Trey Anastasio Has A Terrific Smile May 7, 1995 - Boston Globe Magazine by Staff Most rock singers affect the bored, dazed, and defiant expressions of self-styled rebels and outlaws. But Anastasio, lead guitarist of the rock group Phish, fairly beams the pleasure he takes in performing through the red tussock of his hair and beard. But then why shouldn't Anastasio be smiling? It's December 30, 1994, and here he is capping off an extraordinary year for Phish with an appearance on the David Letterman show. After taping Letterman, the band will go directly to play a soldout show at Madison Square Garden, to be followed the next night by a soldout New Year's Eve performance at Boston Garden. These gala holiday concerts are the highlights of a year during which Phish grossed $10.3 million on tour selling 600,000 tickets to 99 concerts coast to coast and sold 550,000 records. The remarkable thing about the Phish phenomenon is that this Burlington Vermont band has achieved national popularity without benefit of a hit record, major radio airplay, MTV videos, or cover articles in Rolling Stone. Phish is a grassroots success story. Word of the group's distinctive sound has spread slowly outward from the Champlain Valley over the past 12 years. Today, 85,000 fans - mostly high school and college students receive the Phish newsletter. Thousands more log on to the Phish.Net computer newsgroup for a daily dose of Phish fellowship. The fanatical following that Phish has attracted among kids and collegians has tended to relegate it to the status of a cult band, with the mainstream music media seeing Phish as Grateful Dead clones. But those drawn to the driving beat and soaring melodies of Phish's arty jazzrock fusion say they have found something of value in these men and their music, something outside the hype of corporate star-making machinery. Professional surfer Dave Kennedy, who first encountered Phish in concert in Portland, Maine, four years ago, flew all the stay from Hawaii for their Boston Garden show. "In a world where everything is a facsimile," Kennedy explains, "Phish seems very real." Real as opposed to produced, packaged, and promoted. RealDas in live, loose, and lots of fun. "Improvisation is the key," says Greg Stukey, 18, a Phish Head from Syracuse, New York. Stukey is dressed in a long, purple, knitted sweaterdress with the same pattern of orange circles as the old housedress that Phish drummer Jon Fishman wears on stage. "Those extended jams I love it when they go off on tangents. It just blows me away that human beings can create music in that form." Indeed, a Phish concert is a freeform musical happening, during which a polka or an a cappella Hebrew folk song may break out in the middle of a rock set, or an acoustical bluegrass number may follow a 15minute electronic jam session. The Grateful Dead, Sun Ra, Santana, and Frank Zappa are frequently cited as influences. Long jams that defy radio play are the band's stock in trade, and Phish actually practices improvising. In band practice and rehearsals, they engage in elaborate listening drills designed to make totem better listeners and, thus, better to respond to one another musically. The four friends who are Phish are: guitarist Anastasio, 30; drummer Fish man, 30; bass player Mike Gordon, 29; and pianist Page McConnell, 32. Anastasio, who grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, is the band leader in every sense, playing lead guitar, singing most lead vocals, and composing most Phish songs. Fishman, the son of a Syracuse dentist, is the Phish jester, a happy-go- lucky hobbit of a fellow who performs wearing goggles and housedress and sometimes nothing at all. Gordon is a native of Sudbury, Massachusetts. His father founded the Store 24 chain. He is a filmmaker as well as a musician and possesses the most business sense of the four: Before Phish became too big for the band to manage on its own, he kept the books and answered all the fan mail. McConnell grew up in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. His father, a pediatrician and research scientist, helped develop Tylenol. It was McConnell who drove the van when the band was still small and local, who is the Phish elder and philosopher. "I feel like as I get older I'm starting to understand what drives me and what drives us as a band, what makes me happy," says McConnell, "and that's playing live music and writing new songs." PHISH WAS FOUNDED IN THE fall of 1983 when Anastasio posted flyers around the University of Vermont campus, looking for fellow musicians to start a band. Fishman, Gordon, and a guitarist answered the call. "The first minute I met Trey and played with him, I knew I'd found my man," says Fishman. "That was it. I wanted to play drums for this stuff forever." Though Phish got together in 1983, it did not really coalesce until 1985, when McConnell joined the group. Then a student at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vermont, McConnell was paid a finder's fee of $50 a head for persuading Anastasio and Fishman to transfer to Goddard, an alternative liberalarts school that was popular in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s but was down to 35 students in the 1980s. Phish's fifth member left the group when he became a born-again Christian and went off to play in televangdist Jimmy Swaggart's band. As it happens, bassist Gordon also had a profound religious experience around that time. In November 1985, while jamming with Phish in the Goddard cafeteria, Gordon says he was transported by the music into a transcendental state that he now compares to flying or swimming deep in the ocean. "It was the peak experience of my life - the time I felt most myself," says Gordon. "I knew I wanted to do this the rest of my life. Now I'm living to try to create and share the kind of experience I had in 1985." When Phish began playing out, one of the first places they played regularly was Nectar's, a tavern in downtown Burlington famous for French fries with gravy and live music nightly without a cover charge. Phish credits Burlington and Nectar's with getting them off to a good start. "Vermont has had a huge impact on what our music is like," says Anastasio "It's slow moving, and people are really down to earth. It's not a confrontational culture up here. When we used to play at Nectar's, it was so laidback. We'd play three sets a night, just feeling our way as a band. It was such a mellow atmosphere that we were free to stretch out and experiment, to attempt outrageous things and make utter fools of ourselves Phish dedicated its 1992 album, A Picture of Nectar, to Burlington restaurateur / impresario Nectarios "Nectar" Rorris. "I had a feeling some day this band could be good; maybe not as high as they've gotten, but a national band," says Rorris. "They're very dedicated people, and they came to play with the heart not to compete or show off." PHISH'S POPULARITY SPREAD from campus to campus during the late 1980s, moving first east over the mountains into New Hampshire and Maine, then south down the valley to Massachusetts. Anastasio says he knew the band had arrived on January 26, 1989, when Phish played the Paradise, in Boston. The club wouldn't book relatively unknown band, so Phish rented the place themselves and easily it with their loyal followers. "Suddenly," says Anastasio, "all the other clubs wanted us." Another Phish milestone, says Anastasio, came two years later, on October 17 and 18, 1991, when the band sold out two shows at the Great American Music Hall, in San Francisco. The Vermont band was selling out shows on the West Coast without a record contract. Phish is now such a concert draw that it packs arenas lilac Boston Garden, the Mullen Center at the University of Massachusetts, the Worcester Centrum, and Madison Square Garden. Anastasio however, insists that playing to 15,000 at Madison Square Garden doesn't really feel any different than playing to 150 at Nectar's. "It's the same people," he says, "a lot of friends and family. And we're still trying to do something every night that we've never done before." True Phish Heads appreciate the fact that Phish is not interested in playing the same hit song endlessly. Every Phish concert is different, and even individual songs metamorphose on stage, a five minute tune sometimes extending to 15 or 20 minutes minutes when the band gets into it. "Musically, the thing that makes them different," says Amy Skelton, Phish's official First Fan, "is that they build and build and build each song to a peak, so that it's almost like a high. There's total elation when they release the tension they've built." Skelton, 30, a friend of Fishman's at WM, was the only person to show up at Phish's first Burlington gig. Today, she divides her time between her 200-acre horse farm in Maine and serving as Phish's merchandising manager when the band is on tour. "The reason kids get turned on," says Skelton, "is that they see their first show, and here are several thousand of their peers peaceful, cool, outdoorsy people, the 1990s hippie generation. They're young, they've been looking for where they fit in life, and suddenly they've found their spot." This sense of belonging is a powerful magnet for a tribe of Phish Heads recognizable by their woolly South American sweaters, flannel shirts, jeans, and long hair. "It's about all the cool people you see when you go to a show," fan Greg Stukey says of the Phish scene, "and helping people get to the next show." "It takes your mind to a different level of consciousness. It puts your spirit in a really good mood. It's always different and very happy," says Phish Head Sarah "Kitaen" Keating. Keating, 17, a latterday flower child, is from Phish ground zero Burlington, Vermont. She is one of hundreds of Phish fans hanging around outside Boston Garden on New Year's Eve trying to get tickets to the soldout show. She says she has attended 30 Phish concerts and never bought a ticket in advance. Last night at Madison Square Garden was the only time she has been shut out. Keating's Phish faith is rewarded this particular evening when she gets "miracled." A perfect stranger hands her a free ticket to the Boston show. She looks at the ticket in disbelief, utters a scream of joy, and pirouettes down Causeway Street. "It's so joyful. You just can't be unhappy when you listen to Phish," says Rosemary MacIntosh, 22, of Cherry Hill, New Jersey. MacIntosh is a strategic member of the Phish.Net newsgroup. If the fivetimes ayear Phish newsletter, "Doniac Schvice," unites 85,000 Phish Heads, the Phish.Net mobilizes them, providing instant fan reports on concerts, lists of the songs played in each set, and lyrics to all Phish tunes. Since Phish.Net appeared on the Internet four years ago, the Phish newsgroup (to which 40,000 Net surfers have access) has generated close to 75,000 pages of text. While rumors and reviews account for much of the chat on Phish.Net, one of its most important functions is as a tapetrading bulletin board. Phish permits even, encourages the taping of their concerts, and the free (for the price of a tape) trade in Phish tapes is phenomenal. While the band has only released albums on the Elektra Label, for instance, Rosemary MacIntosh has a collection of close to 200 Phish concert tapes. "The taping probably detracts from record sales, but as the band moves out of cult status, it has less and less effect," says Paul Brown, who is in charge of rock promotions at Elektra. "Everything is in place now. The audience is Radio is starting to wake up. Ultimately, what has to happen is to capture the excitement and humor of the live shows on a recording. It might be the double live record [scheduled for release June 20] that does it. All this steam is building up under the band. When it blows it's going to be amazing." Handling the pressures of growing popularity falls to Phish manager John Paluska, president of Dionysian Productions, in Lexington, Massachusetts. Paluska, 27, began booking Phish into college bars around Northampton while still a student at Amherst College and has managed the band full time since graduating in 1989. Phish is Dionysian's only client. Paluska is uncomfortable with Paul Brown's vision of the bands potential. "Phish is like hot coals," he says. "The last thing we want is a brush fire." Phish's popularity has grown gradually, year by year, based on the quality of its live performances rather than on the sale of its records. It is what the music industry calls "a catalog band." Hoist, Phish's 1994 album, sold a respectable 250,000 copies, while its four earlier albums DJunta, Lawn Boy, Picture of Nectar, and Rift sold a combined 300,000 Last year. Junta, Phish's first and most popular recording, still sells 1,500 to 2,000 copies a week. In addition to steady record sales, Phish also does a brisk business in Tshirts, caps, posters, and decals through the Phish Dry Goods Department, a mail-order operation run out of a small shopping center on the edge of Lexington. The Phish newsletter is also produced in Lexington. Far from being retrohippies like most Phish Heads, the Phish business staff in Lexington is a surprisingly cleancut group of bright, young people. Were they not managing the affairs of a rock band, they might easily be running a congressional campaign. And they are as protective of their band's image and integrity as any campaign worker would be of their candidates "How much bigger do we want it to get than selling out Madison Square Garden in four hours?" asks manager Paluska, musing over the forces of growth and change that are the central tension in the life of Phish. Having made it on their own, Phish now faces the challenge of surviving success. One of the problems Phish faces, Paluska says, is keeping the price of concert tickets under $20 so that fans who attend multiple concerts a year can afford them. The other ticket challenge is getting tickets into the hands of people who are going to use them rather than into the hands of scalpers. Paluska is working with ticket agencies on ways to assure that loyal Phish Heads get an early deal at tickets. Another problem of growth is the bootleg market that has grown up around Phish. Many of the Phish Tshirts and souvenirs for sale at concerts and in record shops are not licensed by Phish. For example, the ubiquitous "Vermont's Phinest" bumper stickers which play off the motto of another Vermont institution, Ben & Jerry's ice cream are not licensed by the band. Most Phish Heads adhere to the ethic that it is a crime to rip-off the band by selling Phish concert tapes for more than the cost of tile blank Ape, but even in Burlington, bootleg recordings such as a $60 CD made from a bootleg tape of the three-set New Year's Eve concert regularly show up in local record stores. Amy Skelton, who handles merchandising when Phish is on the road, is now armed with a federal injunction that permits her to confiscate bootlegged and unlicensed Phish products. Skelton has also been placed in charge of outside security at concerts, one of her chief targets being the nitrous oxide vendors who have begun to show up in auditorium parking lots, peddling $5 balloons full of laughing gas to Phish Heads. What Phish fans worry most about, however, is that their heroes will sell out, become too commercial. Band members say they have been hearing this concern ever since Phish got too big to play for free at Nectar's, but they do understand their fans' concern about commercialism. A case in point was Phish's brief and disastrous foray into MTV. Under pressure from their record company, Phish members argued for two years over whether to make a video. Finally, last year, they gave in and produced a video of the song "Down with Disease." Bassist Gordon directed the video, based on an underwater aquarium motif they had used in concert. Fans hated the video and so did the band. "It was a totally farcical, ridiculous thing to do for other people's reasons," says drummer Fishman of the video. The band members have agreed that they will not make another video simply to promote a record. "I don't care if I'm ever on TV or if we ever sell a gold record," says pianist McConnell. "I know what I need to survive, and I don't need an awful lot." AT HOME IN THE wilds around Burlington, Phish members live a generous musical life, sitting in with other bands on the lively local music scene and jamming with one another. Phish's first performance since their New Year's Eve concert will be on May 16, a benefit for Voters for Choice at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. Over the winter, a great deal of the band's time and effort went into selecting a dozen to 15 songs from among 550 songs recorded live during their fall concert tour. The consensus songs will become Phish's first live album. Since live music is the essence of Phish, the new live album may catapult Phish out of cult status and onto the charts, but Anastasio says the band is not out for fame and fortune. "I don't have any goals to get bigger," he says. "My only goals are to get better." Getting better, says Anastasio, is a function of listening to one another, both musically and personally. Communication is what Phish is about and what makes it work. Though Anastasio is the only married member of Phish, for example, band members have already begun talking about what it will mean to the group's dynamic, especially on tour when they start having families. They are all children of affluent, suburban families themselves, and family values underlie much of what might otherwise be the profligate life of a rock band. "We come from good, functional families," says Mike Gordon, "and we've had that attitude with our fans and with the band." If it is unusual to see a rocker like Anastasio grinning happily on national television, it is even more unusual to see a rock musician invite his grandmother onstage during a concert, as Gordon did in Boston on New Year's Eve. Gordon's grandmother died two weeks later, but he had the pleasure of knowing that she compared her appearance in Boston Garden with her wedding day in terms of excitement. Anastasio provided a similar thrill for his step grandfather, a former cabaret crooner, when he invited him onstage a few years ago in Arizona to sing with the band. Gordon's mother, artist Marjorie Minken, paints all of Phish's stage backdrops. So Phish is a family affair. And like a family, the members of the band have made a major commitment to one another. "If anyone quits," says Anastasio of the impact Phish has made, "it's over. It's history." But McConnell says not to worry, all four musicians view Phish as a longterm commitment. That's why they're more concerned about their musical integrity than about the trappings of conventional rock stardom. What I want to be playing and recording for the next 30 years," says McConnell, "is going to have to come from the heart." Music "from the heart" defines the authenticity so many fans find in Phish. It is probably responsible for the euphoric release Phish Heads report when dancing to Phish's hypnotic music. It is the experience Gordon has been trying to recreate for the past decade. As Fishman describes it, it is the experience of letting go, of getting your ego out of the way and "letting the music come through you." "For that one moment," says Fishman of the high that comes when the band is really wailing, "you were truly this band, part of something way larger than yourself." No matter how ecstatic Phish members get when discussing the musical journeys they take with their fans, however, they are very down-to-earth about what they have been able to achieve and refreshingly appreciative of their good fortune. "When I was 5 years old I wanted to play drums in a rock band," says Fishman. "Now I am. I got choice 'A'. I lucked out. But I'm always stopping myself and thinking, "Wow! This is a cool life."