Phish (9 page)

With the barest hint of a smile, McConnell cracked, “You tell me what night you’re gonna do that, Jon.”

“That might not be the smartest idea,” Fishman conceded.

Another time McConnell was playing chess at a friend’s house in Burlington when a few acquaintances dropped by. One was a diehard fan who, spying McConnell, rather too enthusiastically exclaimed, “Dude, I caught you guys in Rochester, I caught you guys in Buffalo, I caught you guys in Colorado, I caught you guys in Miami. . . .” Page looked up and quipped, “And now you’ve caught me at Max’s house, too.”

McConnell is the product of genes touched by genius. His father, physician and scientist Jack McConnell, was co-inventor of Tylenol, helped develop magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), devised a TB test, and was an expert in gene technology. The impetus for creating Tylenol stemmed from the fact that his wife, Mary Ellen, was allergic to aspirin. Dr. McConnell, who worked for Johnson & Johnson, researched an aspirin substitute. He also started a free clinic in Hilton Head, South Carolina, that served as a national prototype. Most germane to Phish, Dr. McConnell was a big fan of Dixieland jazz, and both parents encouraged their son to stick with the piano. Many years later, when Phish would swing through the South, Dr. McConnell joined his son’s band for a rousing version of “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?”

Like Fishman’s revelation about drumming at age five, McConnell realized he wanted to play piano at four years of age. He spent a couple years studying music at Southern Methodist University in Texas before transferring to Goddard. Prior to Phish, he played keyboards in a few college bands, including Tom’s Sub Shop and Good Soup. The former group included future Phish poster and T-shirt artist Jim Pollock, who lived in McConnell’s dorm. Pollock played guitar and sang. They played “R&B kind of stuff, just for the fun of it, on porches and places like that,” according to Pollock. According to McConnell, they had four songs from Velvet Underground’s
Loaded
album in their repertoire. “We were really bad,” Pollock said with a laugh. “Page carried the band because of his musical expertise, and fortunately he found those guys in Burlington.”

Good Soup covered groups like Talking Heads, the Police, and Bob Marley. McConnell cites
Talking Heads ’77
, the David Byrne-Brian Eno collaboration
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
, and Eno’s more ambient works as albums that turned his head during the New Wave era. McConnell was also in an R&B band called Love Goat, which opened for Phish at an end-of-semester gig on the UVM campus, when McConnell sat in with Phish for the first time.

At Goddard, he delved into jazz piano. Bill Evans, Art Tatum, and Thelonious Monk rate high on his list of favorite pianists. McConnell
brought a jazz influence to Phish, providing the impetus for the group’s short-lived alter ego, the Johnny B. Fishman Jazz Ensemble, which performed jazz standards with local horn players. Alto saxophonist Russ Remington, trumpeter Carl Gerhard, and tenor sax player Dave Grippo were subsequently christened the Giant Country Horns—and, in an expanded lineup, the Cosmic Country Horns—touring with Phish for spells in 1991 and 1994. (Anastasio would recruit Grippo and Remington for his horn-oriented solo band in 2001.) Every tangent the band undertook over the years, be it jazz, bluegrass, barbershop quartet, or Anastasio’s fugal compositions, served to broaden their already eclectic musical purview. For such reasons, McConnell credits Phish with providing the bulk of his music education.

“A lot of the formal training I’ve had has been in the band,” he said in 1995. “Trey’s material and some of the stuff Mike has written is really challenging on the piano. There were a lot of two-part invention sort of compositions that really challenge your left-right brain. I was cursing Trey at the time when he would write this stuff—not to his face, of course—but I developed a lot of dexterity and technical ability just through learning the Phish songs.”

 

Goddard was working well for McConnell as a laboratory of self-directed piano studies, and UVM wasn’t working out particularly well for Anastasio and Fishman, so it didn’t take a hard sell on McConnell’s part to convince both to transfer. For their enrollment, Page received a $100 headhunter’s fee—$50 apiece—as part of Goddard’s effort to shore up its sagging enrollment.

“It wasn’t like I was really recruiting them,” said McConnell. “It was more like, ‘Hey, look what I’m doing over here.’ It made sense, especially for Fish.”

“I remember checking it out and going, ‘You can do anything you want here and get credit?’” Fishman added.

Goddard called its program a twenty-four-hour curriculum, in the sense that you’re always learning since you’re theoretically following
a study plan of your own devising. “And you don’t stick to it,” cracked Fishman. “Then you write an evaluation saying why you didn’t stick to your study plan.”

“It can be like that,” McConnell acknowledged, “but if you want to get something out of it, you can. And we were all pretty focused.”

“The good thing about Goddard was as soon as I wasted a semester partying my ass off and then wrote an evaluation and got away with it, I realized I was wasting my own time,” conceded Fishman. At that point he buckled down with his drumming studies. “Basically I locked myself in a room for three years and played drums and went to band practice.” During this period, Phish shared a house just over the Winooski River from Burlington. Fishman didn’t even have a bedroom, just an alcove off the kitchen, where he slept on a futon. Overflowing kitchen garbage pails sat close by, and the place was so filthy that Anastasio claimed it was infested with maggots.

“From a distance, it looked like a pattern in the carpet,” recalled Anastasio, “but up close you could see all these little creatures wriggling around.”

Around this time Fishman went through a hard bout of the lovesick blues. A serious girlfriend split up with the drummer, plunging him into a chronic funk. The relationship ended over what she saw as his laziness. One day he had awoken with the revelation “work sucks” and decided not to show up for his job shoveling snow in downtown Burlington. She issued an ultimatum: “Either you go to work or I’m leaving.”

He didn’t go to work and she made good on her promise, so Fishman retired to his bedroom, rising only for band practice. Actually, he didn’t even have a bed at that point, just a growing mound of dirty clothing that he sprawled upon. Each day he began sleeping later and later. The cycle was broken one day when Mike Gordon brought a plate of eggs and toast to his room.

“I thought you might enjoy breakfast in bed,” he said with the barest flicker of sarcasm. It was five o’clock in the afternoon.

“That was the first thing that made me laugh in a long time,” said Fishman, “and from there, things got better.”

Over dinner, where this tale was told, the band members all cited it as a turning point. The next time Fishman saw his ex was backstage at Madison Square Garden, where Phish headlined in 1994. The reluctant snow shoveler had made good after all. In any case, there were no hard feelings.

“We each wound up doing what we dreamed about,” he said. “She’s an ornithologist, and I’m a rock and roll drummer.”

 

While attending Goddard, McConnell studied improvisation and led a jazz band that included Fishman, Gordon, a saxophonist, and a female singer.

“It was great for me,” McConnell concluded. “I can’t imagine ever having had that experience anywhere else.”

Anastasio, as noted, studied composition with Ernie Stires, whose mentoring proved significant in shaping his approach to much of the material he would write for Phish. He would spend hours at Stires’s home in Cornwall, Vermont, where they would drink coffee, listen to music, and discuss theory and composition. For homework, he might have Anastasio write a fugue. The idea was to expand his musical palette, and Anastasio—always up for a challenge—made the most of this one-on-one education. It’s worth noting that Stires provided extensive tutoring of Anastasio and others, including fellow Vermont musician Jamie Masefield of the Jazz Mandolin Project, for absolutely nothing. He shared his knowledge and overview purely for the love of music.

As a result, Anastasio was able to yoke his imagination to a base in music theory. The musical pieces written during his years of instruction in Stires’s living room uniquely defined Phish’s sound and approach. The typical piece of Phish music from this period had intricate sections that opened into an often lengthy group improvisation. Originating from densely composed music, Phish’s subsequent jams exhibited tightness, discipline, and vigor. The group essentially composed in the moment, listening and reacting intently to one another, as opposed to noodling aimlessly.

It’s curious to realize, however, that Stires never really grasped the extent of his achievement in helping to guide one of the great musical minds of modern times, largely because he had no use (or ear) for rock and roll. Stires was a product of the jazz age and also had a grounding in the classics. He saw rock and roll as endlessly repetitive and harmonically limited. As for the musical revolution he helped incite with his mentoring of Anastasio, he didn’t quite get it—culturally or musically.

“Trey wouldn’t be so enormously successful unless he was hitting some major vein in the psyche of his generation,” Stires said, acknowledging his most famous charge. “What he’s hitting is a mystery to me.”

Like the other members of Phish, Mike Gordon got something out of Goddard, though he remained a UVM student. On November 23, 1985, Gordon had a life-changing experience while playing a gig there with Phish. He reminisced about it in a 2003 conversation:

“It was the night I decided I wanted to make music a full-time career. I wrote two full journals just about that one night of playing. I had this incredible self-actualization, and I dedicated all future journals to figuring out what happened that night and what makes a peak experience like that occur.”

I asked whether that particular show was taped and whether the band might ever release it.

“I taped it, but I’ve never even listened to it,” he said. “I vowed never to listen to it. There’s no possible way that listening to it would ever be the same. It would be like being an entirely different person listening. So I just wanted to save the memory.”

 

Burlington, with a population of 40,000, is by far Vermont’s largest city. Yet it’s still a small city in a small state isolated by geography. Its relaxed cultural climate in no small way influenced Phish’s development.

“Burlington is an excellent womb for a band,” said Fishman. “It’s relatively easy to get a gig, you get paid decently, and it’s not a cut-throat situation at all.”

Phish’s first club gigs were at a place called Doolin’s. They played a midweek happy-hour gig from 5 to 7 P.M. Anastasio maintains that in the beginning there’d literally be only two people there: Amy Skelton and Brian Long, the “first fans.” It was, after all, a frat bar, and they weren’t catering to that type of audience. Still, they did slowly accumulate a crowd, as fresh converts brought their friends to the Doolin’s gigs.

Nothing happened overnight, though. While small club gigs were easy to find, campus gigs were hard to come by at first, and even Slade Hall (the “hippie dorm”) proved a tough nut to crack. This all worked to Phish’s advantage, as they weren’t swamped by success but experienced a slow, steady climb, during which they nurtured their craft in an environment where they gained a following one fan at a time. They gradually cultivated a varied audience of college students and hipsters from Burlington and environs.

“It wasn’t like one big crew,” explained Ian McLean, an early fan and friend of the band. “You’d go to parties and see people you recognized from Phish shows, but we didn’t really hang out together at all.”

On December 1, 1984, Phish ascended a rung on the local club scene by playing their first gig at Nectar’s. This combination restaurant, bar, and music venue on Main Street in downtown Burlington, with its familiar revolving sign over the sidewalk, has long been a local institution. The operation was owned by Nectar Rorris, a Greek entrepreneur with a soft spot for music. Through the years, Nectar’s has served as a place for bands like Phish to develop their repertoire and following. There was no cover, because Nectar never charged a cover. Hungry students could grab a cheap plate of food—gravy-covered fries were a specialty—and hear a little music. There was nothing not to like about Nectar’s. Anastasio even met his future wife, Sue Statesir, at Nectar’s when he dropped by for a drink.

At first, Phish performed not on Nectar’s main stage but at the less prestigious upstairs room (which is currently Metronome Club). For
a brief spell, including this gig, the group was augmented by Marc “Daubs” Daubert, one of Anastasio’s Princeton pals, on xylophone and percussion. Although there’s not much accurate documentation on how many times Phish played upstairs at Nectar’s—
The Phish Companion
lists just December 1, 1984—Amy Skelton maintained, “They played upstairs a bunch in the early days before they moved downstairs.”

Phish also played plenty of private parties, whose dates and numbers also remain largely undocumented. Eric Larson presided over a party house at 39 Dorset Street Extension in Burlington where Phish played a number of times. Larson has a video of one such affair from May 1987.

Hunt’s, a cool club that presented music most nights of the week, also played a critical role as a live venue for Phish in their developmental years. It was a long, narrow room with tables and chairs near the entrance and a dance floor by the stage. As many as 150 or so could squeeze onto the floor on a busy night. Phish got their first break there when the local reggae band for whom they were supposed to open dropped out at the last moment, leaving Phish to play the entire evening. Their fans were decent in number and enthusiastic in response, and Phish went down well enough to earn regular bookings thereafter. By the fall of 1986 they were playing well-attended gigs at Hunt’s and getting to play downstairs at Nectar’s, too. It was on Nectar’s main stage that Phish really gelled. From November 1986 through March 1989, they had an informal residency at Nectar’s, performing every month or two on some combination of Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights. Their increasingly loyal fans would show up every time they were booked, even if it was a three-night stand. That’s not to say Nectar’s was always packed, although it got that way toward the end of their time there.