Phish fans unite August 10, 2004 - Burlington Free Press By Sally Pollak and Brent Hallenbeck Off national radar, local love spawns a band's big name Phish shows, mostly at Nectar's bar on Main Street in Burlington, were little more than parties. And those parties kept growing. And word kept spreading. John Paluska, then a student at Amherst College, helped spread the word in 1988. On a skiing trip to Vermont that March he caught a Phish show at Nectar's. He called the band the next day and booked them for a show at a campus-wide party at his Massachusetts school. Paluska, like early fan Amy Skelton -- she's now Phish's merchandising manager -- became more than a Phish fan. He became the band's manager by the end of 1988 and co-founder of its management company, Dionysian Productions. "I was struck by how passionate the audience was," Paluska said. "The band and the audience had a real dynamic going. People were so engrossed in it and having such a spiritual experience. It was like a mini-version of what you have today. The blueprint was there." Phish outgrew Nectar's, playing its final show there March 14, 1989. Paluska booked a show that year that he considers a turning point. Paluska was having trouble getting the attention of club owners around New England. "I got a lot of, 'Thanks, not interested,'" he said. "Their music wasn't very mainstream or immediately catchy to a lot of club owners. They were just an unusual band." So Phish rented The Paradise in Boston on Jan. 26. Hundreds of fans bused in from Burlington, paying $5 apiece, packed the place. Club owners took notice. Can you dig it? By this time, Phish's music had branched into a growing music realm: jam rock, rock music punctuated by long solos and meandering riffs and improvisation. The Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers had elements of this in their playing, and by the late '80s and early '90s, Blues Traveler, Dave Matthews Band and Spin Doctors found their own commercial success with regular-guy vocals and music devoid of synthesizers or pretense. Phish was having a regional impact. Fans bounced from one show to another, spreading the word about what they had seen. Phish was beginning to stand out. Trey Anastasio was also standing out, a mop of fire-orange hair, a constant smile and energetic improvisational guitar playing. The band also had something corporate rock 'n' roll had lost -- a sense of humor. One night at The Front in Burlington, drummer Jon Fishman descended naked from the rafters to play a solo on a vacuum cleaner. Often the band played a song called "Fee," about a Buddhist weasel competing with a chimpanzee for the love of an aging gospel singer. Some of the band's fans were college kids and frat boys looking for a good party. Others were young fans of The Grateful Dead and similar bands, fans who wanted much more: summers of endless love, drugs and communal experience. And many fans became obsessed. They still are. In Saratoga Springs, N.Y., recently, Phish was playing on stage with keyboardist Page McConnell's father, Jack, entertaining the crowd with singing and tap-dancing. A fan asked his seat mate: What song is that? Told it was "(Won't You Come Home) Bill Bailey," the fan responded. "Oh, yeah, they did that in Atlanta in 1999." A search of the exhaustive book "The Phish Companion" proved he was right: Atlanta, July 3, 1999. In the early 1990s, some fans began attending huge numbers of Phish concerts, eventually reaching -- and passing -- 100 or 200. Mini-communities sprouted among the fans: The Mockingbird Foundation began raising money for charity; the "Book of Phriends" circulated concert sites so fans could put their thoughts in writing or artwork; they shared copies of the band's newsletter and started spreading underground buzz about the band on the then-nascent World Wide Web. A group called the Karma Crew urged fans to stay on the good side of communities that hosted concerts. The Phellowship was a group of Phish fans choosing to stay drug- and alcohol-free, while another group, Inside Out, fought the perceived problem of hard drugs at Phish shows. By the early '90s, the nation took notice of this growing scene. Phish had released two albums, "Junta" in 1989 and "Lawn Boy" in 1990, that were distributed by the small label Rough Trade. The band still had no major record deal. Then it booked two shows at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, Oct. 17 and 18, 1991. The band sold out both shows -- 3,000 miles from home. A month later, Phish signed with Elektra Records. Eight years from the band's Burlington beginning, early fan Skelton went to a Phish concert at Memorial Auditorium in Worcester, Mass. She was part of what was then by far the largest crowd ever at a Phish show. The party atmosphere of the Dec. 31 show included a New Year's countdown during "Auld Lang Syne" and snippets of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," interspersed among the band's free-flowing "Weekapaug Groove." "I remember thinking to myself, 'My God, there's 4,000 people here. They're going to be big,'" she said. "It just seemed destined." All those years Skelton had dragged and driven her friends to Nectar's -- sometimes piled on futons in the bed of her extended-cab pickup truck. Now she was joined by thousands of strangers. And she knew why: "The feeling I've had at Phish shows is gleeful happiness, looking around at other fans getting turned on to this music. I just knew that most people would dig it." The band's first Elektra release, "A Picture of Nectar," came out in February 1992. On the cover was the band's surrogate father, Nectar Rorris. The title was a nod to his bar where they experimented with sound and stagecraft, a place where they became Phish. The band was taking off. It opened for Buckwheat Zydeco in a show broadcast over National Public Radio. It toured Europe as the opening act for Violent Femmes, played amphitheaters in support of Santana and joined the first H.O.R.D.E. tour. It sold every ticket -- $10 each -- for its March 12, 1992, performance at its hometown Flynn Theatre a month before the show. Elektra re-released "Junta" and "Lawn Boy" to a wider audience and, in early 1993, issued Phish's fourth album, "Rift." Still, Phish remained obscure, a find for fans. McConnell said in "The Phish Book" that the fans had a special bond: "Discovering us through word-of-mouth gives listeners a sense of personal attachment to us that wouldn't exist if we were force-fed to audiences or served up as flavor of the week." The national entertainment media weren't helping. Spin magazine, reviewing "Rift," referred to Phish, Spin Doctors and Blues Traveler as part of a "badly groomed, musically unimaginative, socially reactionary boogie battalion." Peter Watrous, music critic for The New York Times, reviewed a Phish show at The Beacon Theater in 1994: "The audience was willing to accept it all as an invitation to transcendence, probably the only time in pop-music history that the hack fusion of the 1970s has ever been taken as profound or exploratory." "At one point in our career everything was entirely positive," Fishman said. "Everybody who heard Phish liked us, and nobody else cared. Now we've reached the point where it's cool to hate us, which is OK with me. It tests our mettle." Anastasio, in "The Phish Book," spoke of another less-than-glowing critique: "For years we were completely ignored by the world at large. Then in 1992 People magazine, in our first piece of national press, voted 'A Picture of Nectar' one of the 10 worst albums of the year. Suddenly there we were, next to Madonna and Bobby Brown. A guy stopped me on the street and said, 'I saw you in People magazine. I figured if they hated it that much, I'd probably love it. So I bought your album.'" Wednesday: The regional success becomes a national phenomenon. Article Copyright © 2004 Burlington Free Press