Phish Archive Articles

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just found this. thought i'd pass it along (incase anyone else missed it)...

Gordon Keeps Evolving
August 2nd, 2006 - The Chronicle Herald (Canada)
By Stephen Cooke
Former Phish bassist headlines music festival in Antigonish

EVOLVE headliner Mike Gordon knows a thing or two about festivals. After all, the former Phish bassist has certainly played his share, not to mention the fact that the band became legendary for staging its own, including The Great Went and Lemonwheel, at Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, Maine.

These late '90s extravaganzas drew fans of the cult phenomenon from across the globe, not to mention the neighbouring Maritimes, and would become a model for fan-friendly events that followed, including this weekend's Evolve Festival taking place outside Antigonish.

"They were just great fun, I have very fond memories of playing those," says Gordon from his home outside Burlington, Vermont. "Our manager would spend about six months in advance, with a team of about 30 or 40 people, and design a whole theme park, where artists would come in and build a city with all kinds of strange buildings and signs and art pieces.

"And then in terms of the camping and access and showers and everything, there was a huge attempt to do it better than most other festivals. We wanted to make it nicer for people, in ways they don't usually get, and just do that. I remember in contrast, the 25th anniversary Woodstock concert, and how much of a disaster it was. They were charging $10 for water and people were dehydrated, you couldn't get anywhere, and our last concert in Coventry had problems due to the rain and the weather, but the Maine ones were great."

Gordon and Phish bandmates Trey Anastasio, Jon Fishman and Page McConnell made rock history with their fan-centric approach to music, building a huge following outside of the usual mainstream channels and paving the way for the jam band revolution.

The band called it quits in 2004 after over two decades of building one of the most idiosyncratic careers in popular music, but the legacy continues. Most recently, Gordon was just on the road for a few weeks with Anastasio and the Benevento-Russo duo, playing shows in support of The Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh.

While he describes himself as "a little road-weary" from the experience, Gordon says it's been gratifying to revive his musical partnership with the former Phish guitarist.

"Last December, he and I did this thing with Bill Kreutzmann from the Dead, as a trio (called SerialPod). It was just one gig, but it was amazing, Kreutzmann is an incredible drummer," says Gordon.

"Trey and I also got together and wrote some songs together for the first time ever. In the 21 years of Phish, we had never done that before, so on this tour we were playing some of those songs. So things keep evolving."

While Gordon doesn't know when, or even if, he and Anastasio will record this new material in the studio any time soon, he certainly enjoyed creating it. As for why he and his former bandmate never wrote songs before, over 20 years of playing together, he can't really say.

"It's hard to explain," Gordon muses. "Maybe the dynamic didn't really allow for that before. It would have been too strange for the other guys if two people were teaming up. A lot of the writing was done with Trey and his songwriting friend from school, his lyric writing friend (Steve Pollak, a.k.a. The Dude of Life [PA correction: Tom Marshall, not the Dude]).

"We just got together and did some jamming, tossed ideas back and forth, threw out some lyrics, and yeah . . . pretty natural. The lyrics just kind of flow together, it's all immersed when it's working right. I guess it's the melody that connects the jam with the words. It becomes the focal point."

A multi-instrumentalist also skilled at guitar he's held his own on two albums with acoustic folk legend Leo Kottke banjo, piano, harmonica and percussion, Gordon comes to the Evolve Festival with his latest musical project, a modern honky tonk hybrid called Ramble Dove. The idea of the band actually has its origins as a fictional entity in Gordon's film Outside Out, but like Kurt Vonnegut's writer character Kilgore Trout or, dare we say it, Spinal Tap, it became a functioning creation in its own right.

"I did a cameo in my own movie as a country star, and called the band Ramble Dove," explains Gordon. "Partly because I thought it was silly sounding, but then we needed a name for this. The way this came about, there was a weekly honky tonk jam every Tuesday at this local coffee shop, and I started going. For almost six months I was going every Tuesday, and the capacity for this place was 39.

"It ended up being really fun, and became a really important part of my week, I couldn't skip it. So when it got to be time to put something together for Bonnaroo, it ended up seeming like the natural choice to make a band out of it."

Gordon feels he's assembled a bunch of "great players" for Ramble Dove, to create a lively mix of stretched-out, body-moving music he calls "a long ride through funky twang."

"We've got some really great singers, that was the original goal. Brett (Hughes), Neil (Cleary) the drummer and Marie (Claire) the keyboard player all have incredible voices. I really wanted to learn some things about singing in that style.

"That was my main goal, I learn things just being around them. I was going on Tuesday nights just to listen, before I started playing. Then I ended up learning a bunch of songs. I don't do the bulk of the songs, but I've learned a whole pile of songs, more than ever, to put the thing together.

"Plus I've ended up writing songs for the group, so it's ended up being more inspired and confused in ways that I don't even realize. Some of the songs just really got to me. I have a weak heart for simple tales of heartbreak, I guess, so I'd really fall in love with certain songs from one week to the next. I even wrote a song called Ramble Dove, I figure we should have a namesake song, and that ended up coming out rather nicely."

http://www.phisharchive.com/articles/2006/evolvemike.html

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looks like some really cool stuff here.

check this one out on Paul:

A Day in the Life of Paul Languedoc
Summer 1991 - Doniac Schvice
by Doniac Staff
It's soundcheck time, and Paul is sitting behind the soundboard, staring at the CD player. The moment of truth has arrived again, as it does every night touring with Phish. Seven hours of setup time combined with thousands of hours of preliminary work designing, building, wiring, soldering and transporting the sound system have passed. When he pushes the play button, digital information will travel down a complex path of wires, circuit boards, resistors, transformers, amplifiers and compressors...traveling across the room in a snake through racks and speaker cables and finally to a cone shaped piece of paper which will send vibrations through the air. These vibrations will move peopl's eardrums, therby causing a pleasurable sensation.

People have traveled a long way for this sensation. They're counting on him... In 1984, Paul was working on building guitars in a barn outside of Burlington when he built Trey a custom mini guitar, the first of a number of guitars and basses he would build for Trey and Mike. The guitar was a beautiful 24 fret hardwood instrument shrunken to the size of a mandolin. You can hear it on "Junta" on *You Enjoy Myself*.

Meanwhile, Phish was just getting off the ground and in need of some sound help, so to speak. Paul was the man. So in 1984 Paul started building up the massive structure that Phish carries around with them. Seven years later, it's still growing (expanding exponentially like some recursive virus). In that space of time, he's built Trey's guitar and Mike's bass, pedalboards, racks, light cases, drum cases, speaker enclosures, monitors, and the list goes on. Moving all this stuff around is another story in itself, and Paul, having rebuilt an engine or two in his day, holds the title of resident truck mechanic as well.

Paul's job is not all fun and games. Phish's first trip to Colorado, for instance, was a direct fifty hour trip with six people crammed into a tiny windowless compartment (that Paul built) in the back of a cube van in August. The truck struggled toward the Rockies and finally gave out in the middle of a rainstorm at ten thousand feet. While everyone else slept, Paul lay on his back beneath the truck in puddles of water, not having slept in days, and managed to get the thing running.

On the way home from that trip, Paul was finally getting some sleep when the truck pulled into a gas station around 3A.M. It turned out that in replacing a lost gas cap at the last stop, someone had put on a locking cap for which there was no key. So one by one, band and crew members began trying to get the cap off. Within minutes, there were four people gathered around the gas tank with tool box open, tools spread everywhere, hammering, wedging, and trying every conceivable way to get the stupid thing off...but to no avail - the cap would not budge. Slowly, the truck door opened, and Paul emerged, half asleep, glasses off, and wandered over to the tank. He picked up the tiniest screwdriver in the toolbox and gently tapped it into the plastic cap, wedging it against the locking mechanism inside. Without a word, he unscrewed the cap and climed back into the truck, leaving behind a group of wide-eyed observers. These are the kind of things that happen when Paul is asleep. One time Mike got left at a rest stop, again at three or four in the morning in Nevada or someplace and no one even realized it until an hour later. Paul and Trey had to drive back and find him. As a matter of fact, one time Paul was left at a rest area by Del Martin (roadie extraordinaire) and the band happened to drive by and see him and pick him up.

There have been many gigs that wouldn't have gone on if it wasn't for Paul. There was a night at the Living Room in Providence when Page forgot his power supply for his piano and there wasn't on to be found anywhere in the city. With showtime drawing near, Paul built him one.

Then there was the time when Mike and Trey began smashing their guitars together during "Big Black Fury Creature From Mars", leaving Mike's bass fret sticking out at a 90 degree angle. As the music went on, Paul appeared on stage with a mallet and hammered the fret back in so that Mike could finish the song.

These kinds of incidents go with the territory; but the really fascinating part of Paul's job is to witness the live show in action and think what a minor miracle it is that this enormous structure of sound and lights actually works night after night. Countless thousands of connections, wires, cables forming a huge spider web of signals and power...everything must be taken into account: electrical engineering, acoustical physics, sound engineering, woodworking, physical engineering used in designing racks and truss systems. All this is blended together into one huge movable system to be set up and broken down once a day. The ultimate goal is the crystal clear reproduction of the music taking place on stage so that the audience hears it just as the musicians are hearing it. It's an exciting goal, because it can only keep improving with time, as technology advances.

To look at the stage and see and hear what Paul has done in just six or seven years is staggering. It will be exciting to watch it continute to grow over the coming years. So it's soundcheck time...Paul is sitting behind the soundboard staring at the CD player. In a minute he'll push play and hopefully it will all work again. The band, through experience, is utterly confident that it wil, and that if it doesn't, he'll fix it. This faith in Paul creates a calm mood amoung the band members, who can concentrate on playing music. We want to thank and salute him for a contribution whose magnitude cannot be overestimated. Thanks, DOHC!!!

http://www.phisharchive.com/articles/1991/paul.html

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Jonny B:

Jon "Fish" Fishman
September 1, 1995 - Modern Drummer
By William F. Miller
JON "FISH" FISHMAN: PHISH'S PHEARLESS PERFORMER What do you make of a guy who insists on performing in a dress and safety goggles? In Jon Fishman's case it's forgivable, because if you look beneath the scaly surface you'll find an inventive player who's holding down one of the most interesting gigs in rock-Phish. For those not in the know, Phish-which also features Trey Anastasio on guitar, Mike Gordon on bass, and Page McConnell on keyboards-is a band that has managed to attract a large and loyal following based on a combination of style-jumping music and an outrageous live show. And while sales of their first five studio releases have not been in the millions, Phish's touring success has been phenomenal. Their last tour saw the band perform seventy dates to more than 315,000 people, including sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden and Boston Garden. Fishman's penchant for strange stage dress and behavior is indicative of his somewhat unusual yet always creative approach to the drums. Virtually untrained, Jon has followed his own muse, coming up with a unique playing perspective. His skewed percussive concepts are without question one of the main reasons Phish has had a steady and successful climb. (Besides, you've got to love a guy who has the unadulterated gall to accompany a cover version of Neil Diamond's "Cracklin' Rosie" by prancing around on stage playing marching cymbals- or whose solo spot has him blowing and sucking weird noises from a vacuum cleaner's nozzle!) But don't get the impression that Fishman is some carnival sideshow act-this guy can play. He must be able to, considering Phish's challenging broad spectrum of music, which ranges from odd meter, Zappa- esque arrangements to earthy, traditional bluegrass. This diversity, as well as the band's love of extended free-form jamming, is obvious all over their new concert disc, A Live One, which they hope will reveal some of the bizarre and wonderful magic of their show. It takes a creative weirdo with good chops to cut this gig, and Jon Fishman is the right man for the job.

WFM: The hippest thing about Phish musically is all of the different styles the band plays. Would you say that handling those different styles is the biggest challenge of working in this band?

JF: Yes, it's a challenge, but it's also a big reason why I think the band is going to last. We're not trying to play lots of styles for the sake of playing styles. We do it because we're trying to get better at a lot of different things that we're bad at. [laughs] There is just so much good music out there. It would be foolish to ignore any of it. If you listen to jazz, bluegrass, rock, reggae, Latin- and all of the subheadings of styles contained in each-you'll find so much to be inspired by. And it seems that we're able to hear more and more of it here in the States now than ever before.

WFM: But most bands seem to fall into a certain style, which makes them a known quantity for their fans and for the music industry. Is being a musically diverse band a negative as well as a positive for Phish?

JF: I think it can be both. That's the discussion that the band always ends up coming back to. On one hand, we try to push our limits by getting better at other styles of music, hoping it brings more depth and richness to our original material. But the argument against that is that we'll never become particularly good at any one thing. It's a bit of a dilemma. Bluegrass is something that I've become really enthusiastic about over the last five years. I've found that the traditionalists in that kind of music are just hard-core. They stick to certain rules. On one hand, it's limiting. On the other hand, you get the straight beauty of the music. It's not covered up with flashiness. To Bill Monroe, the grandfather of bluegrass music, bluegrass had to stay pure. But if that was the only way the world of music could go, then you'd never have Bela Fleck. Bela has become a great master of that traditional form, but he's also gone way beyond it, incorporating all sorts of other things with it. [Fleck has guested on Phish studio discs.] If boundaries weren't meant to be broken, I don't think that they would exist. For me, I can understand the argument that you could end up in a position where you're not really that good at any particular style. However, I feel that the inspiration and the new directions you can achieve by opening yourself up to other styles far outweighs anything you might lose.

WFM: You guys pull from some unique genres, though, like barbershop quartet.

JF: That's right, and it's been good for us. We're just four guys in a rock band who've decided that barbershop music is cool. Vocally, we all pretty much have the same range. Real barbershop quartets are put together based on the ranges of the different singers, so for us to go out and do barbershop is a real challenge. Honestly, we're not a good barbershop quartet, but I still love doing it. I love singing like that. But more importantly, singing in that style makes everybody in the band a much better vocalist. When the other guys sing harmony on one of our tunes, having the barbershop experience makes them able to blend better. We're all better singers together because we spend hours and hours looking at voice vowel charts to shape our vowels correctly. There is nothing, at this point in the world, that you can't learn from some other established genre of music. If Pearl Jam studied nothing but bluegrass for a year it would help them be Pearl Jam. It would help them even if they never played one note of acoustic music. I guess that's the way we look at it.

WFM: When the band is writing original material, is it an open sort of situation where you can bring in a style that you'd like to investigate?

JF: I'm constantly baffled by how open everybody is in this band. We're all willing to try anything once. If someone says let's try this song with a calypso beat, or let's try that with a swing feel, everyone's immediate response is, "Let's do it." Everyone will really put themselves into it.

WFM: With all of the different styles Phish explores, have you had to go back and do research into the specific drum beats inherent in the styles to get your parts to sound authentic?

JF: I have researched things, but what normally happens with us is that we'll want to try something in a certain style, and then I have to figure out something that sounds right. At that point I might try to investigate it a bit further to find out what the "correct" beats are. Then I disregard them. I don't want to play a standard Latin beat or a swing beat. I want to make it my own. More often than not the styles we play are influenced by the music we're trying to make. It doesn't start with us wanting to play in a certain style, which may be a backwards way of doing things, especially as a drummer. But I think I've had a backdoor approach to drumming ever since I started. I can read music, but I can't read well. I can't sight- read at all, but I can write anything out on paper and then learn it. When I was thirteen I took three drum lessons, because I thought I should learn how to read, but I never got that good at it. From that point on I could read if I wanted to. I didn't take another lesson until a couple of years ago, when I went to Joe Morello. Unfortunately I only had one lesson with him, mostly because I'm touring all the time and because he lives in New Jersey. I haven't stayed with it and I've often thought that I would like to go back and really get into it.

WFM: Since you really haven't studied with anyone, how did you develop your playing?

JF: Most of the coordination or chops I've gotten together have come from just sitting at my drumset and working out things I've heard other drummers play. When I was a kid I'd get all excited by a song, like "When The Levee Breaks" by Led Zeppelin. That was the first song that I learned how to play. I remember standing in front of my stereo, just blasting "When The Levee Breaks" and "air-guitaring" the parts. Then I'd go downstairs to the basement with the song running through my head, and I'd try to learn the drum part. I'd have to play it from memory. It was a long, passionate process. I did that for ten years. Eventually I started getting into old Genesis, Bill Bruford's playing in King Crimson and Yes, all of Zappa's drummers, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. I would try to imitate anything from these people that I liked. However, I never did it with headphones on. I never listened to the music while I was doing it, so I never learned exactly what they were playing-it was always from my own warped perspective. I think that's mainly how I developed my own drumming style-by not really copying anybody. Now when I practice I'll just sit down and jam with myself. I'll just be jamming along, and when I stumble across something that sounds interesting but that I can't quite play, I'll stop and try to figure it out. It might take a couple of days, but I'll get it. I enjoy practicing and opening myself up to new things, including drum books. I went out and got a copy of Stick Control a couple of years ago-better late than never! [laughs] I play the exercises on a pillow, plus I do rudiments like paradiddles, double-stroke rolls, and single-stroke rolls, all on a pillow. I guess I should have been doing this all along.

WFM: When you were talking before about being self-taught, it's one thing to cop a simple rock beat, but it's a different matter when you're trying to play, let's say, a syncopated Latin groove. Was it the same process for you when playing more involved styles?

JF: The process is pretty much the same. The reason I've worked on different styles is that I just hate to play a "normal" beat. Someone can bring in a simple rock tune, and I could play a straight rock beat to it, but I think that no matter how straight a thing might be, you can still find some different way to play it and still be true to the basic groove of the song. For a long time I followed this rule: I have to have a different beat for every song. That gets pretty hairy as time goes on because you start to find that your styles, or your approaches to things, overlap. Even though other things may not be exactly the same, there are similarities. That's okay, but I think that I'm always looking for something new. Getting to your question about Latin music, playing in a Latin flavor was the only time when I actually said, "I've got to really research this." I found that there are certain key concepts in Latin drumming that I've tried to latch on to. One of these occurred to me when I was examining Latin music written out. It reminded me of runners in a relay race, where one runner will hand a baton off to the next. I kind of imagine Latin rhythms that way-pairs of 8th notes are lined up so that the second 8th note of one pair will be the first 8th note of another. Once I discovered that, I went about teaching myself how to do all sorts of beats that involved hitting different drums and "overlapping" 8th notes. It isn't necessarily true Latin, just my warped perspective of what Latin drumming is. But at this point I don't think I've had an original thought when it comes to Latin music. WFM: Although maybe the way you've applied it has been original. JF: Maybe, but if so then it's been out of sheer ignorance. I don't enjoy being ignorant. When we went on tour with Santana, Carlos showed me stuff every day. He was really cool and very helpful. I loved that. It's very difficult for me to seek out instruction, because I always have my own agenda. I'm always working on things that I want to develop. When it comes down to taking a lesson and sort of following someone else's program, even though it might be a really great program, I get yanked by my own agenda.

WFM: Many of the styles that the band explores seem rhythm-based. Do you have a big influence on bringing those ideas into the band?

JF: Honestly, it comes from all of us. For instance, I would still be ignorant to bluegrass music if it weren't for Mike. He has always been a pretty big fan of traditional country & western and bluegrass music, and he's helped us investigate those styles. Ten years ago I couldn't listen to country music. Now I like traditional country, although I'm not into pop-country. To me, pop- country is just about as bad as pop-metal. I don't want to start putting down genres, though. Every genre of music has it's great players, and if you do a little investigating you can find out who they are and really learn something from them. Trey writes a lot of things that are rhythmic-based. He and I lived together for about four years, and during that time there were a lot of hours that I would be practicing. My drums were in a room right off the kitchen, so whenever Trey would be in the kitchen he'd hear some of the patterns I would be playing. He'd then go off and write a song around those beats. One time Mike called me up and told me he had an idea for a drum part to a song he had written. He sang what he thought the drum part should be, and I wrote it all down. Mike is probably the worst drummer out of all of us in the band, but the beat he came up with was unusual. As a drummer I would never have thought of it. I would have gone for something much more conventional. One other time Trey had a piece of music that he had written, and he based the drum part on my setup. He actually sat down at my drumset and wrote out the drum part based on where things were positioned on the kit. That was a pretty creative way of coming up with a drum part. WFM: What song was that from? JF: That was from a piece called "Eliza," which is on A Picture Of Nectar. It's a very soft piece. It's actually the second tune on the album and it comes right after this raging thing called "Llama." "Eliza" is this really nice, beautiful melody, and I'm playing the drums with mallets. It's not very well defined; it just sort of goes along and changes with the melody. A lot of the drum parts I come up with are based on things that I'm working on at the given moment. Something I've been experimenting with for a while is playing ride patterns with my left hand. Since my right hand is so much more coordinated than my left, I figure that if I can ride with my left hand I've got a whole universe of stuff I can do with the right. That led me to the beat for "Esther," which is a song on our first album.

WFM: Another element to your playing that comes across loud and clear is your lack of fear. You seem to play on the edge and just go for it. You can hear it even on Phish's most recent studio album, Hoist, which is by far the most produced effort the band has recorded.

JF: I'm glad that's what you hear. It's important to me. Last night I was watching a documentary on the Who, and Roger Daltry said that they had never been that concerned about the correct note. He said they would take a bum note and a bead of sweat over a right note any day. I think that's great-that's the bottom line. You study and try to learn your part as well as you can, and then play the music with the right spirit. Carlos Santana would always say, "If you're thinking about it, you're not making music." As for what I play and how it's been captured on record, sometimes my hands work really well and things come right out, other times I'm just a crude vehicle for this really cool idea. [laughs] But what's important is that the feeling gets across-that you're having fun and that you're playing music. I like to get to a point with any song where I don't have to think about it. What I really like to do is take a song and learn the part completely, really intellectualize it until I know exactly what to play. I want to get it to a point where I could be run over by a truck, get up, walk over to a set of drums, and play the part. The "go for it" attitude comes into play for me regarding the fills. Fills are the points in a song where I'm free to express what's flashing through my brain at that given moment. I like them to be as "unpracticed" as possible. Fills are a true statement of where you are at that moment in your life. Sometimes they come out great and sometimes you fall on your face.

WFM: There are drummers who are extremely careful and accurate when it comes to fills.

JF: I guess they have a different mindset. There is no better place to fall on your face than in the middle of a drum fill. [laughs] The thing to remember is that screwing up a fill doesn't do any harm. A fill is a fill-no big deal. It's real emotion. I think the important idea here is that you have to be accepting of where you're at as a player. You should be able to take the stage, or get in a recording studio, and think, "Well, here I am. I've done my homework. This is as good as I am at this given moment." It kind of takes some of the pressure off and gives you the freedom to play what's in your heart.

WFM: I assume that this "go for it" attitude is all over the new live record Phish is about to release.

JF: We went out on stage and wailed this stuff. Obviously there's no audience when you make a studio album. You go into a little box to record, and you hope to come up with the energy that you feel when you play live. We just never felt that our albums captured that energy. So after eleven years of being a band we came up with the incredibly bright idea of, "Hey, let's do a live album-maybe that will capture the energy of a show." We've gotten good performances on albums, and I think that Hoist was a really good album in terms of the mix. It sounds really good and it's definitely the most relaxed I've ever been about making an album. We all reached a good point with Hoist. But the only way to get to a better level, I think, in terms of that attitude, is to record the live show.

WFM: Did knowing that you were performing tracks live that were going to be used for the album affect how you were playing?

JF: We figured out a way around that by recording almost the whole dang tour! We just went out and played our normal show. We recorded forty- four gigs, and from that we had to come up with 140 minutes of music. If you can't come up with two hours of music out of that many gigs, you should hang it up! [laughs]

WFM: How were you able to determine which tracks to use?

JF: When we'd come off stage each of us would write down what we thought on a list. We didn't show each other our lists until the end of the tour, and the nights that more than one of us chose, we put on a master list. That narrowed it down to about a quarter of the tour. Next, we solicited the "Phish Net" [the band's Internet web site where they communicate with their "on-line" fans]. We made an announcement that we were putting together a live album and asked them for their input. A lot of our fans follow us from show to show, so they have a good perspective on which shows were good. Their input really helped because they were looking at things from a different point of view than we were. So between our notebooks and our fans we were able to come up with the final list.

WFM: Since you were recording shows from different venues, are the basic sounds varied from tune to tune?

JF: Well, yes and no. [laughs] Everything was close-miked and it went right to the decks, but there were different room sounds. There were room mic's at the soundboard and in the back of the room for every concert, so in the end we were able to mix as much of the room sound with the stage sound as we wanted. But some nights the signal of the kick drum going to tape sounded like I was hitting a piece of paper, and on other nights it sounded like a massive explosion. Some nights we were playing in a huge auditorium and other nights we were playing in a school cafeteria. We ended up with a lot of different sounds going to tape, but I think that enhances the album. I kind of relate it to when we recorded Hoist. On it we used a different snare drum for every tune, which was a new experience for me. Apparently a lot of producers and engineers today do that to get subtle differences between the tracks. It's a more internalized way of keeping the listener's attention span. With the different locations for the live record we automatically got different sounds on tape. It might not be the ideal sound you would have thought up ahead of time, but it does change the texture from song to song, and I kind of like that.

WFM: What kind of input did you have mixing the live album?

JF: I didn't spend every minute helping to mix the tracks. I felt very comfortable about giving an opinion, but I acted as sort of an objective ear, coming in and hearing what they had come up with after they fine- tuned everything. Then I had a fresh perspective and could listen to the overall sound. What was nice about the setup for me was that, while the other guys were in the control room mixing tracks, I'd be practicing my drums in another room. I kept my chops up and worked on things.

WFM: Are there any particular problems with mixing concert tracks?

JF: We had one song that had a particularly enthusiastic crowd yelling in the background, and we really wanted to include that in the overall feeling of the song. But when I listened to the mix the guys had come up with, it seemed like there was too much crowd noise and not enough of the actual music. The detail was lost. The tradeoff was that if you let the audience be there at the beginning and then took it away when the song got going, it sounded odd. So those are the types of things we had to overcome.

WFM: Listening to the live tracks, have you noticed any changes in the way you play over time? Has it given you a different perspective?

JF: Oh, my God, yes-too bloody much perspective! I've definitely noticed some things about my own playing, but the main area of growth has been in my ability to groove. It's something that the whole band has noticed. I think one of the reasons my playing has changed, besides the constant gigging with Phish and the practicing I've done, is some of the work I've done outside of the band. When the band wasn't touring I went out and did gigs with some local funk bands. I also worked with a local country band where all I would do was play straight time. It's groove music and it was hard for me. I had to work at it to get it to sound right. That definitely affected the way I perceive things.

WFM: And have you noticed any musical changes within the band because of it?

JF: Well, the stuff that has been most glaring is the band's ability to stay locked in together when we're improvising. While listening to the live tracks there have been moments where I have been truly blown away. We've gotten to a point where we are very tight and seem to know what the others are thinking. We do a lot of jamming, and there are these moments where, on the same beat, all of us just fall right into something, with no signal or command or anything. It's just amazing.

WFM: Playing so many gigs over the past few years has paid off.

JF: That's part of it. But we actually have band exercises that we've developed that help us improvise together. We don't even practice songs anymore, we just practice jamming.

WFM: What are these exercises?

JF: They are designed to open up our ears to each other. Early on I found that all I did was follow Trey, musically. Once we realized this we talked about how drummers and bass players are supposed to hook up, so we started focusing on that. Then Page, our keyboard player, who's the newest member of the band, is on the other side of the stage from me. I sit on stage right and he's on stage left. Page was the last guy in the band that I got around to paying specific attention to. One day we found ourselves saying, "Well, geez. Maybe we should try to open ourselves up to the whole band. Are there ways that we can hear everybody at once and not just be going with one person all the time?" So we came up with these exercises. One is called "Including Your Own Hey."

WFM: How does that work?

JF: When we perform we set up in a specific order across the stage-Page, Trey, Mike, and then me. For this exercise, Page will play a simple, repetitive riff. It doesn't matter what it is. Then Trey follows Page and does something similar to what he played. Then Mike does something based on what those two did. Finally, I come in. Once it's going and repeating, it's up to the next guy in line to initiate a change. Working across the stage, Trey would be next to initiate the change. What happens is, when we hear that each guy has found something and is locked into it, we yell out "hey." When everyone has yelled "hey," the next person in line initiates the change. Everyone listens to see that everyone has responded and has locked in. We just go around in a circle doing that. So by doing this we're having to listen to each other and be creative. That exercise has branched off into different exercises. One is the "Mimicking Hey," where two people mimic and the other two people have to specifically not mimic. For example, Page will play something and then Trey will try to mimic him, and Mike and I will do something totally different. Once Page is successfully mimicked by Trey he'll yell "hey," and then Mike mimics him. At that point Trey listens to what I'm doing and does something off of what I'm playing, but not the same. Once Mike mimics Page, then it's my turn to mimic him. Then there's another exercise we have called "Filling The Hey Hole," which is where we each have to play the parts of the beat not occupied by the others. You can't play at the same time anyone else is playing. So we just go around in circles doing this, and we've gotten better and better at it.

WFM: And you've been able to hear places in the music where these exercises have paid off?

JF: I can't even begin to tell you how much. After about a year of doing the "Hey" exercises, our ability to jam as a unit on stage dramatically improved. We could improvise for longer periods of time without getting boring-it's ridiculous. It's just lifted our playing as a group on several levels.

WFM: Another part of the Phish story is your stage antics, which seem to be a big part of the band's notoriety.

JF: Well, all of it has come to us purely by accident. There was never a time when we thought, "Oh, we have to have something to do on stage." Here's an example of how we came up with one of our ideas: We were driving by this huge yard sale and there were these trampolines for sale. We looked at each other and said, "Let's use those tonight at the gig!" Another time we saw one of those 4 A.M. commercials for a ski-in- place exercise machine, and we thought that would be great during a song called "It's Ice." There's this kind of eeriesection in the tune where the lyrics talk about this guy who is trapped under the ice. It's a solo piano section, so we thought that since Trey and Mike aren't doing anything in that section they might as well be on those ski machines. That's how these things normally develop.

WFM: And what about the dress you always perform in?

JF: It's not a dress, it's a frock. I've worn it every night on stage for the last seven years. It just stayed with me. Everyone has to have a uniform, and the frock is mine. The frock helps me to get into the performance and have more fun. When I go on stage in a frock I'm able to take the music seriously, but I can't take myself seriously. I don't think of myself as an egotistical person, and if you're wearing a dress and goggles onstage in front of ten thousand people, you couldn't be even if you wanted to. Also, I'm kind of an exhibitionist. I'm the only one in the band who has gotten naked on stage. It's not like an obsession or anything.

WFM: Okay the deal with your vacuum cleaner solo?

JF: It all started at a party I was at years ago. I got really drunk. Sophie, Page's fiancie, was joking with me, and asked, "Hey Fish, can you play anything other than the drums?" I told her I could play anything. Since it was a "moving" party there was a vacuum out, so she told me to play the vacuum. I turned it on, put my lips up to the nozzle, and proceeded to cut the hell out of my mouth. But before it got bad I had some interesting sounds happening on it. After that I did it onstage as a joke, and it's just grown to a point where I can get some interesting sounds, and now people expect it. I figure that when I'm really old I'm going to have one really long jowl. [laughs] The audiences seem to love it. When I get on stage, anything goes. I think people can relate to that, because when you go to a rock concert you are definitely going to unwind. You want to forget about your problems. I think it gives people something they need.

WFM: And how about you?

JF: I know I need it-not the antics, but the drumming. If I wasn't a drummer in this band I don't know what I'd be. I realize that drumming is why I'm here. It answers a lot of questions for me. I don't know, I think that if I hadn't found drumming I might have become a bad person. [laughs] I might have become a vigilante, or a sniper, or a Jeffrey Dahmer.

WFM: I'm glad you found the drums.

JF: I am too.

i am too.  :-D

[sls.stormyrider]

long, but interesting
only 3 lessons - makes me feel quite inadequate in my approach to drumming.

thanks
+k

[redrum]

long, but interesting
only 3 lessons - makes me feel quite inadequate in my approach to drumming.

thanks
+k

i'd be willing to bet anything that he's had more than 3 since that interview (in 95).

makes me feel that way too tho, and i'd like to think that i'm somewhat accomplished.

[willsteele]

long, but interesting
only 3 lessons - makes me feel quite inadequate in my approach to drumming.

I couldn't agree more.  I have the original Modern Drummer with this in it.  I always wished, still do, that I had the time to sit at my drums and just figure stuff out and jam.  I can only do it every so often nowadays.  But I can't stand practicing and I hate playing paradiddles and words like "syncopated groove". ha  I just like to play.

[sunrisevt]

long, but interesting
only 3 lessons - makes me feel quite inadequate in my approach to drumming.

thanks
+k

OK, dude--are you sure you're not by brother-in-law?  :wink: If you are, you've done an amazing job of hiding your age and the fact that you dig Phish & the Dead. He's a dedicated drummer... cardiology fellow at U.Mass. Steve Anisman.

[sls.stormyrider]

same 1st name too