Free Phish by Parke Puterbaugh

playing). Rising Low paid tribute to Allen Woody, the bass player for the Allman Brothers Band and Gov’t Mule, who died of a drug overdose in August 2000. In the same movie, Gordon blurred the lines between fact and fiction by contriving a bassist named Joey Arkenstat and having some of the instrument’s real-life legends pay verbal tribute to this nonexistent “influence.” Somewhere in all this can be discerned the broad outline of his serious yet playful personality.
    An inescapable similarity between Anastasio’s and Gordon’s upbringing is that both musicians had a practical, business-oriented father and a creative, artistically inclined mother. In their career you can see this merging of art and practicality. Both sets of parents divorced, too. Moreover, Anastasio’s and Gordon’s siblings each went on to careers in the environmental field. David Gordon earned a degree in environmental law at Harvard and worked abroad in the area of environmental diplomacy. Kristine Manning (Trey’s sister) earned her degree at Duke University and worked as an environmental journalist, editor, and advocate before her untimely death in 2009.
    “Between my sister and Mike’s brother, they’re gonna save the world,” Anastasio noted in 1995.
    “We’re going out there to destroy it,” cracked Gordon, “and we’re counting on them to rebuild it.”
     
    Gordon’s first original contribution to Phish bore the prosaic title “Mike’s Song,” which he recorded as a four-track. Both Anastasio and Gordon were pretty proficient with their four-track machines by 1984, and a good portion of material that wound up on Phish’s first release, The White Tape , stemmed from their individual efforts.
    “Mike’s Song” went on to become a Phish concert staple, formed into a triptych with “I Am Hydrogen” and “Weekapaug Groove” (or,
after 1992, with an ever-unpredictable middle in place of “I Am Hydrogen”). In the beginning, however, “Mike’s Song” was “just a little four-track experiment I did in my sophomore dorm room,” according to Gordon. “We never played the groove that was on the four-track, which was kind of like Motown.”
    “Weekapaug Groove” came about in typical seize-the-moment fashion. A high-school friend of Anastasio’s had a family house in Weekapaug, Rhode Island, a beach town, and Phish played at the yacht club. As they were returning from the gig, the Four Seasons’ cheesy disco-era hit, “Oh, What a Night (1963),” came on the radio. Mishearing the lyrics of the bridge, Gordon began singing, “trying to make a woman that you move.” To that bit of doggerel—“It never occurred to any of us that it has any meaning”—he added “Sharing in a Weekapaug groove,” and the germ of a song was born. For some inexplicable reason, the town fathers of Weekapaug took offense to the song and had a threatening cease-and-desist lawyer letter sent to the band, which they sensibly ignored.
     
    Page McConnell entered the picture in 1985, when he enlisted Phish to play Springfest at Goddard College. Ultimately, he joined the band and also convinced Anastasio and Fishman to transfer to Goddard, which had a self-directed, open-ended curriculum. Goddard students set their own goals and agendas for learning and then meet with an adviser for weekly evaluations in order to track progress. In their final year, a senior study project is undertaken and submitted.
    McConnell studied jazz piano with a teacher named Lar Duggan, who lived in Burlington, and his musical mentor at Goddard was named Karl Doyle. Anastasio was tutored in composition by Vermont composer Ernie Stires and wrote The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday (aka Gamehendge )—for his senior thesis. Fishman played drums and penned a how-to manual on drumming. All three graduated from Goddard.
    During the 1985 Goddard Springfest, the institution seemingly didn’t have much to celebrate, with its student body having shrunk to
a historical low