Phish (22 page)

In the Dead’s wake, the jam-band field largely and logically fell to Phish, triggering even greater growth and interest in the band. In another year they would be performing for an estimated crowd of
70,000 at the Clifford Ball—three and a half times the capacity of Madison Square Garden.

Everything started to change, not just for the band but for their fans, too. Those who had previously been on the ground floor could no longer claim Phish as their personal property. Greater numbers of fans began following Phish from gig to gig, chasing musical highs and road thrills. For some, it became a way of life, and school, job, and other responsibilities played second fiddle to “tour.” (Not
the tour
or
their tour
, just
tour
.) Obviously, the clubby aura of the Nectar’s days was long gone. The two to three thousand-seat theaters Phish played throughout 1993 gave way to small arenas and outdoor sheds—plus the occasional large arena in places where they were well-established—in the following years. In 1996, they undertook their first all-arena tour.

There were now obvious layers of Phish fans, arranged something like the earth itself:

During the later months of 1995, with Garcia so recently laid to rest, you could not read anything about Phish in the press without the Dead referenced close by. A glowing review in the
New York Times
of
Phish’s New Year’s stand, for instance, contained fifteen references to Garcia and the Grateful Dead.

These incessant comparisons didn’t bother Anastasio as much as the media’s invasion of his privacy in the wake of Garcia’s death. He had just walked through the door of his house when he heard the news.

“One second later, the phone rang,” he recalled. “The whole thing was a nightmare. People calling for statements. A lot of people were calling. I didn’t even get a chance to sit down and digest the event at all, so I didn’t really have anything to say.”

What he said was, “Right now, I’m sad and confused.”

“It took me awhile, like a couple of weeks, to think about it,” he said, reflecting on Garcia’s death. “The thing I’ve been thinking is that I learned more about music from the way he walked onstage than anything else. It wasn’t necessarily what he played; it was who he was and what his intentions were.

“Intention has so much to do with it. You can hear that in music so clearly. It’s not like, ‘I’m such a good guitar player.’ Music has nothing to do with that, you know? I read recent interviews with Sonic Youth and the Meat Puppets where they talked about how heavily they were influenced by Jerry, and they both have that same kind of thing. It’s like a purity of intention.”

 

The peak year of 1995 ended with a crescendo. They performed a four-night New Year’s stand—two nights in Boston, followed by two nights in New York City, at Madison Square Garden. The New Year’s Eve show itself has entered the hallowed hall of all-time great Phish shows.

It was quite a scene outside the Garden that wintry night. “Cash for your extra” was the mantra chanted by an army of Phishheads circling the streets. This was the group’s first New Year’s Eve show at this particular Garden. As usual, many ticketless Phishheads had traveled a long distance on faith, willing to gamble that a “miracle ticket” would find its way into their hands. Some paced the block with an
index finger extended. Others stayed rooted to one spot, hoping the miracle would find them. As showtime approached, the chanting took on a more urgent tone:

“Who’s got my extra?”

“I
need
to hear the music tonight.”

Meanwhile, the cold, damp air turned the shivering fans’ breath to icy fog. A bearded, gnomish fellow had hitchhiked from Georgia with empty pockets and full backpack. A young couple from upstate New York had paid a scalper’s ransom, only to learn they’d been burned with counterfeits. At the last moment, I provided them all with “miracle tickets,” which was truly a fun thing to do.

The startled Georgian danced a little jig and then bolted for the entrance. The elated couple proffered a group hug. Despite these happy endings, thousands more didn’t get to hear the music they’d come so far on a wing and a prayer to see. And so they occupied themselves on New Year’s Eve in midtown Manhattan with drum circles and acoustic-guitar strum-alongs, networking for rides or floors to crash on, and swapping fall tour tales. Those who weren’t able to attend those shows no doubt heard them soon after, thanks to the ardent network of tapers, whose microphones stood on the floor of the Garden like a circle of black cornstalks, recording every note.

At the New Year’s Eve 1995 show, Phish took it to the limit with a three-set, five-hour marathon. The first set was highlighted by “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent” and “Fly Famous Mockingbird,” from the
Gamehendge
musical. In addition to extended forays like “The Squirming Coil” and “You Enjoy Myself,” the group covered the Who (“Drowned” and “Sea and Sand”), Collective Soul (“Shine”), and jazz keyboardist Eumir Deodato’s disco remake of Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (better known as “2001”). They encored with one of the toughest, tightest versions of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” I’ve ever heard.

 

After spending a fair amount of time with Phish during the year that had just ended, interviewing them and hanging out on their scene, I scribbled these thumbnail portraits of the band members:

“Mike is the analytical Phish.

“Jon is the extroverted Phish.

“Page is the reserved Phish.

“Trey is the emotional Phish.”

It struck me that camaraderie was the key to Phish’s success. The band members were close to one another and their families. They were close to their management company and crew. They were close, in spirit, to their fans and more willing than most to interact in person.

Mike Gordon was especially approachable. He was the band member mostly likely to hang out with fans or circulate backstage. He’d pedal his bike thorough a crowd before shows or drop into chat rooms on the Phish.Net Web site. Through 1994, he personally answered nearly every piece of fan mail sent to the band. He worried that his habit of making himself available was ego-driven, but it seemed quite the opposite.

“I think I’m overcompensating for having been unpopular in junior high,” he said matter-of-factly. Gordon has a droll, deadpan sense of humor. Once, when I ran into him at a concert and the subject of my long-delayed
Rolling Stone
article came up, he broke into “The Cover of ‘Rolling Stone,’” the seventies novelty hit by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. He knew every word. (In 2003, when Phish finally appeared on the magazine’s cover, they performed that very tune.)

Personality wise, McConnell and Fishman came across as the yin and yang of Phish, especially when interviewed together. McConnell was reserved, refined, taciturn, while Fishman was boisterous, extroverted, given to fits of laughter. Yet they were definitely on the same page, finishing each other’s thoughts and chiding each other in a good-natured way. The talk turned to Phish’s loyal army of fans.

“I think we make ourselves more accessible than most bands,” McConnell said. “On the way to the bus I’ll often hang out and talk to people. Generally our fans are really respectful. They treat us as people, and we treat them with a certain amount of respect, too.”

Anastasio’s boundless will to create has always been the locomotive that drove Phish to the outer limits, but all four of them shared that
attitude. At least some of that creative drive seemed bound up in their genes.

Of Anastasio and Gordon, manager John Paluska noted, “They took good characteristics from each of their parents. They’re both very driven and organized and focused, and at the same time they’ve got real free spirits and creative sides.”

Moreover, the group genuinely appeared to value their friendship with one another. They seemed so bonded that it would have been difficult to imagine a lineup change. Talking in 1995, they agreed.

“I would hope that if, God forbid, something were to happen . . . ,” said McConnell.

“They always look at me when they say that,” Fishman said, laughing. “A disaster waiting to happen!”

“I would hope that the band would just break up. I’d really hope we wouldn’t try to replace anyone,” McConnell continued.

“What we have right now as Phish we can never have again,” asserted Fishman. “The four of us can’t go out in the world and have that again, so when this ends, that’s it. This is definitely a one-shot deal as far as having this kind of chemistry and the same kind of dedication.”

 

What is it about Phish that inspires such devotion?

To fully understand the phenomenon, Phish had to be caught in concert. A typical evening with Phish consisted of two seventy-five-minute sets and an encore—roughly two and a half hours of music and an intermission.

Their magic didn’t translate on MTV, which had little to offer Phish (or vice versa). Once, in 1992, the group dutifully performed for MTV’s cameras, only to see brief, truncated versions of their songs used in a half-hour show called
Hangin’ with MTV
. Since Phish played jams that lasted longer than the entire show, MTV wasn’t the ideal medium to spread the word about the band. In their newsletter, Phish promised fans they’d never do it again.

With few exceptions, they didn’t get much help from radio, either, where they were too unhip for alternative and too weird for classic rock. The myopic rock press kept its distance, too, until the late 1990s. Finally, as good as they are, Phish’s albums by definition couldn’t convey the excitement that transpired at a live show.

“It’s a bit more of a headache in the studio,” admitted Anastasio in 1995, “and the stage is where we have these incredible musical experiences.”

Phish had an active repertoire of 250 songs. Anastasio made the point that he wrote material with the live show, not the recording studio, in mind. Many of Phish’s best-known songs have never appeared on studio albums. So determined was Anastasio that each night’s performance have its own unique pacing and energy that he’d spend hours drawing up a set list, especially in the early to mid nineties. Anastasio would study a computer printout and scrawl a tentative set list in the margin. It would be distributed and taped to the appropriate onstage spots by Brad Sands, the production assistant turned road manager. However, it was always subject to change.

“We’ve got enough material that we can go on tour for four weeks and not play any one song more than three or four times,” Anastasio noted in the mid nineties. The Anastasio-Marshall songwriting partnership would intensify its output in the coming years, and Phish’s songbag would grow even larger.

“I’ve got a stack of music that I bring on the road with me in case I forget some of the pieces,” McConnell admitted. “Almost any of the songs that have that sort of compositional feel have been written out on staff paper.”

The more popular they got, the more determined Phish grew to push the limits of live performance. In 1995, they took it even farther than they had the previous year. Some felt that the lengthier jams on the summer 1995 tour, such as the nearly hourlong “Tweezer” at Mud Island in Memphis, went on for too long with too little payoff. But no one complained about Phish’s willingness to go on a musical adventure.

“I think people like us because they don’t get that experience with a lot of other bands,” said McConnell. “If we’re really confident we’re going somewhere, they’re right there with us.”

“It’s a pretty challenging band,” conceded Fishman. “All four of us have an internal desire to push our personal limits, and that ends up taking a life of its own in the group situation.”

“A lot of times we’ll be satisfied or dissatisfied after a set and talk about it,” noted Gordon. “We started to find that the biggest problem—in some ways, the only problem—is one or several of us being in our own worlds and not trying to hook up. So ‘hooking up’ ends up being the biggest phrase used backstage. Are we hooking up? And what else really matters? Nothing else matters.”

“If we get our egos out of the way and concentrate on communicating among ourselves, that translates into communication with the audience,” said Anastasio. “If I do some kind of flashy guitar riff, I can feel an attitude of
who cares?
a little bit. Whereas if I do something very simple that hooks up with Mike or hooks up all four people, then there’s this locking feeling with the audience that’s uplifting.”

Anastasio and Gordon discussed these transcendent moments.

“Occasionally, I’ll have a real peak experience where we’re playing and suddenly I realize that a lot of thoughts that would normally come into my head to distract me are gone,” said Gordon.

“Losing your inhibitions is what everybody’s trying to do,” added Anastasio.

“If anything, it’s an awareness. It’s like being really aware without being analytical.”

“Yeah. To get to the feeling where you couldn’t play a wrong note if you tried.”

“’Cause right and wrong isn’t even the issue.”

“Right and wrong doesn’t matter, and it’s just flowing through you. You’re just kind of a vehicle. It’s almost like Zen breathing or something. You can get to that state, and once you’re in it, it just rolls along.”