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Authors: Parke Puterbaugh

BOOK: Phish
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It could be argued that
A Live One
was the ultimate Phish album. Whereas the group willingly courted a larger audience with
Hoist
,
there were no such concessions on
A Live One.
This was not Phish’s attempt at a
Frampton Comes Alive
-type breakthrough. It was a concert compendium for hard-core fans.
Who else, pray tell, would sit through thirty-three minutes of “Tweezer”? Not only did it run longer than the typical TV sitcom, but it was also a knotty, demanding listen, even for some fans. Little about it was satisfying in a conventional sense, but it did rise to a crescendo, during which dissonant tension gave way to cathartic release. The recording came from their first concert following the
White Album
Halloween show, and the band speculated it might have been their subconscious response to the rigors of learning all those songs—a good, unstructured jam to help clean out the pipes.
Though it drew from a dozen concerts,
A Live One
was constructed to play through like an idealized evening with Phish. The two discs represented a typical show’s first and second sets. Anastasio announced intermission at the end of disc one, and disc two commenced with a few seconds of typically tasty set-break music (Miles Davis’s “Right Off,” from
Jack Johnson
) as the band reappeared onstage to an ovation.
There was no studio-mandated succinctness here, either. The album’s dozen tracks clocked in at 125 minutes. If you excluded “Montana,” a two-minute excerpt from a much longer jam, the average track length was over 11 minutes. This was just as Phish fans liked it, and tough luck for mainstream listeners who’d been seduced by
Hoist
’s relative accessibility.
“That was definitely a fan-oriented album,” affirmed Anastasio. “If you were really into the band, you knew what was going on. There was nothing on there for radio.”
At the same time, Anastasio still held out hope that radio might someday evolve in Phish’s direction. He spoke wistfully about radio when it used to be free from the constraints of outside consultants and corporate overseers like Clear Channel.
“When I grew up, I remember sitting by the radio, waiting for them to play some song I was into and waiting for hours, listening,”
he recalled. “So now I have this dream, and I believe it can happen. Maybe we can be part of it. That would be something I would be happy to be part of—the rebirth of radio.”
In a sense, the rebirth of more organic, free-form radio did happen with the introduction of satellite radio, and there is a place for Phish on there. In fact, there’s a jam-band channel on XM/Sirius. Commercial rock radio still remains out of reach, but with alternatives like satellite radio and stations that stream on the ’Net, who needs it anymore?
Apparently, there was nothing on
A Live One
for mainstream rock critics, either.
A Live One
was Phish’s sixth official full-length release (not counting
The White Tape
) but only the first to be reviewed in
Rolling Stone
. Tom Moon damned the two-hour extravaganza with faint praise, hanging a tepid three stars (of a possible five) upon it. No fewer than fourteen variations on the word
noodle
appeared in the review. He called noodling “the province of spring-water hippies” and Phish “the most self-indulgent act ever to sell out Madison Square Garden.”
There’s an interesting technical footnote regarding
A Live One
. As Anastasio explained, “We mixed it with this new piece of gear that let us create the image of the sound coming from behind you through phase cancellation. If you sit right between the speakers on that album, you should be able to hear it. I know most people don’t, but we put it on there anyway.”
After
Hoist
’s failure to catch fire, Phish decided not to do anything they found disagreeable. When Elektra asked the group to make a few in-studio appearances at key radio stations to promote
A Live One
, they thought about it and replied, “We don’t want to,” according to Anastasio.
Gordon picked up the story: “Our manager said, ‘You’re right, you’re making a good point. We probably would sell more records. But we don’t want to do that, so we’ll just have to sell less records.’”
 
The above-quoted conversation occurred during the second day of Phish’s weekend stand at Red Rocks in June 1995. This outdoor venue,
located west of Denver, was the setting for U2’s 1983
Under a Blood-Red Sky
concert video. Towering walls of ruddy sandstone surround and enfold the amphitheater. Musically, it’s tailor-made for more organic and improv-oriented acts—the Allman Brothers, the Dead, Neil Young, and, of course, Phish—since the transcendent setting inspires and enhances risk-taking music. Moreover, the air is really thin, making fans a little giddy even without nitrous tanks.
Phish sold out both nights in twenty minutes. It was the third stop of their summer 1995 tour, and the mounting army of Phishheads turned out in force. Whooping. Smiling. Inhaling. Chugging. Highfiving. Exclaiming: “Man, you can practically see Kansas from here.” Holding index fingers in the air—the Dead-derived plea for a single “miracle ticket”—or trying a more direct approach: “At the sound of the tone, you will give me your ticket.
Ding!
”
The little town of Morrison lies at the foot of Red Rocks. It has seen plenty of concert traffic, but Phish’s traveling road show was more along the lines of an occupation. Cars, vans, and Merry Prankster- style buses claimed every available inch alongside the road. Phishheads roamed the streets or fraternized in clumps around a music source. Most didn’t have the money to patronize local restaurants, even the inexpensive Mexican ones. One hapless longhair was trying to hock a pocket calculator for gas money.
Some in the milling crowd were hygienically challenged—hair matted in dreadlocks, bodies splashed with musk and patchouli to disguise the fact that it’s hard to take a shower on the road when you can’t afford motels. The knotty-haired tour rats you’d see scurrying around were tagged “wookies” because of their resemblance to the amusing alien hairballs in George Lucas’s
Star Wars
epics. Wookies were into the total experience—the music, the travel, the drugs, and all the rituals and challenges posed by their combination—and were completely ensconced in their own world, like an army of genetically altered, if basically harmless, mutants.
Their antithesis (and nemesis) were the “custies”—coddled trust-fund recipients. They tended to be well-educated achievers from good
backgrounds who didn’t lack for means. They were preppy in attire and had much in common with the baseball cap-wearing frat boys commonly spotted at Dave Matthews Band concerts. (Inside the world of Deadheads, they were disparaged as “trustafarians.”) Each camp abided the other with varying degrees of amusement and antipathy, and at the end of a concert each group went its separate way, the wooks to their tents and raggedy vehicles, the custies to their nice hotel rooms.
Over the course of their ’95 stand at Red Rocks—my introduction and initiation into the Phish concert experience—they gave their audience ample reason for ecstasy. They performed short songs, long jams, and all manner of things in between. There were bluegrass breakdowns. Atonal fugues. Barbershop quartets. Punchy rock songs like “Suzy Greenberg.” Long, dynamic pieces such as “Run Like an Antelope” and “Split Open and Melt,” which built to peaks of tension and release. They played wonderfully weird covers and conducted humorous bits of onstage business.
During the second set, Fishman bounded out from behind his drum kit to sing Velvet Underground’s “Lonesome Cowboy Bill,” also providing a vacuum cleaner solo. As an intro and outro to his moment in the spotlight, the band instrumentally lit into the chorus of the old Argent hit “Hold Your Head Up.” Why? Because Fishman particularly despised that song, and the others (especially Anastasio) loved to tease him. (“I hate that song,” he said at a 1992 show. “A hateful song, indeed.”) Introduced by Anastasio as “Henrietta,” Fishman triumphantly received the crowd’s applause.
Fishman wore his doughnut dress and goggles, which was about all there was in terms of the group’s attention to wardrobe. Anastasio and Gordon dressed as casually as they would have for a band rehearsal or trip to the grocery store. Gordon’s signature stage look involved rolling his pant legs halfway to his knees. Aside from that, only McConnell, with his Banana Republic-type shirts, accorded onstage attire (as opposed to costuming) the least bit of consideration. As with Pink Floyd, the real visuals were provided by the light show, and
the band members were the antithesis of preening rock-star fashion plates.
I had never seen anything like this before, certainly not by a band performing to a sold-out audience at a venue the size of Red Rocks. I had never heard anything like the music they played those two nights, either. The interlude with Fishman demonstrated that the band didn’t take themselves too seriously. However, they obviously took the music
very
seriously.
The shows at Red Rocks had ample musical highlights. They blazed on “Maze,” with its blistering, focused solo passages, and “David Bowie” rose to a blizzard of ecstatic triplets from Anastasio’s guitar. On the second night, a fine drizzle hung in the air, creating a sublime psychedelic spectacle as green and purple spotlights were absorbed into the billowy mist while the band played.
In June 1996, Phish performed for the fourth consecutive year at the scenic amphitheater. They sold out four nights in record time. The run was not without problems, however, as a purported “riot” in downtown Morrison was triggered when a car collided with a Phish fan, with the resulting brouhaha making national news. Phish would not play Red Rocks again until their reunion tour in 2009.
 
It was a simple question, but one that had implications the musicians likely could not have imagined at the time. In June 1995, I asked the members of Phish, “How big do you want to get?” Here is some of the dialogue that ensued:
FISH [
laughing
]:
So
big, the biggest ever!
PAGE: I think that for us, ’cause what we do is a little bit left of center, it’s not going to appeal to everybody. As long as we’re keeping true to ourselves, there are going to be people who love it, but it’s not going to be for everybody. So I don’t have a fear of [getting too big]. I really like the stage we’re at now. The sheds and some of the theaters and arenas we play, I really feel like we can play to the people in those rooms.
FISH: I like the size right now, too. I don’t think we’ve played in a room yet where we felt out of contact with everybody in the room. When we played at Madison Square Garden, Trey said, “Wow, that’s a huge room. I wonder if it’s gonna feel too big.” When we got there, it really didn’t. Because the show had this big, “all right, we’re all in this together” kind of vibe. I didn’t feel out of contact with people in the back, or that we couldn’t occupy that space, or that the sound couldn’t reach everybody well. But I do remember somebody saying that was like the edge. That was the biggest indoor room we’d ever played. That’s when I realized it’s just barely not too big. It’s pushing the envelope. Beyond that, it’s not about music anymore. It’s about production.
ANASTASIO: We just had a meeting with John [Paluska, Phish’s manager]. We talked about the fact we’re making a concerted effort to realize that this is our career, we’re going to enjoy every minute of it, and that’s it. If it’s not something that we enjoy, we’re not going to do it anymore, because how big do you need to get? We’re big enough.
At that point he cut an apple in half with a decisive snap of a knife.
What they couldn’t have anticipated was the sudden death of Jerry Garcia and disbanding of the Grateful Dead in August 1995. At that point, there was nowhere else for Deadheads to go but home, and the younger ones still had plenty of partying and noodle-dancing left in them. Phish inherited not only Deadheads who were sincerely devoted to the ideals of community and music, but also the gate-crashers and parking-lot opportunists who brought a rogue element to Phish’s scene. There’s little question that much of this would have happened to some degree anyway, but the Dead’s demise certainly accelerated the numbers and issues Phish faced after 1995.
 
Links between Phish and the Dead were certainly nothing new. Once Phish transitioned from an underground cult band to a story that the mainstream music press rather tardily decided was worth covering,
it was the Grateful Dead to whom comparisons were reflexively drawn. The parallels were inescapable. Phish had their Jerry Garcia in Trey Anastasio, and they were a pied-piper jam band around whom a nomadic following formed. Both bands built their careers in an organic, grassroots way, flying beneath the pop-culture radar and keeping the industry from intruding as much as possible.
So was it fair to label Phish the “new Dead,” or was this a spurious association promulgated by lazy journalists? The bottom line is that while it’s impossible to imagine Phish without the Grateful Dead as forebears, many other musicians figured as influences upon them. Some of them—such as Carlos Santana and Frank Zappa—were arguably at least as significant as the Grateful Dead. In reality, the media certainly overplayed the Grateful Dead connection and Phish probably underplayed it, at least in their first decade.
During that first interview with Phish—two months before Garcia’s death, as it turned out—I bluntly asked Anastasio: “Do associations with the Grateful Dead have any validity for you?”
He answered without hesitation.
“Oh, definitely. The Grateful Dead paved the way for what we’re doing and what a lot of bands are doing now. I think even Pearl Jam wouldn’t be having the same career without the Grateful Dead.
“The Grateful Dead as an American live touring act are, I think, the forebears. And it’s not musical style I’m talking about, because style is style, and style is directly related to the lives that the band members have led. So whatever experiences you’ve had in your life are going to come out in your music.

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