Phish (14 page)

He believes that a certain element of synesthesia—a blurring of the senses, as in “hearing” color and “seeing” sound—comes into play at Phish concerts.

“Music affects many senses, and with lighting you can add the visual sense,” he said. “More than just watching the musicians play, you see a visual mood. Color affects mood in human beings, so I’m able to enhance or augment a certain song with the right colors to create the same mood that the music itself is trying to project. You can tune in people in yet another sense, so to speak.”

 

The same month Kuroda graduated to lights, Phish won the Rock Rumble—a battle of the bands—at The Front. They beat out some of the hipper bands about town, like the hardcore groups Screaming Broccoli and Hollywood Indians. This show was also the latest in an ongoing string of naked moments in the spotlight for their free-spirited drummer, who was lowered to the stage in the buff for his vacuum-cleaner solo. (Sadly, someone neglected to plug in the appliance.) With their cash winnings from the Rock Rumble, Phish funded the recording of “Bathtub Gin” and “Split Open and Melt,” which would appear on the album
Lawn Boy
.

Meanwhile, Phish released
Junta
—their second album, if you count
The White Tape
—this same busy April. It, too, was issued in cassette form and sold at gigs. The cover illustration was drawn by Jim Pollock, the Goddard dormmate and bandmate of McConnell’s. Pollock’s commissioned artwork would adorn Phish T-shirts, posters, and even concert tickets throughout their career. His cartoon-like woodcuts illustrated characters and situations from Phish songs, and he also contributed cover art to the LivePhish series. It is not surprising that Anastasio has cited
Junta
as his favorite of Phish’s studio albums. It was made for the innocently self-indulgent art of it, without expectations but with great care, in which the band revels in their first big burst of creativity. It contains several defining songs in Phish’s repertoire, including “You Enjoy Myself,” “The Divided Sky,” “David Bowie,” and the “Fluffhead” /“Fluff’s Travels” tandem, each of which ran on record for at least ten minutes—and generally much longer in concert. “You Enjoy Myself ” and “David Bowie” served as open-ended jamming vehicles, while “The Divided Sky” and “Fluffhead” were revered for their musicality and precision.

“The Divided Sky” contains some of Anastasio’s most lyrical guitar work, especially a passage of thoughtful, clear-toned exposition that follows the mid-song pause.
Junta
also gave McConnell space to solo on acoustic piano on “Esther” and “Foam”—a refreshing sound on a rock album at the tail end of the synth-drenched 1980s.

Anastasio considers “You Enjoy Myself”
the
Phish song. It is by far the most-performed Phish song. For a band whose appeal had much to do with how rarely they repeated themselves, “YEM” turned up on 40 percent of their set lists. It was also the last song they played at the October 7, 2000, show that inaugurated a two-year hiatus.

As with so many early Phish songs, the words were hardly the point. In concert, “YEM” consisted of intricately composed sections that expanded into open-ended jams. A precise reading of the fixed compositional parts prepared the band members for the jams that followed, providing a kind of focus that would help ensure they wouldn’t aimlessly meander. As counterintuitive as it might sound,
Phish’s most raging jams began with an orderly rendering of the composed sections that preceded it. This is why early compositions like “You Enjoy Myself,” which followed this form, proved to be the most jam-worthy vehicles.

“‘You Enjoy Myself ’ was the first long, written-out piece of music where there’s a jam at the end,” Anastasio said. “It was the first time that kind of became the thing. You’re so linked up in the worked-out stuff, you’re such a unit, that it gets you lined up as you’re leading up to the jam.”

“To get so tight in a preplanned way makes the looseness juxtapose even more,” added Gordon. “I look at it that the written-out stuff is a sort of ritual, almost like a prayer session that gets my mind in gear for what’s to come. Sort of like a Hassidic Jew doing a bunch of prayers and moving until he starts to reach God. There’s like this leg-work that has to be done, something where the prayers are already written.”

There were other highlights on
Junta
, such as the playfully surreal “Fee”; the nightmarishly psychedelic “Foam”; and Mike Gordon’s “Contact,” the most unconventional rock song ever written about a car. The amused hosts of NPR’s
Car Talk
laughingly called it the worst car song ever written.

In this period, before Tom Marshall became Anastasio’s full-time writing partner, there was a rift between words and music in Phish. The lyrics might have seemed nonsensical while the music was grandly ambitious. Still, even when the playful surrealism of the words existed mainly to set the table for the music, there were shards of wisdom to be extracted here and there. Consider these cautionary lines from “Fee”—a song about an ill-fated love triangle involving a weasel, a chimpanzee, and a gospel singer—which in hindsight seem eerily predictive:

In a nutshell, these two aspects made Phish especially unique: (1) Anastasio’s compositional acumen, developed under Ernie Stires and carried forward with Phish, and (2) the listening exercises Phish practiced for hours in rehearsal. They had inventive composed material to play and were also able to improvise smartly and as a collective.

Looking back on this early period Anastasio noted, “I think what made Phish unique is that there was so much composed music at the beginning. If you go back to
Junta
, it’s ‘Foam,’ ‘Divided Sky,’ ‘You Enjoy Myself,’ ‘Fluffhead.’ These are long, heavily composed atonal fugues. We would play these very complicated pieces and then improvise. What I found was that the improvisation was bent because we had just coexisted in music that was very tightly composed.

“If we play a four-part fugue, with two hands on the piano playing the inner lines, me playing the melody and Mike playing the bass line, where everything’s interwoven, then when we improvised, the improvisation was changing keys and going together like a snake.

“It made it unique to my ear from other bands I had jammed with. Usually you have a band kind of strumming along and one guy playing a solo. This was not really solos at all, and it really went far. At which point we liked it so much we began to do exercises and rehearse improvisation for hours. That was incredible . . . and fun.”

 

Initially,
Junta
didn’t travel much beyond Phish’s immediate world as a limited cassette-only release in ’89. It received its day in the sun, however, in 1992 after Phish signed to Elektra and the album was reissued as a double CD. The original work was too long to fit on a single disc but left considerable room on a second disc, so forty minutes of bonus material were added: two bits of madness taped at Nectar’s (“Icculus” and “Sanity”) and a lengthy extract of home jamming,
dubbed “Union Federal,” pulled from one of Phish’s Oh Kee Pa ceremonies. This particular one occurred in August 1989.

The Oh Kee Pa ceremony was a Native American test of endurance, and for Phish it represented immersion into the realm of jamming that itself tested their temporal limits as musicians. There were three Oh Kee Pa ceremonies, at which they played for hours without stopping. Marijuana figured into the bonding ritual, and these endless jams can be seen as precursors to the listening exercises that would become part of band practices for a number of years. Mike Gordon elaborated:

“Trey used to take fresh chocolate and vanilla and maple syrup and all these natural ingredients and make four small cups of hot chocolate that had a half-ounce of pot in them. This one time, he was living on the river in Plainfield, Vermont, and we used to practice in his apartment. I would do the commute to Goddard a couple times a week. His neighbor around the corner was this Hungarian girl, and she was cooking us this big meal—Hungarian mushroom soup and all that.

“She said it would be ready in about two hours, so we started this jam session and it ended up going for eight hours. She wrapped it up for us. We never had dinner with her. We started at 3 and went to 11 at night. One of things that came up was the bass riff and the guitar riff to ‘Weekapaug Groove.’”

Over time, this means of finding riffs for songs in fragments of jams would become commonplace for Phish. It was how much of the music for their 1998 album,
The Story of the Ghost
, got written. The Oh Kee Pa ceremonies and the listening exercises they’d do in band practices are where Phish learned not just how to jam but how to compose in the moment (and there is a difference).

Not to confuse matters (though they
are
confusing), but Anastasio wrote a brief instrumental that he titled “The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony.” It appeared on
Lawn Boy
and had nothing to do with their ceremonial jamming rituals. In fact, he wrote this springy little number on guitar
while riding shotgun as Chris Kuroda drove Phish back from a gig. Anastasio would look up and ask Kuroda, “How does this sound?” each time he’d come up with a new lick or section.

In the late eighties, Phish began incorporating “secret language” into their performances. These were musical cues they could play that would trigger a preplanned response. Phish’s secret language was somewhat similar to Frank Zappa’s hand signals in that they cued some change in the music without the audience’s knowledge. One cue involved playing the chorus riff from “Up, Up and Away” (the late-1960s sunshine-pop hit by the 5th Dimension) and then hitting either a low or high note, at which point they’d ascend from the lowest notes or descend from the highest ones, respectively. A tritone down meant play at half-speed. A brief reference to the Beatles’ “Get Back” meant return to the first song in a series. And so on.

At a 1992 show in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Phish clued their audience in on the secret language and taught them cues created specifically for the fans. The best-known of these involved a snatch of
The Simpsons
theme song, at which point the crowd loudly responded “d’oh!” like Homer Simpson. Upon hearing a riff from the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” the crowd members were expected to turn around. The point of all this seeming nonsense was to deepen the band’s relationship with the audience and confound the uninitiated. The sharing of secret language encouraged audience members to become more than casual fans. They were now band-schooled and ritually involved in the enterprise, conferring a certain element of “membership” upon them while confusing newbies and non-initiates who popped into shows out of curiosity. As Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters used to say back in the sixties, you were either on the bus or off the bus.

 

Phish didn’t receive its first notice in the national music media until the fall of 1989, when they were accorded brief mention in
Relix
. Founded in 1973, this retro-minded fanzine existed largely to keep tabs on the activities of the Grateful Dead and other “relix” of the sixties San Francisco scene. In the nineties it would closely track the contemporary
jam-band scene, too. But in 1989 there was no such scene, just a handful of bands making waves close to their respective home bases. Phish were accorded several paragraphs in the September/ October 1989 issue of
Relix
.

With half a dozen years and several hundred gigs under their belt, Phish were, almost insultingly, the subject of that issue’s “Too New to Be Known” column. Writer William Ruhlmann had his ear to the ground, though, observing, “The band possesses a musical flair almost beyond belief.” Praising
Junta
, which had been released a half year earlier, he noted, “The underlying strength of all the material is the virtuosic musicianship and wry sense of humor that runs through it.”

Indeed, humor figured heavily, especially in Phish’s first decade. At a later point, when Anastasio began to worry that the gags were overshadowing the music—especially in the minds of writers and critics, who played up the jokey elements—the humor receded and the jams got longer. But making themselves and others laugh was always part of the Phish experience.

Discussing the themes that ran through Phish’s career, Tom Marshall felt that “humor through music” was a key one. “’Cause it started out about making people laugh,” he said. “All of the band members are incredible comedians, they really are. They’re really fucking funny. I mean, I’m fairly funny, I can make people laugh, but everything out of their mouths would be worthy of writing down. And once Brad Sands [Phish’s road manager] was in that mix, I couldn’t get a word in edgewise and didn’t want to. That’s another guy who thinks on his feet.

“Those five people on one bus together were kind of overwhelming, and they loved new blood to prey on. I quickly found out anything I said that they could latch onto became fodder. Don’t give them material, I guess, is the lesson I came away with. Or let them feed on someone else. It was brutal but funny as hell.”

The most obvious card in the band is Jon Fishman, who’s worn a dress onstage for most of the band’s career (including the current reunion) and, on various occasions, would get completely naked. On the
cover of
Lawn Boy
, he’s shown in greenish-gray makeup—presumably caked with the filthy spew from his other instrument, the vacuum cleaner, with which he is pictured. He frequently claimed a front-and-center comic-relief spot in the set for a vacuum-cleaner solo.

Fishman’s “doughnut dress” is a ghastly garment with large orange-pink circles on a bluish-purple background. In 1995, he recalled how the dress became part of the act: “I was at my friend’s house and there was this pile of material they were making bags out of. There was this dress in the pile, and I was just joking around and put it on. It looked really funny and I thought, ‘I’ll wear this onstage tonight,’ and I’ve ended up wearing it for like six years now.”