Phish (16 page)

Phish recorded
A Picture of Nectar
at Burlington’s White Crow Studios in late spring and early summer of 1991. Earlier that year, over at Dan Archer’s studio in Winooski, they cut another album. For this one they provided musical backup for Anastasio’s old pal, the Dude of Life (né Steve Pollak). As mentioned before, he’d written lyrics for several of Phish’s key early compositions and joined them onstage from time to time, dressed in anything from a gas mask to a huge wig with a sparkly sequined jacket. Helping out on
Crimes of the Mind
, which was jointly credited to the Dude of Life and Phish, was a kind of thank-you for his early involvement and an attempt to help him launch a career of his own. It sat in the can until Phish’s mounting popularity finally justified its release on Elektra three years later.
Crimes of the Mind
would sell a respectable 90,000 copies. So far as Phish was concerned, one of
Crimes
’ songs (“Self ”) was musically recycled as one of the band’s most high-energy originals (“Chalk Dust Torture”).

Another key figure in Phish’s crew entered the picture in the pivotal year of 1991: Brad Sands, a high-school swimmer turned college dropout who was looking for his niche. Sands first caught Phish at a July 1991 gig in upstate New York. Then a Deadhead, he was skeptical but left a total convert. Sands followed Phish, helping out wherever he could on the road. The operation was still informal enough to welcome such assistance, and when an opening came up, he submitted his résumé and landed the job.

At first he was Chris Kuroda’s lighting assistant. In time, he became the band’s road manager, sounding board, confidant, and gatekeeper. Sands developed a sixth sense about whom to let in and whom to keep out of their dressing room.

Sands eventually added even more to his plate: “I was able to grow from being road manager to being a lot more involved in the festivals, in the creative process, in the planning of the tours, that kind of thing,” Sands noted. “My strength was being closest to the Phish fans. I knew what the fans liked.”

He played an instrumental role in various Phish “gags” and during their New Year’s Eve show in Boston on December 31, 1992, he became one of them: “The gag was me dressing up in a chicken suit for ‘(Fly) Famous Mockingbird’ and getting hoisted above the band by a motor,” he recalled, laughing.

 

The advent of a fan-based community in cyberspace was another turning point. It evolved along with technology, beginning as a published digest sent out to a mailing list and then an online newsgroup (the Phish.Net Usenet, whose address was
rec.phish.net
), and finally a Web site (
www.phish.net
). Now serious fans, scholars, and keepers of the keys could post set lists, analyze shows, and make plans to hook up on tour. It’s hard to recall the ’Net in its infancy, when these sorts of things were novel and, given today’s supersonic download speeds, almost excruciatingly slow. Yet it was an exciting new frontier, and Phish fans jumped on it. Matt Laurence, a computer designer and Phishhead living in Hamilton, Massachusetts, founded Phish.Net. Other Phishheads, such as Ellis Godard and Shelly Culbertson, found their way to it, as they began mastering computer tools and technology.

Then a student at the University of Virginia, Godard dove in head-first. “I remember getting a newsletter in the summer of ’91 that mentioned the
rec.phish.net
newsgroup,” he elaborated. “I didn’t know what that meant. I’d never heard of the Internet, and I’d never been in a computer lab on campus. So I went to the lab, and I was blown away and sucked into it immediately.”

Godard edited the site’s Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file, which then included only eleven questions and now has over six hundred. At one point, he also helped manage
The Helping Phriendly
Book
, which tracks Phish’s set lists. It then had four years’ worth of known shows and now runs to well over twenty years of group and solo performances. By 1992, Phish.Net served a community of roughly 50,000 music-loving computer geeks.

As the site grew, so did its offshoots, as various pools of Phish fans with common interests stepped off to the side and set up their own Web sites. These included the Funky Bitches (female Phish fans) and The Fellowship (a support group of nondrinking, nondrugging Phish followers, patterned after the Grateful Dead’s Wharf Rats). While Phish and their music occupied the center of it all, social networks, worlds within worlds, were being created on the Internet.

The intersection of the information superhighway and the burgeoning world of Phishheads generated a tremendous amount of traffic in the early 1990s. It wasn’t long before Phish.Net was third in size among online music newsgroups, behind only Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead. In the 1990s, the Internet would further impact Phish and the music industry in an unforeseen way with the emergence of peer-to-peer sharing of music files via sites like Napster. The industry feared and fought the new technology and music fans’ use of it. Phish had a different attitude toward the taping and disseminating of their music by fans, whether via cassettes or over the ’Net. They were solidly behind it. In the fall of 1993, Phish even began selling “taper tickets” by mail-order, allowing access to a special area set aside for them to erect their equipment at concerts.

“We recently premiered six songs that didn’t make our new al - bum,” Anastasio told Paul A. Harris of the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
in 1992. “A bunch of people taped the show. That night, people put the titles and descriptions of those new songs on Phish.Net and how you could get a copy of the tape.

“So within days, you’ve got tapes of these new songs all over the country, which is exactly what we’d want. That way, we go out on this national tour, people are going to have heard of the new songs, and even
heard
the new songs, before we get to the different towns.”

What would horrify most groups and record labels, Phish found acceptable and even desirable. The philosophy was that by encouraging taping and trading, they were building a committed fan base that would pay to come to shows, buy merchandise, and maybe even ante up for the occasional studio CD. The more they gave it away, the more they got back. They disapproved of for-profit bootlegging of their shows, however.

In addition to word getting around via Phish.Net, the group set up its own mailing list—launched by Trey’s sister, Kristy—periodically sending out free newsletters to fans who signed up. By mid-1992, there were 14,000 Phishheads on that list. In 1994 it was renamed
The Döniac Schvice
and became a pretty big deal—especially to Jason Colton, who was given responsibility for it once he hired on with Phish’s management.

In fact, the newsletter was how he found his way into the band’s employ. Colton is a driven go-getter with a business head and a rock and roll heart. He heard
Junta
and was intrigued. A month later, on April 28, 1990, he attended his first Phish show, at the Strand Theater in Dorchester, Massachusetts. It just happened to be the band’s first theater show, and though it was only half-full, it made an impression on him.

“I was hooked instantly,” Colton recollected. “It was so unique and so cool, and after being used to seeing national touring bands, it seemed very life-sized to me. It definitely felt like a family affair in the sense that I could tell there were a lot of people who knew the band somehow.”

He saw several more Phish concerts around New England in the following months. Checking out the band’s newsletter, he realized that the band’s management offices were located just a mile from his family’s home in Newton, a Boston suburb. Before heading off to study English at the University of Wisconsin, Colton gave Paluska a call and went over to his office. He just wanted a Phish T-shirt, but the two wound up talking at length.

At the manager’s suggestion, Colton said he’d try to book Phish a gig at Wisconsin. He joined the school’s student concert committee on his first day and arranged for Phish to play on campus at the Great Hall on November 8, 1990. It was a sellout show that gave Phish another Midwestern beachhead, and Colton was ecstatic.

“I remember it just being a very defining moment of, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to be involved with bands,’” Colton recalled. Paluska realized that Colton was shrewd, competent, and industrious, and he helped set him up in the concert business, putting him in touch with other band managers. While still in college, Colton promoted shows in Madison, Wisconsin, for artists such as Blues Traveler, Widespread Panic, and Bela Fleck.

When Phish wanted to play Madison again the next spring, Paluska told him, “Find a theater, rent the theater, do the advertising, sell the tickets, and if you lose money we’ll cover you.” They, of course, did not lose money, and Colton thought, “This is easy. I can do this.”

He continued promoting shows in Madison, even after transferring to Stanford University, on the West Coast, where he finished his English degree. His dream had been to work for Bill Graham Presents, the concert empire built by the legendary San Francisco-based promoter, but Paluska made him a job offer first. Colton was attending the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas, when the call came. With Colton’s hiring, Dionysian Productions now numbered three: Paluska, Colton, and Shelly Culbertson.

After graduating with a degree in Russian from Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, Culbertson moved to the hippie college town of Arcata, up in the wilds of Humboldt County in northern California. Before her second Phish show—at the International Beer Garden in Arcata, on October 15, 1991—she persuaded Page McConnell to sit for an interview that she posted on Phish.Net. Interviews with Anastasio and Gordon followed a month later. In 1993, she accepted a full-time management support position with the band. Culbertson went on to develop a mail-order ticket system for fans and helped create Phish’s
official Web site. Colton, meanwhile, grew ever more involved with the business and marketing side of Phish’s affairs—as well as with the newsletter.

At its peak, the Phish office mailed out 180,000 free four-color copies of
Döniac Schvice
each quarter to fans on the mailing list. Unlike most bands, Phish never had an official fan club. The fans had their own elaborate lines of communication. The newsletter was just a way for the band to provide them with news, show dates, and tongue-in-cheek columns by Fishman (“Fish’s Forum”) and Gordon (“Mike’s Corner”). There was also a two-page merchandise spread that served to generate revenue through the sale of logo T-shirts and decals, compact discs, and other Phish-related swag. The
Schvice
continued publication until 2000, at which point the Internet proved a more efficient and cost-effective way to reach fans, especially since Phish had found themselves spending more than half a million dollars a year in the final years of the
Schvice
.

 

During the summer of 1992, Phish opened for or shared bills with a number of other acts both at home and abroad. They were one of over a hundred bands, including Nirvana, that played at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. Except for one prior gig in Canada in 1989, Phish’s jaunt to Europe in ’92 represented their first shows outside the United States. On half a dozen European dates, they opened for Violent Femmes (and, on one of them, for Lou Reed as well). This limited them to single-set performances. Perhaps the experience made them more determined to forge their own way, but there were some memorable encounters. Anastasio got to make small talk with Reed before an outdoor show in Germany. As Phish headed onstage, Reed gave his fellow Yankees a pep talk: “Show ’em how to rock and roll. After all, we invented it.”

Upon returning from Europe, Phish hooked up with the first H.O.R.D.E. (“Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere”) tour for four dates in the Northeast. The scene that had been nurtured at Wetlands
went national with the launching of H.O.R.D.E. The idea was to take a strength-in-numbers approach to help put the jam-band scene on the map. The simple criteria, according to tour organizer John Popper, of Blues Traveler: “Good bands that played well live.” Popper, who was given to bold strokes, hailed from Anastasio’s hometown of Princeton, as did Chris Barron of the Spin Doctors.

The funny thing was, even when Phish were ostensibly part of a movement like H.O.R.D.E., in reality they were only tangentially connected. As if to separate themselves from the pack, Anastasio and McConnell later pointed out that Phish appeared only on the first four shows of the first H.O.R.D.E. tour. H.O.R.D.E. continued to package jam bands for years after that, but Phish was never again among them. While they supported the all-for-one concept and benefited from the national exposure H.O.R.D.E. received, they were obviously an entity unto themselves who were meant to go it alone. Nonetheless, back in the States among the kindred spirits of H.O.R.D.E., they hammed it up at Jones Beach Amphitheater on Long Island. The group wore masks while singing their barbershop-quartet opener (“Sweet Adeline”) and let Fishman rip on the vacuum cleaner toward the end.

On July 16, Phish commenced a six-week tour as Santana’s opening act, which included a three-night stand at Los Angeles’s Greek Theatre. At one of those dates at the Greek, they managed to squeeze only three songs into their allotted 50 minutes. Prior to the tour, the band had expressed hope that the linkup with Santana would show them how to carry their career to the next level. Carlos Santana was supportive of his opening act, coming out to jam with them for half a set in Stowe, Vermont, and inviting them out with his band every night. Stowe was a virtual hometown gig for Phish, since the ski resort lies a short distance east of Burlington.

“That was really solid,” remembered Ian McLean, a fan from the early years. “‘Phishtana,’ when they played together at Stowe, was one of the sickest things I’ve ever seen.”

Santana also added a new term to the Phish lexicon, derived from his words of praise for the band. The master guitarist told them that when he listened, he imagined the audience as a garden of flowers, Phish as a hose, and their music as water. From this came the term “the hose,” which Phishheads thereafter used to describe an especially memorable jam.