“The luckiest thing that ever happened to them was that they played a lot of shows and practiced a lot of hours before anybody really paid any attention to them,” said manager John Paluska. “That might not have happened somewhere else, New York or wherever, where people would’ve caught on to them sooner. They put in an extraordinary amount of time compared to the average band, especially by the time they got noticed. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of bands who’d worked as hard and played as much together as those guys have.”
In a broader sense, everything about Vermont nurtured their creativity. The stoic New England temperament values intellectual rigor and self-discipline, while its countervailing hippie subculture exhibits vestiges of sixties open-mindedness and musical obsession. Anastasio, McConnell, and Mike Gordon found tutors and teachers who kept them challenged and focused.
Then there’s the physical environment to consider, with Burlington nestled in an inspirational setting of rolling green mountains (
vert monts
in French, ergo “Vermont”) and limpid glacial lakes. Vermont’s frigid, snowy winters, lasting half the year, tend to keep folks indoors with their nose to whatever grindstone they’ve gravitated toward. As Gordon has suggested, Vermont is the proverbial “freezer” to which one of Phish’s signature songs, “Tweezer,” makes reference.
Anastasio returned to Fishman’s dorm room with another UVM student, electrical engineering major Jeff Holdsworth, who also played guitar. The three of them jammed for a while. Between that experience and the four-track tapes of his music that Anastasio later played for him, Fishman was completely sold on their collaboration.
“As soon as I heard him play guitar, and then soon after I’d heard some of the songs he’d written, I was like, ‘Ah, this is it. I’ll play drums to this guy’s music.’ Because I could see immediately that he really thought in an original way and that he was really into writing his own stuff and jamming. He had all the right elements, and I was just psyched to play with him.”
The next step was finding a bass player. Anastasio hung handmade signs around the dormitory. Nothing cute, just straight to the point: “Looking for a bass player with a P.A.” Bassist Mike Gordon was simultaneously posting handbills of his own about getting a band together. He was an engineering major at UVM, though he would ultimately switch to film and communication.
Anastasio recalled the first time he jammed with Gordon as the moment he realized something unique was coalescing. As he told interviewer Charlie Rose in 2004, “The first time Mike and I played
together was pretty groundbreaking. I remember it, every note of it. We were in a little room and we were playing, and we just connected.”
So now there were four. In no-nonsense fashion, they hashed out a repertoire of cover tunes and booked their first gig. It was a Christmas dance in the cafeteria of Gordon’s dorm, which housed a lot of students in the ROTC program. Their first band practice was held in the fourth-floor lounge of Wing Dorm. In a 2002
Billboard
interview, Gordon recalled the band working up a few oddball originals (such as “Skippy the Wondermouse” and “Fluorescent Gerbils”), as well as covers of Talking Heads (“Pulled Up”), the Allman Brothers Band (“Whipping Post”), and Wilson Pickett (“In the Midnight Hour”). The last of these had been a mandatory item in the repertoire of every rock and soul band that hoped to get people dancing in the sixties. Even the Grateful Dead played it in their early years. John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd had lately made it popular all over again with their comedy flick-cum-soul revival,
The Blues Brothers
.
According to Gordon, the nascent combo’s practice session attracted a crowd of students who danced along to the music—a harbinger of things to come. The foursome of Anastasio, Gordon, Holdsworth, and Fishman billed themselves as Blackwood Convention. Someone’s parents must’ve played bridge, because the name is a term for a popular bidding convention in contract bridge that was devised by one Easley Blackwood Sr. The date of Phish’s live debut was December 2, 1983. For years, the band mistakenly recalled the show as having been a Halloween dance on October 30, until eagle-eyed archivist Kevin Shapiro made some inquiries and set the record straight. (When you realize that they were off by more than a month, you start to understand how easily historical inaccuracies can creep into the record—
any
record.)
The quartet’s performance had all the hallmarks of a scene from
This Is Spinal Tap
—particularly the one where the heavy-metal foursome was booked to play a weekend mixer on a military base. Their cover-heavy set included the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” the Doors’
“Roadhouse Blues,” “In the Midnight Hour,” and the Grateful Dead’s jammy tandem of “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire on the Mountain.” Anastasio also recalled them playing “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” by the Rolling Stones—a song with a riff that Phish would tease from time to time—and the Motown classic “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Holdsworth, who had more band experience than the others, picked and sang most of the tunes.
Blackwood Convention went over like a lead zeppelin. During their second set, they were rudely drowned out by Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
, which had been placed on the turntable and turned up to goose the party along with something more contemporary. But every band’s got to start somewhere, and as Anastasio has pointed out, they still got paid for the gig. Moreover, the experience provided them with comic fodder once they became famous. In 1995, at the second Halloween show where they covered another act’s album in its entirety, they teased songs from
Thriller—
the riff from “Beat It,” the intro to “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”—to fool the audience into thinking that was what was coming.
Thriller
was the trick, and the Who’s
Quadrophenia
was the treat.
They played another dorm gig, in Slade Hall, within a few days of the abortive cafeteria show. They set the bar high, filling the dorm’s basement with banks of equipment, including a rudimentary, handmade light show; a gigantic backdrop; and multiple speakers and turntables for generating ancillary noise and special effects while they played. It was a bit like Pink Floyd’s multimedia assaults, albeit with a minuscule budget (and audience). Yet even at this nascent stage, one could detect seeds of what the future Phish would become: a band that aimed high and did their best to turn big ideas into reality.
It would be their last public performance for nearly a year. The short answer why the foursome got put on the back burner so soon after forming is that Anastasio got in trouble. The long answer requires some consideration of Anastasio’s complicated, risk-taking, envelope-pushing personality. Without question it helped drive Phish to extreme and sustained heights of creativity. But it has also gotten
him into trouble at various points in his life. This was one of those occasions.
Anastasio and a friend in Colorado had been competing to see who could send the other the more outrageous package through the mail. Anastasio upped the ante by liberating a hand and heart from the school’s anatomy laboratory. (Tom Marshall swore the heart was human, while others claimed it came from a goat.) He boxed the body parts, enfolding the heart in the hand and enclosing a note with the bloody mess: “I’ve got to hand it to you, you’ve got heart.” For this macabre prank he received a semester’s suspension from UVM. He actually got off lightly, as he risked running afoul of U.S. Postal Service regulations regarding the sending of potentially infections biological materials through the mail. You might call it the group’s first hiatus, but they hadn’t even named themselves Phish yet.
Back home in Princeton, Anastasio moved in with his unamused dad, Ernest G. (“Ernie”) Anastasio. Ernie was an executive vice president with the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the company responsible for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). His parents had divorced, and his mother, Dina Anastasio, now lived in New York City, where she edited
Sesame Street Magazine
and wrote children’s books. Given that Anastasio was returning to live with a no-nonsense Italian father who placed a premium on educational attainment, he wasn’t allowed to slack off during his collegiate suspension. And so his fitful education resumed, for the time being, at Mercer County Community College.
Another piece of the Phish puzzle fell into place with uncanny timing. Anastasio and Tom Marshall bumped into each other for the first time in years. Anastasio and Marshall had become friends while attending junior high at the private Princeton Day School. They were part of a crowd of precocious music addicts who’d written songs together as far back as eighth grade. “Golgi Apparatus,” which would become part of Phish’s repertoire, was one of them.
Their friendship had largely been put on hold when Anastasio headed off to prep school in Connecticut. Now fortune found both of them back in Princeton. Ironically, each had involuntarily left college—Anastasio ejected from UVM for his anatomical pilfering, and Tom yanked from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh for poor grades and hanging out with the “wrong element”—when they crossed paths on the community college campus. Anastasio spent just one semester at Mercer before returning to UVM, while Marshall would stay for two years before transferring to Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. His father had been an engineering professor at Rutgers, and Marshall wound up earning his degree there in computer science.
Marshall recalled the moment in early 1984 when he and Anastasio bumped into each other on the Mercer County campus: “I was walking out to my car and he was walking in. This was the first time we’d seen each other, really, since tenth grade. He looked at me and said, ‘Tom?’ And I looked at him—unmistakable person, huge hair down to his ass, red hair—and I said ‘Trey?’ It took him about five seconds to decide not to go to school that day. He said, ‘Do you want to come to my dad’s house and make a recording studio?’ And I said, ‘Of course.’”
They spent the afternoon tacking carpet scraps onto the walls of a basement alcove to dampen the sound. Down there, Anastasio made four-track basement tapes of what would turn out to be some of Phish’s earliest original material: “A Letter to Jimmy Page,” “You Enjoy Myself,” “Run Like an Antelope,” and “The Divided Sky.” Many Phish fans, myself among them, regard the last of these as the quintessential Phish composition.
“‘Divided Sky’ was funny,” recalled Marshall. “Back then it was called ‘Log,’ because Trey recorded it with a log outside. He just started hitting the log and it made such a cool sound that hitting the log was entirely one track, and then he had some metal thing he was hitting. That’s how that one started.”
During this period, Marshall got a glimpse at how seriously Anastasio valued music as both his salvation and vocation. One afternoon
Marshall entered the kitchen of the Anastasio house to find his friend with his hand in the garbage disposer, trying to dislodge a dropped utensil. When he saw Marshall, he began screaming: “Get the hell out of here . . . Get the fuck out of here!”
“It really caught me off-guard, and I was like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’” said Marshall. “I guess he thought I was going to bump a switch and turn it on. And he said to me, ‘Tom,
my hands are my life!
’”
On another occasion, Marshall got a preview of what would become a popular stage routine of Phish’s. This time he entered the house through the basement door, unbeknownst to Anastasio, who was wailing loudly on guitar in front of the bedroom mirror. He bounced up and down as he played, watching his hair go weightless and then falling down.
“I was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ and he was cracking up,” said Marshall. “Years later, when I saw him and Mike hopping up and down on the trampolines at a Phish show, I’m like, ‘Shit, I remember when he came up with that.’”
The rekindling of their friendship began in 1984 and evolved, by decade’s end, into a prolific songwriting partnership. The Anastasio- Marshall byline has yielded four hundred songs to date. About three hundred have been played by Phish or Anastasio’s solo band at some point, while another one hundred are lost soldiers that never made it beyond the duo’s demo sessions. As with lyricist Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia in the Grateful Dead, Anastasio and Marshall have been the primary source of material for Phish, and their partnership carried over to Anastasio’s solo career, too.
“When I used to write more lyrics, it took me so long, and I always wished I was focusing my energy more on music,” Anastasio said in 1995. “Lyrics on a certain level are my thing, but I was really happy to start a partnership with Tom. I can produce so much more and have more fun, because music is more the language that I speak.”
Back in 1998 I asked Marshall what was the first song he and Anastasio wrote together. His e-mailed answer:
I think Trey and I might differ on this. Probably the first song with my lyrics was “Wilson” . . . although I wrote that with Aaron Woolf. “McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters” has some of my earliest lyrics, but it hasn’t been recorded by Phish—in the studio anyway. Ditto for “Makisupa Policeman.” The first recorded song with my lyrics might be “Squirming Coil,” although that was written by Trey alone looking at the lyrics I sent him in a letter. We also wrote “Lawn Boy” over the phone, I believe. We recorded “I Am Hydrogen” together a long time ago . . . but I wrote that with Marc Daubert [another Princeton Day School alumnus], and it doesn’t have lyrics. The first Phish song with my words on it, some people say, is “Run Like an Antelope”—I wrote the famous “Rye Rye Rocco . . . ” part—but realistically I had no part in writing that song. So which is the first song that Trey and I wrote together, face-to-face? I don’t know—there are some old ones, “Mathilda” and “Little Squirrel,” but they’re not Phish songs. “NICU,” maybe? I guess I really don’t know.