Mike Gordon: Flying Phish December 1, 1996 - Bass Player Magazine By Karl Coryat click on thumbnail for larger image If you're a musician, you have to love Phish--even if you're not crazy about their music. Here's a highly accomplished band that can sell out Madison Square Garden in four hours with no hit single, very little mainstream press, and only a few poorly received minutes of MTV exposure. Their seven excellent albums have been "hits" not through corporate wheeling and dealing but because of an incredible grass-roots network of devoted fans, the Internet newsgroup rec.music.phish, and the band's homespun newsletter Döniac Schvice. And since the death of Jerry Garcia, they've been adopted as the band of choice by several thousand former Deadheads, who make the Phish-concert parking lot scene virtually indistinguishable from a Dead show's. Is Phish merely the "Truckin'" band of the '90s? Not on your life. Hardcore "Phish Heads"--the ones that resent the proliferation of acid dealers and gate crashers at recent shows--know a Phish concert is more a musical event than a countercultural convention. While the Dead's improvisational jams could be great at times, Phish is consistently much tighter, more creative, more energetic, and more sophisticated. In fact, strip away all the tie-dyed, trippy-dancing, ticket-begging trappings that are now firmly allied with Phish, and you'll find four great musicians capable of reaching heights of spontaneous artistry far surpassing that of any other rock & roll band working today. It's appropriate bassist Mike Gordon, guitarist Trey Anastasio, keyboardist Page McConnell, and drummer Jon "Fish" Fishman hail from Vermont, land of maple syrup and Ben & Jerry's, the very antithesis of the dog-eat-dog L.A. music scene. Gordon joined the band while an engineering student at the University of Vermont; hundreds of local and college gigs followed, which built Phish a word-of-mouth following that spread from campus to campus across New England, then down the Eastern Seaboard, and finally across the country. Meanwhile, Phish was systematically honing its improvisational chops in rehearsals through an ingenious listening exercise. Standing in a circle, they would jam over a riff and take turns altering the riff while the others reacted and followed; this heightened each musician's improvisational sensitivity and fused the band into an extremely cohesive, communicative unit. After releasing two indie records, Phish was picked up by Elektra, which quickly learned to leave them to their own snowballing devices. A string of wildly eclectic discs (with soaring sales figures) followed, including last year's two-CD live set A Live One. Earlier this year, Phish converged on woodsy Bearsville Studio near Woodstock, New York, to record their latest studio effort, Billy Breathes. (It's due to be released just as this issue hits the newsstands.) When listening to any Phish album--even the live one--bear in mind the band is much more about the concert experience than anything else. Just don't expect them ever to come out in makeup and their original costumes . . . . Did you try doing anything radically different in making the new record? For one thing, we decided at first to produce it ourselves. For our previous studio album, Hoist, we had a producer and lots of guest musicians, and the record company was visiting; this time, we decided we really didn't want anyone involved except the four of us. We didn't want the label to visit. We didn't even want an engineer. When we started the project, we got this idea of recording one note at a time--one person, one note, going in a circle--and that would be the whole album. For about two weeks, every night, we would do either a round of recording or a round of erasing. We called it "The Blob." We try to keep reinventing ourselves, just by experimenting, and "The Blob" was that sort of thing. It ended up being 15 or 20 minutes long, but only a couple of minutes ended up on the album, as part of the tune "Steep." It set up a vibe for the project, though, where it was really us looking inward rather than outward. For the first time, we scheduled a month off during the middle of the project to gain perspective--and what we discovered was we probably needed to get a producer. We thought we had tracked a lot of songs that sounded good, but all of the tunes together seemed to lack excitement. Also, we were spending long hours comping our vocals; we'd sing eight vocal tracks, and then we'd spend the next day and a half making a vocal comp. [Ed Note: "Comp" is short for "composite," one track that combines the best elements of several takes.] Or, we'd do ten takes of a song and try editing the different sections together. Making all of those decisions ourselves and doing all that work got to be really tedious. Music is about having fun playing, and that was getting weeded out of our schedule by all the other things we had to do. So we got Steve Lillywhite to come in and produce. What was different after he came aboard? When we were producing ourselves, we were recording only three takes of a song at a time, because we found if we did five or six, the first or second would usually be the best. Steve, though, had us do about 40 takes of each tune. We'd do eight takes and then take a break, do another eight, changing a few things, and then we'd go to dinner. After dinner we'd do another eight takes, take another hour off, and then we might decide to scrap the whole feel or change instruments or something and record another three takes. By this point it would be 2 AM. These sessions taught me how important attitude is in playing music. By the time it was 2 AM I'd be really tired, so I'd go lie down, and I'd start to feel irritated because the rest of the band wanted me to stay up. I'd fall asleep; at 3:00 or 3:30 they'd wake me up, and I'd think, I can't even stand up, let alone play music! But we'd start to play, and I'd be in this alpha state from being half asleep. Even though I wasn't into it or rocking very hard, my ego would be asleep enough that something would start to bubble up. After a couple more takes, my whole attitude would change: suddenly I'd be thinking, I don't want to go to bed--home, the best I know it right now, is with this bass playing rock & roll. The bass would just pull me along, and I wouldn't even care if we were getting anything on tape. That wasn't the point anymore; I'd just want to express love with each note and have all of this emotion coexist with this incredible feeling of flight. To me, the whole concept of music before 3 AM that night was completely useless and so irrelevant to what life can offer if you're open to it. It's a struggle I'm constantly dealing with. I think that at any given moment, the exact same situation can be perceived in completely different ways. When I'm playing, there are times when a note can be completely thrilling in a way I couldn't even imagine when I'm not in that state, and there are other times when I play that same note and think, When am I going to get some food? The amount of distance between those extremes is phenomenal. Of course, drugs are a way you can change those perspectives. I haven't tried too many drugs, although I like to smoke pot; I don't smoke it that much, but when I do it's to put my mind into a different frame of reference so I can make a ritual out of playing. For me, playing music isn't about creating art that will stand the test of time; it's about performing a ritual. Phish is constantly being compared to the Grateful Dead. Was Phil Lesh a major influence on you? I've never spent a lot of time studying any one bass player, so it's hard to say--but I definitely love his playing. To me, it feels as if he has a sense of the kinetics of sound. There's a sense the notes are resonating through your whole body, and he seems to know how to give a bass line a lot of gravity in its interaction with the other instruments. To achieve that, I think it takes a certain sensitivity to what's going on. You can pick up the bass and just start thrashing on it--which is fine if you're an aggressive person and that's what you want to get out of the instrument--but if you're sensitive to what the notes are doing to you, things can blossom unexpectedly. I also really like Phil's tone. I used to play with my fingers a lot, but now I use a pick 90% of the time. The picks I use are graphite, custom-made by Ken Smith. Actually, it was Phil's bass tech who gave me the graphite picks to begin with. Jerry Garcia often complained Deadheads adored the band's music no matter how horribly they played. Are Phish fans similar? It's funny, because our fans are that way, but at the same time they're critical even when we're playing well. They pay attention, and they're aware of what's going on. If we have a bad gig, people backstage say, "You guys were great"--but we know that means it was a bad show. If we have a good show, the fans might say, "This was the best day of my whole life." Like the Grateful Dead, we have a certain percentage of fans who have left mainstream society for a while to go on tour with us. For them, our music is just the theme of their lives--the background music. Our fans are great; we do really weird stuff onstage sometimes, and we have a group of people listening who'd rather we did that than play the same thing each night. It's so much fun to know we can take chances and that there are people willing to come along and listen and dance. Do you consider the live album a success? We're critical of it. We think it's kind of long-winded, which is why we wanted to follow it up with a short album; usually each record of ours is a reaction to the previous one. But that's not to say we don't like long music. For me, if a jam is really happening, I'd just as soon have it last all day. It's like an adventure, like learning to fly--and if you could fly without an airplane, you'd probably want to do it all day rather than for just 15 or 20 minutes. The live version of "Tweezer," which is about 35 minutes long, is kind of like that. When we went onstage to play it that night, we expected it to last only five or ten minutes, but we just kept playing. Our attitude is always to expect the unexpected, and that tune was one of those situations where we decided to go on a little journey. We hope, though, that doesn't mean we're just four people in our own world noodling; we hope it means going on a journey together and discovering new places. It doesn't always happen that way, though. How hard did you have to work to develop that cohesiveness? It's funny, because the first time we jammed together 13 years ago, it didn't really click; there were other people I had jammed with where I felt it had clicked better. Now, in retrospect, I think that was a good thing, because it made us work at it. We still practice a lot when we're not on the road, but we used to do it all the time--after school, every day. For hours and hours we would jam, write music, and experiment; we tried to zero in on certain things and push them--rhythms we weren't good at, or grooves, or styles. The listening exercises were the culmination of all that. Our favorite thing to do was just to throw all caution to the wind and jam without expectations. But we also realized how easy it is for the four of us to lapse into our own little worlds, playing up and down scales or whatever, not necessarily in the group mind. By getting together and just allowing this group mind to exist, we grew together. Also, our relationships when we weren't playing developed the same way. When we're jamming we're communicating, but if we're just having a meeting we're also communicating, and it's sort of the same dynamic. We recently did this photo shoot that lasted for eight hours, and the whole time we were trying to make each other laugh by going in a circle and saying stupid things, which felt a little like jamming. The other guys in the band would say music is communication; I'd rather say communication is the vehicle, and music is motion. Either way, communication is the first step, and if one person is thinking, How do I look? or, Is this a cool bass line? or, Are we having food on the bus later? it throws the whole thing off. What happens in that case is it feels as if we're mocking ourselves--pretending to be Phish. One of your best jams on record is actually on a studio album-- "Demand," on Hoist. How did you capture that vibe in the studio? That's actually a live jam that was edited onto the album, and it's a good synopsis of what the band is about. The song starts out with a [studio-recorded] fugue-like thing Trey had written, which is like a launching pad; that part was pretty much memorized, which is the other end of the spectrum from not knowing what you're going to play. We're playing all this written music--the disciplined, ritual part--trying to remember fingerings and doing all sorts of left-brain stuff, and it sort of builds up. Then there's the jam, which is really just three bars of 4/4 plus a bar of 9/8. We were out on the road, and our jams hadn't been good for about a tour and a half, but suddenly something clicked and we found this new way of doing it--and it ended up on the end of Hoist. When I get in those situations, sometimes I like to simplify my part to just a single note so it really grooves with no ego in the way. I have to fight the urge to play more--and I often ask myself why that is. Is it because it's uncool to play simply? After all, anyone can get onstage and play one note for ten minutes. But if I surrender myself, completely letting go of my ego, incredible things can happen. I might add a second note and see how that feels; maybe it's a major 3rd in a minor song, and I'll just be an observer and notice what's happening. I'll think, How does this feel? Do I feel agitated? Maybe feeling agitated is good in this context, so I'll go with the agitated feeling. Then I'll add a third or fourth note and see what that does. Finally, I might try going all the way up and down the neck more than I ever had before and see how that feels. Do you ever get lost? All the time. These great journeys are the ideal, but there's another side. Sometimes we get off the stage and fight with each other about who wasn't concentrating. It always comes down to hooking up and communicating. Jamming is definitely the most important thing for me. There are other important parts, like songwriting and arranging, but all I really care about is going on these journeys. It's impossible for people--let me rephrase that--it's impossible for me when I'm not on one of these journeys to remember how ecstatic it feels and how much of a celebration life becomes. On the other hand, it's the worst feeling to get together and play bad music, and we definitely do that sometimes. The good side, though, makes it all worth it. Mike Gordon was born on June 3, 1965, in Boston. He grew up in Sudbury, a small town a half-hour west of the city, and spent the first seven years of his education at Solomon Schecter, a Jewish day school. "By the third grade the teachers were speaking Hebrew only, but I never really learned it," he remembers. "Imagine a kid who doesn't know Hebrew listening to a 20-minute Hebrew lecture! It was kind of a relief when I finally discovered music, because it uses such a different part of your brain--this language of vibrations." His discovery happened several years after the rudest culture shock of his life: transferring to the public school system. "In Solomon Schecter, no discipline was ever needed because nobody ever did anything wrong, and everyone was brilliant. Then, suddenly, I was in a school where the main thing was to beat each other up, do drugs, and peel out in the parking lot. I was the one in charge of getting beaten up; one day I was walking down the hall and this tall, ratty kid said to me, `I hate your face,' and he punched me." Can you trace your musical development from your childhood and adolescence? I was a very strange kid. I never played any sports, ever, and I spent much of my time alone. I didn't want to be a kid--I wanted to be an adult. I spent a lot of time planning projects; when I was nine I planned a full-length feature film, and I also put together these clubs that never existed, with a hierarchy of president, treasurer, and everything. I typed everything, probably from the age of six, and I generated file cabinets full of these typed plans for clubs and clubhouses and inventions--bureaucracy beyond belief, like something out of Brazil. I was completely introverted; even when I was one or two, I'm told, I never played with toys. I preferred things in the real world, like going through the stuff in my mom's purse. I always needed to be building something, like a little-kid mad scientist. Finally, in high school, I came out of my shell, and music started to become this thing I cared about more and more. I had always enjoyed music; I probably listened to Abbey Road a thousand times when I was a kid. Music started to slowly develop as my way of soul-searching. Certain songs would take over and represent the struggles I'd been going through. I had played piano since about age six, and I really liked to sit down and play things by ear; I didn't like taking lessons very much. Later I decided I wanted to play guitar, and I took a guitar course at the local music store when I was 12 or 13. When did the bass enter the picture? I was in the Bahamas with my family, and at the hotel there was this calypso band that played all day long at the poolside. It sounded so good--much better than any music I had heard, and I was completely into it. I was in the pool, I could feel the bass vibrating me, and I told my dad, "If I'm ever in a band, I want to play that instrument!" Shortly afterwards, I rented a Beatle Bass copy and an old tube amp and took some bass lessons at the music store. In my last year of high school I joined the jazz band, and the guest conductor, Diego Poprokovich, hooked me up with Jim Stinnette, who later became my bass mentor. One day in jazz band, Diego said, "Mike, you've got to keep time. It almost doesn't matter what notes you play; you can crumple up the piece of paper and throw it on the floor--all I want you to do is keep time. That's 99% of what matters." I have this problem of hearing things a half a beat off at fast tempos, so Diego would always be looking at me and clapping on the two and four, because after a minute I'd turn the beat around. It's funny, because now I love it when that happens. When Phish goes on these musical journeys, I often try to make myself as naďve as possible so I lose a sense of the one. I love not knowing where the beat is. As high school went along, suddenly I had a social life, and I didn't want to work on projects in my basement anymore; I just wanted to play music and be with other people. I went to college and studied electrical engineering, but I quickly learned my professors didn't want me to be a mad scientist--they basically wanted me to build a small, secret part of a missile that would kill Russians. So I eventually switched to filmmaking. When I was a freshman, I saw a sign that read BASS PLAYER NEEDED. The first Phish jam was in a dorm lounge, and there were actually 25 people dancing. When it was all over I asked, "So, do I get the job?" And I got the job. How did you get so fluent at playing odd rhythms? There was a four-year period when we were playing nothing but odd rhythms. Fish refused to hit the snare on the two and four; it was always a 16th-note off or something. He would practice doing these weird meters, like playing seven with one limb and five with another, breaking down the metronome pulse very scientifically. As a bass player, I had no idea what they meant. Finally, we realized we were unable to groove in 4/4, and from then on we spent every soundcheck just playing blues grooves so we could get a handle on it. Phish is one of the few bands that tackles such disparate styles as jazz and bluegrass. How did you learn to play them? We spent one year playing jazz gigs every Monday night with local horn players. We did the same thing with bluegrass; we bought a bunch of bluegrass instruments while we were in Kentucky, and we learned how to play them on the bus. But understand that we don't pull it off the way a real jazz band, for instance, would; we're just trying to learn something from music that inspires us. How do you see your role in the band? We were discussing this the other day. All of us in Phish have very specific roles, and my opinion is we'll always have those roles. Trey is very much the leader, and at meetings I'm the person who usually doesn't say anything--again, the quiet one, the outcast. But if I do care to say something, I'll talk and argue forever. I'm not cut out to be a leader; being a leader requires you to be diplomatic, encouraging the others to be their best and making everyone feel together. But isn't that the function of the bass? Right--and I'd say I'm much more of a leader musically than verbally. It's funny, though, because sometimes I don't play like a bassist; I might jump up the neck and harmonize a riff Trey is doing for two minutes. At other times, I play like a bassist but don't play the chord progression that's been bestowed upon me. That way I can harmonically lead the band in different directions. Our listening exercises are a good way for each of us to practice being the leader, and when we're jamming, I'm definitely the leader at least a quarter of the time. I guess musically we don't really have a specific leader. Any group of people has to let individuals flourish; individuality is a very right-wing theme, but even in pure socialism there are individuals with ideas that must be recognized. If we're jamming and I start leading, though, it usually isn't an ego thing where I think, Oh--I'm finally in charge. It's more about everyone being excited that we got to a new place where it's fun to be. Taking the lead doesn't necessarily mean taking a solo. Right. I'm not interested in playing solos. I love to see incredible bassists play solos, but even with a great soloist such as Oteil Burbridge, I prefer what he plays in the middle of a groove. He might go up the neck and play some wild, five-note chord and make it fit in. Weaving into the network of the motion--that's what I like about bass and music in general. By playing a high note, I can take the band higher, almost like a hang glider on an updraft. Rather than having to create a solo the music world will think is cool, I can be in the gears of the motion, in the engine room. The notes vibrate different parts of my body, and on the best nights, it feels three-dimensional--where it's way inside but also way outside. I might see someone in the tenth row, and I'll weave the bass line past his head. At that point I'm not the introvert I was when I was younger; I'm completely opened up to the point where I'm not even the musician--God is the musician coming through. The bass seems to lend itself really well to that. I keep wanting to come back to the analogy of flight. If you were actually flying, your inner ear would be giving you information about balance, there'd be wind rushing past your face, and there'd be pressure from the altitude. All of those senses come into your brain, which perceives that you're flying. My theory is that by standing completely still, you can create not only a feeling similar to flight but the exact feeling of flight. When music is great, that's how it is for me--and the bass is the vehicle for that to happen. I keep a journal, and for ten years all I've been writing about is why this works sometimes but not others. It's a really hard question to answer. Sometimes it feels like the battle between God and the Devil, or entropy and order, just carrying itself out in its own way. If it were easier, the payoff wouldn't be as great. You might be right. When I was in college taking four or five engineering classes, we played a gig one night when I had three weeks off before finals--and that was the peak experience I still chalk up as being my best ever. It makes me think. Article © 1996 Bass Player Magazine