“Phish was pretty wild, to the point they would play the stereo loud and just get going,” said Placco. “Most of the time, if we were staying overnight somewhere, they would just come down to the bus and spend the night hanging out. That was distracting in a good way. It didn’t bother me. It was a little weird that you’d go down in the middle of the night and the bus was going wild. It made it a little hard sometimes to take care of the bus, but I didn’t mind.”
Beyond that, he commented on the bonds between them. “To me, they’re the most together group I ever worked with,” Placco continued. “It’s like they think alike, they do everything alike. They’re worried about one another, and they think about one another: ‘Is this affecting you? If it is, let’s change it.’
Nobody
does that. No group does
that. Other groups make it seem like they’re together, but Phish really is together. I really appreciated the way they treated one another.”
I asked for thumbnail impressions of each member, and Placco offered these overviews: “Mike is probably the craziest one, ’cause he’s just so different. Trey is just a straight-ahead guy, man. Jon is one of the most honest people in the world. He can’t help being so honest that it gets him in trouble. Page is just a great person, a super-nice person.
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s not a bad one in the bunch.”
Phish ended their hiatus almost exactly two years after their last show. They made the decision to reassemble at a band meeting in Lake Placid (a lakeside resort not far from Burlington). Upon regrouping at the Barn for rehearsals, the music started to flow and an album of new material basically recorded itself.
“It was all new and fresh, and that’s what we wanted,” said Anastasio soon after these posthiatus sessions. “It was a lot of things. For one, it felt like no time had gone by at all and at the same time it felt as if lots of time had gone by. The thing that struck me was that lots of life had gone by and still there was continuity to it.”
Phish went into the studio to rehearse new material for their reunion shows and left, barely two weeks later, with a finished album. They called it
Round Room
. The title track was a Mike Gordon song (a first), and the cover was a piece of art—a round room, in fact—by Burlington artist Lars Fisk. The album itself was an aural documentary of Phish performing new songs almost as quickly as they learned them. When they realized good things were happening, they contacted producer Bryce Goggin and hustled him up to the Barn to run the machines. The idea was to catch the songs on the fly, and
Round Room
wasn’t so much produced as it was, simply, recorded.
The group considered about thirty songs—upward of twenty from Anastasio and Tom Marshall, close to ten from Gordon, and even a contender from McConnell—and winnowed down the album to an
even dozen. Most were cut during a few charmed nights in September after two weeks of rehearsal. Though they initially regarded them as demos, the recordings sounded so fresh that the group didn’t think that further work would improve them. The mantra became “don’t fix, don’t tamper.”
“There was something nice about hearing the first time we played together in two years captured on tape,” said Anastasio. “There is a lot of emotion involved, to my ear.”
“To make an album so close to the moment of conception was pretty cool,” added Gordon. “Because we were still discovering the songs, I think our sense of wonder comes out. It doesn’t surprise me that there would be good stuff in that moment.”
Round Room
included five big jams—“Pebbles and Marbles,” “Walls of the Cave,” “Waves,” “46 Days,” and “Seven Below”—which was unique for a Phish studio album. Those lengthier pieces had a raw, elemental feeling to them, like leaning into a gale or being pelted with sea spray. One of the songs, “Walls of the Cave,” has an interesting story.
“I wrote ‘Walls of the Cave’ shortly after 9/11 happened,” Marshall allowed, “but I was really writing a song for my son, like ‘Here’s something that will endure for you when I’m gone.’ It’s a semi-morbid song. Right away when Trey heard it, he said, ‘Oh, this is about the World Trade Center,’ and I sort of pooh-poohed it: ‘Nah, it’s a song for Brody [Marshall’s son],’ and Trey was like, ‘Okay.’
“But then everyone instantly keyed in on the World Trade Center and found lyrics like, ‘When it fell, you caught my heart before it hit the ground.’ Lots of people took it piece by piece, and I realized that maybe I did subliminally write it about that. But the fact that ‘Walls of the Cave’ and ‘World Trade Center’ have the letters
WTC
in common was just luck, though no one believes it. That kind of thing has been happening more and more.”
McConnell savored the challenge of learning so many new songs whose length and complexity harked back to Phish’s early years.
“We were trying to learn this huge volume of material, and I love that,” he exclaimed. “I absolutely love rehearsal and learning new songs. Just working my brain in that way again was so much fun.”
There were some memorable shorter songs on the album, too. “Anything But Me” and “All of These Dreams” were in the more introverted and ballad-oriented vein that Anastasio and Marshall had been mining in recent years.
The band’s innate sense of communication survived their time apart. For instance, when Fishman played a straight-ahead beat while learning “Thunderhead,” Anastasio interjected some cryptic instructions.
“It’s not supposed to be on the ground, it’s in the air,” Anastasio said.
“Oh, it’s floating, it’s in the air,” replied Fishman. “Oh, okay.”
“We just know what we mean by that,” Fishman continued, laughing. “It’s so weird. I guess that’s what happens when you’ve been playing with people for seventeen years.”
For the rehearsal and recording of
Round Room
, the group isolated itself from everyone, including crew and management.
“They weren’t pushing us away,” manager John Paluska said at the time. “They were more like, ‘We just need to go be the four of us like we were back in 1984 when nobody cared.’”
They claimed they were ready to walk away from the reunion, if it wasn’t working.
“I’d gotten to the point where I thought Phish is a really special thing, and if it’s meant to keep going, it will,” Fishman said. “By the time we got to the studio, we were all in that state of mind: ‘Hey, if it doesn’t work out we can go home in three hours, so let’s see what happens.’”
What happened was “Pebbles and Marbles”—the ten-minute epic that opens the album. It all unfolded quickly from there. Whatever else one might say about
Round Room
, it was Phish’s least labored studio project. For a band that had always thrived on spontaneity in performance, achieving a similar breakthrough in the studio counted for something.
At the time, Anastasio noted that despite all the ballyhoo and drama over the hiatus,
Round Room
appeared only two years after
Farmhouse
.
“Let’s say we hadn’t taken the hiatus,” Anastasio said with a chuckle. “When you look at it, we probably aren’t that far off the normal schedule of releasing another Phish album. Someday, it’s not even going to look like we took a hiatus!”
Indeed, if they hadn’t uttered the word “hiatus” and just went quietly inactive for a while, their absence wouldn’t have drawn all the attention it did. A mere two years’ downtime between albums and tours would actually qualify as an accelerated schedule by many musicians’ standards.
Round Room
nonetheless fared poorly on the charts, reaching only No. 46, and was disparaged by fans and critics. Perhaps fans were punishing them for not touring. Critics never really did get Phish, so their disapproval was nothing new. Admittedly, a few songs on
Round Room
did seem unfinished or in need of further work, but the album as a whole had a spontaneous freshness and sounded like nothing else in Phish’s catalog.
“We went away and came back recharged, which was the goal,” said McConnell soon after the
Round Room
sessions. “We’re back, simple as that.”
But in hindsight, it wasn’t quite that simple. Looking back in 2005, Anastasio admitted that Phish came back too soon and not for all the right reasons. His attitude toward
Round Room
also evolved away from the positive words he spoke upon its release.
“Throughout the hiatus, we still had an organization that required hundreds of thousands of dollars a month,” he said. “It was totally overblown. So basically what we had during the hiatus was a lot of people, from my standpoint, saying, ‘When are you going to get back together? We need the money.’ If you go back and listen to
Round Room
, it just sounds exhausted, like four exhausted people.”
If you pay attention to the earliest shows of the reunion, you might well draw the same conclusions: that they were still tired and not
ready to come back, that the core problems that led them to take two years off had not been worked out during the interim.
The New Year’s Eve show at Madison Square Garden that welcomed in 2003 was a case in point. The performance wasn’t as noteworthy as the event itself—Phish’s much-anticipated return from a two-year hiatus. It was an entertaining show, and one highlight was the supposed appearance of actor Tom Hanks, his presence triggering the band’s use of a scene from his then-current movie
Cast Away
. In the film, Hanks is marooned on a desert island with only a volleyball for companionship. The manufacturer’s name, Wilson, is stamped on the ball in big letters. A chunk of Hanks’s deranged monologue, directed at Wilson, provided an inspired lead-in to Phish’s song of the same name. The group purported to bring Hanks to the stage, where he blurted the “blat-boom” line when “Wilson” kicked in again. The crowd was fooled; in actuality, it was Page McConnell’s brother Steve, who closely resembles the actor. It wasn’t just the crowd that got pranked; some news media picked up the story of Hanks’s guest spot at Phish’s reunion show and reported it as fact. It was good to see that Phish’s prankster instincts were as sharp as ever.
However, during the three-night run that followed at their beloved Hampton Coliseum, they seemed rusty, and fans worried that Phish was still unwell. Anastasio appeared addled on the second night. Brad Sands brought coffee onstage to help straighten him out. However humorous the gesture, it was also a bit disconcerting. During the second set, the band had to restart “You Enjoy Myself” after botching the intro.
“We’re gonna start again,” a peeved Anastasio told the crowd, “because we’ve practiced it and we know it so fucking well, and I’m really ashamed of the fact that, after two and a half years off, that’s the best we can do. So please, let us play it again.”
That early stumble proved to be more of an aberration, as 2003 turned out to be one of Phish’s strongest later touring years, featuring some of the most solid performances and adventurous set lists since the mid-nineties. The playing was especially inspired on the summer tour, which has been referred to as the “sober tour.” The group—and
Anastasio in particular—made a conscious effort to walk a straight line and avoid enabling one another. Anastasio swore off everything (even caffeine!) and practiced yoga and meditation in hotel rooms. “That tour, for Trey, it was basically doing yoga and working out. He was having me find yoga people in every place,” said Brad Sands.
In part, the tour strategy came from Neil Young. They noticed Young would “do a runner” after shows: that is, get offstage, into a car and out of there. For a band that was trying to reform itself, it seemed like a great idea: instead of succumbing to backstage temptations, just get shuttled to the hotel or point the bus out of town. It made for a memorable summer tour, and for the band’s year-ending four-night stand in Miami, Anastasio still practiced yoga and did a nightly runner up to West Palm Beach after the shows.
“Everyone was making a conscious effort to turn the tide,” recalled Brad Sands. “I think you could hear it in the music.”
In 2003 Phish played loads of new songs, brought back some long-neglected items—especially the uber-rarity “Destiny Unbound,” whose one-time unveiling after 11 years absence shocked Phishheads—and attacked old favorites with renewed vigor. There were many remarkable nights on that tour, including their two-night stand at Palo Alto’s Shoreline Amphitheatre (July 8, 9), which featured some amazing playing; a show in Pittsburgh that had plenty of breakouts and rarities (July 29); and a performance in Utah (July 15) with a riveting half-hour jam on “Mr. Completely” and a playful segment that wove in and out of Gordon’s mock hardcore song “Big Black Furry Creature from Mars.”
Phish’s It festival ended the standout summer 2003 tour on a high note. It was a big event, drawing 60,000 fans to the remote reaches of caribou country. Musically, Phish continued pushing the envelope, looking for fresh combinations of new and old material. A ninety-minute PBS documentary of the event aired a year later. It was filmed in high definition and mixed by Elliot Scheiner, who’d worked with Steely Dan. Issued as a double DVD,
It
included four hours worth of music and extras. It’s a fine documentary package that leads one to
conclude how much better it might have been had Phish ended things there instead of Coventry.
At that point, Phish seemed right where they needed to be and were playing as well as any reasonable fan could hope for twenty years into their career.
After the hiatus, the group took LivePhish a step further, offering downloads of shows within forty-eight hours of each performance. They did this from their December 31, 2002, reunion concert at Madison Square Garden through their bow-out at Coventry in August 2004. Fans could purchase full-resolution digital downloads of individual shows or entire tours. An individual show cost $9.99 in the MP3 format—not bad for three hours and three discs, on average. They’ve continued the practice since reuniting in 2009.
“Phish broke all kinds of ground throughout their career, but the live download thing was a huge innovation,” said archivist Kevin Shapiro. “It was a generous step for them to agree that you’ll get it and you’ll get all of it, uncut, from the soundboard. Paul [Languedoc] had an incredible touch recording the live shows, but they’re still revealing and unforgiving, and a loud bad note in the room becomes a
really
loud bad note on a soundboard tape. I always thought we should reserve the right to say no on some given show. But I think it demonstrated great trust on their part of their own output.”