Why is this woman swooning over this man? June 1, 1996 - Life Magazine by Charles Hirshberg Like all such stories, it begins with a Talent Scout for a Major Record Label. In December 1990, Sue Drew of Elektra Entertainment enters Manhattan's Marquee club expecting to hear a band, but finds instead another culture. The scene at the Marquee is late 1960s: long, untended hair; baggy, tie-dyed clothes; a friendly sense of community bolstered by booze and grass. But these kids are under 25. What on earth is happening here? The lights dim, and the sounds that explode from the stage are outrageous. The audience twirls and whirls ecstatically in a kind of free-form ballet called noodle dancing. The kids are rapt, responding to the music with an intensity Drew has never before seen. A few days later, at a different venue, the scene repeats: explosion, noodle dance, ecstasy. Afterward, Drew creeps backstage to meet the four sweaty musicians responsible. She introduces herself as a Talent Scout for a Major Record Label. It's the moment for which every rock band lives. Drew's new friends listen politely to everything she says about a future in Elektra's bosom. But, as she will later laugh, "They could not have cared less." Weird? Maybe. But Phish's indifference to fame and fortune isn't nearly the weirdest thing about them. For starters, they're from Vermont, a state better known for pancake syrup than for music. And although everyone calls Phish a "rock band," it's a misnomer. "We play bluegrass, Latin, rock, funk, classical, jazz, calypso and hard- core," says bassist Mike Gordon. "Oh, yeah--we've got a Broadway sound, too." Their repertoire includes "Sweet Adeline"; Avinu Malkeinu, a Hebrew prayer they chant in rumba rhythm; and "I Wanna Be Like You," a song originally performed by an orangutan in Disney's Jungle Book to which drummer Jon Fishman has added a solo on vacuum cleaner. (This is not a misprint.) Fishman, who looks like a bearded troll, also wears a purple muumuu onstage, except when performing nude. Sometimes his bandmates hop on exercise trampolines as they play. Sometimes they climb aboard a giant hot dog and fly over the audience. Phishheads last year purchased more than 800,000 tickets to such spectacles--about $16 million worth. A Phish.Net Website generates hundreds of pages of Phish gossip every week. The Phish Dry Goods Dept. fills an average of 2,000 monthly orders for Phish hats ($15), stickers ($1 to $3), key chains ($9) and fancy sweatshirts ($38). But if the band has spawned one of rock's most devoted followings, the recording industry views Phish as something of a phlop. Its best-selling album to date, Hoist, has sold about 375,000 copies. That's not exactly lead, but it's not platinum either--which is what Elektra's chairman once publicly predicted Phish would be by now. So why could Phish not care less? Why is this band always, always smiling? It's a brilliantly sunny afternoon in Burlington, Vt., but Jon Fishman is still in his plaid pajamas and furry slippers, trying to rouse himself with a cup of hot tea and soy milk. His home, a fat domed cylinder nestled on a beautiful hillside, looks like something out of Lord of the Rings. So does Fishman, but he actually grew up in Syracuse, N.Y. "My dad's an orthodontist," he says. "He's just this great, awesome, supportive dad." Reminded that rockers are expected to have turbulent relationships with their parents, Fishman apologizes and adds that his mother often travels with Phish. In fact, all members of Phish come from happy families. Guitarist Trey Anastasio used to write songs with his mom when he was a child in Princeton, N.J.; one of their compositions, concerning an impetuous frog named Joe, can be heard on a kiddie album called Sing and Learn Large Motor Skills. When teenage Mike Gordon told his father that he wanted to play the bass "because you can vibrate people," the elder Gordon, who founded the chain of Store 24 minimarts, lent Mike a company van to drive his rock and roll gear around their hometown of Sudbury, Mass. And keyboardist Page McConnell fondly remembers childhood vacations in the Finger Lakes when his banjo-playin' pop (a physician who helped develop Tylenol) and mandolin-pickin' mom would sing "Sweet Rosie O'Grady" with the whole family. "We don't have any agendas," says Fishman. "And we're certainly not here to voice the angst of Generation X." That's fortunate, because they wouldn't know much about it. Each Phish lives in a spacious house in the vicinity of Burlington. A typical winter's day finds Fishman watching a Lupo the Butcher cartoon. A few miles away, Gordon is in an outdoor hot tub with his girlfriend discussing computer graphics and spirituality. Later, McConnell, the most laid-back among them, hops into his Land Rover for a course in off-road driving, and Anastasio, who looks like an Irish setter with spectacles, heads into the woods on snowshoes. "Vermont has everything to do with who we are," he says. "Simplicity and slowness. And cold. People here are in no rush to get anywhere. And neither is Phish." Phish's flow to fame has been glacial. The band was born back in the fall of 1983 when Anastasio met Fishman, a fellow freshman at the University of Vermont. "Funniest-looking guy I'd ever seen," Anastasio says. "I literally pointed at him and fell down laughing." Gordon, also a freshman, joined them soon after, and Phish played its first gig at an ROTC fete, using hockey sticks for mike stands. The moment they paused for a break, someone rushed to the stereo and put on Michael Jackson. + "It's hard to misunderstand a hint like that," says Fishman. Anastasio's academic career at UVM had an equally inauspicious start. By the end of his first semester, he had become so bored that he decided it would be funny to steal some human body parts from the anatomy lab. He was caught and suspended. Following his return, he met McConnell while playing a gig at Goddard, an alternative college in nearby Plainfield. In the autumn of 1985, McConnell not only joined the band but also received $100 in finder's fees from Goddard for inducing both Anastasio and Fishman to transfer from UVM. Thus was Phish made whole. Not long after, the band found the key to its future sound and eventual success. "All music is conversation," explains Fishman, reciting Phish's unofficial motto. "And sometimes when we played, we were all talking and no one was listening, which sounded horrible--like Congress. So we started doing 'Hey!' exercises." A "Hey!" exercise begins with all four Phish forming a circle. One plays a musical phrase and the others join in. When each musician is convinced that all are playing in concert, he shouts: "Hey!" But if anyone does so before the others are ready, it is proof that the shouter is not listening carefully enough and deserves a razzing. ("That's usually me," says Fishman.) Phish developed countless variations of this exercise and, at its best, began to sound like a single musician with eight hands playing four instruments at once. Improving constantly-- dramatically--Phish started to build its audience, and by the end of the decade Phish concerts were becoming the highly developed rituals of youth culture they are today. Time: the present. Place: Phish.Net, somewhere in cyberspace. A Phishhead named phshnaway@aol.com has posted a message: "NEWBIES! ARRRRGH!" (newbie being a Phishhead-come- lately). Newbies are making it practically impossible "for real phans to get tix....I saw a family of four come into a show, three kids and their mom!" This intolerant attitude provokes a storm of indignation. "There's nothing wrong with going to a show with a parent," says kevhd@mcs.com. "It might open their eyes." "I took my mom to her first show on New Year's," adds sbshaw@fas.harvard.edu. "She had a great time." Finally, cubed@pcix.com ices it. "Get this," he writes, "I hear that some guy named Fishman goes to Phish shows with his mom all the time! What a loser!" A Phish concert actually begins before the band arrives. As soon as the parking lot opens, hundreds of hard-core fans settle in to picnic and gossip. The typical male sports a wispy adolescent beard, tie-dyed T-shirt, unlaundered trousers, preposterous hat, leather choker and face glitter. Many females look pretty much the same (except for the wispy beard), though others favor earth-mother skirts, South American sweaters and jewelry made of hemp. Shoes are optional for both sexes. One Elektra official calls these Phish cultists "hygienically challenged," but this is unfair. They're sometimes musty, but rarely unsanitary. When 10,000 or so Phishheads are ensconced in the arena, the fun begins with a little chess. (This is not a misprint.) A huge board is lowered from the rafters, and an audience member mounts the stage to move a piece; the band will later respond. Over the years, two games have been played to conclusion, Phish winning the first, Phishheads the second. The concerts themselves are long--usually two 90-minute sets--but audiences remain riveted, responding to all the band's sly musical jokes. When Anastasio slips a snatch of the Simpsons theme into a solo, everyone hollers "Doh!" a la Homer. "They come expecting the unexpected," says Fishman, and he gives it to them. He'll hop down from behind his drums, switch on a vacuum cleaner and stuff its hose into his mouth. He's played the Electrolux for eight years now but never knows quite what it will do. "There are fart sounds, Donald Duck sounds and a blowing-across-a- bottle sound," says Fishman. "If you get the spit caught in just the right place, you can get three or four tones bubbling at once." But, he warns, vacuum cleaner playing is hazardous. "I often picture myself as an old man with one really long jowl on one side of my face and the other side totally normal." A half hour after Phish's final encore, about two dozen Phishheads meet in the parking lot, where 21-year-old Shane Johnson hands out brooms and trash bags. Then he herds everyone into a phalanx that begins sweeping everything in its path. All cans, bottles and papers are carefully separated for recycling. "Phish is our community, and when we go into a town, we know we don't own it," says Johnson, who is paid a modest salary to head Phish's Green Crew (the Phishheads are rewarded with a ticket each). "We try to be positive and responsible." Finally, in the wee hours, the Green Crew puts up its brooms. But still the concert will live on. Thank "the tapers"--Phishheads who have attended with expensive recording equipment. Doubtless the thousands of tapes generated in this way choke album sales. Phish could not care less. It's 1992, and Phish is high above Manhattan in the office of a music exec, listening uncomfortably as he details a plan to squeeze more money out of the band's songs. Phish's manager, John Paluska, mentions that concerts are routinely taped. "I'm surprised the record company allows it," sputters the executive. "We should talk about putting a stop to that." Impossible, replies Paluska, who is as clean-cut as Phish is scruffy. The band values its relationship with its fans almost as much as music itself, the band considers each and every show special, the band is flattered by the taping. Says Gordon, "He didn't say, 'Take this skyscraper and stick it,' but he might as well have." Does all of this sound familiar: sanctioned tape-recording, improvised music, obsessed fans ("heads") who camp out in parking lots? Wasn't the Grateful Dead doing this stuff while Jon Fishman was still making drum sets out of Lego? "Oooooh, touchy subject," says high school senior Micah San Antonio of Bangor, Maine, encountered on the Phish.Net. Touchy indeed. Phish has "EVERYTHING" to do with the Dead, according to Victor Szalvay, a biochemistry major at the University of Washington. Phish has "not much" to do with the Dead, according to New Jersey Phishhead Jannette Wing Pazer. "Younger Phishheads throw a temper tantrum if you try to compare them," says Jeff Kays, a Phish-loving law student at the University of Missouri. "It's as if they want their cultural phenomenon to be unlike any other. But the similarities are there, like it or not." (Elder statesman Kays is 30.) The band declines to enter this dispute, although Gordon offers wryly, "I think you're more likely to see a puppet show in Phish's parking lot, and you'd have been more likely to see flamethrowers in the Dead's." But there's another difference: The Dead was a band born of the '60s. Phish is a band out of time, a whole-food feast in an era of glossy production, high-tech marketing and MTV. It's 1994, and Phish, emerging as one of the hottest live attractions in America, has released four soft-selling CDs. Elektra is chafing, urging them to cross the Final Frontier of Commercialism: a video. The band commences an exhausting series of should-we-or-shouldn't-we debates. "Let's just do it," McConnell finally pleads, "so we won't ever have to have this conversation again!" Gordon, the most over-the-top of an over-the-top group, directs. He calls for Phish to don scuba gear and, through special effects, dive into a fish tank while "Down With Disease" plays. As shooting begins, Gordon is feeling a host of "people breathing down my back--a producer, the record company and, as much as anyone, the guys in the band." First, Anastasio and Fishman absolutely refuse to lip-synch; that would be stupid, they say. Then they insist on lip-synching: Not to do it would be stupid, they say. Months later, Jon Fishman slips a tape into his VCR. It's Beavis and Butthead, watching and critiquing the ill-starred video. "Whoa," rasps Butthead. "They're, like, diving into the fish tank. Cool." "The what?" "The fish tank." "Oh. I thought those things were just fancy clear toilets." "Beavis, you think everything's a toilet." "Well, there's fish in there," Beavis says. "And they go to the bathroom, right? So it's a toilet." Fishman rubs his chin thoughtfully. "I think," he says, "that's a pretty good way of summing up the whole experience." Standing in his kitchen, clutching his baby daughter, Eliza, to his chest, Trey Anastasio quotes the eminent rock philosopher Pink Floyd: The video, he says, was "a momentary lapse of reason." He somberly recalls the hundreds of letters the band received from fans--confused, flabbergasted, even betrayed. It wouldn't have bothered him, he says, if he hadn't felt that Phish had betrayed itself and, worse, betrayed music. "People can tell when you're doing that. They listen and they can hear the intent." It won't happen again, Anastasio promises. "I definitely feel back on track. We barely talk to anybody at the company anymore. They've essentially given up." He shuts his eyes and gives Eliza a squeeze. "And thank God for that." Suddenly, Eliza spits up on him. Maybe he was squeezing her too hard. Or maybe she's on retainer from Elektra. Jon Fishman begins 1996 dressed in a diaper and bonnet, a bearded Baby New Year hovering 50 feet over a Madison Square Garden crowd of 15,000 screaming Phishheads. He showers them with glitter while the band plays "Auld Lang Syne." As Fishman is lowered to his drums, total strangers are embracing and wishing each other well. It's New Year's Eve, after all. But it's also a celebration of Phishian values. And what are they? "Express yourself but listen to others," Fishman says later. "Maybe that's why there's such a community aspect to Phish's following. The band is four people who are reaching out to one another, and to the audience, but are still very much their own people." For the young, searching for their own identities and struggling to throw off the self-centeredness of childhood, it's hard to imagine a more constructive set of goals. Halfway through "You Enjoy Myself," the Phish stop playing their instruments. (Why? Because they're Phish.) They begin to hum, toying with harmonies, first tentatively, then wildly. The audience begins to murmur with appreciation. A single word rises. "Sweet," the Phishheads coo. "Sweet." © 1996 Time, Inc.