Phish (2 page)

W
hen I first met Phish in 1995, I knew too little about them even to have preconceptions, positive or negative. For me, writing about Phish looked to be another fun assignment for
Rolling Stone
, which I was doing a lot of at the time, and as a freelance music writer, I was simply grateful for work. While I might have preferred hanging out with R.E.M. or Robyn Hitchcock, you could send me on the road with anyone. (Well, maybe not Molly Hatchet or W.A.S.P.) Then and now, I love nothing more than traveling around and talking to musicians, who tend to be interesting and colorful even when their music isn’t to my liking. And so I was excited at the prospect of flying to Vermont both to spend time with Phish and to hike to the top of Mount Mansfield.

To prepare, I acquired their catalog and began listening. I started with the most recent releases,
Hoist
(1994) and
Rift
(1993). It didn’t take long to realize how exceptional these albums were. I couldn’t have predicted anything like this.
Hoist
was all energy, speed and color.
Rift
was a deep, dreamy concept album about an unraveling relationship. The music was original and bracing, uncategorizable and without obvious influences. I marveled at the complexity and depth of songs like “Maze,” “Mound,” “Julius,” and “It’s Ice,” as well as the lyrical cunning.

Chagrin at my ignorance quickly turned to delight at the realization there was a whole mother lode of Phish music to dig up and discover.
The studio albums were just the tip of the iceberg, as all manner of concert tapes and CDs circulated within Phish world.

My mounting interest in Phish’s music was further fired once I saw my first concerts: Red Rocks, Morrison, Colorado, June 1995, both nights. As it turned out, I had plenty more opportunities to see and speak to Phish as the assignment became a lengthy, quixotic undertaking. It languished in editorial inventory, as a new regime in
Rolling Stone
’s music department sat on the story, uncertain about what to do with it or whether to publish it at all. But Phish kept ballooning in popularity, so eventually they realized the group had to be covered. Periodically, I’d get a call: “Can you freshen up that story on Phish? I think we’re going to run it after all.” I did four iterations of the piece over a two-year period before it finally ran.

Phish remained remarkably sanguine about the delays. The wholly unexpected outcome was that after I got to know Phish and vice versa, they tapped me to do writing for
them
. To top it off, when the
Rolling Stone
article finally ran in 1997, it was nearly 5,000 words in length—a virtual journalistic mini-epic.

And to think that everything, including this book, sprang from a story that very nearly didn’t run.

I
an McLean was an enthusiastic early fan of Phish. After high school, he was introduced to the band by some friends who’d moved to Burlington to attend the University of Vermont. McLean lived in Hebron, New York, having moved there with his family from Arizona. He’d been a Deadhead—turned on to them by a much older brother who’d been a camp follower dating back to the Fillmore days—but like a lot of Deadheads of younger vintage, McLean ultimately found Phish’s music and scene more viable after a certain point in time.

“They were the first band that was taking all the shit we really liked from the Grateful Dead shows and doing more of it: free-form jamming and real spacy, out-there music,” said McLean. “That’s what attracted me to it, and that was at a time when the Dead seemed much less genuine. The transition for me was like, why would I go on tour to watch that fricking sad junkie [meaning Jerry Garcia] croak onstage
when there’s these sick dudes that are playing right down at Nectar’s? That’s what got me going.”

McLean regularly made the hour-and-a-half drive to hook up with his buddies at Phish shows—particularly at Nectar’s, a funky restaurant, bar, and live-music venue in downtown Burlington. Nectar’s served as Phish’s creative incubator through 1988. On its cramped stage, they took their music as far out as they dared, and a small but growing fan base hung with them through every bizarre gag, unpredictable meter change, and lengthy jam. By the time Phish began venturing away from their home base in Burlington, they had amassed a group of supporters who followed them, helping to light a fire in other communities.

Anchoring the circle in which McLean ran was Eric Larson, a former dormmate of guitarist Trey Anastasio’s and ardent early fan who hired the group to play at his house parties in Burlington. (In the 1990s, Larson got hired as Phish’s chiropractor, masseur, and videographer.) Larson and McLean had been to “a million Dead shows together,” in McLean’s words, but had now cast their lot with the hometown band. Their crew was a fixture at Nectar’s, and they also traveled to see Phish gigs at campuses and pubs in Vermont villages like Waitsfield and Rutland. The raucous, outgoing McLean was a particularly vocal fan and booster. If you listen closely to the live cuts from Nectar’s that were appended to Elektra Records’ expanded reissue of
Junta
, you can hear him whooping and shouting between songs.

McLean lived on a farm in Hebron with his friend Brad Condon. Every Memorial Day, they’d throw a big bash with food and music. It was McLean’s job to book the bands and Condon’s to roast the pig. These were no small affairs; at one of them, McLean booked six bands. The farm occupies several hundred acres, so there was no worry about annoying the neighbors. McLean twice recruited Phish to play on the farm: a late-summer party in 1987, attended by roughly thirty people, and a Memorial Day blowout in 1989 that attracted upward of four hundred party maniacs.

The first of these, held August 21, 1987, was notable for the sheer number of animal companions in attendance. Phish never missed a trick, and they performed a number of dog-themed songs for the occasion. Barking was as audible as applause. Anastasio’s faithful retriever, Marley, was designated “head of security.” The first set opened, logically enough, with “Dog Log” and also included “Shaggy Dog” and “Funky Bitch.” The middle set included “Harpua,” a protracted narrative about a monstrous canine that devours a beloved feline named Poster Nutbag.

The audience was tenfold larger when Phish again played the farm not quite two years later, by which point they’d become a good deal more popular in New England and were beginning to conquer other parts of the country. They were still a homegrown phenomenon but were on the cusp of something much bigger and evolving by leaps and bounds. This day-long bacchanal, referred to among fans and tape collectors as “Ian’s Farm,” occurred on May 26, 1989. It was a cool, clear late-spring day—perfect party weather. You can just imagine how idyllic and intoxicating the gathering must have been. As McLean observed, “What can you say about a party that’s got eighteen kegs and a band like Phish playing?”

There was one hitch. For a few nervous hours, McLean worried that the group wasn’t going to show. There’d been a van breakdown somewhere on the rural highway between Burlington and Hebron, and in that time before widespread cell phone usage, Phish couldn’t call the farm to explain the delay.

“I was a little freaked out, like, ‘Oh my God, my boys aren’t gonna be here,’” McLean said. But they made it in time to fire up their first set with the sun still in the sky, initiate the second as it was setting, and perform a raucous final set after nightfall. At the end of the first set, Phish relayed the hosts’ pleas for a sober driver to make a beer run. This dialogue between band members and partygoers is a nonmusical highlight of tapes from Ian’s Farm. Phish’s loose, danceable final set included ZZ Top covers (“La Grange” and “Jesus Just Left
Chicago”), the funky New Orleans groove of Robert Palmer’s “Sneaking Sally Through the Alley,” and the jaunty Caribbean calypso of the Mustangs’ “Ya Mar.”

Even after three sets and four hours of music, the revelers at Ian’s Farm weren’t ready to let go of Phish.

“The music was pretty killer, it really was,” McLean recalled. “I remember at the end we were like, ‘C’mon, a hundred bucks a song, keep on going!’ And they were like, ‘No, we’re fucking done. We’re going home.’ The show’s gotta end sometime, but they definitely played a long time at that one.”

The cost of hiring Phish to play all day at a private party in 1989? According to McLean, the band got paid $600—a hundred bucks for each member and their crew guys, Chris Kuroda and Paul Languedoc. Those were the days, in more ways than one.

“America was a different place back then,” McLean mused. “I think if you throw a party like that anymore, you’re gonna have problems. Now there’s all sorts of liability issues and the rest of it.”

Another thing he recalled of Phish in that time frame was their intense dedication to the music they were creating, almost to the exclusion of everything else.

“They were all pretty straight,” McLean said of Phish. “We were always trying to corrupt those guys, and they would never play along with our little tricks and games.

“We tried to be a bad influence as hard as we could,” he added, laughing, “but they were really focused at that point. They were really committed to what they were doing.”

Amy Skelton was Phish’s first fan. She attended their first show (and was among the few paying attention) and, in fact, befriended drummer Jon Fishman before there even was a band. She can recall sitting
in on an early rehearsal: “I remember Jon saying he had just met Trey and those guys and was starting to jam with them, and I remember going to one of those practices at somebody’s house. So I was at all of those first gigs because my buddy Fish was playing.”

Amy and Jon shared an interest in dropping acid that pretty much deep-sixed the academic side of their second semester at the University of Vermont. Skelton went on to excel at UVM as an animal science major, while Fishman ultimately found his niche at Goddard College, where he and Anastasio joined keyboardist Page McConnell. (Of the four of them, only bassist Mike Gordon started and finished his studies at UVM.) All the while, Skelton’s fandom and friendship with Phish remained at a high level. In 1992, she began working tours for the band on the merchandise side, and signed on in 1997 as a full-time salaried employee.

The reason Skelton didn’t hire on earlier, despite the fact they implored her to do so, was that she took a job running a horse farm in Maine shortly after graduating from UVM in 1989. On August 3, 1991, Phish played a legendary show on the farm that served as a precursor or blueprint for the outdoor festivals that would become a significant part of their legacy. In Phish-fan lore, the event was forever branded as “Amy’s Farm.”

The official name of this equine enterprise was Larrabee Farm, and it was located in Auburn, Maine, where Skelton grew up. Skelton boarded thirty-five horses, including thirteen of her own, and gave riding lessons. To save money in the cash-poor early days, the band would bunk down at the farm whenever they played in the area—in Portland or at Bates College in Lewiston, for instance. In 1991, Phish were beginning to break out into bigger venues on a more national level. They hatched the idea of playing a free gig to thank their New England fans, who’d sustained them with enthusiastic support from the beginning.

“They were doing well in Boston, and it just grew from there,” Skelton recalled. “There was this groundswell of kids who were telling
other kids, and it was spreading by word of mouth. That was a really cool thing, and by ’91, they really wanted to say thank you. It was as much a thank-you as the big gigs were in the later years. Give it back to the fans.”

Amy offered the farm, and on one of Phish’s visits she saddled them up and rode them out to look at the field she had in mind. “They were like, ‘Wow, this is amazing! We could have a great gig out here! It’d be so cool!’”

On the way back, the horses carrying Mike Gordon and Jon Fishman bolted for the barn. “I was terrified that I’d be the cause of one of their deaths,” Skelton said, laughing. “But they survived it.”

Skelton subsequently sorted out the “mass gathering” regulations with the Auburn city council, widened a tractor road and bridge to make the fire department happy, and hired a water truck to placate the health department. They built a stage, rented a generator, and mailed a postcard to fans containing a map, date and time, and instructions on what to bring (e.g., “It’s a hay field, so it will be stubbly, and your feet will hurt if you come barefoot, so bring shoes”).

Skelton and Phish had no idea how many people would show up. Previously, the biggest crowd they’d played for hadn’t been much more than a thousand or so. Amy’s Farm drew three thousand Phish fans. It was a strong three-set cavalcade with a “Harry Hood” encore and guest spots from the Dude of Life and Sofi Dillof (Page’s then-girlfriend and future wife). Every bit as impressive as the music was the sense of community. Amy’s Farm marked the moment when Phish fans began to come together and revel in their swelling numbers.

A swimming hole on the property gave the horde a place to take a dip when the band wasn’t playing. There was a keg behind the stage, where Phish hung out with their girlfriends and pals from Burlington. Skelton informally patrolled the fields on her horse. They’d erected chicken-wire bins where people could deposit garbage and recyclables. When the show ran long and night fell, Chris Kuroda fired up the one light he’d brought along and manually changed colors with gels he
carried in his pocket. “It was a great day,” Skelton recalled. “The show went off without a hitch.”

Afterward, the band and entourage repaired to the farmhouse and partied till three in the morning. A few hours later, after they’d crashed, it started to rain. It dawned on someone that Phish’s gear was still sitting onstage, exposed to the elements. “We all went, ‘Oh, shit!’” Skelton recalled with a laugh, and they scrambled outside to rescue it.