“You wonder, how did we get so popular? But it seems kind of obvious when you look at it that way, because our experiences are similar to many other people’s and our music speaks to them.”
Gordon made the same point about
Slip Stitch and Pass
in simpler language. “A lot of it is really just sort of fun,” he said. “It’s kind of letting loose. I can imagine that if people wanted to play a Phish album at a party, this would be the one.”
There were notable dates in Europe during the lengthier return jaunt in June and July as well. This leg opened up in Dublin on June 13, 1997. Phish debuted thirteen new songs over the course of two nights.
This included half a dozen songs that would appear on
Story of the Ghost
(one of them, “Olivia’s Pool,” was reworked and retitled “Shafty”) and even a trio of tunes that wouldn’t show up on record until
Farmhouse
, which was three years down the road. They also broke out a memorable and never-repeated first-night encore combo of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Stand” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Izabella.” Incidentally, the whole pile of new originals and covers, and more as well, were first tried out at a private party called “Bradstock,” which was held at the home shared by crew members Brad Sands and Pete Carini.
After the European tours, Phish’s approach to jamming continued to evolve, becoming more groove-oriented, ambient, and textural.
“In the late nineties, we got more into jams that would stay on one chord and not modulate as much,” said Gordon. “I think there was an influence from seeing Neil Young jam in Europe and listening to James Brown a lot. Not changing so much became more important than changing a lot. Trey’s guitar playing also got a little bit different. Whereas he used to play a lot of notes and do some ferocious soloing, later on he got into being more subtle and riding on top of the groove by holding out more sustaining or looping notes.”
Anastasio would even stop playing guitar and bang out rhythms on a percussion setup that had become part of his rig. This phase of live Phish had its adherents, but many fans missed the livelier, more propulsive and crescendo-oriented jamming. At the same time, this more even-keeled and groove-oriented approach proved alluring to some in the Dead camp who’d theretofore found Phish too frenetic.
In the late nineties, Phish’s jams more often resembled glowing embers than blazing bonfires. Still, there were exceptional shows and tours, especially the summer tours of 1997 and 1998, and there was no dearth of deserving new material. “From 1997 to 2000 was a gloriuos outburst of creative new Phish songs,” observed Brad Sands.
“The summer ’98 tour was one of the best of all time,” said Eric Larson, a longtime fan and employee of the band. “They were playing
very well, and every night they broke out some new cover. They had developed such a wide repertoire that you never really knew what they were going to play. That was definitely one of my favorite tours.” I would have to agree. At one show I attended—at Raleigh’s Walnut Creek Amphitheatre, August 7, 1998—a hellacious late-afternoon thunderstorm blew in from one side, bringing heavy winds and downpour. Ever attuned to their surroundings, they opened with “Water in the Sky” and the Who’s “Drowned” while the heavens opened up. On this same night, which later cleared up, there was also a lunar eclipse. Anastasio’s sister Kristine, who lived in nearby Chapel Hill, casually mentioned that celestial occurrence to him. A lightbulb went off in his head, inspiring surreal narration during the second-set “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent” that incorporated the moon’s vanishing into the
Gamehendge
saga.
While the ambient grooves Phish fell into during the late nineties might sometimes become monotonous, the group often found power in repetition, tapping into the visceral, hypnotic buzz rave kids got from electronic rhythms and loops. Ecstasy, the drug of choice in that scene, was definitely on the rise at Phish shows during this time frame. When Phish played Salt Lake City’s E Center, Anastasio welcomed the audience to the “
E-e-e-e-e-e-e
Center,” and the druggy implication wasn’t lost on the crowd.
“E” was one thing, but it was the arrival of white-powder drugs that started to affect their scene in troubling ways. If you were into Phish, you might have heard rumors on the fan-driven gossip mill as far back as 1997. Fishman and Gordon were reportedly just dabblers in the smorgasbord of substances that gradually became part of Phish’s backstage scene. Anastasio got hooked, cleaned up, and relapsed a few times before his well-documented bust in 2006. McConnell fell somewhere in the middle.
In defense of working musicians, too little attention has been paid to the use of cocaine and similar drugs not only as a recreational high but also as a practical tool in a demanding and oftentimes exhausting
occupation. The touring side of rock and roll is a grinding routine of traveling from city to city, setting up and sound checking, performing and breaking down, all the while grabbing whatever rest and sustenance one can manage while being constantly on the move. Cocaine serves an especially utilitarian function among road crews, who erect stages and equipment by day and load it all out in the dead of night. It’s tough physical labor, and the hours are brutal. As rockers and roadies lose youthful resilience, cocaine combats the fatigue of their nocturnal, nomadic lifestyles. It’s surely no accident that harder drugs didn’t become an issue until they were in their thirties.
Humor has always figured in Phish’s cosmology. In the mid to late nineties, that started to change, at least onstage. As they drew more attention, they became more self-conscious about the gags and gag songs, lest they be portrayed by the media as some kind of novelty act.
Fishman elaborated on this more serious mindset in a 2004 interview: “Trey’s been on this crusade, ‘I don’t wanna write nonsensical stuff that’s just an excuse to have singing to go with the instrumental stuff. I’m gonna get up there and sing lyrics, I want them to say something.’ The biggest change is that nonsensical stuff is unacceptable. He’s really turned off about singing a lot of our older things, even if there is some great music that goes with it that people wanna hear.”
There was a growing sentiment that bouncing on trampolines, tossing boxes of macaroni and cheese to the audience, and having a dress-wearing drummer who played vacuum-cleaner solos might be detracting from their stature as serious musicians. Thus, in 1997, there were fewer gags, and Fishman even gave up the dress for a spell, opting for a utilitarian T-shirt and ball cap.
Classy
became the by-word, while
quirky
was out of vogue. Since 1994, the band had also been elongating jams to unheard-of lengths, and by the later years of the decade all the musical exploration was crowding out the humorous
bits. In some respects, life was becoming less amusing to them as growing popularity and media scrutiny brought pressures they’d not had to contend with before. And they were simply getting older, too.
“I certainly liked bringing people to shows in the early to mid nineties more than I did in the latter years,” said Amy Skelton. “Because somewhere between 1995 and 1997, they started to jam more than play the funny stuff. I think they started to tire of the gags. They weren’t so humorous themselves, and they were much more into playing, improv, stretching it out, going new places, and writing new music. The Big Ball Jam, the secret language, all that stuff—they got sick of it. They got sick of doing it, and they got sick of people clamoring for it, people talking about it, and articles being written about it. The focus wasn’t on the music. I felt that they always kept their focus on the music, but that wasn’t true of outsiders.”
After returning home from Europe in early March 1997, Phish headed from Burlington back to Bearsville, where they’d recorded
Billy Breathes
, to begin work on their next record, which would eventually be called
Story of the Ghost
. They hoped to capture the new style they’d forged on the continent while their fingers were still warm.
“We’d always wanted to tape ourselves jamming and coming up with stuff, because a lot of times it feels like that’s when it’s most connected,” said McConnell. “So we pushed the ‘record’ button and improvised for four days.”
They repeated the scenario half a year later, holing up at Bearsville for four more days of jamming. What they took away from those sessions were forty hours of tape. McConnell volunteered to winnow the reels down to highlights, and the group used the most inspired passages as unaltered templates for songs that wound up on
Story of the Ghost
.
“We believed in the process and decided to have faith that we would make the right decisions along the way,” he said.
“What you’re hearing on
Story of the Ghost
is first takes, first creation, first everything,” Anastasio noted at the time.
“Because it was largely recorded at the point of conception, I really do think the album sounds more like us than any album we’ve ever made,” McConnell continued. “Parts of it are a little quieter and pull you in acoustically and introspectively, but it also has the funk and the rock stuff we’re doing, and it’s not overly produced.”
Indeed, parts of
Story of the Ghost
weren’t produced in any conventional sense at all, and it would turn out to be their most experimental album. The writing and recording of the album occurred in several bursts over the course of a year using methodologies that were unorthodox even for Phish.
Anastasio and Marshall had ensconced themselves for three-day songwriting and demoing sessions at farmhouses in the Stowe area, which yielded upward of thirty songs. Then Phish as a whole tried to get into the act of writing material together, so that the album—or at least a major portion of it—would be a true collaboration. During their working retreat with an eight-track recorder at a rented farmhouse in Stowe, Vermont, Phish added words and vocal melodies to the instrumentals McConnell had excerpted. Working from a book of lyrics by Tom Marshall, band members sang along to the instrumental tracks as inspiration struck. These farmhouse vocals, originally conceived as demos to be later recut in the studio, were preserved largely intact on the finished disc. In this fashion, the group worked up ten songs from the jam tapes. When it came time to pick songs for the album, they devised elaborate voting schemes to accommodate all four viewpoints. As a result, certain Anastasio-Marshall songs that would’ve made
Story of the Ghost
stronger and more cohesive, such as “Dirt,” didn’t make the cut. (It turned up on the next album,
Farmhouse
.)
“Some of the songs that I thought should’ve been on that album were voted off,” said Anastasio. “Not because they weren’t good songs but because it was getting weird that I was bringing so much music.”
This presented a conundrum. Should the de facto bandleader, who was also a compulsive songwriter, willingly sacrifice some of his output
to keep everyone happy? Or should the others, who had their own reasonable desires to be creatively involved in the music’s conception, willingly step aside and be content to play songs and even parts that were almost completely mapped out on demos?
In order to exercise some of the cool stuff they were writing in front of a live audience, Phish performed a series of four shows—April 2-5, 1998—dubbed the Island Tour. The islands they played on were Long and Rhode, where they performed two shows apiece at Nassau Coliseum (in Uniondale, New York) and the Providence Civic Center. They were eager to generate some electricity and rekindle some live energy that might carry over to the studio. Ultimately, the Island Tour fired them up to finish
Story of the Ghost
.
In a few furious days later that month at Bearsville, Phish laid down twenty-nine Anastasio-Marshall songs with producer Andy Wallace. When they took stock of what they’d created, Phish found themselves with a surfeit of material: thirty-nine songs in all, from which a single disc had to be culled. It was “a necessarily painful process,” noted Marshall, who initially suggested that Phish issue a double CD.
Thematically,
Story of the Ghost
hinged upon the haunting opening track, wherein Marshall confided about a friend he felt was an intermediary between him and the spirit world. Anastasio saw it in more universal terms. “Everybody’s got their own ghosts,” he said before the album’s release. “I know what it’s about for me.”
The album also included “Guyute,” the eight-minute epic that was the only older song on the album, having made its live debut in 1994. It was the last time one of Anastasio’s intricate, multipart compositions would enter the repertoire for many years—really not until “Time Turns Elastic” turned up during the 2009 reunion. One dissonant, slalom-style passage in “Guyute” is as challenging as anything in Phish’s catalog. So why did they wait four years to record it?
“The time was right,” said Anastasio. “We were playing it a lot on tour, and it got to the point where it was flowing and we were inside of it. We had moved beyond the notes.” Also notable was “Birds of a Feather.” Spliced together by McConnell from three jam excerpts, it
clearly nodded at the urgent, jittery funk of Talking Heads—not surprising, since they’d covered
Remain in Light
the previous Halloween.
“Sometimes I think the album sounds so different for us that it’s about shedding the old Phish and moving on to the new Phish. I think it goes back to a line in ‘Meat’: ‘I need a different life, I think.’ It’s some kind of metamorphosis, changing into something new, which has been kind of the theme for the last year. 1996 was a question-mark year—like, what is going on? Something’s gotta change, gotta give.
Story of the Ghost
has something to do with the past and making it through that transition.”
Was the experiment a success? The answer is yes, no, and maybe, depending on whom you talk to.
Gordon thought particularly highly of
Story of the Ghost
and the process that went into its creation. “The feeling was so collaborative and I like the way that album sounds so much that under ‘Phish’ on my Web site—sort of as a joke or minimizing—I only list
Story of the Ghost
,” he said in 2008.