Phish (34 page)

 

Early in the hiatus, Anastasio cast his lot with Oysterhead. The Oysterhead story began when Claypool was approached in 2000 by New Orleans-based Superfly Productions to organize one of their “Super-jams”—interesting and even improbable combinations of musicians brought together for a night of jamming. Claypool recruited Anastasio, with whom he’d played a few times—most memorably at a 1996 Phish gig in Las Vegas, where he and Primus guitarist Larry LaLonde sat in for a wild, extended “Harpua” encore—and Stewart Copeland,
the former drummer for the Police who’d been doing film sound-tracks in Los Angeles since that band’s breakup. They played a single sold-out show at New Orleans’ Saenger Theater on May 4, 2000. That was supposed to be all there was to it, but they got the bug to pursue their promising chemistry, and Oysterhead took on a life of its own, leading to an album and tour.

“I play with a lot of people, as does Trey, and I’ve never felt that kind of chemistry before,” said Claypool.

This trio represented the convergence of, as Anastasio put it, “three alpha dogs.” Their neo-psychedelic album,
The Grand Pecking Order
, mushroomed (pun intended) at Anastasio’s Barn Studio (or “tree fort,” as Claypool called it). Anastasio and Claypool knocked around song ideas. They had a big jar of ’shrooms, which contributed to the trippy, black-humored vibe of an album that, thematically, examines how the world works in a time of military-industrial complexes, global terrorism, and tyrants who subjugate the masses. Anastasio and Claypool must have had their ears to the ground, because they tapped into this unsettling zeitgeist mere months before the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

 

It was during the Oysterhead sessions that Claypool nicknamed Anastasio “Johnny Flip-Flop.” It was a kind of backhanded compliment that recognized his willingness to compromise or change course to placate people. A seemingly admirable character trait, Anastasio’s accommodating nature ultimately drove him over the edge. Even he owned up to it. Speaking to
Rolling Stone
’s Will Dana about the Phish organization in 2001, Anastasio allowed, “I always feel like, because of my role in this thing, a kind of responsibility. I want everybody to be happy.”

Shortly after recording
The Grand Pecking Order
, Claypool had this to say about working with Anastasio: “He’s a very well-rounded player. He’s very intuitive. He’s Mr. Happy Pants, too. His personality, he’s just a good positive-energy kind of guy. He’s got a good sense of humor, and he’s a pleasure to play with.”

Tony Markellis, who played bass on Anastasio’s solo projects from 1998 through 2004, also saw this side of Anastasio.

“He’s a very generous friend and employer,” said Markellis. “As long as I’ve known him, he’s gone out of his way to help those around him. If you need something, he’ll give it to you. I’d call him up or he’d call me up, and he’d say, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, kinda sitting around trying to figure out how to pay the bills.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, let’s go on a tour.’ I mean, literally it would go from maybe I couldn’t figure out how to pay this month’s bills to a week from then there’d be a tour planned, just because the spark of, ‘Someone I play with needs some money. Let’s do something.’”

A groove-oriented bassist with a long résumé, Markellis also got a bird’s-eye view of Anastasio’s relentless creativity. He confirmed the perception of Anastasio as someone whose brain is in constant motion.

“As far as I can tell, his mind never stops working,” said Markellis. “It never stops creating. And it just seems to be sparking at all times. I really don’t know if he ever has a moment’s relaxation. I certainly saw it when we were onstage. We’d even be backstage waiting to go out for an encore and he would say, ‘Here, I want to teach you a new song.’ And he would teach us a new song for the
encore
, as we’re waiting to go onstage! I don’t know how he does it. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be inside his head.”

The barrage of work from Anastasio during the hiatus included his first major-label solo album, the self-titled
Trey Anastasio
(released in 2002). It was a way for him to score for horns, to explore aspects of harmony more deeply in a larger group setting, and to delve into African, Cuban, and Caribbean rhythms. He even incorporated a seventeen-piece orchestra into a few of the numbers. He spoke of the band with an excitement that he hadn’t exhibited about Phish in quite a while.

“I’m trying to make music that uses what’s good about improvisation—which is the spontaneous moments—while getting to a point where not even ten seconds go by that there isn’t some
elegant or unique moment happening,” said Anastasio. “This band is an idea I’ve been carrying around in my head since before I did
Surrender to the Air
. If you look at it, interestingly, it’s virtually the same band. Not the same people, but the same array of instruments: two drummers, organ, bass, guitar, and a horn section with flute, alto sax, trombone. And now, with these tours and this album, this is a much more fully realized version of that, I would say.”

Markellis saw how Anastasio’s work with the solo bands, in which he was the unquestioned leader, gave him some freedom from Phish’s sometimes stifling group democracy.

“Trey was one of four nominally equal partners in Phish, although that could be argued,” said Markellis. “Most of the decision-making really was more him than any of the others, probably because of the nature of his personality and the way his brain works. Where another person might come up with an idea or a suggestion a week, he’s got a hundred of them a day, and of those hundred, at least fifty of them are probably pretty good.

“So just by sheer volume of output, he’s gonna be the leader of a group like that by default. But in the case of the trio and all those other groups I was involved with, there was no question that it wasn’t a democracy. Yes, he wanted our input, but he was the boss and we were there to do what he wanted us to do. So I think for him it was an opportunity to mentally breathe in a way that he hadn’t been able to in the context of Phish.”

“He’s a very sentimental guy,” Markellis added. “One funny thing I noticed was that he’s not good at goodbyes. At the end of a tour, everyone would be saying, ‘See you next time’ or whatever, and he was nowhere to be found. He doesn’t care for saying goodbye to people, even temporarily.”

 

Mike Gordon was also productive during the hiatus, making a documentary film,
Rising Low
, about bassists and bass playing.

Rising Low
had a threefold purpose. First, it was an homage to Allen Woody, bassist with the Allman Brothers Band and Gov’t Mule, which
he co-founded with Allman’s guitarist Warren Haynes. Woody was found dead of heart failure—with drug use a contributing cause—in a hotel room near New York’s LaGuardia Airport on August 25, 2000. Second, the film documented recording sessions during which Gov’t Mule’s surviving members—Haynes and drummer Matt Abts—cut two albums’ worth of new music using twenty-five guest bassists from across the musical spectrum. Released in two volumes as
The Deep End
, the albums and Gordon’s accompanying documentary were a sendoff to Woody and a way for Gov’t Mule to carry on without him.

Finally, Gordon delved into the roles, styles, and psychologies of those players who hold down the low end. He covered a lot of ground in what is probably the “straightest” project he’s ever undertaken. Yet in his inimitable way,
Rising Low
managed to combine documentary insight with offbeat perspective. Gordon even managed to incorporate a fictional bassist, Joey Arkenstat, into the narrative, getting well-known bass players to cite him as an influence.

In those years, Gordon also struck up a productive musical partnership with a fellow eccentric, twelve-string guitarist extraordinaire Leo Kottke, which resulted in two albums of subtly twisted musical genius,
Clone
and
Sixty Six Steps
. They were Kottke’s first collaborations with another musician on full-length albums. Gordon had sent the guitarist a tape of one of Kottke’s songs (“The Driving of the Year Nail”), over which Gordon had dubbed a bass line. Kottke could see the potential for collaboration, and they clicked.

Kottke described their improbable fit: “By the arranging rules, Mike and I shouldn’t be able to play together because he plays the bass more like a lead instrument, especially with me, and when I play the guitar, I hog the bass job. I’m playing a lot of the twos and the threes and roots and stuff, and I’m always stepping on bass players’ toes. I drive ’em nuts, and they drive me nuts.

“So you get a guy who plays the bass like a horn, who’s much busier than most bass players, and it should just be a collision, but it’s not at all. It continues to startle me how much we can play without getting in each other’s way.”

Page McConnell, who was “the quiet Phish” much like George Harrison had been “the quiet Beatle,” surprised everyone by also forming a band. He called it Vida Blue, after a major-league hall-of-fame pitcher. He recruited an A+ rhythm section: bassist Oteil Burbridge (of the Aquarium Rescue Unit and the Allman Brothers Band) and drummer Russell Batiste (who joined a reformed Meters in the 1980s and hails from one of New Orleans’s great musical families).

“I saw the Allman Brothers and the Meters within about two weeks of each other,” said McConnell. “It just all came together for me then, and I started making calls.”

Vida Blue’s self-titled first album was, in fact, cut in New Orleans, with sessions commencing just three days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The second Vida Blue album,
The Illustrated Band—
whose title punned off novelist Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction classic
The Illustrated Man—
appeared two years later. This one was made in Miami with the Spam All-Stars—a five-piece band with a deejay and a Latin, dance-oriented groove. It was almost completely improvised and pushed into areas both contemporary and experimental, making it the hippest and most urbane of all of Phish’s side projects.

Another project that might seem unlikely from the soft-spoken keyboardist: he sponsored a demolition-derby team, for which longtime friend and Phish fan Ian McLean was the driver. They called it Team Vida Blue.

“Not that many people know that side of Page,” said McLean, laughing. “He was the financier. We would find a car and fix it all up, and then I would drive it in the local demolition derby. That was wicked fun. We had great bonding and a huge time doing that. Maybe at some point we’ll do it again, fire up Team Vida Blue and smash more cars up.”

 

Meanwhile, Jon Fishman served as drummer for Pork Tornado, a group of Burlington all-stars who were the ultimate Vermont bar band. Among its members was guitarist Dan Archer, at whose studio
Phish had recorded
Lawn Boy
years earlier. Working titles for the album give the irreverent flavor of the enterprise:
Kiss My Black Ass
,
Naughty Pooping Pig
,
Plain Cardboard Cover
. After the record company weighed in, they simply called it
Pork Tornado
. It is a wildly fun and amusingly unkempt piece of music that touches on everything from R&B and funk to country and novelty tunes. “It’s a freak show,” said Fishman upon
Pork Tornado
’s release in 2002. “It’s just the weirdest group of people. It’s a constant source of entertainment for me. The mix of people is as eclectic as the music. That is why I’m in that band. Every time I go back to it and we’re partying or working on something or whatever, it’s always a laugh a minute.”

You wouldn’t expect anything less of a project with Fishman at the center. He also drummed with the Jazz Mandolin Project, which he’s done on and off for years, most recently in 2009.

 

Amid this flurry of activity by the individual members, the group also launched the LivePhish series. If the fans couldn’t see Phish for however long they were away, at least they could purchase these live soundboard recordings of choice gigs.

The first batch of six LivePhish releases launched in September 2001. Another half-dozen followed in 2002. The next set comprised all four Halloween shows at which they covered other bands’ albums. Gordon selected four more, including a couple of shows from 1994—May 7 in Dallas and December 29 in Providence—that were such obvious milestones, it was surprising they hadn’t been released during the first round.

Despite plans for a semiannual barrage of LivePhish releases, the series stopped at twenty. After the initial runs sold out, the deluxe packaging—silver-foil covers adorned with unique Jim Pollock illustrations and plastic double-folded CD housings—were scrapped. That was a good thing, as the plastic partially liquefied and leeched onto the CDs—well, my copies anyway. They’re available as downloads at
livephish.com
, and can be ordered online as physical CDs, too.

During the rollout of the LivePhish series, I was asked to do a number of interviews with key associates who performed important nonmusical roles. One of them was Dominic Placco, Phish’s bus driver. I was curious to see if his impressions jibed with mine on one matter in particular. I’d always been impressed by the fact that even when there were issues or conflicts, the members of Phish still displayed mutual respect. They never spoke ill of one another publicly or, in my experience, privately. They put friendship on an equal footing with music. If anyone was in a position to witness how Phish truly interacted during the long hours offstage, it was Placco. And so I put the question to him.

He’s an interesting fellow—a musician himself who’d been part of NRBQ’s Whole Wheat Horns. In fact, that beloved cult band wouldn’t have existed without Placco, who brought members of different bands together to form NRBQ. Placco started working with Phish in 1994 and didn’t stop until they did. He’s driven for Anastasio’s solo tours, too. He has even restored cars for the band members: a Chevy Camaro for Anastasio and a Buick Riviera for Fishman. He got to know them all pretty well, and he saw the partying and their private lives. In fact, his bus became Phish’s preferred place to blow it out.