows, making tapes for anyone who would listen, and proselytizing Phish at every opportunity. The faithful went the extra mile at this turning-point gig. Many made the road trip from Burlington to Boston to cheer them on. A couple of Phish’s ardent early supporters, Tom Baggott and a guy known as Brother Craig, rented two Bluebird buses and packed each with forty-seven Phishheads. They also organized carpools and, by Baggott’s count, sold 207 tickets to the home crowd for the Paradise show.

Since The Paradise wouldn’t book Phish, Phish booked The Paradise. This was a brilliant gambit by managers Hunter and Paluska.
Arriving in carpools and busloads from back home to pack the house was the fans’ contribution to Phish’s upward mobility. Anastasio’s mom even returned from Ireland to attend the show.

The bus ride itself was a trip, in more ways than one. “As was typical, we were all messed up the whole ride down on the bus,” Baggott related. “I tipped the bus driver hundreds of dollars. I was like, ‘Hear no evil, see no evil, do no evil,’ and he was like, ‘Fine by me.’ We had a keg on the bus, and there was definitely plenty of extracurricular activity going on.”

In Baggott’s recollection, Phish rose to the occasion that night. “Oh, they were on fire,” he said. “It was a great show.” The fans performed with gusto, too, dancing with the frantic, dervish-like abandon they’d perfected over the years at Nectar’s and The Front. It was quite an evening, all the way around. And it made an impact.

“I was standing right next to this dude,” Baggott continued, “and he turns to someone else and says, ‘You know, I wouldn’t give these guys a gig, and I don’t know how the hell they did it, but here they are. They sold out my club.’ He was just blown away.”

There were more ripples when word got around Boston that these unknowns from Vermont had packed The Paradise. And not just sold it out but left a few hundred ticketless Boston collegians standing in the street.

Beth Montuori Rowles recalled the reaction at Don Law’s office the next day: “Jody Goodman, who was the club booker at the time, was like, ‘Does anybody know who this band Phish is? They sold out The Paradise last night. How did that happen? I’ve never even heard of them before. They’re from Vermont. What is this? They sold the place out!’

“All of a sudden it was like the radar’s on them. The next time Phish played in Boston, the Don Law Company promoted it. They wanted a piece of it. End of story.”

Interestingly, Mike Gordon—while acknowledging the Paradise show’s significance—does not remember it being one of the band’s more stellar performances.

“It was definitely a landmark gig, and our managers had gone to great lengths to make it seem like we were much better-known and respected than we were, with radio station ads, etc.,” he acknowledged. “It was exciting, but all I remember was the music feeling not so good. Feeling like we can’t really groove together, the acoustics aren’t great, just sort of screechy-sounding and blaring and not fun.

“And the next night I think we played somewhere in upstate New York for like ten people and it was really fun. And the night after that we played at a frat [at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire], and it was the most incredible gig ever. And it was just a bunch of frat guys hanging out. It wasn’t anything like the exposure or landmark that The Paradise was. But with the pressure of that gone, it was like, ‘Okay, now we can let our hair down and be silly.’ There was a big picture behind us of the founder of the fraternity. We’d have one big light shining on that picture as we’d play to it and make jokes about it. It was just that free-flowing feeling that can make for great jamming as well.”

 

The success they had renting the Paradise not only opened some doors but also gave them the notion to try the same strategy in places where the doors still weren’t opening very easily.

“They were having a hard time because they were so unconventional,” recalled manager Paluska. “People don’t realize these guys were not an easy band to pitch. They were way complicated. This was the era of grunge. In 1989 and 1990, Pearl Jam and Nirvana were breaking on the scene. It was a very different sensibility in terms of what was considered cool music, especially on a nightclub level.

“I’d send out a demo tape with ‘David Bowie’ and ‘Golgi Apparatus’ and those kinds of songs. . . . I mean, I had a lot of unreturned phone calls and very unsatisfying conversations with owners or buyers at clubs. We had to make our own breaks.”

So in the early nineties they started renting venues around New England: places like the Colonial Theatre in Keene, New Hampshire; the Portsmouth Music Hall in Maine; and various rooms outside
Boston, such as the Somerville Theatre, the Strand (in Dorchester), and Memorial Auditorium (in Worcester). They even rented Boston’s World Trade Center for one of their first big New Year’s Eve shows.

“It was kind of fun, and in a way it bred this entrepreneurial spirit that led to our festivals. You can see a real direct lineage there. We were doing our own thing early on and got a taste for it. We saw the difference in how it felt to do those shows. It felt a little more like an adventure. It was our thing. We weren’t playing at some club on somebody else’s schedule and under somebody else’s rules. We made our own rules.

“Later on, when we did our festivals, we were already in the practice and saw the benefits of doing it ourselves. We could control all the parameters and put it out there the way we wanted. There was something very satisfying about creating something out of whole cloth instead of plugging it in to some existing paradigm.”

Phish began doing it themselves because many promoters weren’t interested in them. But the joke was on the promoters, because Phish were doing great business every night. Moreover, by cutting out the middleman, they were able to control costs and make more money, which they plowed back into their operation.

“That was a big thing with them,” noted Paluska. “They had a lot more gear and production stuff early on than most bands. They were really clear that any money that came in, they wanted to use to make their show better. Everything was in service to the show.”

All this self-sufficiency emboldened Phish to continue to do things their way. In a sense, they were learning at this stage that they didn’t need the music industry—or, more specifically, they didn’t need to follow its rules just because it was “the way things are done.” Once they were able to quit their day jobs and fully support themselves as musicians, however modestly, they realized there was no imperative to compromise.

“Within the band, there was a sense of ‘Why would we want to compromise anything when we can make a good living doing exactly what we want to do?’” said Paluska. “Of course, that was the best decision
they ever could’ve made, because people are attracted to something pure. I’ve always been a big believer that intent is so fundamental in people’s visceral response to any art form—particularly music, since it’s just a direct experience. There’s no mistaking Phish’s intent. There was joy and purity in what they were doing. You might not like it, but you certainly couldn’t deny it.”

Things started breaking for them, even in hard-to-crack New York City. The opening of the Wetlands Preserve—on Valentine’s Day 1989—gave jam bands like Phish a place to play in the Big Apple. The downtown Manhattan club nurtured the fledgling jam-band scene over the next decade. It served as a launching pad for Blues Traveler and also helped the Spin Doctors, the Dave Matthews Band, and Widespread Panic gain some traction. Phish themselves played eight memorable shows there in 1989 and 1990. “Things started to build for them in New York once the Wetlands opened,” manager Paluska noted. “That place was very much tailored around music like theirs. We were a natural fit and built an audience pretty quickly there.”

 

On April 13, 1989, Chris Kuroda officially took over as Phish’s lighting director. Kuroda had been a fan since first catching Phish at Goddard. Subsequently, he took guitar lessons from Anastasio and followed the band as devoutly as anyone in the crowd at Nectar’s. Kuroda had been managing a place in Burlington that silk-screened T-shirts but quit to join Phish’s crew. At a show in New Hampshire, the group’s lightman, Chris Stecher, took a break and Kuroda filled in on “Fly Famous Mockingbird.” Anastasio noticed the unusually creative coordination of lights and music, and Kuroda was bumped up to lighting director—a job he performed for the next fifteen years (and resumed in 2009, when Phish reunited).

His ability to fuse lighting with music and his uncanny sense of timing lends an added dimension to Phish shows. He became so integral that Phish had him sit in with them at band practices from time to time.

“I was hitting all the changes and trying to learn how to count the songs, which are all in wacko time signatures,” Kuroda recalled. “It got to a point where they realized I was capable of keeping up with them. So we would talk about how to light certain songs—new songs they were writing that had difficult time changes.” He would also “jam” with them on lights. His acumen as a lighting engineer largely came on the job, but he also went to school—learning the craft at Veralite in Dallas and Altman Stage Lighting in Yonkers, New York—during off-time. The band’s move to bigger rooms necessitated greater engineering sophistication to master automated lighting and bigger rigs. He was astute enough to take into account what had happened to some of his cohorts in the Phish crew who hadn’t kept abreast of changes, and he didn’t make the same mistakes himself.