He was also quick to add, “Trey came up with all kinds of great experiments to include other people in the creativity, so I wouldn’t blame him or anyone if I ended up shying away from some of it [on other albums] in the end.”
A few years after
Ghost
’s release, Anastasio reflected on the process. “By the time we got to
Story of the Ghost
it started to get weird,” he said in 2001. “Mike was getting a little frustrated, because I was bringing all these tunes and they were done. So then there was a feeling of, ‘Well, we want to write together.’ So I was like, ‘All right, let’s write together.’ We got together in the same farmhouse me and Tom had [
laughing
], and we tried really hard to write together. It was somewhat successful and somewhat not. But it’s like the point was getting lost. I got really upset, and so did Page, because I had come in with all these demos and we were like, ‘We could make a great album. This is our chance.’”
Instead they wound up with an album whose whole was compromised by its various parts, which didn’t mix well: the “Tom/Trey
songs” (as Anastasio called them), the band-written pieces (with lyrics by Marshall), and the lengthy “Guyute” extravaganza. In hindsight, perhaps it would have been best to place the band-written songs on one album and the best of the Anastasio-Marshall copyrights on another, issuing them either as a double disc or two single ones (like Bruce Springsteen did with the simultaneously released
Human Touch
and
Lucky Town
CDs).
All the same, every song on the album turned up in Phish’s concert repertoire, and many of them—particularly “Ghost,” “Birds of a Feather,” “The Moma Dance,” and “Limb by Limb” became live staples. With its moody, undulating groove, “Ghost” proved to be a highlight of Phish concerts for years to come.
Nine months after the release of
Story of the Ghost
came
The Siket Disc
, an instrumental album culled from their jamming sessions at Bearsville. It was issued as a Phish album, albeit with limited release, through their merchandising division. McConnell listened to, selected, and digitally edited the album’s nine pieces, which bore such titles as “Quadrophonic Toppling,” “Insects,” and “Fish Bass.” Named for engineer John Siket,
The Siket Disc
has a trance-like, Pink Floyd-meets- Brian Eno flow. There are no “songs” and it is all too brief (thirty-five minutes), but its late-night ambience is eerily captivating.
The Great Went and Lemonwheel—Phish’s weekend festivals in 1997 and 1998, respectively—had much in common. Both were held in far northern Maine, in remote Aroostic County. Like the Clifford Ball, they were sited on a decommissioned Air Force base (Loring AFB, near Limestone). Though they lacked that festival’s shock-of-the-new aura, both offered the uniquely surreal down-the-rabbit-hole experience Phish provided. Moreover, the art installations were even more innovative—Lemonwheel’s theme, for instance, was Asian—and the sense of a community apart from the mainstream thrived in the wilds of upstate Maine.
That community ethos extended all the way to the site clean-up afterward. One of Phish employee Beth Montuori Rowles’s self-assigned
tasks was to go through boxes of lost-and-found materials after the festivals. The security team would send boxes of lost items to Phish’s office in Burlington. Beth would don gloves and, with the help of others in the office, pick through the boxes, separating items and trying to identify their owners. They tracked down the owners of lost credit cards through the issuing bank and cell phones through the service providers. They returned as much as they could, even seemingly insignificant items with personal value, such as journals and diaries, by sleuthing for addresses, phone numbers, and other clues.
They tended to go that extra mile because that was the tone of the whole operation, from Phish’s music to Dionysian Productions’ management style. This attitude carried over to their work with various charities, too. In 1997, Phish established the WaterWheel Foundation. Motivated by the philosophy to “think globally, act locally,” they helped out a host of Vermont-based charities. The primary beneficiary has been Lake Champlain, the hundred-mile body of water that touches Burlington and divides Vermont from upstate New York. Over the past century, the lake has been polluted by sewage discharge and agricultural and urban runoff. Through Water - Wheel, Phish has donated significant sums of money to raise public awareness, fund studies, and buy land and equipment to help control environmental degradation. Through their linkup with Ben and Jerry’s via Phish Food, over $1 million in royalties has gone to the WaterWheel Foundation’s Lake Champlain initiative. The foundation has also given money to Vermont nonprofits—mostly arts-related causes—and collected money on tour for designated charities in various communities.
In 1998 Phish released
Bittersweet Motel
, a band documentary about Phish, directed and produced by Todd Phillips (whose films include
Hated
,
Frat House
, and
Road Trip
). He and his crew were given carte blanche to follow Phish around for about a year. The resulting eighty-four-minute film was a musical travelogue that tracked Phish in the U.S. from Maine (Great Went, August 1997) to Rochester, New York
(December 11, 1997). Filming carried over to 1998 for the summer tour of Europe.
Twenty-three songs are performed in whole or in part, including everything from fan favorites like “Wilson” and “The Squirming Coil” to covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Loving Cup” and Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.” The title
Bittersweet Motel
refers to an original song Anastasio and McConnell sing in the final scene. The film falls squarely in the rockumentary tradition of the Who’s
The Kids Are Alright
, the Clash’s
Rude Boy
, Bob Dylan’s
Don’t Look Back
, and—given the rock-festival footage—
Woodstock
.
It all started when Phish decided to document the Great Went. The project grew in scope from there. John Paluska called Phillips and invited him to Chicago to see a show and to meet the band. Phillips recalled thinking to himself, “‘Who the fuck are these guys? How do they have money to make a movie and fly me out to Chicago?’ I literally didn’t know, I mean, I’d heard the name Phish but I didn’t know—”
Phillips was mostly left to his own devices. “Phish told me, ‘Just make the movie. Put in what you want, don’t put in what you don’t want.’ There was never any of this thing you fear in situations with people who can exert control. You know, ‘I don’t look good in that shot’ or ‘I look weird here.’ None of that bullshit. They’re so open and understanding of the creative process, I guess because of the freedoms they’ve had.
“In a way, I think they liked the fact they were working with someone who was not a fan, because they thought, ‘Oh, this guy will be a fan by the end of it.’ And when I spent some time listening to the musicianship and heard how good these guys are, I became a fan. I’ve since been to shows we weren’t filming, and I’ll continue to go to them. And it’s not because I’m buddies with them now but that I have a real appreciation for what they do creatively: how they don’t have a set list, they’re playing something different every night, and you don’t know what you’re going to get when you show up.”
Phillips interspersed concert footage with interview snippets, backstage scenes, and other comical or illuminating glimpses of life
on the road with Phish. Among other things, they discussed (and dissed) critics, made up songs on the spot, hung out on the beach, and bartered for weapons at a shop in Barcelona. During the bartering scene, Anastasio literally held a gun to Gordon’s head and haggled with the shopkeeper over a whip. In one backstage scene while strumming the guitar, he made up a little funny song about McConnell on the spot.
Even when Anastasio got caught up in potentially problematic or embarrassing situations, he didn’t harbor any illusions about what he was doing or hide it from the world. With the filming of
Bittersweet Motel
, perhaps he wanted the world to see exactly what was going on with the band during this period.
“It’s hard having a movie made about yourselves,” noted Phillips. “It can stir up weird feelings of ‘What are we doing this for? Does this make sense?’ The other guys were more self-conscious about it than Trey, who said, ‘This is going to work. We’re just going to go for it and let it go.’ There’s a lot of Trey in the movie because that was his attitude—you know, see what happens as opposed to avoiding it. Not that the other guys were tough to work with, but the more accessible one is, the better it’s going to be. I wasn’t doing an exposé, and I didn’t want to bang down their doors. I wanted them to feel comfortable about it, and in that regard I would say Trey was the most comfortable.”
Things were slowly threatening to get out of control, both within and without. As their scene mushroomed, Phish started to lose a grip on what was transpiring backstage and in the parking lots. By the latter half of the nineties, the lots at Phish shows were similar to the “Shakedown Street” scenes that had become institutions at Grateful Dead concerts for so many years, with vendors dealing the typical assortment of T-shirts, jewelry, food, and, of course, drugs. In fact, Phish fans also called these zones of unlicensed commerce Shakedown Street.
In terms of drugs, all the old hallucinogenic standbys (pot, acid, mushrooms) were joined by plenty of harder stuff: cocaine, heroin,
Ketamine (“Special K”), methadone, and newer knockout pharmaceuticals like Oxycontin. Plenty of nitrous oxide (“hippie crack”), too. The snake-like hissing of tanks filling balloons with nitrous was a common sound in the lot. Sucking gas from a balloon produced a brain-busting high to fans looking to get spun out of their gourds on the cheap. Ecstasy became prevalent, too, and that—combined with Phish’s turn to a steadier, more grooving style of jamming—fueled the dance-party vibe.
Meanwhile, Phish’s backstage scenes were starting to look more like standard rock-star bacchanals. In 1997 they set up an inner sanctum for which special passes were required. It was, unfortunately—in light of subsequent events—dubbed “the Betty Ford Clinic.” It started out as a joke, with an “Alcoholic Clinic” sign hung on a backstage door at the Worcester Centrum over Thanksgiving 1997 (whose second night, incidentally, featured an hourlong “Runaway Jim,” the longest song performance of Phish’s career). The idea was institutionalized, so to speak, on the fall 1998 tour, when special “Betty Ford Clinic” passes were issued. The impetus was innocent enough. As Anastasio explained, the band wanted easy access to friends and loved ones like they’d had back in their club days, when all they’d had to do was step offstage and mingle.
“The Betty Ford Clinic was the party right next to the band room, which was a conscious decision,” he said. “You see, once we went into arenas, we were isolated from everyone for the first time. When we were in bars, we’d come offstage and all our friends would be hanging out. In 1996 we switched into full-time arenas, and it was a really odd tour for us, because suddenly we were back there all alone. We felt like we were losing a sense of the fact we were in the middle of a huge party. We actually thought for the sake of the music, it would be much better for us to be partying, hanging around that energy, and remembering what kind of vibe was going on so we could play appropriate music to fill that void. So we started the Betty Ford Clinic. All our friends would be there, and we could come offstage—
boom!—
hang out and have a good time.”
In other words, it was intended as a way of keeping them grounded in these larger new environs. However, as the partying accelerated, some friends and hangers-on wouldn’t even leave the clinic to catch the show, which was another sign of shifting priorities.
One observer described it: “The focus changed. There was more interest in partying, famous guests at shows, and rich people making the scene. Post-show gatherings started to include more party drugs, booze, pills, and girls in tight dresses. Issues of access—passes, parking, private suites, poser platforms, roped-off seating—exploded into a new pecking order.
“The band carried it well, for the most part. But it was digging at them. When you start to run into and butt up against idolatry, it cuts up against what feels natural for a human being to experience. The amount of energy that is created and exchanged can become too much to handle.”
Tequila, cocaine, groupies—it all sounds a lot like the mid-seventies Eagles, but it was late-nineties Phish, too. It’s the stock script for practically every episode of VH1’s
Behind the Music
. In 2000 Jason Colton was discussing possible ways to promote Phish’s
Farmhouse
album with Anastasio and suggested doing something on the cable music channel.
“
Behind the Music!
” Anastasio cracked, only half-jokingly. “When you really think about it, we’ve had just about everything go on with us that goes on in every one of those
Behind the Music
things. We’re just not as melodramatic about it, and no one ever notices.”
Colton could see his point.
“It’s not like they haven’t had serious things to wrestle with over the last few years,” he noted.
If there’s anything disappointing about this aspect of Phish’s story, it’s that they walked into the minefield of sex, drugs, and rock and roll clichés knowing better. For many years, they seemed sufficiently idealistic, intelligent, well-bred, and on guard to avoid the pitfalls. But they eventually succumbed, although no one will ever confuse Phish
with Van Halen or Mötley Crüe, because they didn’t wear misbehavior as a badge of honor. Besides, setting aside puritanical ethics, a certain degree of misbehavior is understandable. If ever a bunch of musical workaholics was entitled to blow off steam, it was Phish. But when all the raging started affecting health and welfare, and the forward progress of their music suffered to the extent that the band stopped practicing, one could argue that a line had been crossed. Perhaps the moral of the story is that the lure of drugs and debauchery is irresistible and that the lid to Pandora’s box will pop open, as if springloaded, once the spoils of rock celebrity insistently present themselves.