Phish (7 page)

Anastasio also had another collaborator: his mother, Dina. They wrote songs together, selling them for $250 a pop, and several of them wound up on kids’ albums. In 1995, he could still sing them from memory:

The mother and son would be given a theme, such as “self-esteem,” and write accordingly: “I like me, I like me, I like me.” Their most adventurous effort was a musical called
Gus, the Christmas Dog
. They envisioned it becoming a made-for-TV Christmas special, but there were no takers. That’s not to say the songs went to waste. The main theme from
Gus, the Christmas Dog
became the final section in “The Divided Sky.” Other parts of
Gus
were appropriated for Phish songs as well. One of its numbers, “No Dogs Allowed,” became part of Phish’s early repertoire and their first stab at barbershop quartet. A cadre of early fans used to follow Phish around and scream for them to do “No Dogs Allowed,” and occasionally they’d oblige. The song tells the tale of a lost puppy who enters a New York subway station and is turned back:

With his fists, Tom Marshall pounds out a deep, reverberant rhythm atop a giant hunk of metal in the shape of a rhomboid solid. In 1966 an artist named Tony Smith designed this metal sculpture, giving it the generic name “New Piece.” Marshall, Anastasio, and their friends simply called it “the Rhombus.” It figures heavily in Phish lore.

The Rhombus sits in a grassy field behind the Institute for Advanced Studies, where some of the great minds of our age have come to puzzle out the world’s mysteries. Albert Einstein, who clearly understood the wages of fame in ways that Phish would eventually appreciate—“It certainly gets in the way of your work,” declared the genius—was among them. To one side of the Rhombus is a pond, and pathways meander through the peaceful, shady surroundings, designed to provide a serene, inspirational setting for all the brains at the institute.

A pack of Princeton schoolkids—mainly Marshall, Anastasio, Dave Abrahams, and Marc Daubert—had different designs on the Rhombus. They went there to drink beer, smoke dope, make music, and commune with the cosmos. Hanging out at the Rhombus became a kind of pagan ritual that allowed them to tap into a primordial energy source and get a good buzz in the process. For one thing, it was far enough from the main road to escape the prying eyes of the authorities. Out by the road, the local cops would periodically sweep the former battlefield with their lights, rounding up all the potheads who were in the grass, so to speak. If they did smoke dope there, their little group learned to hide behind the columns of the memorial so the cops’ sweeping lights wouldn’t expose them.

Back then, mounting the Rhombus was part of the ritual. On a warm afternoon in May 2008, at Marshall’s suggestion, we scaled the metal sculpture and talked atop its summit for hours, as he and Anastasio had so many times in years past. Of course, ascending the eight-foot-tall Rhombus in middle age was not as easy as it had been in junior high and high school. Marshall tried to ascend its slanting side with a running start, letting his momentum skip him to the top, as they’d done effortlessly way back when. He succeeded on the third attempt, a testament to his athleticism and height. (He’s a rangy six foot four.) Before doing so, he gave me a leg up so I could grab a corner and hoist myself to the top.

“So this is the magical Rhombus,” said Marshall. “A lot of the energy of the Rhombus came out when you hit it, and we’d ruin our hands by slamming into the late hours. But when you’re laying back on it, it feels like it’s echoing up into the solar system. It’s an incredible feeling. It’s definitely a power source. There’s enough room to get four or five people up here, and you all chant and sing, and there has to be a guitar and a six-pack to do it right.”

In my notes from that day, I wrote, “Birds twittering, Rhombus rumbling, geese honking, wind howling.”

There
was
something alive about the Rhombus. The steel skeleton seemed to vibrate with an elemental energy. The Rhombus is where
the chant for “The Divided Sky” originated, inspired by a phenomenon Marshall and Anastasio witnessed one night.

“We’d always lay on our backs and start with a drum pulse,” Marshall recounted. “This one night, we noticed that half the sky was dark and half was light. It was an effect that came from the clouds being really low and the institute tower being lit in such a way that one-half of the lighting appeared to be off. It cast this incredible beam of light right over our heads. Half of the sky was fully lit and the other half was completely black. And we began chanting, ‘Divided sky, the wind blows high.’”

Marshall got married in 1992, and he held his bachelor party at the Rhombus. Phish were almost nine years into their career at that point, and it was a pivotal time. That year saw the release of their first album on a major label (
A Picture of Nectar
, Elektra Records); the re-release of their prior indie-label albums (
Junta
and
Lawn Boy
), and the recording of the concept album
Rift
—which, in part, addressed Marshall’s marital jitters. (Just listen to “Fast Enough for You.”) Phish also gigged 112 times in 1992. Amid this bustle, Anastasio returned to Princeton for Marshall’s marriage. At the wedding ceremony, Anastasio and Dave Abrahams performed a Bach processional on acoustic guitars. The bachelor party was somewhat less sacrosanct, ending with a fiery, heavy-metal exclamation by the Rhombus.

“There were six or seven of us,” Marshall recalled. “Trey had his guitar, and we played and drummed and smoked and drank. At the end of the night, we had quite a lot of garbage—six-packs and bags and shit. My resourceful friend John Sprow opened the hatch of the Rhombus. It has since been welded shut, but back then it was just held down by gravity and we knew how to open it. He threw all the bags and stuff into it, which was blasphemy for us since we’d always treated the Rhombus nicely. Here’s a guy who didn’t know our ceremony and just figured, ‘Oh, wow, what a nice garbage can.’ Then he threw a lighted match on top of it, and before long our butts were getting hot.

“This is a quarter-inch or more of solid steel, and the heat was becoming an issue, so we threw the door back down on top of it. All of
a sudden we heard a howling, and it really was
howling
. Each screw hole began making this jet-like sound and shooting flame about a foot high. The Rhombus became a blast furnace. It really was the night the Rhombus came to life. It was either saying ‘thank you’ or ‘get the hell out.’ We’d like to think it was saying thank you for all the years of fun.”

Every so often during Phish concerts, Anastasio would provide what the fans called “Rhombus narration” from the stage. Seeking out the Rhombus became a kind of holy grail for serious Phishheads. It’s hard to understand why the Phish following had such difficulty finding the Rhombus, since this unmistakable metal icon sits in plain view in a park behind a well-known building in Anastasio’s hometown of Princeton.

No doubt part of the reason is that Anastasio offered clues from the stage that actually threw them off the track. For instance, during “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent” at a 1995 show in Hershey Park, Pennsylvania, he purported to reveal that the Rhombus was located in King of Prussia. And so the Rhombus largely remained a mystery well into the nineties.

 

Anastasio returned to the University of Vermont for the fall 1984 semester. During his absence, Mike Gordon and Jon Fishman played in a group called the Dangerous Grapes—another two-guitar outfit that mined an unoriginal but satisfying blues-rock groove, drawing from the usual suspects: the Allman Brothers Band, the Grateful Dead, Stevie Ray Vaughan. If nothing else, their afternoon jam sessions entertained the members of the UVM fraternity at whose house they rehearsed. The return of Anastasio, however, promised fresh challenges and original material, and Fishman unhesitatingly threw in his lot with the prodigal guitarist.

Gordon also came around, but with a proviso: He wanted the band to continue to include covers in their sets. In this he had an ally in Jeff Holdsworth, who was also still in the fold, though his role would diminish as original material and musical charts increasingly entered
the repertoire. That said, Holdsworth provided Phish with two original songs—“Camel Walk” and “Possum”—which they continued to perform long after he left. In fact, “Possum”—a catchy, finger-popping country-blues shuffle—became a live favorite. Anastasio even made it part of his original
Gamehendge
song cycle.

As for the covers, Gordon had an interesting point to make, as he usually does: “We always talk about getting away from our egos,” he told Richard Gehr in
The Phish Book
, “but there’s a certain egotism about who wrote whatever song you happen to be playing, so that’s another part of the ego to do away with. The source of what you’re playing shouldn’t make any difference if you’re attempting to be true to the moment.”

The foursome finally settled on Phish as a name. Amy Skelton, who was around for Phish’s birthing, doesn’t remember exactly when or how it emerged. They first mused about calling themselves Phshhhh (without a vowel), based on the sound that brushes make on a snare drum. Someone even came up with a poster that had
Phshhhh
on it, but the lack of a vowel ultimately presented problems. (Imagine a promoter’s confusion: “You call yourself
what?
How do you spell that?”) And so Phshhhh became Phish, the decision made the afternoon before they played a Halloween party in 1984. This was also their first gig since resuming the band after Anastasio’s one-semester suspension from UVM.

The name Phish was intriguing but ambiguous, and it didn’t tie them to any particular sound or movement. Phish played on Fishman’s name and on fish in general, much like the minor alteration of animal names that turned beetles into “Beatles” and birds into “Byrds.” To clear up one oft-repeated misconception, Phish was only coincidentally a contraction of Phil Lesh, the name of the Grateful Dead’s brilliant bassist, despite speculation by fans that this might be some sort of nod to the Dead.

“Definitely not,” stated Skelton. “Definitely not remotely on any of their radar screens.”

“The band is called Phish, because Fish is the drummer,” Anastasio said matter-of-factly in
Specimens of Beauty
, a band documentary made during the recording of
Undermind
in 2004. “If I went and saw Phish, I’d be watching Fish.” It was Anastasio who designed the clever band logo, which depicts a rather circular fish with the five letters in Phish artfully outlining the piscine creature. Air bubbles that look like eyes stream from its open mouth as it swims from right to left. The elongated letters are reminiscent of sixties psychedelic art.

 

Mike Gordon is the
x
factor in Phish. He is a maze of seeming contradictions. For everything you can think of to say about Gordon, virtually the opposite is true, too. He is introverted and outgoing. He is warm and congenial, wary and reserved. He is spontaneous and process-oriented. He is low-key and high-strung. He is an utterly unique individual who willingly submerges himself within a group dynamic. He’s also hilarious in a subtle way, possessing a dry wit and deadpan delivery.

The youngest member of Phish, Gordon was born on June 3, 1965, in Waltham, Massachusetts. He spent most of his childhood in Sudbury, another town within commuting distance of Boston, where the family moved when he was three and a half. His father, Bob Gordon, founded a chain of convenience stores (Store 24) in New England. His mother, Marjorie Minkin, is a renowned artist, painting large abstract shapes on various media, including Lexan—a thick, clear plastic—in bright, iridescent colors.

For many years, from 1987 and well into the 1990s, Minkin painted Phish’s stage backdrops. She troubled herself to measure the wall space behind the band at Nectar’s (seven feet by twenty feet) to get it exactly right. Later on, when the venues got larger, she painted a series of four-feet-by-eight-feet sheets that hung side-by-side. Her work explores the interplay of light and color, and Chris Kuroda’s lights brought out different properties in the paint that made them come alive. His illumination of her paintings was another aspect of the band’s shows that was uniquely Phish.

Born into a family of observant Jews, Gordon had what he calls a “very religious upbringing.” He spent much of his youth roaming the outdoors. Near Gordon’s home in Sudbury were acres of fields and streams that he explored with his friend Steve Andelman. Down the hill is a network of five square miles of fields and paths. “My whole childhood was spent walking through these fields,” he reminisced. “There are stone walls hundreds of years old. It was just magical going there with my various friends, exploring streams and climbing trees.” For more on this, listen to “Andelmans’ Yard,” a dreamlike, autobiographical reverie from Gordon’s 2008 solo album,
The Green Sparrow
.

He credits music with helping him break out of his shell socially. He played bass in a few high-school groups, including the Tombstone Blues Band. There’s a charming picture of Gordon with his fellow adolescent bluesmen, instruments clutched earnestly while wearing matching half-sleeve baseball jerseys with “Tombstone Blues Band” printed across the chest. Gordon moved on to more contemporary sounds with The Edge, which included numbers by Talking Heads and the Police in its repertoire.

As Phish’s most devout Deadhead, Gordon has freely acknowledged the role of bassist Phil Lesh in shaping his approach to the instrument. But Gordon remains open to any and all sources of expertise and artistry across the musical spectrum. He immerses himself completely, almost obsessively, in his effort at continuous improvement. In one recent year, for instance, he spent a few hours a day learning Benny Goodman’s clarinet solos on the bass guitar. He’s also the band member who brought the bluegrass element to Phish. Perhaps the simplest way to explain his perspective is to observe that he’s into honoring roots while breaking new ground, too.