Phish (3 page)

In the big picture, Amy’s Farm opened the door for further adventures on a grander scale. “I think it gave them the can-do attitude,” she continued. “You know, that they could do things their own way and do things themselves.”

This was surreal.

I was gazing across an endless runway at the heart of a decommissioned U.S. Air Force base three miles south of Plattsburgh, New York. The runway could accommodate the Space Shuttle, and indeed Plattsburgh AFB still rated fifth on NASA’s list of contingency shuttle landing sites, despite the fact the base had been decommissioned the previous year. With its closing went 10,000 jobs and the small city’s largest employer. As a result, there had been nothing but ghostly quietude on the vast concrete expanse.

However, in late summer, Plattsburgh AFB sprang to life again as a tie-died multitude of 70,000 flew high to the music of Phish at their rock-festival-in-the-middle-of-nowhere, the Clifford Ball.

I piloted a rented car down the runway. After about a mile or so, clumps of wandering bodies and parked cars came into view like a mirage. Instead of warplanes streaking in from practice runs, the flight line was overrun with a civilian army of beatific Phishheads who had amassed for Phish’s summer tour finale and first multiday concert and campout. Cars and vans parked in endless orderly rows on the runway,
while acres of green-domed tents were pitched tightly together on the broad, grassy strip between the runway and the forest’s edge.

The community that materialized almost overnight became the ninth largest city in New York. It wasn’t Woodstock, the original rock festival, which at half a million strong could boast of being the second largest city in the state. But the Clifford Ball was pretty damn big—and they all came to see just one band. There was, in fact, an uncanny Woodstock connection. The timing of the Clifford Ball coincided with the dates of the original Woodstock Festival in 1969. All in the Phish camp professed surprise when they later learned of this. It was just one of these serendipitous, synergistic things that routinely happened to this band.

As a live-music event, the Clifford Ball was a late-summer bonanza that blew the other warm-weather tours—H.O.R.D.E., Lollapalooza, and Perry Ferrell’s doomed Enit Festival—out of the water in the summer of ’96. Unlike those other festivals, however, only Phish played at the Clifford Ball. They performed three sets per day, each lasting around ninety minutes. The afternoon sets commenced at 3:30 P.M., and the group was still jamming away at midnight.

The impetus for playing at different hours of the day came from Jimi Hendrix. “A lot of his monumental concerts—Monterey, Woodstock, Rainbow Bridge, Isle of Wight—were at different times of day,” explained Trey Anastasio, Phish’s guitarist and nominal leader. “I wanted us to be able to play at all different times of the day at one concert to capture all those different moods.”

He likened Phish’s Saturday afternoon opening set to his daily wake-up ritual of putting on a pot of coffee and a bluegrass record. And so, on Saturday, the members of Phish got up, drank their coffee, and began picking a bluegrass tune, “The Old Home Place.” A happy, howling crowd fanned outward from the stage to the distant campground as far as the eye could see.

Over the course of the weekend, Phish performed for roughly nine hours without repeating a song. As if that weren’t enough, Phish literally
went the extra mile and played an unannounced jam at 4 A.M. on Saturday. For this, they were drawn through the campground on a flatbed truck. Astonished Phishheads bolted out of their tents and wordlessly joined the swelling, Pied Piper-like procession. This side trip was the musical highlight of the Clifford Ball for Gordon, who felt he’d approach his goal of “bridging the gap between playing music and dreaming.”

The festival was named after Clifford Ball, the man who pioneered the idea of air-mail delivery. While passing through the Pittsburgh airport some years earlier, Phish had noticed a commemorative plaque describing Ball as “A Beacon of Light in the World of Flight.” They first used the phrase on
A Live One
, their 1994 double-disc concert compendium, which bore the notation “Recorded live at the Clifford Ball.” Phish even suggested Clifford Ball as a festival name to Blues Traveler’s John Popper, who instead went with H.O.R.D.E. (“Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere”) for the jam-band tour he organized. So the Clifford Ball went from
A Live One
’s make-believe ballroom to Phish’s (sur)real-life festival, the first of a eight weekend campouts they have hosted in isolated places.

As befits an event named for an aviation pioneer and held on an Air Force base, planes and aeronautics were a recurring motif. During the festival Phish arranged for flybys from F-14s, biplanes, and stunt planes. Prop planes trailed banners like those you’d see at the beach or ballpark, but the messages ran to Dadaist philosophy (“Hopeless Has Exceptions”) and bizarro-world humor (“Running Low on Fuel—No Joke,” with a stunt pilot sputtering his plane in the sky).

There was even more to see in the sky at the Clifford Ball. An acrobat did gymnastic flips and twirled on circus ropes while Phish played “Run Like an Antelope.” On Friday, they launched into “The Divided Sky” as the setting late-summer sun colored half the sky a rosy orange and the other a darkening indigo. They dusted off a faithful version of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars”—a timely nod to headline-making revelations from NASA’s Mariner spacecraft that there might indeed
be life on the red planet. A fireworks display painted the heavens as Phish played “Harpua” at the close of Friday night’s set.

Leaving no stone unturned, Phish even invited a relative of Clifford Ball—a grandson of the old gent—to attend as their guest. I spoke to him for a while, and he professed awe both at the event and his invitation to participate. Ben and Jerry—who are to ice cream as Phish is to music, with both entities calling Burlington, Vermont, home—made a cameo appearance onstage. “Phish Food” would soon be introduced as Ben and Jerry’s newest flavor, joining Cherry Garcia in the realm of frozen musical tributes.

The only other musical act that appeared onstage at the Clifford Ball was the Plattsburgh Community Orchestra. They played soothing, impressionistic works by Debussy and Ravel late Saturday afternoon. While the orchestra cooled the crowd with Debussy’s “Nocturnes,” a glider accompanied the orchestra with an aerial ballet.

Phish even operated a completely licensed, fully functioning, FCCLICENSED radio station (“Clifford Ball Radio,” 88.9 FM) twenty-four hours a day during the festival. Deejays played everything from hip-hop to Iggy Pop and conducted off-the-wall interviews with characters like Fred Tuttler, a retired dairy farmer from Vermont. (Q: “Which is better, Jersey milk or Holstein milk?”) Anastasio dropped by to cue up favorite discs by Pavement and bands that had influenced them. Kevin Shapiro delved into Phish’s live vault for his “From the Archives” radio show.

The massive audience for Phish’s sets fanned outward toward the runway. They throbbed to the music like a single organism. Onstage, Phish was arrayed in a straight line—from left to right, McConnell, Anastasio, Gordon, and Fishman—the customary formation for much of their existence. From a platform on the scaffolding to the side of the stage, I could clearly see the expressions on the musicians’ faces, somewhere between concentration and rapture. Anastasio flashed smiles at the others as he counted off each number with rhythmic downstrokes on his guitar.

The Clifford Ball represented a mid-career peak for Phish. At the end of what had been an atypically abbreviated summer tour of the States—owing to the fact they had been touring in Europe—attendance at their first festival was twice the size of the largest audience for whom they’d previously played. That prior milestone had occurred barely a week earlier, when 35,000 turned out to see Phish at Wisconsin’s Alpine Valley outdoor venue on August 10, 1996. According to
Pollstar
, the Clifford Ball was the largest concert in North America in 1996.

More than a triumph of numbers, the Clifford Ball stood as a feat of imagination and logistics, driven by a desire to entertain and inspire fans that almost seemed antiquarian in its total indifference to the bottom line. In fact, the idea was to provide an experience that money couldn’t buy. The band members themselves emerged from the event as agog as the audience. That was because the denizens of Phish Nation, much like the throng at the original Woodstock Festival, behaved as a relaxed, peaceable, and self-regulating body. There was one wedding, one death (by drug overdose), and just a handful of arrests among the blissed-out crowd. The only complaints weren’t about brown acid but green grasshoppers, which infested the campground.

“It felt like so much more than just a big concert with 70,000 people,” Anastasio reflected a few weeks later. “It felt like some kind of exciting new thing. We did as much of it as we could, but most of the feeling came from the way people were. That’s the part I couldn’t have anticipated and that just kept blowing me away.”

It was all about peaceful coexistence and phenomenal music, and it was Phish that imagined it into being. Those three days at the Clifford Ball were unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was as close to an Edenic scene of peace, love, and musical bliss as I’ve ever experienced, and many who were on hand echo that sentiment. The memory of that weekend remains as hopeful evidence that even in this politically muddied, corporately hog-tied, culturally degraded, and violence-wracked world, something approaching utopia still is possible.

No one who was there will ever forget it.

This was surreal, too, albeit for very different reasons than the Clifford Ball.

For one thing, this was the end. Phish’s last hurrah. They’d announced that they were breaking up, and the village of Coventry, Vermont, was the site of their final concerts.

It had been raining for days. Rain fell in relentless sheets that turned the land in and around the sylvan village of Coventry into the world’s biggest mud puddle. In Vermont, they call this time of year “mud season.” The timing couldn’t have been worse, as an army of Phishheads—estimated with remarkable imprecision between 25,000 and 70,000—were descending upon a small state airport bordered by farmers’ fields outside of Coventry. This was supposed to be a grand finale. Instead, it turned out to be a waterlogged disaster, dampening already disillusioned spirits within Phish Nation. There was no joy in Mudville.

The only thing worse than being there was not being there. Traffic had backed up for thirty-five miles along Interstate 91. And yet the festival site could not accommodate another car, because the fields were too saturated for parking. Many among the army of pilgrims who’d come from every corner of the country—and from other countries, too—couldn’t get to the festival because of the interstate gridlock and untenable parking situation at the festival site. The police, promoters, and Phish saw a calamity in the making and called on fans to go home, promising reparations at a later date. Gordon broke the bad news on the radio.

And then something remarkable happened: In a mass act of civil disobedience, they didn’t go home. They parked their vehicles on the interstate’s breakdown lane and walked, like a ragtag army of refugees, toward the festival site. Some walked twenty miles or more. They were not going to be denied a final chance to see their band, rain and mud
and discomfort and inconvenience be damned. If ever there were a demonstration of loyalty to a rock band that went above and beyond the call of duty, the determined mass march to the Newport State Airport at Coventry to see Phish was it.

Musically, Phish made a disappointing exit. Their relatively dis - pirited and untogether playing—so atypical of a band that had always operated on principles of musical tightness, infectious joie de vivre, mind-boggling concentration, and continuous improvement—appeared to jibe with rumors of drugs and disarray within the Phish camp.

The stage was rumored to be sinking in the mud. Truckloads of wood chips, gravel, hay, and plywood rolled in to stabilize the grounds. This was the inspiration for some lines from “Invisible,” a song from Anastasio’s first post-breakup solo album,
Shine
: “Fall down good, sink in the water / But you’re walking on wood.” It was a reference both to the state of the band during Coventry and the state of the land as the musicians trod the boards to navigate the sodden site.

Fortunately, the rain stopped falling on Saturday, when the music was set to begin. But the damage was done. The sea of mud had taken days to form, had been worked over and stirred up by all the vehicles and human feet, and would not vanish as quickly as had the clouds.

“I want to welcome all of you to this incredibly special night and weekend,” Anastasio told the crowd as Phish took the stage on Saturday night.

“In twenty-one years, I’ve never ever been nervous going onstage before a Phish concert—ever, ever, ever,” he said a few songs later. “Tonight, I’m a little nervous.”

It sometimes showed in his playing. Coventry was not his, or Phish’s, finest hour. Clearly, he was a man in pain. Combining the long-simmering issues that led him to break up the band, guilt and uncertainty over that decision, and the use of drugs to numb those emotions with the meteorological mayhem that wreaked havoc and dampened spirits, Coventry in a sense became Phish’s Perfect Storm.

Even loyal friends had a hard time coming to the group’s defense at Coventry, though they stopped short of outright criticism. What, for instance, did Ian McLean—a veteran fan of “Ian’s Farm” fame who saw at least one show on virtually every tour—have to say about Phish’s performance that weekend?

“No comment.”

Phish subsequently refunded unused tickets to those 10,000 ticket-holders who hadn’t gotten in to Coventry. In addition, each was sent a limited-edition photo book hand-signed by every member of Phish.