INTERVIEW: PHISH Trey Anastasio November 21, 1991 - Somerville, Massachusetts (PHISH.NET) by Shelly Culbertson This interview took place at Dunkin' Donuts in Somerville, Massachusetts from midnight till 3 am (after the show at the Somerville Theater) on 11/21/91. Incidentally, the contract with Elektra was signed the following morning, 11/22/91. ...The rhombus is a real thing. The rhombus actually exists. Tom and I sit on the rhombus and write songs, often. As a matter of fact, this incredible thing happened, Tom got married recently; and the night before his wedding he wanted to re-live all our high school days, so we all met at the rhombus at a certain time, Tom and I and this guy Dave who wrote Runaway Jim with me, we went to the rhombus; it's this magical place, the rhombus has got this energy.. and you climb up, you have to climb, it's hard to get up on, 'cause it's big. It's a rhombus, in the middle of this huge field. I'm dead serious. It's near where I grew up. Anyway, we got up on the rhombus. Whenever we get on the rhombus, and the sun will go down...the incredible thing about the rhombus is, no-one ever comes there, I've never seen anyone there, except us, and this group of friends of ours. Now we're close to thirty years old, average age, and we've been doing this since we were in eighth grade, going to this rhombus. Sitting on top of it, singing, it's just as cool now as it ever was. Last time we went out there, like I said, a couple months ago, Tom got married the night before, and we actually...we got inside the rhombus, we got the top off the thing somehow, and we were in the rhombus, it was pitch black, and we were just beating, primally screaming and beating on the inside of this rhombus...it was crazy; the whole thing was crazy. And then we actually started a fire in the rhombus, like lit the inside of the rhombus on fire then put the roof back on, and we were climbing on top of it, and it was turning into this blast furnace! There were these tiny holes, steam was going [makes steam noise], shooting out of these little things, and we were screaming and singing That's where Divided Sky was written. On the field, walking through the field toward the rhombus one day. Just this incredible moment...it was me and Tom, and my friend Daubs. I had this acoustic guitar. The clouds were splitting open up above us, and we threw this acoustic guitar on the ground and just started beating on it, singing Divided Sky, spur of the moment.. It's incredible. Last time we were there we wrote like five songs, I mean every time we go there...we don't write them, we just sit there singing at the top of our lungs, and playing guitars. It's so great. As far as the origins of the lyrics, I would say, to answer that question in not such a roundabout way, this group of friends that I grew up with were such a creative bunch of people, and we played off each other, and we're still -- Tom and I, like I said, we're still working together, and Dave and I; Runaway Jim was written around that period, ninth grade or something. What happens is a lot of these things stick with me in my head, the chorus, things we used to sing. We used to sing Runaway Jim, the chorus, sort of. It wasn't even the same as it is now. "I had a dog, his name was Jim; Runaway, runaway, runaway," -- that; and then I take them and write more lyrics to them, or write a story behind it. And with Tom, Tom sends me stuff in the mail a lot of the time, or we'll get together, but usually he sends me things in the mail and I'll put them to music. That was the case with Bouncing Around the Room, Lawn Boy, The Squirming Coil, Stash...well, Stash was different. Stash was a whole bunch of his poems that I took little lines out of each song and put them into one thing; Guelah Papyrus he sent me in the mail. [Who wrote the lyrics to It's Ice?] Tom. Those are great lyrics, oh my god, I don't know if you canw understand them... ...[about skating on frozen pond?] Right, do you get that he has a battle with his image underneath? I love those lyrics. To me, they're some of Tom's best. It's a tough tune. Is that the image you got? They battle it out. The guy is under the ice, trying... I love those lyrics. I was completely blown away when he gave me those lyrics. It goes, "I'm tied to him or him to me, depending who you ask," because their feet are hooked together, you know? It goes, "I press on the elastic sheet, I'm breathing through a slice." -- that's the guy under it; it's sung basically by the guy under the ice. But then it becomes one of those things where...then the other guy on top says, " Are they worms or are they serpents, bubbled through the ice. The source was quite invisible; the ever-present voice. While skating, both legs tracing different shapes, I made my choice." You know, that could be either one? "I'm mimicing the image in whose radiance I bask. I'm tied to him or him to me, depending who you ask. All the same reluctantly reflections tumble in. I slide with all the others on the wrong side of the skin." I really like that line. "He's fallen on the ice; it cracks; will he plunge in and join me here? He meets my eyes, to my surprise; he laughs in full light of my frown; my double wants to pull me down." It's a really heavy song. I'm glad people are liking it. The music sounds like it's like tumbling downwards...I was worried that when we played it live people were going to just think, "This is too much. I can't deal with this." On the album it's going to be really good. I'm happy that people are liking it so much, because it's fun to play. It's definitely kind of a new direction...sort of; maybe an old direction. I don't know what it is, but I really like those lyrics. He's got this one other thing that he wrote, that I haven't actually put to music yet, which is my favorite thing that he's done. It's called Rift. We did it for a while and I didn't really think that the music did it justice so we stopped doing it. I've been trying to put it to music. Some of them -- Tom and I, we have a good connection, and some of them I'll get in the mail and just know exactly how they're supposed to go, right off the bat; and it's always different than how he was hearing it, like the rhyme scheme would be different. Bouncing Around the Room is a good example; it took five minutes. I got it in the mail and then ran upstairs and it was done. I knew exactly how it should go. With the rhyme scheme at first he didn't expect it to go the way I had heard it. Something about growing up together and having sung songs sow much, I mean that's always what we did, it's really easy to work with him. Same with Guelah Papyrus, where I felt like I knew right away what the thing should be. And that's about my friend Dave, who I wrote Runaway Jim with; it's about his mom -- sort of. [Is that -- "he looks too much like Dave"?] That's him! He looks too much like Dave; the whole joke of McGrupp was that line. You know Wilson? Wilson was written by Tom and my friend Aaron -- Aaron Woolfe, who's a real person. The two of them at this party one night wrote that. See, it's all tied in together; he also is becoming a film maker now. He's in film school, and he had this idea for a film where it was in Viet Nam, where this woman had had a child of an American soldier in Vietw Nam, and the soldier's leaving. This was the first scene of the movie. The soldier's leaving, and these Vietnamese women are trying -- "take the baby, take the baby," trying to throw him the baby, and they throw the baby and this mine goes off and the baby gets hit -- not killed; but his hands and feet are mangled; but he grows up to be a genius anyway -- that's what he told me! And then the next day I started writing, "Your hands and feet are mangoes," me and Tom started singing that chorus, and then I went and wrote all those lyrics about the waiter. It's always all connected like that. But Wilson -- there's lines in Wilson about my other friends who we used to always play music with, it was just a totally musical group. The whole time we were in high school, all we ever did was jam. It was my friend Peter, who was on the original version of Slave to the Traffic Light, which is on that white Phish tape -- all this stuff is tied together; my friend Peter is playing the drums; he's a drummer. He's on it, and then my friend Roger is playing acoustic guitar on that tape, on this thing called Aftermath. Anyway, it says, "I talked to Mike Christian, Rog and Pete the same" -- that's my friends Rog and Pete. You know, the whole thing...it's so funny, all this stuff just grew out of all these bizarre connections like that; I love those guys a lot. The funniest scene was about a year ago. My friend Aaron didn't even know that this whole band existed or anything, like a year ago; he had no idea about any of this. And I'm telling you, Golgi Apparatus was something we used to sing every day at school, in eighth grade, at least fifteen years ago. I got him to come to this gig at the Marquee and we did Golgi and he was standing therew just freaking out. But the thing was that he had actually heard it -- that's not the whole story; I just remembered, the whole story is that he was at a party in California. He had no idea about the band, and somebody put it on the stereo, (that's right, 'cause then I met this other guy who told me that he was at the party with him) and Aaron started going "I wrote this! I wrote this!" And they went, "No, man, this is Phish." So he says, "What are you talking about -- I wrote this!" The whole thing..."runs like a junkyard dog" Ok. I'm rambling. Did I answer you? Is it going to be hard to dissect all this stuff out of here? [Where did the whole trampoline thing come from?] That was one of a long series of jokes that we started laughing about in band practice, and then we just did it. That one was funny, and it stayed. Usually we come up with things in band practice that we think are the funniest things in the world, and we do them, and they're just completely stupid. That happens all the time. There have been a number of times that we've made total idiots out of ourselves onstage, it happens all the time. I'm sure plenty of people have seen us do it. It's embarrassing sometimes, especially Fish. [Where does he get his outfits?] Fish? Oh him? Oh, somebody just gave him that dress and he put it on. He's like that all the time. It just doesn't seem...really what it is, we just act the same way onstage that we do...like you know this wig Mike's been wearing? You know the wig? We went to Elektra to have these business meetings about our albums, and today we went to meet with a lawyer, and he had the wig on. We're sitting there in this business meeting and we look over and there's Mike with his wig on. It was pretty funny. I will tell you a couple interesting things if you want that I learned during the gig tonight...starting at the New Britain gig. That's kind of where this whole thing in my mind had started. See, I've been really exhausted from this tour. That's where it started...it really just hit me like, "I can't go on anymore." That kind of thing. It's just weeks and weeks and weeks, and we're just about home, just this last stretch. But what has happened is, it's almost like a sleep deprivation kind of thing. We've been getting into these things in gigs -- I definitely don't think that the gigs are lacking because of it, but I think that they're taking on different forms, without me knowing it. Tonight was a really good example of that, where for me, actually, the first couple songs there was kind of tension between Fish and I. That happens sometimes, you know, just with four people playing in a band, just like if you imagine you locked yourself in a room with four people for eight weeks, which is basically the same experience we're having being in a band so much. I mean we're just on top of each other day and night. All day, all night, every meal. This is a rare moment. Normally I would have gone back to the hotel with them. This is only the second time on this trip I didn't go back to the hotel, pretty much. So anyway, here we are on top of each other, we're still getting along remarkably well, we haven't started to argue, everyone gets along very well, but like a bickering sort of thing can happen every once in a while, or little things that don't mean anything can be turned into bigger things. Now tonight when we started, I thought Fish was speeding up Chalkdust. Which really pissed me off. I'm giving you the honest lowdown of my experience of the gig tonight. At one point in the gig I was going to say this whole thing to the audience, 'cause I really like the fact that we're straightforward with the audience, and I want to be straightforward about what's going on. But this happens all the time at different gigs. So I thought Fish was speeding up and it pissed me off. And then we stopped Chalkdust and I wanted to go right into Bouncing Around thew Room, but he decided something was wrong with his cymbal and started trying to fix it. Now that's a habit that he has, though he might not even admit it, it is. Mike has a habit that pisses Fish off (it doesn't piss me off); he tunes during songs. Fish gets really mad, because the bass is supposed to hold the song up; and if Mike decides to tune in the middle of a song, the song falls apart. And a lot of times what happens is, Page and I will look at Fish and say, "come on, hold it together." 'Cause we're on top and they're on the bottom, they're the roots of the tree and they have to hold it up. Ok. Fish's habit -- it's not really a habit, but for some reason, Fish always has something wrong with his drums -- this is such a little thing, it took thirty seconds, but he decides to fix his cymbal, and I had just been kind of mad 'cause I thought he was speeding up; I don't even know if he was speeding up, this is just what I was experiencing and I'm not trying to lay any kind of blame on him. At any rate, he looked at me and got pissed at me and I looked back at him and got pissed at him. So then we were pissed at each other. At which point we played, I think, Guelah. But Guelah was really good, I thought, 'cause it was kind of a mean song, in a way? And what's happening is, we've gotten to this point basically where my whole life is being up on the stage; to an absurd degree, after the kind of touring we've been doing. It's scary how much it's like living up there. So we had this little pissed off thing and then the set went on, and then we did Horn. And when we were playing Horn, I was totally bumming out, in a way; I was frustrated, and I thought the music was going well, but there was a frustration in me, and then I was singing that line about, "Now I know the reason why..." and I was thinking, before that, I had been playing and I was thinking this stuff about, "Boy, you know, I'm getting tense because I haven't been getting enough exercise, and I haven't been outside. It's just too much, I've got to stop this touring." And then I got to Horn and I was singing that part about being forlorn and everything, and I was so into it. I meant it so much. It was so much the perfect song. "_Now_ I know the reason why I'm feeling so forlorn," you know? Each night it's a different thing. So then, right after Horn, we did Split Open and Melt, at which point I started thinking. I said, "In the morning I pack up my gear and toss it in my carryall," and I was envisioning clearly -- the words as they were coming out of my mouth, I was saying to the audience, "Every morning I get up, and I'm in this hotel, and I pack up my bag, and I throw it in the back of that van." I've never thought this before; tonight, it happened. At which point the gig became completely alive, to me; during Horn and Melt, because I was singing about something that I really meant. And then it all started. It's like the floodgates open when that happens, as soon as that starts to happen sometimes, these songs that may seem like gibberish or something, to someone, have complete and utter meaning to me. Every line I was singing meant something, and it makes me start laughing on stage, "God, I never knew this song meant this, but it really means it tonight." And then I was kind of tired, thinking, "one more day and I'm gonna be home," and then we got to the jam in Split Open and Melt, and I said "In the evening I undo my belt, split open and melt." I was thinking, at night we do the gig and I loosen up and let everything out. You know what I mean? That's what it meant to me at the time. And then we had this big jam...and I was trying to get this frustration or tension out, which it did, and that completely turned my mood around. And then the next thing that I realized -- then I started thinking about the concept of art, what makes great art, and I always have this theory about the turn of the century in Paris, there were a lot of great composers; the great artists were all there. It was a result of turmoil, a lot of times. Stravinsky was exiled from his home. So then I was thinking, if people knew what our whole lifestyle is like, I think they'd be surprised. It's kind of an old thing, but I think that people definitely have more of a romantic view of what it's like to travel around the country in a rock band than it really is. No matter what...it's a lot of driving, you've got to really love.... I know now why bands break up. As years go by, I cannot believe that the Allman Brothers are still playing. I mean, I can't believe it.w But more than that, I can't believe that B. B. King, who does more than 300 nights a year, is still playing. Every year, since the forties, the guy has been doing 300 nights a year. I saw an interview with him, there's nothing else that he could do, that has become his life. It's not like a side thing. Tonight, I felt -- I had thoughts, halfway through the first set -- sometimes you're feeling, "Well, we've got to get the audience going," that might be something you feel, but I'm just feeling totally and utterly tonight like "I don't care, at all, about the audience," in a way, and that sounds bad, at first. It may sound bad. But that popped into my head. It just seemed like I was seeing the structure of the importance of my life and what was going on, and at the time, I just had no interest in cheerleading the audience in any way, and getting the audience riled up or playing a big hit song or something like that. I didn't care at all. And then we went into Weekapaug Groove, at which point the set had been going on, all these different experiences had been going through my head, and we just completely started going into new areas. At which point I felt completely energized, wasn't tired at all, forgot all about that stuff, but I had gotten to that point through being totally relaxed because I was in Boston, and I knew that the crowd was friends of ours, and we had nothing to prove in Boston, at all. If there's any place we have nothing to prove, it's the Somerville Theater. And there had been some form of turmoil in my life;w new things came out of that. I had a thought tonight also that -- on the one hand I was thinking, boy, I need to take a vacation; and then on the other hand I was thinking, as great things would happen during the night, moments where we were really hooking up, I would think, I need this, though. If I don't have this outlet, music, that Weekapaug Groove tonight, if I don't have that, I would feel clogged up. I wouldn't be able to release some kind of...but at the same time, I can't... I need a vacation, but at the same time it scares me. Taking a vacation sort of scares me, because I don't know what I'm going to do for that kind of outlet. The thing with the lyrics actually has happened to me ever since...it's definitely not a new thing. I'm glad that it happens to me. It's always happened to me; tonight it happened on a certain level, but it's always different. One night on this tour, the last time that I remember it happening that clearly, where this song had a new life that it had never had in a different way, was Chalkdust one time, and I don't even really know how to explain that. One night we were singing Chalkdust, which till that point I hadn't really known what...I mean, I had gotten the basic gist...certain times certain lines pop out. For instance, I've had experiences singing Chalkdust where I feel like I'm talking to the audience, in a way. No, no, not Chalkdust, that'd be Cavern; "it's later than we think," and all that stuff. But Chalkdust -- in Colorado one night I was singing it, and just completely it was saying something to me, in such a strong way. That was Tom, my friend Tom wrote those lyrics. That's an interesting one, because Tom wasn't all that excited about that one when we first wrote it, Chalkdust, and then after he heard the album version of it he started really liking it. Now it's one of his favorite things on the album. [Music communicates a wider range of emotions than speech....] I think, going along with what I was saying before, for me it's becoming more and more...I used to think, I think when I first got into it, there was more of a preconceived emotion that you were trying to convey to the audience, where you're there to get the audience like "Yeah!". Lately it hasn't been like that for me anymore. Lately it's just been whatever I'm feeling. That includes anger, at times. In one show it can range -- tonight was a good example. The more tired I am at the end of a tour, the emotions can range, just swing wildly, from complete laughter and happiness, in the Weekapaug Groove jam, to just utter frustration, when we were doing Horn tonight, to even anger at times, when I just feel like..."fuck you." You know? I mean really. That used to kind of bother me. One time I talked to Bruce Hampton about it. There was some time we played with him, with the Aquarium Rescue Unit, I just came off the stage and I said, "God, I was...I hated that. I just was hating that up there." This might sound weird, but it's true. And he said, that's great, because that's what makes you guys, or somebody that's a good musician, somebody that's an exciting musician to see, exciting; because if you're up there, and your mood is swinging from hatred to pure joy, then when you do hit those pure joy times, you're living it, right there on stage; you're feeling it. If you're just happy all the time, there's never going to be an exciting moment. It's just going to be bland. What's happening with this long touring, and also just the years that go by for the band -- it's been eight years that we've been playing now, is that it becomes more and more the real thing up there. It amazes me how different I feel at different gigs. Sometimes I just feel like talking, I don't feel like playing at all. That was kind of like at that one with the Gamehendge thing. And sometimes, I just feel like boy, I should say something, but I just have nothing to say. I can't talk at all. And then I just don't. It just changes so much, day in and day out. It's really incredible to me. It's scary sometimes, you just don't know what's going to happen. Man, you should have seen this gig in Washington we just did. That was unbelievable. We went out for the first set. The first set was real tight, but kind of boring, in a way -- not boring, but nothing happened, really, I didn't think. I mean, it was alright. That was right before Hartford; I was starting to get a little tired there, too, and I didn't think we had any energy. Then we came on for the second set, and it was unbelievable. We just started -- we did Bathtub Gin, and it was...I don't know if you can put this on the net, but anybody that was there will be able to remember this. Mike and I just started flinging ourselves around the stage completely crazily, and then finally we all four of us just fell down laughing; we couldn't play, we were laughing for two minutes. It was unbelievable. And then we went into You Enjoy Myself right after that; and You Enjoy Myself was completely different than it's ever been, to the same level that Weekapaug Groove was tonight. You know, Weekapaug Groove has usually got sort of a certain structure? But tonight it was just nothing like that. It was like that with You Enjoy Myself. I didn't even really do a solo; we just kind of got really quiet and we jammed, then we kind of built up, then Mike stopped playing and stepped off the stage; just me and Fish were standing there playing for a while, we were playing, then Mike came back on, and then we started hitting things, and then it just kind of went into the vocal jam. It was completely different. And it was so weird, 'cause the difference between the two sets was like night and day. It was two totally different bands, almost. I had no idea that was going to happen. There was no explanation for it, really, it was just this thing that happened. I mean, my mom was there for the first set; she wasn't there for the second set. I was thinking, "You missed it! You missed it, Mom." But there were a lot of other people there. Actually, Tom was there, which is really cool. That was a greatw gig. [Did you ever have a radio show in college?] I had a radio show at UVM. Five o'clock on Monday morning -- five to nine, which I really liked, because I knew it was when people were waking up, if anybody was listening to it at all. It was called the Ambient Alarm Clock. I used to play a lot of bizarre stuff. I had a friend who did a radio show, who was my hero; this woman, her name is Ann LaBruciano (sp.?), and she did this incredible radio show at UVM; I definitely stole some ideas from her. She would sometimes have three turntables going simultaneously. It was just like a jam, in the sense that a band would do a jam on stage, where she would get on a roll, like it would be sort of a lecture about Native American things or something, and then it would blend into -- another turntable would come on at the same time with someone talking about the same subject with a different point of view, clashing against each other, things like that. She had an incredible record collection; unbelievable. It was just out there. There's no way I can describe it, it was so different every time. So I tried to do different stuff, but she was a big influence. I used to play these talking plays a lot, but with music going, different turntables playing different music in the background. It was kind of like the band -- it would start out with classical for the first half-an- hour ºlaughsº, and then it would go into Eno-sort of ambience for the next half-an-hour, and then by the time eight- thirty or nine rolled around I'd be playing new rock, basically. It was interesting because the guy who came after me never knew; he always used to sort of say little things about my show, like it was a boring show, 'cause he always only heard the last ten minutes, when he was driving to the radio station. --laughs--; [What music do you listen to?] We listen to a lot of different kinds of music. Every time we stop at a truck stop we buy a couple more tapes. Let's see; in the last couple weeks we listened to the first George Benson album, we were listening to it today; I'll backtrack as much as I can remember; that's the last thing we listened to. It's a really good tape. I don't know if you ever heard it? It's called, "The Most Exciting Young Guitarist On The Jazz Scene Today." That's the title of the album! And he's real young and he does these really funky sort of sixties versions of, like, Stormy Weather. --sings-- Oh, he's just great. So I listened to that, and then, let's see....god, if you looked in our tape box... millions of things, I don't even know where to start. Each trip there ends up being sort of a favorite tape. I think our favorite tape on this trip was Gladys Knight and the Pips, with Midnight Train to Georgia. That became the theme song for this trip, we played it over and over. We'd pick up hitchhikers -- "You've gotta listen to this! I know you've heard this before, but you've gotta listen to it again!" She's great; ah, love her. And then...I'm trying to think, I don't know...a lot of different stuff. One of my favorites from this trip was a tape of Benny Goodman playing Eddie Sauter arrangements. [Here Henry asked Trey to compare the experiences of motorcycle racing and jamming, in terms of the building intensity of energy up to a certain point beyond which it is difficult to go, and the sense of flow which occurs when that point is reached] I've definitely thought about the connection between those two things. I used to date someone for a long time who, before I dated her, she had been living with this guy who was one of the top ten nationally ranked moto-cross racers. His name is JoJo Kelly. I didn't even really know the guy, but I met him a couple times and that used to fascinate me. He was really into music though, he had this huge stereo in his van, with about eighteen-inch speakers. There's definitely some kind of connection there, just reaching that, hitting that, going full blast.... I don't know what it is, but I did find out something interesting doing this motorcycle racing school in California, and that is, I'll never make it as a motorcycle racer so I better stick to guitar ºlaughsº. The difference is that you have to have no concern for your body. Plus, I was on the track with a couple pros when I did this thing in California, and these guys were going so fast. But it's the same kind of thing. I know what you mean, the faster you go, it just gets more...I really don't know how to put it into words... Sometimes it gets going like you can't stop it, it's got a mind of its own. There's definitely that feeling, oftentimes. .... For example Run Like an Antelope, or David Bowie, will take on a mind of its own, and it gets to a point where...it's not all that often, but it gets to a point where everyone in the band will say you just couldn't play a wrong note if you tried. Whatever wrong note means. That starts to mean nothing once you get out into that kind of bizarre land. The only thing I think of, sometimes, I'm always thinking of having to get it to the next level, having to get a few more horsepower out of it, just more and more. Like I said, sometimes it feels like it's got a mind of its own. Sometimes, though, it's a thing where it's going, you're playing, and your on the edge, you know, and you're trying to take it farther and farther out, just farther and farther out, but the problem is if you go a little bit too far the whole thing just tips over! And that's the end of it. And it just falls apart. So the trick is trying to get it as out there as possible without crossing that fine line where it will fall apart. [Conversation shifted to the business commitments and the record contract. Henry: "Most of the crowd at the shows would rather see happen what you want to see happen in terms of success, rather than the record label's definition of success."] When I think of success right now, what I would want for success, I think that we've completely got 100% success in terms of live playing. The only things that I think of wanting to improve in my life are somehow making touring more livable, in terms of possibly getting single rooms, which is what we want to do now ºlaughsº, not having a roommate, not that we don't like each other -- we love each other, but...a little space, single rooms. Possibly getting a tour bus so that we don't have to drive ourselves, which we have to do; and that's usually Page, he does almost all the driving, and I do the second amount of driving. Things like that, you know? So then you might ask, well, why are you doing this [record contract]? Well, I'd like to sell records at the same time too, and this record contract will afford us opportunities to do things. The good things that they're going to bring us are distribution of our album, which we wouldn't have gotten; secondly, when we put our album out, last time we put it out with an independent label and we didn't get paid. I mean, we sold ten thousand albums and we didn't get paid for it, because the place folded. It didn't end up being any kind of catastrophic problem or anything, but we would have liked to have gotten paid for the records. So this is a lot more...the money is going to be there. Third of all, we're going to be able to work with producers and recording engineers that we wouldn't have been able to work with without the record company, which we're really excited to do, because that's something that, as far as recording albums, something that we've been wanting to do. The other thing is that we want to put out more albums than we've been putting out. We've only been putting out an album once every two years or something, because of money, this, that and the other thing, whatever -- it's just been complicated, because we don't have a stable record contract. So now that we've signed this record contract we're going to have an album out in February and we're definitely going to have another album out within a year; hopefully within nine or ten months. So those are all reasons that we've weighed in deciding that we want to do this kind of a thing. [Henry mentioned that he was intrigued by The Curtain, and asked Trey to comment on it.] The Curtain is another one that I wrote with a friend of mine, that same group of friends; Marc Daubert, who's a guy who used to be in the band for a while -- he used to play percussion a _long_ time ago, like our first three gigs -- he wrote the lyrics and we kind of wrote it together. It's different, in a way, than the rest of the songs 'cause his lyrics are just different than my lyrics or Tom's lyrics in a way. He writes great songs. If it sounds different, that might be why. It's the only song that we do that he wrote the lyrics to. [What kind of music did Space Antelope play?] Well, Space Antelope had the Dude of Life in it; that's where the Dude of Life thing started. That was when I was in high school.... [Was it original songs?] No, not really. There were a couple stupid originals.... We did a lot of different kinds of stuff. One time we did Dogs by Pink Floyd, the whole thing, and we did it in front of the whole school -- seven hundred people, you know? And it was awful. But the night before we had done a dress rehearsal that was really good, I mean pretty good, considering. The whole thing, we had the acoustic guitar at the beginning, and then reel-to-reel tapes with dogs barking, and the synthesizers. I thought that was pretty ballsy for a high school band, to try to play that, or any band to try to cover that stuff. But the Dude of Life was funny. [What's happening with his album?] Well, we're going to try to do something with it. We've got to see what happens with this record deal...we just want to settle this first. Everything's been up in the air for so long. That's it; it's done, it's not mixed because they might be interested in putting it out in which case we would let them, and then they would set him up with a mixing engineer. If not, we'll have to pay for it, or he'll have to pay for it; and I don't even know what the deal is going to be with us playing on it now. That's kind of one of the weird things about signing with a major label -- you can't record with anybody else. We might have to be pseudonyms or something. Which is fine; I don't care, I'll be a pseudonym. It's a great album though, I really like it. The Dude...he just showed up at a gig in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I don't think people knew how to handle it -- it was weird, half the room walked out while he was on stage. Seriously. It was really funny. [Henry asked about point of view in the lyrics, usually not first person but one exception being Rift] Those are some of my favorite lyrics that Tom ever wrote, and not my favorite music, which is why we stopped doing it. ºTrey told me on the phone that the music to Rift has been re-written and that the new Rift will most likely be debuted on March 10 at Portsmouth Music Hall, along with four or five other new songs.º Well, there's Lawn Boy, that one is first person, and Horn is also; those are both Tom. I don't usually write from that perspective personally all that much, except Split Open and Melt I guess, but that's still more fantasy. I think that's one of the things I like about certain ones of Tom's lyrics. Horn, to me, is a breakthrough for us. That is without question my favorite of our new songs, new meaning the last year and a half or two years, going all the way back to...that might even be, of all our songs, one of my favorite songs. To me it's got something that other Phish songs don't have. And it's not a big song live. It's a song about -- it's got some funny lines in it, but -- it's about being in a rotten love relationship basically, we don't sing songs about stuff like that. Except that one; it's just totally different, to me, than anything else. And it's got a really nice singing melody, which is the focus of the whole song, and then that music at the end. I really like the way that worked out. It's got this yearning quality that goes right along with the song to me. For a while -- when we first started playing it, it was weird, because it seemed to be completely different than something like...even than Bouncing Around the Room, which to me is kind of similar in a way, 'cause it's got a pretty vocal melody. But that, the lyrics are still much more in a Phish realm. Just that first line, "Now that you've deceived me...". I love it. Horn and Foam are two of my favorite Phish songs. I can't really put my finger on it and that's what I like about it. They're things that just kind of came out, and I think....Horn -- I love it. I would play that song every night; but we don't... Did I just completely digress? It's too late; I'm digressing. But go ahead. [How do you decide what you play? Do you decide beforehand] Yeah, we do. [Does it change?] Well, it depends. In New Britain we wrote out a songlist and we just didn't play it at all. Even the first song -- we were going to open with Brother, and then we went out on stage and opened with Uncle Pen. It just seemed like the wrong thing. So, we usually write out some kind of songlist, but we don't necessarily do it. Tonight we did that again. We usually don't do it... sometimes we do and sometimes we don't. Oftentimes we won't actually do the songlist. It's good to have something. I definitely don't like standing around going, "What do you wanna play?" You know? We used to do that, but it got boring. Plus it's fun figuring out, certain parts of the night, working out cool little transitions -- like Zappa; I really like the way Zappa does that. He's always got his whole set completely worked out from beginning to end, it's always different. He's got incredible transitions, just going from the middle of one song it's "bang!" Not spacey transitions, but wham!, one song right into the other one, completely changing tempo and everything. He's really great about that. Except he doesn't tour anymore. [Henry mentioned hand signals that Zappa gives to his band while playing, and asked Trey if Phish use any signals] We don't have verbal signals, we have sound signals. We have musical signals to do things; I'm sure you've noticed some of them. ºMakes noise -- laughsº -- that's one of my favorites. That was invented for this tour. I love that one. Chris ºKuroda, lighting designerº is in on all that stuff, too. He's really good about that. Chris is really up on all of our... like tonight, that was the first time we ever did that Weekapaug reprise, he was right there, he knew what he was doing. I mean, we didn't plan it. It just happened. It was really funny. We saw this band in New Orleans, this blues band, and they were doing that stuff, you know? Like telling people to go get a drink at the bar. ºsings blues rhythmº "Yeah, we're gonna go take a break"...ºsingsº... "Go get a drink at the bar!", and they go dancing off stage. [Henry noted the variety of humor in shows, and asked if there were any specific comedic influences on the band.] I don't know...that's just the four of us, from living together so much. I'm sure anybody that spent the amount of time that we do together...it's crazy. I mean it is just crazy. It gets really weird sometimes, in a fun way. That's definitely one great thing, we've got a sense of humor that keeps moving forward, moving forward in weird ways so that things that most people wouldn't think are funny at all become funny to us because we know about this series of jokes that led up to it over the last eight years. What ends up happening is that we do these things onstage that we think are going to be so funny, then we do them and they're not funny at all ºlaughsº. Nobody laughs and you just feel like an idiot. Usually that's Fish. Fish usually does that. [Henry: "what about ºWait!º?"] Oh, that was great. That was so funny. Were you there? Were you at that? [People described it on the net.] Oh did they? What did they say? [Oh, just that the song would keep starting, and then someone would say, "Wait!", repeatedly.] Right! Well, we did this thing called the Oh Kee Pa Ceremony; it's like a ritual that we have, and it just involves being locked in a room, playing free-form music for hours and hours and hours. That happens once a year or so, to try to keep the channels open and everything, really really let loose. This time, that Wait thing happened in the Oh Kee Pa Ceremony at first. Fish started playing something on the drums, he stopped and he went, "Wait!" And then he did it again, and right at that point, all three of us came in and we went, "Wait!" We did it for half an hour or something, over and over again, rhythmically. And then on Halloween, we just started doing it; and the whole crowd started -- the place was going sick already; it was really wild, it was a great gig. We started doing it, and everyone started screaming; whenever we said "Wait!", they all started going ºcrowd screaming noiseº, you know? And then that turned into "No!", every time we'd say "Wait!" This went on for a long time; and then finally, they all just started going "Fuck you!" The whole crowd. At the top of their lungs. Over and over again. The same size crowd as the theater tonight. Everyone just going ºsings a rhythm and stopsº "Fuck you!" It was weird, 'cause I couldn't tell if they were just getting really sick of us doing it and wanted us to shut up, or if they were kind of laughing. Then we did it again. Then we finally did a song, and then we did it again. We just kept doing it. ºTrey told me that the Oh Kee Pa Ceremony is actually a Native American ritual involving nipples. He said that if you want to know any more you should rent the movie "A Man Called Horse" from your local video parlor. (I did this, and never heard the ritual referred to by that name; but thew ceremony itself is hard to miss.)º [The topic of doing funny things on stage progressed into the topic of doing things on stage which were funny in practice, but wh ich the crowd didn't understand during the show.] We've done a lot of stupid things like that. They're so weird I can't even explain them. One time we were doing this song "Shaggy Dog" we used to do. In band practice we were doing the song and we got to the ending and, on the spur of the moment, we were going, "Shaggy dog..." and we went "shaggy dog, dog, dog...shaggy dog, dog, dog...," and then, "ho, ho, ho...ho, ho, how it's magic! Magic!" and then we went "Magic and the Jets!" -- you know Bennie and the Jets. Just this stupid thing; and we thought it was the funniest thing in the world. So we decided we'd do it at the gig. And we did it, this stupid thing -- no-one laughed. Everybody's just standing there like "What are you doing?" We're laughing this really dorky laugh on stage. It's a good thing to do though, completely embarrass yourself. [Henry begins to ask a question about covers but hesitates, and asks Trey if that's a bad thing to ask about] Is that a bad question? No, that's a good question. [Henry: "Some artists don't like to hear about music that's not their own."] No way, I don't feel that way at all! [Henry: "I've noticed there's not as many covers."] But we still want to do covers. I love playing other people's songs, too. Some covers remain. [Have you thought about playing any more with other elements like the Horns?] Yeah, I've definitely thought about it. I've definitely thought about playing with other...I want to play with a choir. I want to have a choir at the end of Lizards. I want to have a choir singing the chorus to Golgi Apparatus -- a hundred and twenty people, you know? I also want to have a choir, in Tweezer in the middle of the jam, have a signal where they do a dissonant chord. That's the next thing I want to do; the problem with that is going to be moving them around. Maybe we'll have a very short local tour. [You could play cathedrals.] Oh wow! That would be amazing! About covers...the only kind of covers I enjoy doing that much are...in terms of rock covers I like doing Good Times Bad Times on certain nights. It's fun, I love that kind of music. Country covers I like to do, any jazz stuff I like to do. Things come and go, they go through a period and like I said they just fade out. We just started talking about doing another rock cover.... Sometimes we do things in soundcheck... [Speaking of soundchecks, though this isn't a cover, I really like the slow a capella My Sweet One (which I remember from the soundcheck in Arcata)] We did that at one gig [Santa Cruz], Fish's girlfriend was there. ºlaughsº [I like all of the a capella stuff a lot...] I love doing those a capella things -- oh, those are covers. Those covers I like to do; we want to learn more of those, too. I'd like to be able to do a whole set some time. What are you guys thinking? Maybe we should hit the road soon. Here's an answer to your ten-year question -- I'm more interested to see where we're going to be a year from now than where we're going to be ten years from now, 'cause I think that's going to be a signpost. I'm really interested to see what, if any, effect this new album is going to have on us. The feeling among the band is that, nobody ever talks about getting into big rooms. The only time that ever comes up is in the sense of, ºI wonder if we'll play in a place like that?', joking around. The concern is with just day-to-day getting by, and what was good or what was bad about the gig last night, and what are we going to do about such-and-such a song. That's it, we're there, that's what we've been doing. Nothing has changed, in my eyes, I really don't feel any different playing a gig like I did tonight than I did playing at Goddard seven years ago, at all. I can clearly remember a gig at Goddard in the hay barn. Page might have just joined the band. We played Harry Hood, and it was incredible. An incredible Harry Hood. I remember having a total musical experience playing this song in the hay barn. There were people dancing around in the hay barn, I'm thinking of it right now. And tonight we played Harry Hood, same thing; I mean very different, I'm sure if you listen to the two tapes they would sound radically different, but I mean....that's it, you know? Everything else is just so much extraneous. Everything else is just framework to get to that thing that we're there for; that's what the people are there for and that's what we're there for, for something like that to happen while everybody's standing in the same room. Once you've got the equipment set up, that's it. Everything else -- all this record company stuff and all of this stuff, everything that we're talking about, in the end, is simply framework for getting the equipment set up in some room with a bunch of people standing there night after night. We talk about the tour bus, or we talk about single hotel rooms, or record contract or anything, the only reason that any of that stuff is even an issue is because we want a few more nights to be able to jam live. As many more as you can get. It's the same thing with practicing -- we practice really hard when we're at home. We practice five hours a day when we're at home. It's work, it's hard, it's a pain, but we just keep thinking that if you can practice for three months, you'll get another year and a half of good gigs. Three months, if we can just do it, if we can get ourselves to practice for another two months, if I can just sit down and write five more songs, then we won't get bored with our songlist, we'll have five more songs to choose from -- it never ends, it just keeps going and going. Like the songlist -- I always think, wow, the songlist is really big now, we've got enough songs, we'll never get sick of our songlist or feel like we need more songs, and then inevitably two weeks later I'm thinking about writing new songs. And I think about writing new songs in a sense of filling out the songlist. Even writing songs is purely so that when we get on that stage we can have more of an open thing. I'll actually write songs -- when I wrote the last section of songs it was Sparkle, Brother and It's Ice. I literally wrote those songs to fill niches, in a sense. That is kind of what I was doing; Sparkle, you know, there's a certain point in the night when you want to be able to just sing something that's really fun. There's a certain point of the night when you want to be able to go sick, which would be Brother; and there's a certain point of the night when you really want to get deeply into an involved mind-twisting song, and that was It's Ice. Next time we sit down to write songs, I'm always thinking of this stuff, I'm always thinking of the next gig, how are we going to make it last a little bit longer, well if we just had another song that had a major open jam, or if we -- It's Ice was specifically written for Page to have a song to sing 'cause he doesn't sing enough, and for there to be another piano solo. I wrote the song, but I wanted Page to sing it, and I wrote it in his range, and I wrote it with a piano solo. Because that will make the gigging more enjoyable, that will make us expand, and that will make the whole thing be able to last a little bit longer. Every ounce of effort on everyone's part in this whole band thing is purely to be able to make the thing that already exists keep going. It's kind of like the corporate grow-or-die syndrome in a sense, because as things naturally get bigger with more people...it doesn't have to keep growing, it's there. But it's got to keep changing, it's got to grow and change, 'cause once you go on stage -- and that's another thing that we definitely have a philosophy about, if you go on stage and you do a Weekapaug Groove like we did tonight, where it got really quiet which doesn't usually happen and we stopped playing and then we started again, and so on, then you can't do that again because no matter what it's going to be inferior. You won't get that same kind of feeling of excitement by repeating what's already happened. You've got to go out and do something new. And in order to be able to go out and do something new -- it's interesting because I don't think that the Harry Hood tonight, or anything that we play, is better than what we played in 1984, or 1983 when we first started. I think that jams that we had back then were probably just as good, even though we weren't as good players or we weren't as accomplished. But the problem is, if you don't keep improving at your instrument (this is why you have to practice), then you won't be able to get the same high. The high was from taking the jam one step higher than you did last time. The high of the moment was doing something that you never did before; and the only way you can keep getting that high is to keep doing something different. So you keep improving. © 1991 Trey Anastasio, Henry Petras and Shelly Culbertson.