Phish brought a lot of the headaches that plagued them in later years upon themselves. They wanted in-house management, merchandising, ticketing, etc. It’s a key reason they operated so effectively outside of the mainstream and were able to imprint their personality upon every aspect of their career. But it did involve them in micromanaging everything from T-shirt designs to staff salaries—matters the average musician does not have to contend with all or even any of the time. And that took its toll.
Phish’s concern about staff size—combined with mounting drug issues and the simple fact that Phish needed a break from each other after seventeen years of constant work—led to their two-year hiatus. However, those unresolved issues came back to haunt them post-hiatus. In addition, tensions between McConnell and Anastasio intensified—especially on McConnell’s side, when he perceived that Anastasio’s drug use affected his playing and, therefore, their shows.
McConnell outwardly maintained professionalism and self-discipline. Anastasio’s less responsible behavior, coupled with his oversight of the band, caused McConnell’s resentment to simmer. McConnell’s issues with management went so far that he actually had Dionysian Productions audited.
Despite his reserved manner—no one in the band quite comported himself with McConnell’s well-heeled politesse—he could exhibit a steely, unsentimental resolve when push came to shove. Some thought of him as the “ice man,” and even he referred (in
The Phish Book
) to “the dreaded ‘call from Page’ you don’t want to get when you’re in the Phish organization.”
After Anastasio’s performance and condition at Coventry, McConnell didn’t speak to him for over a year. “He holds a lot inside, and he was bitter about things for a long time,” said former Phish employee Amy Skelton. “I think he’s come to terms with a lot of that. It took him some time to decompress and relax and see everything for what it was. But he was steaming mad for quite some time—at the office, at John [Paluska], at Trey, at Mike. He was unhappy. And towards the end, particularly with Trey, those two butted heads a lot.”
After the breakup, Anastasio made a curious remark that set Phishheads’ antennas waving: “The truth of the matter is, somebody should call Page and talk to him,” he told Tim Donnelly in a
Relix
interview. “He wanted to stop as much as I did. He had serious issues that date back to
Billy Breathes
.”
There is some ambiguity in the remark. Phishheads, rightly or wrongly, took “serious issues” to mean drugs, while in the context
of the interview, Anastasio might well have been referring to Page’s problems with the organization.
Mike Gordon also had his issues, which he dealt with in a more passive-aggressive manner. Once he realized his contributions wouldn’t be accorded equal time, he quietly redirected his songwriting energies into other endeavors.
“When I started to see that my songs weren’t going to be used on albums or when I didn’t have the confidence to bring songs to band practice and push them through,” Gordon reflected in 2008, “I decided I would start making movies, which was another thing I wanted to do anyway. I spent four years on my first movie when I could’ve been writing songs for Phish. The point being that I found a creative outlet where I could work fourteen hours a day, which I like to do. Whereas with Phish I couldn’t really do that.
“Phish was an incredible collaboration,” he allowed. “It was a collaboration with a clear leader and a lot of intelligence and creativity with all the people involved. For me, in a way, I haven’t always been mature enough to use my incredible creative drive in the collaboration.”
He noted that jamming, the live experience, was inherently more participatory and satisfying. In terms of generating new material at rehearsals or putting the albums together, Gordon felt less involved in the process.
“We were great at making decisions and steering our career and talking openly and being disciplined and having a sense of vision to see it to incredible heights,” he continued. “But for me the piece that was missing was sort of a creative—not indulgence, but when you’re fully immersed in something. So my task now is to try to mature to the point where I can be as creative in collaboration [with Phish] as I’ve been on my own,” he concluded.
The point is not to blame McConnell for rocking the boat or Gordon for finding other boats to sail, because their issues were largely valid
ones. McConnell, for instance, had some understandable frustrations about being in a group that was fronted by an increasingly dysfunctional leader in its later years.
It’s a familiar story: mounting drug use, natural imbalances in power, and years of living in close quarters fuel grievances to the breaking point. There’s also simply a natural cycle, a rise and fall, in the lifespan of every organic entity, including (and especially) rock groups. After twenty years, it wasn’t surprising that internal issues would tear the fabric binding Phish together.
In contemplating the career arc of musical entities—especially dynamic and gifted ones like Phish—I’m reminded of passages from Oswald Spengler’s
The Decline of the West
, in which he employs biological metaphors to describe the life cycles of great cultures throughout history. A rock band like Phish, which attracted an entire community to it, giving rise to a unique set of beliefs and lifestyle, is a subculture to which the same principles apply. Spengler wrote of the “majestic wave cycles” by which cultures swell and swamp the ordinary with their creative power. He also foretells their inevitable demise:
A culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless. . . . It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities. . . . But its living existence . . . is an inner passionate struggle to maintain the idea against the powers of chaos without and the unconscious muttering deep down within. It is not only the artist who struggles against the existence of the material and the stifling of the idea within him. Every culture stands in a deeply symbolical, almost in a mystical, relationship to the Extended, the space, in which and through it strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained—the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual—the culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down.
Ergo, Phish at Coventry, if you want to apply the theories of a controversial German historian to a troubled twenty-first-century rock festival. And why not? The inevitability of Spengler’s worldview is not incompatible with Trey Anastasio’s outcome in the make-believe world of
Gamehendge
.
To this day, the mere mention of Coventry is enough to strike fear in the hearts of Phish fans. It was the finale from hell. Anastasio was in poor shape, and this mud- and muck-filled weekend did not make an ideal exit scenario for spirits already dampened by the knowledge that this was the last hurrah. Among some Phishheads, Anastasio had become a villain for bringing an end to the good times and community that had formed around Phish. Some at Coventry wore T-shirts that read “BeTREYed” and “Trey Is Wilson” (Wilson being the evil overlord of
Gamehendge
who confiscates and withholds the source of the protagonists’ way of life).
One of the art installations inadvertently expressed the out-of-kilter aspect of the scene within and without in its topsy-turvy later stages. Trees had been dug up and replanted upside-down, with their roots in the air. They looked kind of cool, with the root-system canopies resembling the tops of palm trees. But it was a bit like karma stood on its head: the opposite of the way things ought to be, upside-down, out of sync, and unhealthy. One fan posted this note on the Phantasy Tour Web site: “At Coventry, I don’t know how many times I heard, ‘Got your coke . . . got your meth . . . got your Oxys.’”
Summing up the scene, another disgruntled blogger described Coventry as “a mass of 70,000 screaming fans getting their final look at a bunch of dorks who took about half of their disposable incomes.”
If the rain-soaked and mud-caked Phishheads were having a hard time at Coventry, it wasn’t much more comfortable in the areas set aside for friends, family, and hangers-on, either. The thousands or so of them on Phish’s VIP guest list couldn’t be accommodated in the VIP parking and camping area, which had flooded. Between the rain and
bad vibes, many guests left early or bagged Coventry altogether. Much of the planning had been designed to accommodate the small city of guests in the pampered manner to which they’d grown accustomed. Afterward, Anastasio estimated the bloated guest list at 3,500. Others say less. Some say it was more.
Coventry almost didn’t happen at all. The Vermont State Police felt strongly that it should be canceled. Phish’s management puzzled over how to handle the situation as it worsened by the minute.
“It’s one of those events that when it’s happening in real time, it’s so surreal,” recalled manager Paluska. “It’s kind of like you’re in triage, doing the absolute best you can but it’s so far beyond controlling. It was like a mini Hurricane Katrina: Everything was happening too fast, coming apart at the seams and falling apart.”
Fortunately, Sgt. Bruce Melendy of the Vermont State Police—who was roused from bed and sent up to Coventry at 4 A.M. to help sort out the mess—could clearly see that canceling the festival on the day it was supposed to begin would have been the worst thing they could have done, stranding 30,000 people in a mudhole and possibly sparking a riot. In addition, though this didn’t figure into his thinking, shutting it down wouldn’t have been fair to the tens of thousands of people who’d traveled from all over the world and were already there.
The compromise solution was to let the festival go on with the 30,000 who were there and to close the highways, forcing the 30,000 who were still trying to get in to turn around and go home. It didn’t quite work out like that. The Phishheads marched down the highway to the festival site. The sun came out, and the show went on.
Acknowledging Gordon’s loyal opposition to their breakup, Phish opened the first set on the final night at Coventry with “Mike’s Song.” About the best thing you can say about the sets they played that weekend was that they got through them. The biggest buzz had to do with speculation over what song they’d finish with. Given that this was ostensibly a breakup and not a hiatus, it would be the last song these four musicians ever played together, for all the audience knew. The final number was, in fact, “The Curtain (With),” a compositionally
and improvisationally inspiring early song and a fitting one with which to drop the curtain. Among its Trey-penned lyrics: “Please me have no regrets.”
In a conversation held almost exactly a year later, Anastasio recalled the experience of playing at Coventry: “Leading to it was so confusing and so dark, and Coventry itself was such a nightmare. It was emotional, but it was not like we were at our finest. I certainly wasn’t.”
As soon as the festival ended, his wife, Sue, spirited him and their daughters to the airport, where they jetted off for a recuperative ten-day family trip to Bermuda.
“I didn’t want to be around for the aftermath,” he said. “When we got to Bermuda, I slept for like a week. And that was it.”
“It was a very hard way to end,” acknowledged Paluska. “Really hard. It was tough for that to be our final act.”
Coventry was just one bad—well, disastrous—gig in the twenty-one-year lifespan of a group that had performed 1,400-plus shows that were good to great to off-the-charts. To put it all in perspective—and by “all,” I mean the scene in toto: the community of band, crew, staff, and fans—I’d like to relate a story about the quixotic journey of a Phishhead. If it were presented in song-lyric form, it might be titled “The Ballad of Mike Meanwell.” It was an amazing odyssey related by Beth Montuori Rowles, who has worked for Phish since 1995.
One day Phish’s office staff received an inquiry from the father of a Phishhead who had died in a fiery car crash close to home. The father knew how much Phish had meant to his son, whose name was Mike Meanwell. The father asked a favor of the organization in his memory: Could they put a tin with a few of his ashes onstage at a show?
Rowles picks up the story:
I said, “Sure, I can do that, that’s pretty easy.” I was thinking, “I can put his ashes in my pocket and walk onto the side of the stage.” The father sent me one of those little stash tins that we sell—which was
kind of funny, ’cause I don’t think he actually realized what it was used for—with some of the kid’s ashes in it. So I went to several shows on that last tour, and I basically told crew the guys I had this kid’s ashes with me. And we had them on the soundboard. We had them on the monitor board. At one show—I think it was Great Woods—Brian Brown [Anastasio’s guitar tech] took the ashes and touched them to each of Trey’s guitars. There were things like that that went on during that whole tour.
I had him in my backpack the whole time at Coventry, and every single time [
pauses
] . . . It was really difficult on a lot of levels for the people employed by the band, because they were about to move on. We knew people were going to move and exodus from Vermont like crazy. These were the people you spent every day with, so it was really hard. And every time I started thinking about how horrible it was, I would think about Mike Meanwell and think, “This really isn’t all that bad. This could be so much worse. This is just life moving on; this is what happens. It happens all the time. We’ll get through this. It could be so much worse, ’cause here’s Mike sitting in my backpack.” And it really helped me. I tell you, it really helped me.
After the whole thing was over, I got back in touch with his father, told him what we’d done, and asked, “Do you want me to send the ashes back?” He said, “No, you can dispose of them however you see fit.” So we went out one night—me and my husband, David; Kevin Shapiro; and Jared Slomoff, who works for the band—and we all read Phish lyrics that were meaningful to the situation. We had a little ceremony and cast the ashes into Lake Champlain, right off Burlington.