Phish (10 page)

The way the Nectar’s stage was configured influenced how Phish aligned themselves as a band, even after they graduated to large arenas and outdoor stages. The stage was long and narrow, forcing the
musicians to array themselves in a line, without the drummer behind the other musicians, as is typical. What was a pragmatic necessity at Nectar’s turned into one of Phish’s most visible quirks thereafter: a straight-line arrangement across the stage, with McConnell and Fishman at opposite ends and Anastasio and Gordon in the middle.

The band all lived within walking distance of Nectar’s, with Anastasio around the corner and the other members sharing a red house on King Street, across from the Harry Hood milk plant and overlooking Lake Champlain. “The house was “in the pit of Burlington, a funny little house down low, low as you can get without going into the lake,” Anastasio recalled. The fourth roommate was Brian Long, a former dormmate.

Anastasio remembered the crowd dynamic at Nectar’s: “Usually there wouldn’t be that many people at the beginning of the night. People would come and go, and it would just kind of swell. Eventually, it started getting really packed, which is why we had to stop playing there. But for a long time, it wasn’t.”

Chris Kuroda recalled seeing Phish at Nectar’s. Despite his best intentions of attending to schoolwork and forgoing late sets on school nights, he found himself reeled in by Phish time and time again.

“My experience of Phish at Nectar’s was that I couldn’t leave and I couldn’t stay away,” Kuroda said. “And that was a very common thing. Many times I said, ‘One set and I’m going home,’ and it never happened. It was addicting.
Unbelievably
addicting.”

Imagine the scene: a wildly enthusiastic crowd, everybody dancing, hair flying, the band and audience trading wisecracks between numbers. It was a musical experiment unfolding in a sociable laboratory. The crowd would slam-dance, like mock punks, whenever the band played the Gordon-penned hardcore sendup “Big Black Furry Creature from Mars.”

It was a varied crowd, too. One could see long-haired hippies, buzz-cut frat boys, and plenty of students and natives who fell into no obvious clique. In this sense, it was a preview of Phish’s fan base once it blew up in size and scale in the nineties.

“It was kind of like a Phish show [in the later years] where you had serious hippies who were doing the whole tour and sleeping in their cars,” said Amy Skelton, “and then you had kids coming out who were pretty clean cut and did well in school and obviously came from money. You had that same thing going on even at the Nectar’s stage of the game.”

“For five years we had Nectar’s and other places around town to play from nine until two in the morning,” recalled Fishman. “We’d get three-night stands, so we didn’t even have to move our equipment. Basically, the crowd was our guinea pig. We’d have up to five hours to do whatever the hell we wanted.”

“We really took things out at Nectar’s,” added Anastasio. “We did the play [
Gamehendge
] there, and we did a lot of songs where people would come onstage and do weird things.”

For instance, Steve Pollak provided surreal comic relief on occasion as the Dude of Life, sporting bizarre outfits and props that included a shower curtain, pool goggles, and rubber chickens. In some way, large or small, Phish would try something new every time they played Nectar’s.

The group taped some of the early gigs but, preoccupied with the shows and their execution, eventually relegated that task to various friends and fans. Many of the Nectar’s sets, for instance, were taped by Del Martin, a friend of the band. Phish hasn’t yet come to terms with him or others who want money and/or an assurance of their release, and therefore none of the Nectar’s shows have turned up as official LivePhish releases or downloads.

“We would have picked more shows from the eighties, if more were available,” said Gordon. “A couple of ones that were on my list of favorites, the early ones, just weren’t taped at all.”

Phish started taping every show, or nearly so, in an organized way starting in the fall of 1991. Prior to that, taping was much more sporadic and haphazard, which leaves about seven years of Phish history that is incompletely documented. Band archivist Kevin Shapiro has this to say about the years for which Phish possesses relatively few tapes:

“In some situations, people they trusted to make tapes at the time won’t give us what they made and want big payoffs or promises to release certain things. So far Phish hasn’t been willing to do that. To this day, we haven’t bought out any collections. There are a few we
should
buy out, in my opinion. But so far, as a matter of principle and financial reality, they haven’t done that.”

Nectar’s figured so prominently in Phish’s development that the band put its owner on the cover of their third album and cited him in the title,
A Picture of Nectar
—a phrase from the song “Cavern” that can be taken two ways: “a pitcher of nectar” or a photograph of the mustachioed Greek club owner. The group also appended a note to the CD jacket paying tribute to the man who let them develop as a band on his stage. In part, they wrote: “Eight and a half years ago, we played our first bar gig at Nectar’s in Burlington. Nectar . . . was happy to give us a gig despite our lack of experience, organization or a song list long enough to last two sets. . . . Those nights at Burlington taught us how to play.”

Anastasio unequivocally stated, “There wouldn’t be a Phish without Nectar’s.”

The group later granted Rorris permission to print up and sell T-shirts that read: “Nectar’s—Home of Phish.” He told the band, “You wouldn’t believe, these things are selling like
pancakes
!”

What’s curious about all this attention given to Nectar’s is that Phish actually played more gigs—or at least more documented gigs—at another Burlington club called The Front, a larger venue where they moved after outgrowing Nectar’s. Phish played The Front fifty-six times, compared to forty-three known gigs at Nectar’s. McConnell ventured that “we must’ve played Nectar’s a hundred times,” and Chris Kuroda guessed there were upward of seventy-five shows. Either McConnell and Kuroda, who were in a position to know, are both way off in their count or there are many more than the known number of Nectar’s gigs. Perhaps they were so eventful that it
seemed
like there were a hundred of them.

The emphasis on Nectar’s has to do with the fact it was Phish’s laboratory and playpen. There was no compulsion to be “professional,” just entertaining, and that came naturally. They treated the Nectar’s shows like open band rehearsals, with false starts, abandoned tangents, between-song chatter about what to do next, good-natured banter with the audience, gags and laughter, and ever more adventurous jams. This freedom gave Phish confidence to experiment and progress as they learned what did and didn’t work before a crowd. What they found out was surprising: The more risks they took, the more people liked them. While honing their act at Nectar’s and other local venues, they discovered a sizable audience in Burlington with an appetite for musical adventure. What they couldn’t have imagined was how widespread that hunger would turn out to be.

 

During the mid-1980s, before Phish began recording as a band, Anastasio and Gordon had been recording on their four-tracks at school and at home, and the fruits of these labors saw casual release as
Phish
(aka
The White Tape
). It was something they could send out as a calling card to get gigs, and they also sold it at shows and gave it away to friends. Depending on your point of view, this is or isn’t Phish’s first release. Only three of its sixteen songs—“Alumni Blues,” “AC/DC Bag,” and “Dog Gone Dog”—have all four members playing on them. Four of them are Gordon’s songs, and nine are by Anastasio, cut alone or with his Princeton comrades. This low-fi assemblage doesn’t really cohere as an album and, despite its charm as an embryonic glimpse at the band and its repertoire at an early stage, is hard to regard as a finished release.

On the other hand,
The White Tape
was distributed as a Phish release, and those three group endeavors do mark the spot at which Phish debuted on record (or, rather, tape). Moreover, five of Anastasio’s endeavors, cut alone or with his Princeton co-conspirators, went on to become key items in Phish’s repertoire. These numbers—“You Enjoy Myself,” “The Divided Sky,” “Slave to the Traffic Light,” “Fluff ’s
Travels,” and “Run Like an Antelope”—appear here in rough form. “Slave to the Traffic Light” is the most developed, in terms of a band arrangement. “Run Like an Antelope” was a straggler from Anastasio’s Taft School days with Steve Pollak in Space Antelope that had been re-recorded by Anastasio with Tom Marshall on a tape they called
Bivouac Jaun
before showing up on
The White Tape
. Drawn out to nearly seven minutes, it is an impressive one-man show and would become one of Phish’s longest-lived and most beloved numbers. In fact, its key lines were practically a rallying cry for Phishheads: “Set the gearshift for the high gear of your soul/You’ve got to run like an antelope, out of control.”

As for the rest, they’re mere snippets, with “You Enjoy Myself,” “The Divided Sky,” and “Fluff’s Travels” running only for a brief, skeletal minute or so. Gordon’s four numbers aren’t so much songs as experiments in sound, such as the audio-vérité dentist-chair torture chamber of “NO2,” or surreal spoken-word tracks with musical accompaniment, like “Minkin” (about his mother’s art) and “He Ent to the Bog” (a disorienting narrative that includes recited jokes about hamburgers). In a more hardcore vein, Gordon is solely responsible for the rock-music-as-middle-finger message of “Fuck Your Face.” His tongue was in his cheek, but there’s evident venom in his rebellion, too.

The White Tape
was released on compact disc in 1998, coinciding with a ramping up of the band’s merchandise arm. It still sounds like the equivalent of a very weird bunch of baby pictures. And while it is hardly essential listening, one can hear the groundwork of a band that was unafraid to break with convention and follow their own path.

Meanwhile, Phish were improving with every gig and gaining new fans as a result. Their fans turned friends on to live tapes and dragged them to gigs, where Phish made good on all the word-of-mouth that preceded them. Converts became proselytizers themselves, and the audience grew in an organic way. The band worked on their weaknesses—which were mostly vocal in nature—and tightened up instrumentally through incessant practice and regular gigging.

“They sort of sucked when we first started seeing them,” admitted Tom Baggott, a Phish fan and acquaintance. “They were getting it together. They were sort of sloppy, you know, but that was the fun of it. That was the magic of it. It was like there was a big joke going on and all the early Phish fans knew the punch line—which was that this was gonna be something big.”

“I thought they needed to work on the vocals,” noted Ian McLean, “but as far as the musicianship and the songs they wrote, I was like, ‘If they’re this small and people are that into it, then there’s no limit to how big it could get.”

“I was noting increasing dexterity, polish,” Amy Skelton recalled of Phish circa 1986-1987. “They rounded out the rocky edges.”

Skelton spent her final year of college attending the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Bitten by the Phish bug, she’d commute back to Burlington for their gigs, packing her pickup truck with fresh converts from UNH.

“I brought lots of live tapes with me to UNH, and Phish was good enough by that point that people who’d never heard them could be caught by the music. That’s saying a lot. You’re talking about crappy audience recordings of somebody’s friend’s band, so there’s no real reason for people to listen. But they were listening. I was making tapes for lots of people in New Hampshire who were asking for them.”

“They were my friends,” Skelton conceded, “but they were getting darn good. It was really danceable, you could get a good groove going, and the musical changes—even by 1985—were pretty right on. The whole band moved together and moved well. And they practiced hard.”

From the beginning, Eric Larson would tell anyone who’d listen, “These guys are going to be famous. These guys are going to make it.”

You could argue that it was miraculous that four musicians from four states, each possessing unconventional passion, talent, and vision, found each other in Vermont. McConnell has noted that he was within a hair of leaving the state when he finally connected with the others, and Anastasio’s misadventure with anatomical parts easily
could have scuttled Phish, as well. This much is true, however: They made the most of the opportunities their unique chemistry offered them.

Having gained momentum on the local scene, Phish next turned their attention to the world beyond Burlington.

T
rey Anastasio, Page McConnell, and Jon Fishman all graduated from Goddard College’s performing-arts program after submitting their senior study projects to their faculty advisers. McConnell—the group’s original Goddard enrollee—titled his paper
The Art of Improvisation
. Fishman wrote a manual called
The Self-Teaching of Drumming.

Anastasio titled his project
The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday
. It was a musical fable set in a fictional land called Gamehendge. Many Phish fans simply refer to the suite of songs as
Gamehendge
. Though the piece was rarely performed in its entirety, various individual songs became highlights of Phish’s live repertoire. A few other
Gamehendge
-related tunes were added along the way, and the story line got fleshed out onstage, as Anastasio would elaborate about Gamehendge’s inhabitants and power struggles.

Gamehendge
defies easy description or categorization. Being that Phish is a rock band and
Gamehendge
unfolds as a series of songs that tell a story involving various characters, the first inclination would be to label it a “rock opera.” But Anastasio had been exposed to the
Broadway theater by his mother while growing up, so
Gamehendge
might just as easily be considered a musical. In framing its main conceit, Anastasio drew from C. S. Lewis’s
The Chronicles of Narnia
, and the abundance of spoken narration takes it further into the realm of theater and literature. Because it was never officially released on CD—although it has been bootlegged—you can’t exactly call it a “concept album.” Maybe a “concept tape”? That’s the form in which Anastasio submitted it. The prized cassette is stored in the Goddard College archives.