Phish (19 page)

I pulled up on a crisp morning in late May to find the group gathered outside. A wiffle-ball bat rested on Gordon’s shoulder. The four of them studied me with the wary look of New Englanders sizing up a
stranger. The group had thus far achieved considerable success without the mainstream media, which had made virtually no effort to investigate the Phish phenomenon. So there was a certain understandable cautiousness about playing ball with periodicals like
Rolling Stone
just because they’d suddenly shown some interest.

After almost literally breaking the ice—snow was still visible atop nearby Mount Mansfield—we repaired to the rehearsal room. Cluttered and unfancy, this was where Phish spent five to seven hours a day working up material and practicing exercises of their own devising. In one corner stood a dry-erase board marked up with the set list for the “Voters for Choice” benefit they’d just played. This being a popular and prosperous rock band’s workspace, one might have expected a refrigerator stocked with Vermont home brews (like Magic Hat, made in Burlington) and other goodies, but there was nothing but a box of Wheat Thins making the rounds.

They worked hard and laughed often. Phish’s insistence on pushing themselves was evident at these sessions, where they spent considerable time on self-devised listening exercises. The best known was called “Including Your Own Hey.” These exercises, which formed a large part of their practice regimen from 1990 through 1995, are not so easy to explain but important for understanding how Phish could maintain a seemingly telepathic chemistry in concert. The whole idea was to improve the level of collective improvisation by learning to listen to one another while jamming. They’d do this by conjuring riffs and patterns out of thin air, varying and embellishing them until they were “locked in,” individually announcing their arrival with the word “hey.” When they’d each included their own “hey,” it was onto another round.

“‘Hey’ means we’re locked in,” explained Anastasio. “The idea is don’t play anything complicated; just pick a hole and fill it.” They explored different elements of music—tempo, timbre, dynamics, harmonics—within the “hey” regimen. A variation on “Including Your Own Hey,” which they called “Get Out of My Hey Hole,” had
the cardinal rule that one musician’s note could not sustain over anyone else’s.

“Get the hell out of my hey hole,” Anastasio barked to Fishman, and the drummer evacuated the hey hole, so far as I could tell.

“Mimicry is the lowest, most basic level of communication,” explained Anastasio. “These are anti-mimicry exercises—listening to each other, hearing each other, staying out of each other’s way.”

Another exercise found them inversely varying tempo with volume. “The faster we go, the quieter we’ll play,” instructed McConnell. “The slower we go, the louder we’ll play.”

The group set up a monstrous wail on one loud, slow passage that would have frightened a Black Sabbath fan.

Yet another was “Two Plus Two,” in which one musician picked another person in the band to hook up with while still listening to the other two.

They went at it like this for hours.

“This is what we spend our time doing,” Anastasio said matter-of-factly. “This is our job.” Years later, after the breakup, he would admit that what he missed most about Phish was band practice. I could see why; there was a tangible sense of concentration mingled with camaraderie present in the room.

In terms of concert dividends, “It doesn’t always work 100 percent of the time,” Fishman noted. “But I still think those exercises really pay off, because it puts you in a state of mind where even if you are making a lot of noise and stepping on each other’s toes, you’re still aware of it. At least it’s not like you’re just blindly forging ahead.”

At that point in the afternoon, Phish ran through a new song for an audience of two—a captivated journalist and Languedoc’s disinterested cat. Titled “Taste,” it was a complex piece of music in which they all played asymmetrical parts in different meters. The song, in a somewhat different arrangement, wound up on their next album,
Billy Breathes
. At a later point, they changed its title and lyrics, renaming it “The Fog That Surrounds” before reverting to “Taste.” It
was a good example of Phish’s inveterate tinkering. Every song was always in the act of becoming, subject to amendment and revision.

As they worked on “Taste,” it fell to Fishman to juggle four rhythms—the three other musicians’, plus one of his own in 6/8 time. Afterward, Anastasio wandered over to the drums, excited because he thought he heard another implied counter-rhythm. He picked up a drumstick and tapped out the elusive fifth rhythm on a snare for Fishman, who attempted to incorporate it. They knew what they were aiming at but couldn’t quite nail it.

This tangent was abandoned, but the very fact they pursued it demonstrated the group’s insatiable drive to push further. They’d constantly ask themselves, explicitly or implicitly,
Is there something else we can do?
And so they’d add, subtract, and rework parts, tinkering until they were satisfied a piece was as good as they could make it. Even then, it might change at the next rehearsal, and would certainly evolve onstage. This process of continuous evolution explained why no two Phish concerts were alike.

The group, at their best, also knew how to quickly enter a creative mind-set, almost a dreamlike state of consciousness. Mostly this would start with Anastasio. As Fishman noted, “One great thing about Trey is that he always goes into that non-thinking mode, even when he’s working on an intense composition. Kind of jumping up and down, walking around the room and letting it flow.”

Getting out of one’s own way was the idea. This goal of tapping into right-brained mode is echoed throughout music and literature. Neil Young and his producer, David Briggs, had a favorite saying: “You think, you stink.” Jack Kerouac described his writing style as “spontaneous bop prosody,” and he let his pencil fly without self-correction, saving any editing he might do until later. Unselfconscious expression was also the point of Ken Kesey’s mid-sixties Acid Tests—a lesson learned well by the Grateful Dead, who provided the music for those unscripted happenings in their earliest days as a band.

Phish likewise aimed to create in the moment and cultivate a group mind. They also realized when it was time to stop doing the exercises.

“Early on, we did those ‘Including Your Own Hey’ exercises in rehearsal,” said Gordon. “We were doing an ‘Including Your Own Hey’ exercise in sound check every day, too. And then we started to find that our jams sounded too much like the exercises, especially in the sense they were repeating patterns in two-bar or four-bar clumps. So all of our jams were starting to sound like these repeating patterns.

“I remember a point where Trey said, ‘I think we should try to break out of this.’ We even stopped doing the exercises and began making an effort to have the jams
not
be repetitive, where there was a specific
lack
of repetition.”

After a full day given over to listening exercises and working out “Taste,” a group dinner followed. It was a bit like
My Dinner with Andre
(or with four Andres). There was not a lot of idle chatter. I found them all to be lively, well-read, and serious conversationalists. Topics included the origins of myths and their place in culture throughout history; the declining role of organized religion in modern society; the work of writers and thinkers ranging from Joseph Campbell to Oswald Spengler; and the latest schools of psychological thought concerning the development of human personality from cradle to grave. Environmental issues were also discussed, with the band professing their dismay about all the nonrenewable fossil fuel that gets burned in the course of a tour by them and their fans.

“I lay awake nights wondering about things like that,” confessed Anastasio.

 

In the annals of Phish concerts, which are dissected, analyzed, and rated by hard-core fans at Phish.Net, the Halloween ’94 show in Glen Falls, New York, merited a 9.9. The only reason not to give it a perfect ten was that it started late. They didn’t crank it up until 10 P.M., and because it was a three-set show, the event concluded around 3 A.M.
In addition to their usual two hours-plus of original material, Phish performed the Beatles’
White Album
—all thirty-two songs, in order, without a break.

For Phish, the motivation for undertaking such projects simply came down to “liking a challenge,” Gordon explained with a shrug. Phish’s Halloween shows had always been special, dating back to the Goddard College years. (Think psychedelic drugs, a gaggle of Vermont heads turned loose on a deserted college campus on All Hallows Eve . . . and Phish.) In 1994, however, they decided to up the Halloween ante by performing an album by another act in its entirety. Moreover, they let fans pick the album. The band solicited votes in their newsletter. The
White Album
won;
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
placed a close second.

Phish mastered the bulky double album while on tour, rehearsing whenever they could steal a few hours. “We tried to learn the actual arrangements as deeply as we could get into them without doing the overdubs,” Anastasio said in 1995, when Phish were getting material together for their next album,
Billy Breathes
.

“We improved as a band by it,” Anastasio continued. “Several people actually said our new songs have more of a Beatles vibe. It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s true, because the last thing we did before writing them was to learn thirty-two Beatles songs. My philosophy is, how can you lose? It can only make you better.”

Phish lived by such challenges. It was this same philosophy that inspired Phish to take musical tutors on the road, invent arcane practice exercises, and start throwing their otherworldly outdoor festivals. For much of their career, each concert was approached in the hopes of breaking new ground. Even if the end result occasionally fell short, one had to applaud the effort because the intention was always pure.

The Halloween experiment went so well they did it again a year later with a different album. In 1995, the Who’s
Quadrophenia
garnered the most votes. Again, it was a double album, but with “only” seventeen songs. The performances were strong (except, perhaps, for Fishman’s
earnest but strained singing on “Love Reign O’er Me,” a vocally demanding tune). More songs than usual were sung by McConnell, and “Drowned” lingered thereafter in Phish’s live repertoire. Four years later, at a 1999 show, they jammed on “Drowned” for a half-hour. It was a rare cover tune that could launch a jam of such duration.

Phish performed the Halloween ritual twice more. On both those occasions they—not the fans—picked the albums. They chose Talking Heads’
Remain in Light
(in 1996, at Atlanta’s Omni) and Velvet Underground’s
Loaded
(in 1998, at Las Vegas’s Thomas & Mack Center). In every case, learning another band’s album influenced Phish’s songwriting and jamming to some degree. This was especially true of Talking Heads’
Remain in Light
, whose minimalist, polyrhythmic approach became embedded into Phish’s musical language.

 

Phish spent much time reviewing tapes of their fall 1994 concert tour to assemble something fans had been clamoring for. Many a tape-trading Phishhead desirous of soundboard fidelity had asked, “When are you going to put out a live one?” The group responded by putting out
A Live One
.

I was interviewing them at the very moment finished copies of
A Live One
were delivered to the hotel room. I mention this only because it was reminiscent of a scene in
This Is Spinal Tap—
a fact instantly noticed by Anastasio—where the group was handed copies of
Smell the Glove
, with its all-black cover. The difference was that Phish very much liked the cover of their new album. They liked everything inside the booklet for
A Live One
, too. There were tons of live shots from ’94, including one of a nude Fishman onstage at the
White Album
Halloween show. Fishman’s privates were just barely concealed by a flourish in the second “
h
” in Phish. One thing they didn’t do, though they’d talked about it, was put a fishhook on the cover—a symbol that would have signified “The Band Formerly Known as Phish” (a sly riff on Prince’s then-recent change from name to symbol).

The four of them laughed and bantered about the photo spread.

Every song on
A Live One
came from a different show, with one minor exception: McConnell’s extended piano coda on “The Squirming Coil” was plucked from the same October 23 concert as “Harry Hood.” (The main part of “The Squirming Coil,” however, was taken from an October 9 performance.) The entire fall 1994 tour had been taped. After each show they’d make notes about songs to consider for inclusion. By tour’s end, the list was well over five hundred songs long. They also polled fans online for their favorite performances. Honing it down required much listening, and at group meetings songs were crossed out or left on the master list. This process took two months, by which point they’d reduced the list to thirty. The final lineup was settled over plates of mushroom caps (baked and stuffed, not the hallucinogenic variety) during a group confab at a restaurant.

Among other things, the album revealed the extent to which Phish and their fans had bonded. The audience went beyond energizing the band with sold-out houses and applause. Now they provided cameos in key places. They chanted “Wilson” at the appropriate spot in that song, clapped three times rapidly during the pauses in “Stash,” and sang while bouncing up and down to “Bouncing Around the Room.” The audience had grown large but retained a group identity by means of in-jokes, knowledge of details, secret language, and concert rituals. Going to see Phish at this juncture was a bit like attending a midnight screening of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
.