The Barn was baptized and ready when Phish came in to record
Farmhouse
. Having their own studio gave Phish accessibility at any hour and allowed them to work in a more casual environment without an expensive hourly charge. In fact, much of the time the sessions took on the tone of a spirited happening, if not an actual party. A snippet of the bantering that went on around the soundboard was recorded on the sly and tacked on as a coda to “Twist.”
“It’s got a great vibe,” McConnell said of the Barn. “We recorded this album much more quickly as a result of being relaxed about it.”
That homey, pressure-free atmosphere resulted in some of the most cohesive studio playing of their career. These were rock-solid songs built around grooves of varying flavors and tempos. They ranged from the shuffling railroad rhythm of “Back on the Train” to the exuberant bounce of “Gotta Jibboo,” from the bottom-heavy funk of “Sand” to the blithe, bopping “Heavy Things.” There are moments of delicacy and lyricism, too, such as the ruminative, sweetly melodic “Bug” and the orchestrations that weave in and out of “Dirt.”
Farmhouse
also included two instrumentals: “The Inlaw Josie Wales,” a piece of acoustic “newgrass” augmented by Bela Fleck on banjo and Jerry Douglas on dobro, and “First Tube,” a first take recorded on the first day of tracking for the album.
“We were coming right off a tour, got a bunch of people all around us, and had a big party,” Anastasio enthused at the time. “We were having a breakthrough in terms of musical solidity and simplicity. There was a feeling, too, that we’re settling into our own groove as people and as musicians.”
Behind the scenes, Anastasio acted to dispense with Phish’s “democracy bureaucracy” that had crippled
Story of the Ghost
. He asked his bandmates to let him produce the album without collective oversight, and they agreed. Anastasio’s co-producer was Bryce Goggin (Pavement, Lemonheads), while John Siket—a regular at Phish’s sessions since
Billy Breathes—
worked the board and brought an eclectic assortment of tube amps, vintage mikes, and old gear. The trio were mainly responsible for the making of
Farmhouse
.
“With this album, Trey said he needed to be able to stretch out and make decisions without having to check with everybody,” Gordon said at the time. “With music, learning to get your ego out of the way makes it better, so in a sense surrendering the democratic process was a way for us to do that. As a result, we were better able to be ourselves, to do our thing and jam and have a loose attitude and come up with good-sounding songs.”
“Nobody was threatened by the fact that I had all these arrangements in my head,” Anastasio asserted. “I had written all these songs and had a pretty clear vision of how I wanted them to sound. The other guys let me step forward, and they were cool about it.”
That’s not to say there weren’t bruised feelings.
“There was one point when I definitely felt jealous, because there was a creative process going on I wasn’t part of,” Gordon admitted. “But the stuff sounded good. And then Trey came up and said, ‘I really want to thank you for letting me do this, because I was in a mental rut.’ The fact that he said that made me feel that it was the right thing that we did.”
Eight years after its release, Gordon elaborated on his true feelings about the album. “
Farmhouse
was one I felt very not involved with. I didn’t have any songs on it and we had given it to Trey to produce, which often Trey was doing anyway. But beyond that, maybe it was the headspace I was in at the time. I was really going through hard times on my own and I just felt very distanced. So I don’t think I ended up with as much a feeling of ownership.”
By pointed contrast with
Story of the Ghost
, there were no group-written songs. Those few that weren’t Anastasio-Marshall collaborations grew out of the solo tour Anastasio undertook with bassist Tony Markellis and drummer Russ Lawton in the spring of 1999.
At the time Anastasio said, “Phish is going to be around for a long time, and there will be plenty of opportunities for each member to take the reins.” But the band would announce its hiatus soon after
Farmhouse
’s release, and no reins would be taken by other band members on the albums recorded thereafter. That statement was typical of Anastasio, who always tried to put the best face on things. Behind the scenes, things were not going so well, and he took over the album because they weren’t interacting much offstage.
“That was honestly part of the reason Phish had to take a break,” he said during the hiatus. “If you think about that
Farmhouse
album, what was weird about it was that I got together with Russ and Tony, and there was this creative outburst. We wrote all these tunes, and the ones we didn’t write, we arranged. So that’s ‘Heavy Things,’ ‘First Tube,’ ‘Gotta Jibboo,’ and ‘Sand’—half the
Farmhouse
album—in like a weekend. And then the next couple of weekends I got together with Tom and wrote ‘Farmhouse,’ ‘Bug,’ and other songs on
Farmhouse
. I played all the instruments and Tom wrote all the lyrics and did vocals. So I had drum parts and bass parts and everything.
“When we got together to record
Farmhouse
, it just had been so intense with Phish for so long that we weren’t really doing anything together anymore except for the live playing. They weren’t even there, basically, for that album. I mean barely at all. Basically Mike and Fish played the exact bass lines and drum parts that either Russ and Tony or I had played, and then left. You can hear on the Tom/Trey album [
Trampled by Lambs and Pecked by the Dove
, an album of Anastasio- Marshall demos released via mail-order in late 2000] that those songs are virtually identical. And then normally Page would’ve been more involved, but he had his baby right then, so he couldn’t be there, either. So even some of the piano parts I played.
“I really like the album and everything, but I felt like we needed to—you know what I mean—something weird was going on.”
In the midst of this, Big Cypress reestablished Phish as a band still capable of groundbreaking magical strokes. Arguably
the
all-time Phish concert, Big Cypress was a rock and roll landmark. With a gross of over $11 million, it was the biggest money-making event in America on New Year’s Eve 1999. The parameters were different from its festival predecessors. Instead of the typical late-summer gathering, Big Cypress took place as December 1999 gave way to January 2000. Instead of northernmost New England, the event was held on a Seminole Indian reservation in the Florida Everglades.
Originally, the plan was to hold it in Hawaii, but that proved impossible for legal and logistical reasons. They wound up looking for another warm-weather locale in the lower forty-eight states, and Florida seemed an obvious place to base their search. Florida had the advantages of being on the East Coast, easily accessible to the heaviest concentration of Phishheads, and generally temperate weather in late December. They visited five Seminole reservations, picked one, and went to visit Chief Billie—who was on the Big Cypress reservation that day—to ask permission and work out details. After laying eyes on Big Cypress, they thought it would be the most amazing site of all for the festival. Figuring it couldn’t hurt to ask, they did just that.
“Why not?” said Chief Billie. And the rest is history.
Promoter Dave Werlin termed Big Cypress “the holy grail of festivals. This was probably the ultimate Phish experience from every point of view.”
Like a lot of the group’s brightest ideas, it started out as a “what if?” kind of joke, a crazy idea that assumed a life of its own. The idea dated back a number of years to the band’s notion of staging a long gig (or “LG,” as they took to calling it). Beth Montuori Rowles recalled how Anastasio related the original idea to her. It went like this:
“What would happen if we told the audience they couldn’t go home that night? We’d ask them all to fold up all the chairs, and we
would provide mattresses. There would be oranges and bananas, snacks people could eat, and doughnuts and coffee in the morning. Basically tell everybody they could make one phone call to let people know they were not coming home that night. Everybody would stay and the band would play all night long.”
Big Cypress became that all-night slumber party. It was the most labor-intensive of Phish’s festivals. Roads were cut, a stage was built, and a pool was dug backstage for the band and those on their voluminous guest list. The biggest hassle was traffic. The arrival of Phishheads resulted in a twelve-hour jam along Alligator Alley that had nothing to do with music. Once the crowd had assembled, Big Cypress revealed itself as
the
place to be as the clock ticked down to the new millennium. Though Big Cypress and the Clifford Ball were the twin peaks of Phish’s career, there were some obvious differences between them. By the time of Big Cypress, Phish and its crowd were four years further down the experiential road than they had been at the Clifford Ball. The drugs were harder, outside elements in the scene more visible, and the party vibe more unbridled and extreme.
In advance of the year 2000, people all over the world were concerned about planes falling out of the sky, computers crashing, and other disasters related to the “Y2K” phenomenon. Some were made so paranoid they thought that time itself would stop. These cosmic jitters were in the air as 1999 rolled to a close, and this no doubt contributed to the aura of footloose revelry. Yet this weekend gathering of 80,000 Phishheads in the Everglades played out without catastrophe.
“Big Cypress was the ultimate Phish experience from every point of view,” said promoter Dave Werlin, of Great Northeast Productions. “The Holy Grail of festivals.”
“It was over the top, beyond anybody’s comprehension,” said band masseur and videographer Eric Larson. “We stayed up four nights in a row. You wanted to be up, ‘cause it was so exciting.”
Big Cypress culminated in what many—Phish among them—consider their greatest single set of music. “The Show,” as fans call the nearly eight-hour performance, began about twenty-five minutes before
midnight with a witty bit of theater. “Father Time” appeared onstage, pedaling an exercise bike that powered a clock. But the old gent’s energy flagged and he collapsed, stopping the clock just shy of midnight.
Phish came to the rescue, arriving on a swamp boat that exploded to reveal the same mobile hot dog that had ferried them around the Boston Garden five years earlier. Onstage they revived Father Time by feeding him “meatsticks” so he could power the clock to the midnight hour. At that point, logically enough, Phish began their marathon performance with “Meatstick.” This was all very amusing, but in the process of moving props offstage a cable got run over and ruptured, causing a short in the lighting system and short-circuiting Chris Kuroda’s evening as well.
“I actually lit from midnight to 8 A.M. on about a third of the lighting rig,” Kuroda recalled. “I was very frustrated and spent most of the time trying to get it working with technicians changing cables and running around back there. It never came back, so my personal experience of Big Cypress was kind of a nightmare. But whenever I talk about that, I always make a point of expressing that I know how special it was. My little bubble on that night was not that great, while tens of thousands of other people’s bubbles were incredible.”
Indeed. Paul Languedoc consciously kept the volume down to a reasonable level to keep the audience from getting exhausted from eight hours of loud music. After a certain point, the group ran on adrenaline, as all self-consciousness slipped away and the music played
them
.
“Big Cypress, which was the biggest show ever, felt like it had some of the best jamming ever,” said Gordon. “That eight-hour set was so much a pinnacle for all of us. We just jammed free-form and let the year 2000 come in as the sun reflected across Page’s grand piano at 7:30 in the morning. It just felt like we were playing in someone’s living room, even though it was 80,000 people.”
As Phish left the stage after performing for nearly eight hours, road manager Brad Sands asked, “Do you want to do an encore?” They looked at him like he’d lost his mind.
Fan-chronicler Jeremy Goodwin summarized the whole amazing night in these words: “We had just seen the peak of rock musical accomplishment in the twentieth century. They had just jumped through an enormous hoop for us, and I felt 100 percent satiated. I never needed to see this band play again. What more could I possibly expect them to do for me?”
That turned out to be a question that Phish posed themselves. How could they possibly top Big Cypress? What more was there for them to do? Their big summer-into-fall tour of 2000 was not bad, mind you, just anticlimactic. There was the notable exception of a seven-show Japanese tour in mid-June, which let the band return to its roots by escaping large crowds and untenable expectations. They were also dealing with the reality of fraying relationships, having lived for a decade and a half in incredibly close quarters—not just on buses, stages, and hotel rooms, but inside each other’s heads.
At the same time, Phish was now a big-time rock band. Both
Story of the Ghost
and
Farmhouse
had entered the album charts in the Top Ten. From 1996 through 1999, Phish’s total concert grosses came to $93.1 million. They sold a lot of ice cream, too: The Ben and Jerry’s flavor Phish Food, introduced in February 1997, was the company’s third most popular, with 3.5 million gallons sold annually. Finally drawing the attention of the mass media, Phish made the cover of
Entertainment Weekly
(for the week of August 4, 2000), and that issue had not one but four different covers, each bearing the face of a band member gurgling in water, like—ha-ha!—fish.
Behind the scenes, music was no longer the shared, all-consuming occupation it had been. For years they’d been committed to a four-way marriage with Phish, touring and practicing obsessively. Now familial links were impinging on those fraternal bonds. All of them had gotten married in the nineties—Anastasio to Sue Statesir, Gordon to Cilla Foster, McConnell to Sofi Dillof, Fishman (briefly) to Pam Tengiris—although among the group members’ first marriages, only Anastasio’s would last.