Phish by Parke Puterbaugh Read Free Book Online

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