Phish (33 page)

Marriage, divorce, and kids further altered the interpersonal landscape among the band members. They were no longer footloose twentysomethings who could pledge their allegiance entirely to Phish. Those legendary daylong rehearsals, where they’d work on collective improvisation and musical group-think, were in the past. According to Anastasio, they virtually stopped practicing after 1998, except at concert sound checks. While families and outside projects figured more into their lives, they were also starting to fret among themselves about the burgeoning office staff. The increasing overhead brought with it pressure to tour even if they didn’t feel up to it—and in the wake of their marathon triumph at Big Cypress, there was a certain amount of band ennui and “what’s the point?”

Though their operation never grew anywhere near as top-heavy as the Grateful Dead’s (which surpassed three hundred employees), Phish’s payroll numbered just over forty. However, the perception from within the band, particularly from McConnell’s and Anastasio’s perspective, was that the office had become an albatross. The band members didn’t always recognize all those in their employ when they dropped by their combination office and warehouse space on Pine Street in Burlington. If Phish wished to suspend touring for a while, they still had fiduciary obligations to their employees. The only alternative was to downsize.

Yet from the start it had been Phish’s desire to keep as much as possible in-house, including merchandise. Early on they’d tried farming work to outside companies, but the products lacked the stamp of uniqueness Phish wanted on everything that bore their name. They enjoyed coming up with ideas and having the artists and staff on hand to actualize them. When done in-house, they could go from an idea someone might’ve had over coffee one morning to reality in a matter of days. That is in contrast to wrangling with slow-moving outside entities that likely didn’t grasp the Phish aesthetic.

“There were some tensions once their business had grown so large that there was a lot to keep track of, to the degree they wanted to engage with and have people accountable to them for things,” Paluska
allowed. “It’s hard to juggle that as an artist, so there were times when they wished things were simpler. In the case of merchandising, you can do it yourself and do it well, or there’s a market that’s going to get filled by somebody else. I always wanted the business to be run as well as possible, and we were really into doing things ourselves, and they were into that, too. But sometimes the realities of doing that felt like a lot to them. All of the business stuff could be oppressive at times. There were certainly plenty of tensions and complexities in juggling the artistic and business stuff over the years, and at some level I think that’s just unavoidable.”

The bottom line is that one can’t have a lean payroll and receive the benefits of in-house merchandising, art, ticketing, and management staffs, not to mention a loyal and dedicated road crew. But the idea that the group, exhausted after working steadily since 1985, couldn’t take time off because they had to meet a sizable monthly payroll engendered a slow-burning paranoia among them about the office. In the sense that the staff were paying their own way—each worker added value to the bottom line over and above salary and benefits—the office issue was something of a scapegoat. The notion that Phish were burdened by excessive staffing might have been more perception than reality, but any and all issues at that time were to some degree magnified by drugs and fatigue.

And so they took a hiatus to address that and other matters weighing upon them at the time.

 

Anastasio announced the impending hiatus onstage in Las Vegas on September 30, 2000 (his thirty-sixth birthday). All kinds of reasons were given, but it boiled down to these things: They were exhausted; they needed a break from each other and from the bus and backstage bacchanals; and they intended to streamline the office staff. They also wanted to play with other people and work on solo projects.

Drugs were never overtly mentioned as a reason for the hiatus, but after the resumption Anastasio stated it plainly to writer Anthony DeCurtis in a 2003
Relix
interview: “Nobody ever talks about this
around Phish, but drugs had infiltrated our world—and me. I don’t want to point my finger at that, because the problems had started a long time before. It was about losing myself, losing track of who I really am.”

This open-ended break held forth the possibility they might never regroup, an option feared by fans who’d grown accustomed to organizing their lives around Phish tours. Many Phishheads had spent much of the previous decade living from tour to tour, and now the plug was indefinitely pulled on their main source of pleasure and personal identity. They’d either have to find another band to follow or give up the game until Phish returned.

Phish performed their last show before the hiatus—or “the first last show,” as it’s since been called—on October 7, 2000, at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Palo Alto, California. It was a memorable concert, highlighted by a great “Mike’s Song” trilogy and a sublime jam on “Bathtub Gin” that, in some indefinable way, got to the core of all that was good about Phish and what both sides, band and fans, would miss when they were gone. They encored, fittingly, with “You Enjoy Myself.”

After Phish left the stage, the crew members were introduced and received standing ovations from appreciative Phishheads. Paul Languedoc played the Beatles’ “Let It Be” as they cleared the stage. Many tears were shed.

Meanwhile, the band huddled by themselves, silently honoring the moment and taking stock of what they’d accomplished over the past seventeen years. Brad Sands stood sentry outside. Not even close relatives were admitted as they reflected on how far they’d come together, not knowing how long they might be apart.

I
n the wee hours of August 3, 2003, Phish took over the control tower at a U.S. military installation. They staged this bloodless coup at It—the actual name of the event—which was the sixth Phish festival and their first since Big Cypress, three and a half years earlier. (Unsurprisingly, sensing a vacuum and opportunity, Bonnaroo—the Phish-inspired mother of all latter-day rock festivals—debuted in 2002, during their hiatus.) In a nutshell, It was mud-plagued but musically and conceptually solid, and it had one particularly remarkable moment: the Tower Jam.

The group borrowed a line from William Shakespeare for the occasion. These words were inscribed into an illuminated arch beneath which festivalgoers passed as they entered the site: “Our Intent Is All for Your Delight.” They got the wording slightly wrong. The exact quote, lifted from Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
, was this: “Our
True
Intent Is All for Your Delight.” Phish made good on that statement of intent.

“I just loved that line as the mantra for the festival,” said Jason Colton. “It’s like, ‘We are creating this magic for you.’ Trey often talked about the concept of completely reimagining a concert environment, thinking about everything through the eyes of a fan. What can you do, how can you create a space for the fans’ sake? That stuck with me because it really was a philosophy to go by—to check everything you’re doing and think about how it’s going to affect the fans and their experience. That overlying philosophy was an exciting goal to shoot for.”

There was much at It to delight, confound, and blow the minds of festivalgoers. Burlington artists Lars Fisk and Scott Campbell designed an installation called Sunk City, filling a recessed spot in the landscape with a partially submerged skyline. The installation looked like a future archaeological site filled with the listing remnants of a collapsed urban civilization. Ten thousand rolls of masking tape were used to wrap trees in a patch of forest, like some project that artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude might’ve dreamed up on a bad trip. Roaming through the masking-tape forest were performance artists attired as squirrels and other bizarre characters (imagine perambulating the masking-tape forest while tripping). The water tower bore Groucho Marx’s likeness, and a giant statue of a burger-toting Big Boy—the fast-food icon whose uplifted arm held aloft a plate, which one could stand on—perched at the edge of Sunk City. It was an extreme recontextualization of familiar cultural icons, delightfully disorienting and appropriately surreal.

Even with the wealth of sideshows, sights, and displays, nothing was more mind-blowing than the Tower Jam, which started at 2 A.M. For the next hour, Phish jammed free-form in a shimmering, ambient-techno fusion style on the roof of the control tower. That wasn’t the half of it. Chris Kuroda lit the structure with his phantasmagoric palette. Strobe lights encircled the tower, which was also bathed in green and red spotlights. Pink fireworks and circling blue lights lit up an adjoining field. A trio of dancer-gymnasts rappelled along the sides of the tower like giant gravity-defying spiders as Phish played and lights danced.

“The coolest manmade psychedelic installation of all time,” ventured archivist Kevin Shapiro.

“One of the most creative, over-the-top ‘gags’ ever devised by the band and crew,” agreed promoter Dave Werlin.

Even fans who thought they’d seen it all rated the Tower Jam as a special moment. Overall, it and It were something of a last hurrah—the undisputed high points of the rather brief reunion that followed Phish’s hiatus.

 

After staging Big Cypress, Phish spent much of the first decade of the twenty-first century out of commission. To summarize, they went on hiatus in 2000, regrouped in 2002, toured heavily in 2003, and broke up “for good” in 2004.

But the members of Phish did not rest on their laurels. The amount of musical output from them actually multiplied because instead of one band, there were now several bands and side projects.

During the hiatus, Trey Anastasio ramped up the activities of his solo band and also formed Oysterhead, a supergroup of sorts, with Primus’s Les Claypool and the Police’s Stewart Copeland. In an inspired pairing of two like minds, Mike Gordon formed a duo with guitarist Leo Kottke. He also released his first solo album (
Inside In
) and second film (
Rising Low
). Page McConnell became a bandleader, forming Vida Blue with a sterling rhythm section. Jon Fishman drummed for the Burlington-based outfits Pork Tornado and the Jazz Mandolin Project.

After two years apart, Phish regrouped. They quickly cut a new studio album (
Round Room
) and returned to the stage with a New Year’s Eve show at Madison Square Garden. They toured throughout 2003, a year that included a lot of ups (an amazing summer tour, climaxing with the It festival) and a few downs (more of the problems that had caused them to declare a hiatus).

Barely fifteen months after the New Year’s Eve reunion show, Anastasio declared “we’re through” with a note on the band’s Web site. There was a final album (
Undermind
), a short summer tour, and Phish’s
muddy, messy farewell festival outside Coventry, Vermont, which wrapped things up on a sour note in August 2004. In its wake, Phish disbanded, Dionysian Productions dissolved, and virtually all crew, staff, and employees were dismissed.

Then it was back to solo careers for Anastasio, Gordon, McConnell, and Fishman, and an acceleration of archival concert releases. The Phish family dispersed professionally and geographically, moving on to other careers or absorbed elsewhere in the music industry. Certain key figures—Brad Sands, Chris Kuroda, Paul Languedoc—kept working intermittently with Anastasio, though things weren’t quite the same as his personal situation fluctuated and, ultimately, deteriorated.

 

No one saw any of this coming when Phish entered their hiatus in October 2000. The dictionary definition of
hiatus
is “any gap or interruption,” and in this sense there was discontinuity in the career of Phish. But the hiatus did not mean there was any sort of musical stoppage or lightening of the workload at the Phish office. To the contrary, the staff found themselves attending to four careers, each of which involved albums, tours, and detailed planning. “We were super busy during hiatus because they started doing their side stuff
and
we downsized in staff at the same time,” said Beth Montuori Rowles. “So instead of one band we had four or even five bands, depending on what day it was and what Trey was doing.”

She laughed at the notion that Phish’s staff had nothing to do for two years. “People were like, ‘You work for the band, but what do you do? I thought they broke up. How can you still have a job?’ I would say, ‘You have no idea how much these guys put out and how much caretaking it takes and how much administration it requires.’”

In other words, it may have been a hiatus, but it was hardly a vacation. The band members were as busy as ever. As soon as the hiatus commenced, Anastasio—for whom “downtime” is not part of his vocabulary—got right to work on a long-cherished project: a symphonic version of “Guyute,” the ambitious, extended centerpiece of
Story of the Ghost
. Parts of it sound like a Celtic jig, and no wonder: Anastasio composed it in Ireland. “The first day of the hiatus, I started working on orchestrating ‘Guyute,’” he said. “I came home from that Shoreline Amphitheatre show, woke up the next morning, pulled out the manuscript paper, sat down at the piano, and started writing. And I was pretty much working all day for months. At least four months.”

“Guyute” would take on a life of its own in this decade. First it was scored for and performed by the Vermont Youth Orchestra. Then Anastasio recorded it with an orchestra in Seattle. That version became the highlight of
Seis de Mayo
, his all-instrumental solo album (released in April 2004). Finally, he conducted the Nashville Symphony Orchestra in a live performance of “Guyute” on the final night of the 2004 Bonnaroo festival.

That was just the beginning. Anastasio maintained a grueling workload from the hiatus to the reunion and on through the breakup right up until his 2006 drug bust. His recorded output in that six-year period included seven solo albums (
Trey Anastasio
,
Plasma
,
Seis de Mayo
,
Shine
,
Bar 17, 18 Steps,
and
Horseshoe Curve
), two Phish studio albums (
Round Room, Undermind
), and a studio album with Oysterhead (
The Grand Pecking Order
). There were tours with Phish, Oysterhead, and his ever-evolving solo band (“Trey Band,” in fan parlance), which grew from three to eleven pieces. He played on Dave Matthews’s 2004 solo album (
Some Devil
) and tour, which was the hardworking singer-guitarist’s own version of a hiatus from the ridiculously popular jam band that bore his name.