Phish (37 page)

Page McConnell eventually added his own note of assent and explanation. Fishman kept quiet. Gordon made no secret of opposing the breakup. He argued for staying together on the basis that longevity was preferable to demise. For that, Phishheads accorded him hero status.

Because of his reviews, Jarnow was saddled with the reputation of being “the guy who broke up Phish” within a certain unforgiving corner of the fan world. He got a subtle earful from Mike Gordon, too. A month after the breakup announcement, following the first show of the summer tour—an awesome performance at KeySpan Park, on Coney Island, that was released on DVD—Mike Gordon pulled Jarnow aside in the Betty Ford Clinic and told him, “Just so you know, your reviews came up at our end-of-band meeting. No hard feelings, though.”

Once he made up his mind, Anastasio was capable of following through with an assertive finality. For example, Gordon told
Rolling Stone
that Anastasio got rid of his CD collection and set fire to his television set. He was given to such bold strokes, and his handling of Phish was no different.

“I have to see this [disbanding Phish] as one of those things,” Gordon noted.

 

I didn’t see it coming in the conversations I had with McConnell, Gordon, and Fishman for the
Undermind
album bio. Perhaps I should’ve gotten a clue when Anastasio demurred on his interview, as it was the first time that had happened. But Anastasio was a very busy man with a lot on his plate, so that was understandable.

I did speak with him on May 19—two days before the meeting at Gordon’s where he pulled the plug—about his upcoming performances at Bonnaroo. I was writing an article about Anastasio for the festival program. He was scheduled to play as a guitarist in Dave Matthews’s solo band; as conductor of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra in a program of his compositions; and as the leader of his horn-filled solo band. He was juggling a daunting set of tasks, and the pressure must have been considerable.

He said little that would have led me to believe he was poised to end Phish. In hindsight, the only comment he made that might offer a clue to his weary and overwhelmed mindset came as he praised David Byrne, who was also appearing at Bonnaroo.

“There’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t find myself laughing about some David Byrne lyric in the context of my life,” Anastasio said. “It happens so often. It just happened recently. He’s right on the money. Like ‘No Compassion’: ‘So many people . . . I’m not interested.’”

 

After the breakup, Anastasio mused freely about his reasons for disbanding Phish. There were many such reasons, some of them extra-musical, but in retrospect the fact that they’d gotten away from the
band practices that were so fundamental toward bonding them loomed large.

“I often liked band practice better than the . . . ” he said, trailing off.

“Performances themselves?” I offered.

“Yeah. My memory of band practice is the thing I’ll miss the most. And maybe that’s part of the reason why . . . We don’t practice anymore. We haven’t practiced . . . We can’t.”

“I don’t think the music was as good after Big Cypress, from 2000 through to the end,” said Amy Skelton. “Certainly, the last show before the hiatus had some really incredible moments. But those years weren’t that amazing. And I wasn’t jaded. I still loved the band most of the time, but I remember standing in the room many times, listening and saying ‘yeah,’ but I wasn’t sucked in. My hair wasn’t standing on end at the top note of one of the best songs. They were sort of going through the motions. It was decent, but it wasn’t transcendent. There were a lot less of those moments in those years. And some shows, I didn’t get it at all.”

Not coincidentally, those were the years when Phish stopped practicing and instituted a “no analysis” rule for their live shows. The escalation of drug use and backstage scenes was also a cause or symptom. All of these things eroded the intense self-scrutiny and disciplined, goal-oriented strategy that had made them so unique for many years.

 

Even after the hiatus, the organization the band felt financially obliged to support remained something of an obsession, the elephant in the room.

“I don’t know if you ever went to the Phish office, but it was pretty big,” Anastasio said in 2005, after it had all gone away. “I mean, as long as it was going to keep going, it was as big as it needed to be. It’s very hard and I felt so guilty about all the people losing their jobs and everything. I still do. There’s still people floating around Burlington kind of trying to work for Phish. . . . But, I mean, people were unhealthy. Things had gotten really gross in a certain way, and now they’re not.”

Chris Kuroda elaborated on how consuming life working for Phish had become. “Phish was 365 days a year whether you were on tour or not,” said Kuroda. “It became all-consuming of all of us. We were just living this Phish thing day in and day out, being consumed by it in an unhealthy way. Personally, I came to realize I’d lost my identity. I thought my identity was there when my identity as an individual was something completely different.”

Anastasio felt especially weighted down, rightly or wrongly, by the organization. In a far-ranging interview that ran in
Guitar World
in August 2004—the month of Coventry and Phish’s breakup—he identified “owning a merchandise company” as being among the things that most bugged him.

“I love the people who work on it,” he elaborated, “but every time I walk in there, I really get kind of ill. There’s boxes and boxes of posters, and a feeling of the selling of us. I’m not going to be sad when that goes away.”

Of course, there was another side to the story.

“When the band reflects on the beast that the office became, half of that weight was mail-order, although it was the easiest half to farm out,” noted Amy Skelton. “You can always farm out merchandising. There are lots of merchandise companies in the country. But they’d been down that road, and they didn’t like it. It wasn’t smart, it wasn’t responsive to their needs, it wasn’t necessarily respectful of their artistic taste. So that’s why everything slowly went in-house and stayed there.”

“My feeling was that Phish could have had the best of both worlds with a better plan after they broke up the first time,” noted Brad Sands, referring to their failure to resolve in-house staffing issues to their satisfaction during the 2000-2002 hiatus.

Leaving the band members out of it for a moment, the crew and the office staff each thought the other had gotten too big. The crew-office dynamic can be contentious in any band organization, and Phish’s situation was no different.

Paul Languedoc, for instance, had much to say about the office staff:

“I was the equipment manager for what eventually became a four thousand-square-foot warehouse of equipment. I had Pete Carini as an assistant, although he eventually became the guy at the Barn [Anastasio’s studio]. I’ve always felt like if I did things the way the office did things, I’d have a staff of twelve people and we’d have to get a bigger space because we’d be creating more stuff.

“I’ve always personally liked things to be small and efficient. But what happened at the office was that it was John [Paluska] and Shelly [Culbertson] at first, and then John hired his girlfriend [Cynthia] to take care of the merchandise. So she was in charge of the merchandise department, and then she’d hire somebody else. They’d hire friends, and then
they’d
hire
their
friends to be assistants, and eventually they’d split off this little department. They just kept hiring people, and they kept hiring their friends.”

Skelton made a counterargument in defense of the office:

“There was never any dead weight,” she said. “Everybody who ever worked at the office wore a lot of hats and produced a lot of work. There weren’t that many full-time employees. The only dead weight was that Phish still had to pay a lot of crew. In most of the rest of the rock world there are
some
crew that get paid year-round, of course, but many of them are road crew—you hire them [temporarily] for a tour, and you’re done. That’s why they’re called
road
crew.

“So that was the only dead weight. But we never hired one person, one-
half
a person, more than we needed to get the job done. We were exceptionally frugal with people in mail-order, and the Dionysian Productions side stayed pretty static through the whole time. Once it got to a certain size, it stayed right there. And that was the size we needed to get the job done. It couldn’t have been any smaller.

“We had tickets in-house, merch in-house. Doing all of our own management. It was all in-house, and you just couldn’t do it with any less people.”

Phish themselves created and nurtured this monster, which perhaps wasn’t really such a monster. Had the organization, in fact, grown too big?

If Phish were annually playing half as many shows as before, maybe yes. But if they were now adding four (or five) solo and side-band careers to the mix, maybe no. Moreover, if one or more members was looking for something to blame escalating drug use and intergroup tensions on . . . well, the office made a convenient scapegoat.

“It was something to fixate on when there were a lot of other problems,” Skelton noted. “It
was
kind of a scapegoat, an issue that was easy to point at, while the other ones were a little harder to talk about.”

It’s an old story: Drugs are used to escape problems, and then they
become
the main problem. Anastasio knew this to be true, and he’d discuss it with Skelton, who by 2000 was walking a straighter path while watching, with growing concern, what was going on all around her.

“Trey and I had a lot of heart-to-hearts in those years,” said Skelton, “and we had them because he was hooked and he wanted to talk to somebody about it.”

Eric Larson, among the earliest Phish fans, was on the band’s payroll as a massage therapist and chiropractor. When asked how he, as a health-care professional, approached Phish about substance-abuse issues, he had this to say:

“As the health-care guy I have to make suggestions,” he said. “You can’t make demands of anybody. So I tried to intervene where I thought it was reasonable to intervene and make suggestions, knowing full well that people are going to do what they’re going to do. I think I had some limited effect. Certainly, overall, in terms of diet and posture and exercise and fasting and all those things, I think I gave them much over the years.

“When you get into a scene where there’s drugs and alcohol, everybody’s got to make their own decisions. It really has to come from the person. No one else can dictate or tell you how to behave. So I
think for all of us it got disturbing, and that certainly contributed to them wanting to take a break. I did the best that I could and tried not to be involved in the whole situation anyway. Just being on tour, the whole thing was a big party. Moderation’s a tough thing on the road. And if you last, you eventually learn some degree of moderation. That’s the only way it
can
last, right?”

Larson left the Phish organization in 2003, while Skelton moved to Nova Scotia with her family after the breakup.

“It was a different time for Phish at that point,” said Skelton. “There was a lot less energy trickling down, and the writing was kind of on the wall.”

 

So why do groups break up?

For one thing, talent, creativity, and leadership are not equally allocated. Within any musical group there will inevitably be imbalances, leading to bruised egos, factionalism, and disproportionate compensation to he (or she) who is prolific and also writes the songs that resonate most with the audience and best represent the band.

Phish wrestled with this dilemma as rationally as they could, allowing deep friendship, good intentions, and institutional democracy to smooth over the rough spots as much as possible. But it was still an issue that simmered beneath the surface.

Inevitably, somebody’s got to lead. Back in 1972, David Bowie took Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople aside when that group was foundering and told him, “Somebody’s gotta play God.” Within Phish, Anastasio was the undeniable leader, by virtue of his inexhaustible store of energy, enthusiasm, and ideas. He naturally has a “take control” type of personality—not in a heavy-handed way but as a consequence of the music that continually flows from him. He can’t help himself and shouldn’t have to try. Trey Anastasio is a force of nature, pure and simple.

Yet the other members are abundantly gifted and have been band-leaders in their own right. Within Phish, however, none of the other musicians generated the type or profusion or type of material that
defined the group from day one. That has always been Anastasio’s role, and it made him the driving force in the band.

To use a metaphor, think of a band as a car. Cars may have four tires (which make contact with the road, per a beloved Mike Gordon song), but they do not have four steering wheels. There is only one wheel and can be only one driver. That’s not to say the others are just along for the ride. They can be navigators, too. They can even spell the driver and take the wheel themselves from time to time.

To extend the metaphor, Anastasio willingly relinquished the wheel at various points to keep his fellow travelers happy. He did it during
Story of the Ghost
and the more ambient, sparse, and funky phases of live Phish in the late nineties. In terms of administrative decision-making, Phish outwardly functioned as a democracy, with each member getting a vote and each capable of nixing any decision. The four of them had to be in unanimous agreement before moving forward on such things as producers, tour plans, big events, album covers, and whatever else came up in their increasingly complex career.

Even management had a say in the voting, as the Phish organization bent over backward not to be a typical top-down hierarchy. This was an office that didn’t even assign formal job titles. Eventually, this led to what they called the “democracy bureaucracy.” At that point, Anastasio declared “enough” and assumed a unilateral role in recording
Farmhouse
in 1999. After the breakup, Anastasio claimed that twenty-four band members and employees had to be polled about the minor design issue of enclosing the band’s name in a box for the cover of their 2004 album,
Undermind
.