Phish (6 page)

That may be another way of acknowledging that the their friendship and collaboration is so prolific and long-lived it’s difficult to completely untangle the threads.

 

The Anastasio-Marshall friendship started back in eighth grade, when Marshall switched from public to private school. His parents had sent him to Princeton Day School, figuring there would be fewer trouble-makers to fall in with. They were wrong.

“It turns out Trey was sort of a misbehaving-type character, and I was happy to find people like him existed,” Marshall said with a laugh.

There were other misfits and social outcasts at Princeton Day as well, and they all gravitated to music. In addition to Anastasio and Marshall, the core of the “Princeton mafia” comprised Aaron Woolf (immortalized as “Errand Woolf” in the
Gamehendge
saga), Dave Abrahams (an inspiration for several Phish numbers, notably “Dave’s
Energy Guide” and “Guelah Papyrus,” which also name-checks his parents), and Marc “Daubs” Daubert. Their personalities and contributions left their mark on Anastasio, especially in the band’s early years.

“It was a really amazing thing how musical our grade was and how many bands we had,” said Marshall. “People like Aaron, Marc, Dave, Roger Halloway, Pete Cottone, Trey and me, plus at least ten and maybe even fifteen other guys out of a total class of a hundred, had bands, played an instrument, or were very interested in music.
Extremely
interested in music.”

 

Anastasio was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on September 30, 1964. His family moved to Princeton when he was two. Exhibiting musical precocity from a young age, he took up drums at age eight. The guitar wouldn’t enter the picture until ninth grade, and even in high school he still regarded drums as his primary instrument. His drumming background would strongly influence his approach to the guitar, with his rapid-fire soloing, snare roll-style chording, and impeccable timing.

As a schoolkid, he would also learn lessons he would later draw upon with Phish in an unlikely place: the hockey rink. Anastasio was a solid hockey player who played right wing, and his dad coached the team. Many years later, Anastasio adapted the knuckle-down work ethic Ernie Anastasio imposed in hockey practice to Phish’s rehearsals. These practice sessions were legendary for their duration, focus, and intensity. So Phish fans can thank Ernie Anastasio for cracking the whip on the ice.

Anastasio, Marshall, and his Princeton pals came into musical awareness at a time when classic rock was the rage. Anastasio sifted through it all, choosing his influences well. Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix topped the list, with a shot of Frank Zappa and a host of progressive-rock outfits from the familiar (Robert Fripp’s King Crimson and Peter Gabriel-era Genesis) to the obscure (France’s Gong
and Italy’s PFM). At home, his parents provided a sound musical foundation of music from the sixties.

“I grew up with my dad and mom playing Hendrix’s
Band of Gypsies
, the Rolling Stones’
Sticky Fingers
, and the Beatles’
White Album
in the next room,” he recalled. Zappa also was a key discovery, attitudinally no less than musically. It was Zappa who posed the rhetorical question: “Does humor belong in music?” In Zappa’s case, humor—specifically, corrosive social satire—was a huge part of his music. Humor figured in Phish’s music, too, though in a more whimsical, surrealistic way than Zappa’s increasingly puerile jibes at obvious targets. Surely the notion that music could both amaze and amuse registered with Anastasio, though he wisely didn’t buy in to Zappa’s lowbrow socio-sexual japes. Phish never wrote anything as juvenile as “Titties & Beer” or “The Illinois Enema Bandit.” As Anastasio noted, “A better question for Zappa might’ve been, ‘Is humor the
only
thing that belongs in music?’ You have to be careful about that, too.”

For Zappa, the ultimate joke might have been his conjoining of intricate, sophisticated music with juvenile lyrics depicting elements of American society at their most vulgar and degraded. However, Anastasio was Zappa’s opposite when it came to how he viewed people. Anastasio was optimistic and gregarious, whereas Zappa became the ultimate curmudgeon and misanthrope. Still, Zappa set a powerful example as a fluid guitarist who could compose for and conduct an orchestra, exhibiting a far-ranging overview that encompassed everything from Igor Stravinsky and Edgar Varèse to doo-wop harmonies and avant-garde jazz.

“I have the highest respect for Zappa, for who he was, what he represented, and the fact that he didn’t give a shit what anybody else thought about him or his music,” he told biographer Richard Gehr. This attitude of self-sufficiency would serve Phish well during those periods when they were overlooked or misunderstood by the rock press.

At the same time he was digesting all these superlative sixties influences, Anastasio experienced and understood the sociology of the suburbs in the seventies—that peculiar time and place where he came of age. In 1997, he expounded on how its banality acted as an impetus—for him and his Princeton pals, as well as the other members of Phish—to reach for something greater.

“The life that is put before you is so meaningless and boring: Just go to the mall for the weekend, get good grades in school, get a job at a corporation, and that’s your life,” Anastasio said. “And you’re thinking to yourself, ‘This can’t be it!’ It’s like,
c’mon
.”

That skepticism carried over to the music they were hearing.

“I can remember way back in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades always feeling like there was something better out there,” Anastasio recalled. “Yet still you go to parties, you listen to the radio, you hear it. You can’t help but hear it. I grew up going to hundreds of parties where people put on
Fly Like an Eagle
, Pink Floyd, Meat Loaf, and stuff like that.

“That was the soundtrack to my youth, regardless of how much I wanted to be like my idols, like Jimi Hendrix or something. But the experiences are different, and you just aren’t Jimi Hendrix. So all those different experiences add up to who you are. And all the while you’re striving for some kind of meaning, and we found that meaning in music.”

Life in Princeton wasn’t all soul-sapping suburban sterility. This leafy, attractive college town with its venerable tradition of education and culture actually had much to offer. The Princeton University campus was an oasis of ivy-covered Gothic buildings and bikeable brick walkways. Anastasio and his pals made Princeton part of their playground.

“We were always on the Princeton campus, and we knew it like the back of our hand,” said Marshall. “We biked on it, we walked on it, we were there all the time. That was our thing. We’d also always break into the Princeton parties at an extremely young age. Back then, it
felt like one big community, and a lot of us even thought we were going to go to Princeton eventually, just stay here and go.”

Amid all the partying, they took their music quite seriously. Anastasio was the drummer in an eighth-grade band called Falling Rock. They had one of those diamond-shaped yellow road signs with the words “Falling Rock” printed in block letters. The band played hard rock by the likes of Deep Purple (“Space Truckin’”) and others in that vein. Toward the end of ninth grade, Anastasio picked up the guitar. He had a natural aptitude for the instrument and before long he quietly shut down a lot of the six-string hotshots in the vicinity.

“I went to a party,” recalled Marshall, “and a bunch of the regular guitarists were sitting around in a circle trying to decipher ‘Skronk’ by Genesis. Over in a corner I heard this little amp plugged in, and I went over to see who was playing, and it was Trey. He was playing guitar by himself, and it sounded like Duane Allman. And I didn’t even know he could play!

“I said, ‘Trey, what’s going on? You play guitar?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’m picking it up.’ ‘
Picking it up
? You’re playing better than anyone over there.’ He was by far better than anyone in our grade. They were struggling note by note with an easy song, and he was improvising on ‘Rambling Man’ or something and just nailing it. And I asked, ‘How long have you known how to play guitar?’ And he said, ‘Tom, I’ve just always sort of known.’”

The social life of Anastasio, Marshall, and their pals at that time sounds like a collage of scenes from
Dazed and Confused
,
That 70’s Show
, and various smoke-filled Cheech and Chong farces.

“I remember a party at Trey’s house,” said Tom. “Of course, there’s some drug stuff, and it’s my first exposure. But I was just drinking beer, which was bad enough for me. It was like the standard ending to all movie high-school parties. The headlights swept across the yard, someone yelled, ‘Your dad’s home,’ and people just began piling out the back door, sprinting across the yard, hiding in closets, and crazy shit.”

Having become a handful for his parents, Anastasio was sent to the Taft School, a prep school in Watertown, Connecticut. Founded in 1890, Taft has a motto of “Not to be served but to serve,” though it’s hard to imagine many of the troubled kids from good homes there taking it seriously. At Taft, Anastasio befriended Steve Pollak. He was christened “the Dude of Life” by his pals after uttering a series of mock profundities while they were all under the influence of mushrooms. They formed a short-lived band named Space Antelope, for which Anastasio was the drummer. Pollak, like Anastasio, wound up attending UVM and finishing elsewhere. He was on the scene during Phish’s germinal years, and several songs he wrote with Anastasio—“Slave to the Traffic Light,” “Fluffhead,” and “Run Like an Antelope” (an amended Space Antelope leftover)—became standards in the group’s repertoire.

Anastasio was also at Taft when Talking Heads’
Remain in Light
was released in 1980. It was the New Wave quartet’s fourth album—and the third in a row produced by Brian Eno, who had become a de facto member.

“It was a really influential record for me,” Anastasio said a few weeks before Phish played
Remain in Light
in its entirety at their 1996 Halloween show in Atlanta. “When I think about it, I may have listened to this album more than any other album, ever. I practically learned how to play guitar listening to this record. It was literally my guitar-practicing album. Anytime I wanted to learn something new and practice it, I would put on
Remain in Light
and kind of jam to it. I used to use it instead of a metronome.”

Knowing this deflates the exaggerated notion that the Grateful Dead figured prominently in his musical upbringing. In 1980 he knew how to play a Talking Heads album, but it would be two more years before he even attended his first Dead show. He didn’t get into them the first time around, either. But, as was the case with a generation of concertgoers, everything became perfectly clear when he saw them again after dropping acid.

“It was just incredible,” he recalled. “Blew my mind. It was just surreal, you know: improv. Hooked up. I had never really seen anything like it before. That’s what I mean when I say different musicians have validated different aspects of music for me.”

Beyond the obvious, noted procession of influences—Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, Frank Zappa, Robert Fripp, David Byrne, and Jerry Garcia—Anastasio absorbed and refracted elements of style from others who crossed his radar. These included another classic-rock guitar hero, Queen’s Brian May, with his fat, multitracked midrange sound; musical brigands like Miles Davis and Bob Dylan, who stuck to their guns when the audience revolted; jazz guitarists Joe Pass, Django Reinhardt, and Pat Metheny; and Igor Stravinsky (“who simply had it all”).

Anastasio also understood that the ultimate goal of any artist is to discover his own voice. From amid the welter of guiding lights that set him on his musical path, he would do so fairly rapidly in Phish.

 

Meanwhile, back in Princeton, Marshall, Dave Abrahams, and Marc Daubert had their own high-school band, And Back. An enlarged version of that group included the aforementioned Pete Cottone and Roger Halloway. Marshall and Aaron Woolf also had a group, A Dot Tom, which is where “Wilson”—the inspiration for Anastasio’s
Gamehendge
saga—originated. “Wilson” makes passing mention of “Pete and Rog” in yet another name-check of Princeton friends.

Though Anastasio and his pals back home were playing in different bands, there was still much informal collaboration. “They were my jamming buddies in high school,” he recalled in 1996. “All we ever did on Friday and Saturday nights was get together and jam and make four-tracks. That was it.

“Tom and I made a couple of four-track albums starting in high school and have been writing ever since, and he always sang and played as much as I did. That’s why I’m such a big fan of Ween, because it
reminds me so much of all these hundreds of four-track tapes we’ve made.”

Ween, incidentally, comes from Hopewell, New Jersey, the next town over from Princeton. Matthew Sweet and Mary Chapin Carpenter hail from the area as well. More relevantly, Blues Traveler and the Spin Doctors—jam-band mainstays, friends of Phish, and core acts on the H.O.R.D.E. tours—have solid roots in Princeton, too. All four members of Blues Traveler and Chris Barron of the Spin Doctors attended Princeton High, a public school. There must be something in the water or, more likely, in the schools’ music departments. In any case, the solid push those budding musicians got in high school did not go unnoticed. When Phish’s
A Live One
received gold certification (500,000 copies sold) from the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), Anastasio sent a gold album to Princeton Day School’s music department.

I asked Anastasio whether any of those high school-era four-tracks survived.

“Yeah, I’m looking at ’em right now. I’m in my studio and there are stacks of them,” he said. “It’s hilarious stuff, from five o’clock in the morning when we were up all night.”

“It started out to be about making people laugh,” affirmed Marshall. “That was almost the whole point of getting together, because we would just laugh our asses off when we were writing this shit. If the tape recorder was rolling, then we’d stop it, play it again, and play it fifty more times, laughing harder each time.”