The Phish Companion
and the Mockingbird Foundation exemplify the spirit of Phish’s fan community. Phish thought so highly of their endeavors that in 2003, after receiving some criticism for creating another revenue stream for themselves, the group began donating net profits from their LivePhish downloads to the Mockingbird Foundation. (After the breakup, they scaled back, donating an unspecified portion of the downloads’ proceeds to the foundation.) So
The Phish Companion
isn’t just a document of Phish history but an essential part of it. And to think it all started with a handful of hard-core Phish fans who were fumbling their way around with a new technology called the Internet way back in 1990.
As Phish gained popularity, a number of other books appeared in the late nineties. Uber-fan Dean Budnick led the pack with his informed, conversational
The Phishing Manual: A Compendium to the Music of Phish
. Dave Thompson, a prolific music journalist, knocked off
Go Phish
in 1997, a breathless relating of band history largely compiled from clip files and fan-based Web sources. The prosaically titled
The Phish Book
, an official band project jointly credited to writer Richard Gehr and Phish, appeared a year later. Essentially an oral and pictorial history, it was assembled by Gehr from extensive interviews with the band here and abroad.
As odd as it may sound, Phish has always been a great cover band. For a group as devoted to original music as Phish, the notion of drawing
from other artists might seem pointless. But it makes sense when you take several factors into account.
First, in the early days, they included covers for a purely practical reason: to have enough songs to fill a set or an evening of music while building their own repertoire. Second, Phish has never been shy about acknowledging influences. They are all musical omnivores. On the bus, in their cars, and at home they devour music from all corners, from Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones to Miles Davis and Igor Stravinsky. So it makes sense that they’d pay homage to favorite songs and artists by covering them.
Third, cover songs can be approached by a rock band like Phish the way jazz musicians treat a pop standard—as a launching pad for improvisation. Finally, over the years many guest artists would sit in with them, and often they’d perform something by that artist or an iconic cover familiar to both parties.
Phish have always chosen covers wisely and well, drawing from sources both diverse and obscure. Unless it was a cast-iron rock standard like AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” or Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Phish has always understood that a well-chosen cover reveals less-obvious influences and well-tuned ears. A number of Phish’s covers became part of their basic repertoire. Several recurring ones drew from the realm of cosmic Americana they revered but weren’t culturally situated to write themselves. These include Los Lobos’ “When the Circus Comes to Town,” Jimmy Dale Gilmore’s “My Mind’s Got a Mind of Its Own,” Norman Blake’s “Ginseng Sullivan,” Josh White’s “Timber (Jerry),” Del McCoury’s “Beauty of My Dreams,” and Bill Monroe’s “Uncle Pen.” In their later years they began writing strong originals “in the tradition” like “Back On the Train,” “All of These Dreams,” and “The Connection,” and their experience of playing covers by prototypical folk, country, and blues artists had to have helped.
Given the broad range of artists they covered and the wide range of material they wrote, it’s not hard to understand why Phish fans grew so loyal to them that they didn’t feel the need to venture far beyond
their universe of music. Phish was essentially a one-stop shop for music of all kinds. By following Phish, you’d get well-rounded exposure to all sorts of genres. Their well went so deep that there almost wasn’t time to listen to anyone else, especially if attending or acquiring as many live Phish shows as possible rated as a high priority in one’s life.
All this talk about cover songs is germane because Phish briefly reconsidered its relationship to outside material in the late nineties. Covers were minimized for a period in 1997, and certain classic originals were given a brief retirement, too. But then the group pointedly re-embraced outside material. On the summer 1998 tour, they broke out a new cover version almost every night. They drew from an eclectic bunch of artists: the Violent Femmes (“Blister On the Sun”), Jane’s Addiction (“Been Caught Stealin’”), the Fabulous Thunderbirds (“Too Much of Everything”), Marvin Gaye (“Sexual Healing”), the Beastie Boys (“Sabotage”), and Van Halen (“Running with the Devil”).
Phish was willing to try anything to rejuvenate themselves at this point in their career. However, the solutions were less intuitive than they had been when the band was younger, the audience was smaller, and their business affairs were simpler. Inspiration does eventually run up against a wall of creative fatigue, and it is rare that true innovation and inspiration sustain for more than five years (if that long) in popular music. Phish has doggedly tried to swim upstream, with some success. They would manage to produce some of their most memorable music onstage (notably, Big Cypress) and in the studio (
Farmhouse
) in 1999, which was fifteen years deep into a career that was already dense with achievements. Even when there were friction and difficulties within, they still tried to act in the best interest of the music. That would never change.
Following their triumphant summer tour, October 1998 turned into an extremely busy month that found Phish becoming more deeply assimilated into the rock establishment. On October 3, they played a single set at Farm Aid on a bill that included organizers Neil Young, John Mellencamp, and Willie Nelson, plus Wilco, Brian Wilson, Hootie and the Blowfish, and more. The highlight was having Young
sit in with them for a chunk of the set. At mid-month they caught up with Young again, performing at both of his Bridge School Benefits—along with R.E.M., Sarah McLachlan, and Barenaked Ladies—at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California.
Returning to the subject of covers, Phish played another band’s album in its entirety for the fourth time on Halloween 1998. Performing at Las Vegas’s Thomas & Mack Center, Phish tackled the Velvet Underground’s
Loaded
. This might seem an odd choice, since
Loaded
was the most accessible of the four studio albums released by Lou Reed and company during their time as a band.
Loaded
would seem to offer little opportunity for jamming or musical growth, unlike its predecessors. Performing the Beatles’
White Album
all the way through in 1994 helped improve Phish as songsmiths. Covering the Who’s arena-rock powerhouse
Quadrophenia
in 1995 helped Phish adapt and pro - ject in larger spaces at a time when they were moving into arenas and outdoor venues. Cloaking themselves in Talking Heads’ exercise in cross-cultural rhythms,
Remain in Light
, in 1997 heavily influenced Phish’s music for years to come.
The Velvet Underground’s
Loaded
also turned out to be the right album at the right time. Because the band had become bogged down in textures, loops, and trance-type jamming,
Loaded
offered relief in the form of song-oriented sunlight. Just as
Billy Breathes
evinced a bit of Beatles influence,
Farmhouse—
the next studio album after the Halloween 1999 show—exhibited some of the artful clarity and poppy accessibility of
Loaded
.
They’d covered “Sweet Jane” on their recent summer tour, and Fishman had occasionally sung “Lonesome Cowboy Bill” during his comic turn in the spotlight. As it turned out, they jammed out
Loaded
more than any other Halloween album, with “Rock and Roll” and “Lonesome Cowboy Bill” each topping ten minutes. It’s been pointed out that with Anastasio’s mounting affinity for groups like the Velvets and Pavement, Phish took a less perfectionist and hyper-analytical approach in concert during the late nineties. In fact, there came a point where they suspended postshow analysis altogether.
Anastasio privately revealed that Phish had actually toyed with the idea of covering
three
albums that Halloween. “We had that planned for a while,” he said with a chuckle. “We talked about doing
Loaded
,
Exile on Main St.
, and
Lark’s Tongue in Aspic
, or something like that.” Imagine hearing Phish tackle albums by the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones, and King Crimson on a single night. As it turned out, Phish did have another trick up its sleeve. Two nights after the Halloween concert in Vegas, Phish played Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
for a smallish crowd in Salt Lake City.
The motivation was poor ticket sales. Following the Halloween show, Phish had a day off before playing Salt Lake City, which was followed by two nights in Denver. Most fans drove straight from Vegas to Denver, skipping the Salt Lake show. When the band and crew got to the E Center, they noticed there were few fans in the lot. Barely one-fourth of the tickets had been sold for the 12,000-seat venue. Road manager Brad Sands and crew member Eric Larson conspired to make absent Phish fans regret this oversight.
Larson recalled what happened: “Brad and I immediately ran to Trey and said, ‘There’s only 3,200 people here! You’ve gotta hurt ’em! You’ve gotta get ’em good!’ And he said, ‘Well, what can I do?’ And Brad and I looked at each other and said, “I think it’s time for
Dark Side of the Moon
!’ And Trey said, ‘Okay, we’ll do
Dark Side
. Get the band.’”
The others were pulled away from dinner and, with only ninety minutes before the start of the show, they listened to the album and ran through it once. They played the first set and went over a couple of songs backstage during set break. Then they did a full second set, concluding with “Harpua.” During the part where Anastasio riffs on what “little Jimmy” is listening to on his stereo, the band launched into “Speak to Me,” the first song on
Dark Side of the Moon
. Then came the second song from
Dark Side
. . . and the third . . . and so on, through the entire album.
For years, Phish fans had requested
Dark Side of the Moon
. Phish finally relented, but not on Halloween. That was a typical Phish
move—ambitious, unexpected, exciting. That show quickly passed into Phish lore and helped guard against empty houses thereafter.
It was a throwback to their “you snooze, you lose” tour strategy, where a small crowd meant a big concert surprise that would leave those who’d blown off the show cursing the decision.
“There were probably 3,200 cell-phone signals coming out of the arena when they struck that first note,” Larson said with a laugh. “And then, of course, the fans thought they were just getting one Pink Floyd song. And then when they went into the second song people said, ‘
Oh, my God. They’re gonna give us the whole album?!
’”
“Brad and I were climbing off the bus in Denver,” Larson recalled, “and some kids asked, ‘What’d they do last night?’ We just looked at them and went, ‘Ohhh . . . You didn’t go?’ ‘No, we came right from Vegas.’ We said, ‘Ooh, bad move. Not good.’ We wrote it down and handed them the list. They looked at it and then looked at this one kid and said, ‘
It’s your fault we skipped that show!
’ I’m sure there was a lot of that going on, a lot of finger-pointing at somebody who was trying to cut some miles off the road.”
Larson still marvels about that night: “To be able in about ninety minutes’ time to listen and learn a whole album and then come out and perform it? I mean,
please
.”
The year 1998 ended strongly with a Thanksgiving stand at Hampton Coliseum (in Hampton, Virginia) and an unprecedented four-night, one-venue New Year’s run at Madison Square Garden. Since Phish’s first gig there in 1995, Hampton had became a favorite venue. There were no skyboxes or big-arena affectations at Hampton, which had an old-school vibe and plenty of musical ghosts in its past. The Grateful Dead, for instance, played a legendary show there in 1989 where they broke out “Dark Star” for the first time in five years. Phish’s two nights at Hampton went so well that they released the whole of it as
Hampton Comes Alive
. The six-CD box earned a Grammy nomination for packaging, made
Billboard
’s album chart (unusual for a box set), and attained gold status (indicating 500,000 units sold) from the RIAA.
The new year started off slowly, insofar as band activities were concerned. Phish didn’t even play their first concert of 1999 until June 30. In hindsight, this looks like mini-hiatus. (There was, incidentally, a pre-tour dress rehearsal at Trey’s Barn Studio on June 24, an affair dubbed “Carreystock” because of the presence of comedian Jim Carrey.) During those six months sans Phish, Anastasio formed a solo band with an outside rhythm section while Gordon threw himself into his first feature film. Starring Col. Bruce Hampton, it was titled
Outside Out
. He claims to have invested five thousand hours in its making. Gordon’s left-of-center project related “the story of a boy, and a guitar, and his desire to be a true artist.”
Phish convened for an abbreviated summer 1999 tour that concluded with four shows in three days at the Fuji Rocks festival in Japan. The band was given its own stage, dubbed “Fields of Heaven” by the promoters. Then came a monthlong fall tour, followed by recording sessions for
Farmhouse
. They hit the road again in December, culminating with the live event known as Big Cypress, the millennium concert in the Florida Everglades, at year’s end.
With the notable exception of Big Cypress, these weren’t the best of times for Phish. Anastasio reflected on the reasons in a 2004 interview with Anthony DeCurtis in
Guitar World
: “In 1994, every night, I would rush back to the hotel and work for six hours on the next night’s set—literally. But I couldn’t maintain that. And once I stopped doing that, what people saw—maybe in like ’99—was a sloppier Phish.”
Eschewing the experimental strategies that went into
Story of the Ghost
, Phish assembled the more accessible
Farmhouse
. The recording of
Farmhouse
occupied much of fall 1999. Big Cypress further fired up Phish when they reentered the studio for mixing and overdubbing in January 2000. Phish felt truly at home in the studio, because now they literally
were
at home.
Farmhouse
was recorded at the Barn, a refurbished 150-year-old barn that Anastasio had hauled to the top of a mountain not far from Burlington. By the time of
Farmhouse
, two
other albums had already been recorded there. One was by mandolinist Jamie Masefield’s Jazz Mandolin Project. (Masefield was another Vermont native and one-time pupil of Ernie Stires.) Over the years, Anastasio and Fishman were intermittently involved with Masefield’s group. The other project was
One Man’s Trash
, an Anastasio solo CD of experimental snippets that was sold through the band’s mail-order division.