Free Phish by Parke Puterbaugh Page B

people came over to check it out. They didn’t speak any English, and this guy set a big boom box down in the sand, looked at us, and went, “Lynyrd Skynyrd?” And we’re like, “Yeah, Lynyrd Skynyrd!” “Deep Purple?”
“Yeah, Deep Purple!” We listened to “Free Bird” and “Child in Time.” We hadn’t heard music for a couple months. Things like that made the whole European trip just amazing.
    The two also had a portable Sony cassette recorder upon which they recorded their travel experiences, dubbed the “Tape of Life.” On one side of the tape was the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour , and on the other was Pink Floyd’s Meddle . The unit’s erase head was broken, so instead of recording over the music, it simply added sounds from their travels to it, such as a voice repeating the line, “Hello, my name is Yannis, I come from Cyprus.”
    “Everyone we met would talk into this thing—weird people we met on the street and weird events,” Anastasio recalled. “By the time it was over we had this incredible collage tape. We camped under the Matterhorn one night and were singing, drinking wine, and that was on there. It was all on there.”
    One night in Paris, they were busking in the street—Anastasio on a mini-guitar, Fishman on a Flexatone (an odd little percussion instrument dating from the early twenties), Pete on bongos—alongside fire-eaters, glass-walkers, and other freaks. They drew a large crowd that really got into the music, dancing and digging the scene as Phish crowds would in years to come. Unwilling to break the spell, even though they were getting separated from their belongings as the surging crowd pushed them back, they discovered afterward that someone had stolen the Sony unit with the “Tape of Life” in it. The loss of their tape recorder wasn’t the worst thing that happened to them abroad. While tripping on their German friends’ acid one day on Pelekas Beach, they decided to swim out to a raft offshore just as a violent storm was blowing in, and Anastasio nearly drowned. After this harrowing experience, he sat on the beach and wrote the music for “Harry Hood.”
     
    Once McConnell was in, there followed a half-year period during which Phish carried on as a five-piece band, with him and Jeff onboard.
This was not the most convivial period in the band’s history. While McConnell was on the same musical page as the other members of Phish, in terms of breaking ground and moving forward, Holdsworth began to detach from the group. His anchoring influence became less essential as Phish increasingly set sail for uncharted waters. With his interest waning and days numbered, Holdsworth began shedding gear and downsizing his role. Anastasio has cited as a “defining moment” the day he brought sheet music for “You Enjoy Myself” to band practice. Everyone but Holdsworth was gung-ho about the idea of tackling original, scored music.
    In March 1986, Holdsworth bailed out. He graduated from UVM, left town, and underwent a religious conversion. Having heard tales about the abundance of pot, mushrooms, and acid within the student community at UVM and Goddard in general and within the local musical community in particular, it’s reasonable to speculate that someone like Holdsworth, who didn’t navigate easily through that world, might’ve wanted to extricate himself from it. Moreover, Holdsworth didn’t have the compositional mind of the others, nor did he share with them the compulsion to bend old forms into new shapes and sounds.
    Holdsworth eventually paid his erstwhile bandmates a return visit, sporting short hair and a tweed jacket to which a “Jesus Is Love” button was pinned. He was a lot thinner, they noticed.
    “None of us really knew him that well, when I look back on it,” noted Fishman. “None of us knew him well enough to pinpoint what caused that, except for the fact he was always kind of a loner.”
    “Really quiet and nice guy, too,” added