Phish (8 page)

Gordon also has an interest in cinema that has paralleled his career in music. He studied film at UVM, and one professor in particular, Ted Lyman, became something of a mentor. As a cineaste, he cites as his favorite directors such existential wits as Woody Allen and David Lynch, as well as the linchpins of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. He has wielded the camera for Phish’s
lone video (“Down With Disease”); for
Tracking
, a half-hour documentary about the making of Phish’s fifth album,
Hoist
; and for two full-length films,
Outside Out
(a cryptic, quasi-comedic tale featuring Col. Bruce Hampton as an anarchic mentor) and
Rising Low
(a fine documentary about bass players and bass playing).
Rising Low
paid tribute to Allen Woody, the bass player for the Allman Brothers Band and Gov’t Mule, who died of a drug overdose in August 2000. In the same movie, Gordon blurred the lines between fact and fiction by contriving a bassist named Joey Arkenstat and having some of the instrument’s real-life legends pay verbal tribute to this nonexistent “influence.” Somewhere in all this can be discerned the broad outline of his serious yet playful personality.

An inescapable similarity between Anastasio’s and Gordon’s upbringing is that both musicians had a practical, business-oriented father and a creative, artistically inclined mother. In their career you can see this merging of art and practicality. Both sets of parents divorced, too. Moreover, Anastasio’s and Gordon’s siblings each went on to careers in the environmental field. David Gordon earned a degree in environmental law at Harvard and worked abroad in the area of environmental diplomacy. Kristine Manning (Trey’s sister) earned her degree at Duke University and worked as an environmental journalist, editor, and advocate before her untimely death in 2009.

“Between my sister and Mike’s brother, they’re gonna save the world,” Anastasio noted in 1995.

“We’re going out there to destroy it,” cracked Gordon, “and we’re counting on them to rebuild it.”

 

Gordon’s first original contribution to Phish bore the prosaic title “Mike’s Song,” which he recorded as a four-track. Both Anastasio and Gordon were pretty proficient with their four-track machines by 1984, and a good portion of material that wound up on Phish’s first release,
The White Tape
, stemmed from their individual efforts.

“Mike’s Song” went on to become a Phish concert staple, formed into a triptych with “I Am Hydrogen” and “Weekapaug Groove” (or,
after 1992, with an ever-unpredictable middle in place of “I Am Hydrogen”). In the beginning, however, “Mike’s Song” was “just a little four-track experiment I did in my sophomore dorm room,” according to Gordon. “We never played the groove that was on the four-track, which was kind of like Motown.”

“Weekapaug Groove” came about in typical seize-the-moment fashion. A high-school friend of Anastasio’s had a family house in Weekapaug, Rhode Island, a beach town, and Phish played at the yacht club. As they were returning from the gig, the Four Seasons’ cheesy disco-era hit, “Oh, What a Night (1963),” came on the radio. Mishearing the lyrics of the bridge, Gordon began singing, “trying to make a woman that you move.” To that bit of doggerel—“It never occurred to any of us that it has any meaning”—he added “Sharing in a Weekapaug groove,” and the germ of a song was born. For some inexplicable reason, the town fathers of Weekapaug took offense to the song and had a threatening cease-and-desist lawyer letter sent to the band, which they sensibly ignored.

 

Page McConnell entered the picture in 1985, when he enlisted Phish to play Springfest at Goddard College. Ultimately, he joined the band and also convinced Anastasio and Fishman to transfer to Goddard, which had a self-directed, open-ended curriculum. Goddard students set their own goals and agendas for learning and then meet with an adviser for weekly evaluations in order to track progress. In their final year, a senior study project is undertaken and submitted.

McConnell studied jazz piano with a teacher named Lar Duggan, who lived in Burlington, and his musical mentor at Goddard was named Karl Doyle. Anastasio was tutored in composition by Vermont composer Ernie Stires and wrote
The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday
(aka
Gamehendge
)—for his senior thesis. Fishman played drums and penned a how-to manual on drumming. All three graduated from Goddard.

During the 1985 Goddard Springfest, the institution seemingly didn’t have much to celebrate, with its student body having shrunk to
a historical low of 33. (In 2002, Goddard completely terminated its traditional-age on-site bachelor’s degree program. Now it exists solely to provide a low-residency education for working adults.) McConnell recalled that the ’85 Springfest included a dozen bands besides Phish.

After recruiting Phish to play Springfest and then jamming with the group at a UVM gig in May 1985, McConnell set his sights on actually joining Phish. It was a good fit and, for sure, more challenging than the groups he’d fallen in with at Goddard. In his desire to join Phish, he had an ally in Gordon. While Phish went on another hiatus in the summer of 1985—during which Anastasio and Fishman spent the summer bumming across Europe—McConnell moved to Burlington and Gordon rehearsed Phish’s repertoire with him. When Phish revved up again that September, Gordon made sure McConnell was on hand.

McConnell and Fishman recalled what ensued:

The sticking point had to do with the fact that Anastasio wasn’t entirely sold on the concept of Phish with a keyboardist in their ranks. “Phish is a two-guitar band,” he protested. But this was one time his opinion did not hold sway, fortunately, for all concerned.

 

Anastasio and Fishman’s European vacation in the summer of 1985 is a story worth relating in its own right, not just because it was eventful but because a couple of Phish’s most renowned songs (“You Enjoy
Myself,” “Harry Hood”) came out of it. As Fishman recounted, he and Anastasio painted houses for a month to make enough money for a summer abroad. The two of them, joined by Anastasio’s Princeton school chum, Pete Cottone, set off for Europe with about $400 in each of their pockets. By the end of the summer, they were relying on Pete’s dad’s credit card. Their travels carried them to England, Belgium, Italy, France, Holland, and Germany, culminating in a three-week beach campout on the Greek island of Corfu. In a sense, this was Phish’s first tour of Europe, although the full quartet wouldn’t make the trek for purposes of performing for seven more years.

Their experience of living in a bamboo hut on Pelekas Beach sounds something like a more exotic preview of Phish’s festival campouts, albeit a bit more edgy and real-world. Fishman recalled the scene:

The two also had a portable Sony cassette recorder upon which they recorded their travel experiences, dubbed the “Tape of Life.” On one side of the tape was the Beatles’
Magical Mystery Tour
, and on the other was Pink Floyd’s
Meddle
. The unit’s erase head was broken, so instead of recording over the music, it simply added sounds from their travels to it, such as a voice repeating the line, “Hello, my name is Yannis, I come from Cyprus.”

“Everyone we met would talk into this thing—weird people we met on the street and weird events,” Anastasio recalled. “By the time it was over we had this incredible collage tape. We camped under the Matterhorn one night and were singing, drinking wine, and that was on there. It was all on there.”

One night in Paris, they were busking in the street—Anastasio on a mini-guitar, Fishman on a Flexatone (an odd little percussion instrument dating from the early twenties), Pete on bongos—alongside fire-eaters, glass-walkers, and other freaks. They drew a large crowd that really got into the music, dancing and digging the scene as Phish crowds would in years to come. Unwilling to break the spell, even though they were getting separated from their belongings as the surging crowd pushed them back, they discovered afterward that someone had stolen the Sony unit with the “Tape of Life” in it. The loss of their tape recorder wasn’t the worst thing that happened to them abroad. While tripping on their German friends’ acid one day on Pelekas Beach, they decided to swim out to a raft offshore just as a violent storm was blowing in, and Anastasio nearly drowned. After this harrowing experience, he sat on the beach and wrote the music for “Harry Hood.”

 

Once McConnell was in, there followed a half-year period during which Phish carried on as a five-piece band, with him and Jeff onboard.
This was not the most convivial period in the band’s history. While McConnell was on the same musical page as the other members of Phish, in terms of breaking ground and moving forward, Holdsworth began to detach from the group. His anchoring influence became less essential as Phish increasingly set sail for uncharted waters. With his interest waning and days numbered, Holdsworth began shedding gear and downsizing his role. Anastasio has cited as a “defining moment” the day he brought sheet music for “You Enjoy Myself” to band practice. Everyone but Holdsworth was gung-ho about the idea of tackling original, scored music.

In March 1986, Holdsworth bailed out. He graduated from UVM, left town, and underwent a religious conversion. Having heard tales about the abundance of pot, mushrooms, and acid within the student community at UVM and Goddard in general and within the local musical community in particular, it’s reasonable to speculate that someone like Holdsworth, who didn’t navigate easily through that world, might’ve wanted to extricate himself from it. Moreover, Holdsworth didn’t have the compositional mind of the others, nor did he share with them the compulsion to bend old forms into new shapes and sounds.

Holdsworth eventually paid his erstwhile bandmates a return visit, sporting short hair and a tweed jacket to which a “Jesus Is Love” button was pinned. He was a lot thinner, they noticed.

“None of us really knew him that well, when I look back on it,” noted Fishman. “None of us knew him well enough to pinpoint what caused that, except for the fact he was always kind of a loner.”

“Really quiet and nice guy, too,” added McConnell.

Having found the Lord, Holdsworth made a stab at converting them. But by then they were pursuing a higher calling of their own. As Fishman put it, “We all have a certain desire to honor the roots and traditions of music, but there’s also this persistent desire to find out what else we can do rather than the common forms, the things you always hear.”

McConnell can remember the first time the foursome (minus Holdsworth) realized they had something unique among them. “One
afternoon in the practice room we were playing a song with a jam in it. All of a sudden this jam started to take off and I was having this experience like, ‘Oh my God, this could really work as a foursome, this is really happening.’ I have a real vivid memory of that.”

It wasn’t all smooth sledding for Phish as a reconfigured foursome. Even as late as 1995, McConnell quipped, “We’re still getting used to it.”

Yet McConnell was indisputably the piece that completed Phish. Like the others, he possessed self-discipline, tremendous ability on his instrument, a willingness to put in long hours of rehearsal, and the desire to aim high. Less eccentric than Gordon, less extroverted than Fishman, less extreme than Anastasio, he was kind of a grounding force—the one who instinctively knew when the gags were going too far or the jams were getting off-course.

Now no one recognizes his worth more than Anastasio. “Page’s piano is what sets us apart from the million other two-guitar bands,” Anastasio told Richard Gehr. “He truly makes the band something special.”

Beneath his outward reserve lurks a subtle but incisive sense of humor. He’d wisecrack in a quiet deadpan. During a joint interview with McConnell in 1995, Fishman spoke of wanting to get new faces backstage to freshen up the scene.

“I think it’d be cool to throw a bunch of random passes into the audience,” he proposed. “Throw them into a fan and blow ’em out there, just to meet some new people.”