TOM MARSHALL AND THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS
By Jack Chester

While working on his recent feature [Relix, Nov ‘04], Jack Chester had the unique opportunity to correspond with Phish's lyricist in several different settings after Coventry. Fittingly, Chester's discussions began with a series of online interviews, conducted through Marshall's most frequent means of communication, email. Below, we offer you the full transcript of Chester and Marshall's digital dialogue.

Subject: Tom Marshall here: Relix questions
Date: August 30, 2004 10:32:26 PM EDT
To:

1) How was your Coventry experience?

I’m not great with goodbyes. When I got there, I quickly realized that this wasn’t your regular Phish festival. I felt the end of Phish weighing on everyone... and it wasn’t just the mud. There was some overall oppression that I had personally weighing on me—don’t get me wrong, I saw PLENTY of people having a wonderful time. But I had flown in with the band and I couldn’t help but be saddened as the reality dawned on them somewhere between Camden and Coventry. The music suffered as well... Trey was emotionally overwrought. I had recently had a great time with him in Hampton and again in Camden. I felt those were really my last shows... and then more and more I began wondering what I was doing at Coventry. So I left in the morning after the first night of music. I was very glad to have gone—to have seen everyone walk in over insurmountable miles of muddy roads and hills to see Phish’s last stand. That was a triumph for Phish, and for me. I have been to every Phish festival, and there was no way I was going to miss the last one, and apparently thousands felt the same way. But when I drove out on Sunday, I felt relieved in many ways. I then went on a week’s vacation where I finally, peacefully was able to put Phish to bed despite the strong emotions that Coventry had conjured.

2) You got to have your moment at center stage. You’ve been on stage with Phish before, but how did the last one feel?

It was incredible actually... I had never stood onstage before such a vast crowd. When everyone enthusiastically responded to my wave and half-bow, I was thrilled, and felt like they were all saying “thank you”—when in fact that was what I wanted to say. As luck would have it, my words were pre-sculpted, and I said the magical line that started it all... and ran offstage numb, dumb and happy.

3) A few days removed, how do you feel about the Phish experience as a closed body of work?

I don’t think of it that way. There are still songs there. That’s a living body of work, and I don’t think of those songs as locked into a strong-box at all. The closed portion is the Phish concert experience. I think Phish will continue to exist now through those songs alone. I am happy and proud of the huge body of work that Trey and I were able to amass and call “Phish songs,” but by no means do I feel like it’s over for them now. Perhaps other bands will play them. Perhaps they will emerge on satellite radio shows... who knows?

Subject: Tom Marshall: questions part II
Date: August 30, 2004 11:34:30 PM EDT
To:

1) In an interview with Josh Baron [Relix 28-2], he referred to you as a “lyricist,” as you are often labeled. You replied that you didn’t really think of yourself in that respect and implied that your half of the Anastasio/Marshall songs weren’t necessarily your words over Trey’s melodies. Is there a greater partnership than that? In simple terms, would it be fair to say that Trey has affected, if not written, some of the lyrics and you perhaps have affected, if not written, some of the music that is credited to your songwriting partner?

Definitely. Over time, Trey and I wrote songs in many different ways—I have faxed, phoned and emailed lyrics to him and awaited a result with no further interaction. Songs like “Squirming Coil,” “Horn” and “Julius” were born this way. Then we had the write-by-phone sessions, him in Vermont, me in New Jersey: hours and hours spent writing songs like “Lifeboy”—Trey playing and singing, me penning, crossing-out, re-writing and carefully uttering a new phrase into the phone when the moment was right, until it was complete. These methods took us through Hoist. I then compiled a whole bunch of poems that my friend Scott Herman and I had collaborated upon into a book called The Salamander Prince. This book became the basis of the next several albums following Hoist: Billy Breathes, Ghost and Farmhouse.

We had created a new method of writing shortly before Billy Breathes was created: the songwriting vacation. Trey (kindly) picked up the tab for several of these amazing forays to different spots across New England and the Caribbean. The first of these was a scuba-diving trip to the Cayman Islands, and that water theme is quite evident in Billy Breathes, and has followed us around quite a bit since then. The Cayman Islands trip marked the first time when Trey really turned over quite a bit of the melody creation and harmony formation to me. It became a true collaboration in every sense, with Trey helping with the lyrics and me helping with the song structure and vocal lines. “Waste” was our most ambitious product of that island trip, although “Limb by Limb” was truly fun to record, including a portion of the song where we placed the recorder in the bathroom and sang the refrain, slowly backing out of the room and into the hall and down the corridor into the living room... “and I am taken far away...” From that point on, the value of the songwriting vacation was realized by us and the Phish organization as well, since Trey and I would write 15 or more songs in a long weekend. Thus, they became slightly more extravagant in some ways: we graduated from a stereo-recording Walkman to a full-blown 16-track digital mobile studio including a full drum kit, keyboard station and bass and guitars that someone (usually Paul and Carini, and later my friend Chris Metaxas) would set up a day in advance, and leave for Trey and me in a beautiful spot: sometimes a rental property in Stowe, Vermont or Nantucket, a resort in Saratoga, or even five-star hotel rooms in Philly and in the Atlantis Hotel in the Bahamas. All trips were a success, I’m happy to say, and each different location has left its own discernable mark on the songs that were written there.

2) In an interview with Jesse Jarnow you said that you respond to Phish fan queries about Trey or the future of the band with “polite misdirection.” Do you do the same with questions regarding your lyrics? Are you more interested in the individual experience than the historical record?

Well... that makes it sounds sort of selfish, but there were in fact times when I felt that misdirection might help protect an artifact or a legend. For example, of course, the Rhombus: we wrote “Divided Sky” there. I spent many of my high school nights there writing long-forgotten songs and drumming with Trey and our friends Marc and Dave. Eventually the folklore of Gamehendge, to some fans, began to seem like all-important clues, like footholds to attain a higher grasp of all that is Phish, and a concerted effort was made to find it—Trey, Phish and I, in due course, were happy to “misdirect” people to King of Prussia now and then. However, out-and-out lying didn’t seem right, and I eventually let go of the Rhombus, and the importance of keeping the location a secret slowly slipped away. Enough people have found it now that of course people are compelled to vandalize it by etching “Phish” into it—ignoring the value of the work of art it is in itself. But any misdirection I may have taken part in in the past I believe has vanished with age...

I do realize the import of the historical record, and rarely partake in the former silliness I may have that still rears its head in question-form now and then like, “Are you really a biology teacher?” or something about a “24-hour Utalk concert,” which never happened. (Utalk was a band Trey and I formed briefly with the intent of playing some of our music apart from Phish.) As for misdirection about the meaning of lyrics—I’ve often said that I’m uncomfortable assigning a “meaning” in some cases, and am pleased when people interpret a song in a wholly different way than my personal interpretation. My interpretation of a song can change over time as well—I’ve mentioned this instance the most, but “Walls of the Cave,” which even has the initials WTC if you’re willing to omit the “O,” is very clearly about the World Trade Center attack to some people. Initially, I wasn’t among those who interpreted it that way. And while lines like “and when it fell, you caught my heart before it hit the ground” to some is obviously about the Trade Center’s collapse, it wasn’t that obvious to me when I wrote it. It still isn’t specifically about it in my mind, however, I’ll admit that it was written shortly after 9/11, and that I was traumatized along with the rest of the world, and while writing a slightly morbid “goodbye” song to my son perhaps some WTC imagery slipped in there...

(For the record, the goodbye to my son was my projecting myself in the future, eventually having to say goodbye to him—not the other way around—and he and I are healthy and happy.)

3) Can you give me an idea of what part Scott Herman has in your writing process?

Yes—as I mentioned before, Scott and I wrote a whole bunch of poems in a collaborative call and answer fashion. Email was the medium and songs like “Cavern,” “Axilla” and “Limb By Limb,” where we took turns writing different lines, were the result. We became more proficient (and artful if I may so presume) and eventually felt the need to create a book with about 200 of these poems for Trey’s personal use. That was called The Salamander Prince and we printed that in 1997. Later we made a book with 109 poems called “Walls of the Cave”—that came out in 2001. In all, Scott may have co-written more than 25 Phish songs, and he is still actively writing with me for my band, Amfibian. I still have a copy of each book we printed, and I hope Scott does. Trey’s copy of The Salamander Prince, the last time I saw it, was so worn from use that I suggested he retire it to Kevin in archives. I sincerely hope he did, because it had tons of scribbles, both his and mine, that might someday yield important clues to a Phish historian as to the origins of songs like “Stash”... although in that case, the historian may simply be wondering “why”... and, if pressed, the answer for that will certainly be skirted by some serious misdirection.

Subject: Tom Marshall -- round III
Date: September 1, 2004 10:59:54 PM EDT
To:

1) What is your very earliest memory of Trey?

They’re not my earliest, but they’re extremely vivid ones.

(A) Probably sometime in 1979 when Trey and I were in ninth grade, he had switched from being one of our class’ few drummers, to one of many aspiring guitarists. I remember a specific moment in PDS [Princeton Day School] classmate Barry Lamb’s basement where a bunch of the school’s guitarists were gathered in a corner teaching each other riffs—like “Rock ‘n’ Roll Hootchie Coo” and “Smoke on the Water” and stuff like that. I walked over to the other side of the basement, and there was Trey, sitting alone with his guitar. I sat next to him thinking, what the hell is HE doing with a guitar? He’s a drummer! Then I listened to him playing Allman Brothers riffs and several other songs in their entirety and realized that he, after playing about two weeks, was leaps and bounds better than several guys who had taken lessons for many months, even years. I asked him, “When did you learn to play?” He just said, “I always sort of knew how.” I never questioned that statement—because it was irrefutable.

(B) Another great memory of Trey, where I realized that he indeed was on his way to stardom or was at least in the early stages of planning for it, was when I walked into his basement after knocking a while before realizing his guitar was wailing so loudly there was no way he would hear me. What should I see, but Trey, in his underwear, playing loud Black Sabbath-style chords, looking at himself in the mirror as he BOUNCED. Yes... he was watching his waist-long mane of red hair go weightless for a moment, and then settle down in the next moment, only then to repeat that cycle many times over, in time to the power chords. Finally I yelled something at him and he seemed somewhat embarrassed that I had witnessed that personal ritual. Years later did I realize that the signature trampoline act had been planned long in advance... by a hippie teenager with a guitar and a dream.

2) How much has the length of your relationship had to do with the honesty of your collaboration? Has it allowed a certain innocence to stay with you, do you think?

Oh, no question. I think what has stayed with us most, is the sense of “doing it for ourselves first”—that is, when [other PDS classmate] Aaron Wolf and I wrote Wilson, it was for the sole purpose of making each other laugh. It just so happened that only one person for whom we “performed” it, understood the sentiment... and in fact remembered the words and the tune for several years before he turned it into a famous rock anthem! Trey’s and my writing style seemed to be based on a joke—it WAS a joke for a while. Writing music, for a while, wasn’t anything more than turning on a tape recorder and spouting silliness with guitar accompaniment. Soon, though, when songs like “Slave” and “Antelope” and “Letter to Jimmy Page” and “Divided Sky” (which was originally called “Log” because of the wooden percussion used) were being recorded in his dad’s basement, did I realize how good Trey had gotten, and how I would rather listen to this stuff that ANYTHING else. The joke element was still there, clearly—I mean, how else would “Rye, Rye Rocko...Marco Esquandolas...etc.” make it into a song? The answer was that it wasn’t “FOR” anyone but us. When people began to discover Phish, this intimate sense of humor was conveyed to them and made them feel like part of the joke. I’ve had many people tell me that over the years. Many years later Trey and I talked about how the joke is still there, but by realizing it, we could avoid being the joke as before...and instead could harness the positive energy...

3) Will there still be occasional songwriting vacations, perhaps for the benefit of TAB and/or Amfibian? Or is it more, perhaps, that songs are merely a byproduct of the time you two spend together, so it would be assumed that songs will occur between you whenever you come together regardless of what bands either of you may be in at the time?

I think you answered that question yourself. Yes—we’ll still get together, and since when we get together, songs are the result, then yes—we’ll have more songwriting vacations. Anytime we have a planned get-together, music is the implied purpose. We both have kids now, and we have fantasized about and even planned camping trips and the like... but they haven’t happened; instead, we hole up in a farmhouse somewhere and record a dozen or more songs... and we probably will never have it any other way.

4) You said that you’ve created very few songs “with a purpose.” Whether or not it’s deliberate, do you recognize the allegorical aspects of your verse? Can you see how many of your visual images readily lend themselves to the insertion of outside context?

Yes, I can see that. After a while, of course, a pattern emerged and I realized, “Hey, I guess that’s what some refer to as a ‘STYLE.’ I have a style!!!” Honestly, I’m fairly blind about what I’m writing as I write it. Often there are songs which simply spill out. I have to look back later and figure out what was going on at the time—sometimes a meaning will emerge months later. As far as self-analysis goes, I don’t really do it—perhaps because I’m not very good at it, or just don’t want to? For whatever reason, I’m happy to continue writing and let others enjoy... and analyze if they so desire. That’s my style.

Subject: Re: Relix Phish tribute
Date: August 31, 2004 1:32:08 PM EDT
To:

1) When I posed the question of individual experience over the permanent record, I was more curious about whether you have ever deliberately withheld the intended meaning of one of your songs so as not to infringe on other interpretations.

Oh definitely. I like “withheld” better than “misled.” Even in the very early days of “Squirming Coil” and “Guelah,” I learned to listen to people’s own interpretations and then generally agree rather than try to steer them into my private interpretation space, because who’s to say which is valid? I mean yes, I wrote the song, but they’ve probably listened to it a hell of a lot more than I have.

2) How do you feel knowing that fans who have found some of your secret places have felt the need to leave their own marks there?

Well, as far as the Rhombus goes in particular, I was expecting it, really. Every time I would go back there I would look for some telltale sign of a Phish fan who had to leave a mark... and of course eventually I got my wish. I didn’t really feel much since I had already severed my emotional ties to it. That was the hard part—I mean, it was a place I cared for intensely, and was absolutely magical. Aside from writing songs there, I had my bachelor party there with Trey playing guitar, and my crazy friend John Sprow lighting fires, and others experiencing several bouts of naked running through the woods, pond and fields... the tequila gods were smiling on that place for a while and I didn’t want to share it. But at some point in my 30s I began to realize that I had really let it go, and that others could have that as their own place of inspiration and meditation and creation... and hopefully not vandalism.

3) How many copies of The Salamander Prince and Walls of the Cave did you produce? Is there another book of poetry in your foreseeable future?

We made about five copies of The Salamander Prince and maybe ten of On The Walls of the Cave. They’re pretty closely held, and were meant specifically for Trey and no one else. As for a book meant for public consumption, I have thought about one which shows the poems in their infancy and how they evolved to their final form but so far it’s only a thought. I have more fun writing more songs. Maybe I should eBay some of the extra copies of Walls?

4) No matter what your lyrics are describing, most of your visual images (as opposed to word salads) seem to be rendered from a great enough distance that the story takes on a structural life that can be applied almost anywhere; like successful little allegories. Was this ever a goal? Do you try and describe things in such a way that you attempt to harness an underlying truth or pattern?

I haven’t really thought of it in that regard. In fact, very few songs I create have a “purpose.” “Pebbles and Marbles,” on the other hand, was specifically for and about my daughter, but something like “All of These Dreams”... I’d be at a loss to say specifically what my intent was in its creation. Sometimes I do imagine myself in the role of the storyteller— as in “Anything But Me,” whereas in “Julius” I’m watching from a distance despite the first-person rendering.

5) Is it easier for you and Trey to allow the “Music by Trey and Lyrics by Tom” myth to persist? Do you think that Trey likes being able to claim that all words are yours to avoid having to answer content questions himself?

Oh—I didn’t mean to create any confusion about that. I am happy with the “music by Trey and lyrics by Tom” claim, because it is for the most part true; myth is too strong a word. If I was trying at some point to change that impression, it was only to show that we aren’t rigidly locked into those roles one hundred percent of the time.

********

On September 6, Chester sat down with Marshall in a more formal setting to discuss the songwriter's relationship with Phish and his native town of Princeton, NJ. Along the way, Chester and Marshall also touched on songwriting with Trey and life working in the doldrums of the insurance industry. And, in case you're still wondering, yes the Rhombs is real.

JC: You’re working at XXXX currently?
TM: Yeah, but I just like saying, if you don’t mind, “a large insurance company.” Every motherfucker at XXXX, when they read the last interview where the company name was mentioned, I think it was Waful’s article, called and my phone rang for ten days with XXXX employee’s ‘cause there’s like 20,000 of them, chances are some of them are into Phish and they can get my number.

Reasonable. What exactly do you do there?
I’m a manager in the IT department and our particular group handles the money that comes in from insurance policies either in the form of annuities… I don’t want to get too detailed.

That’s fine. But this is what you’ve been doing professionally for the vast majority of your time since school?
I bounced around from job to job; this is the only one I’ve stayed at this long, five years. I worked at AT&T, ETS, Computer Associates, a bunch of places, all tech-related.

Okay, let’s go back to the early days for chronology’s sake. You gave me those two great early images of Trey; do you actually remember the very first time you crossed paths or was it that you guys would have just been in class together?
He had gone to private school all along and I was one of the new kids in eighth grade. I was kind of the outsider, but yeah, I just knew him at first from class. All of my friends were always sort of into music and I was always into music and we all sort of congregated at parties, during free time, at lunch and it kept building from there.

The songwriting vacations didn’t start until just before Billy Breathes, so before that it was more of an exercise in editing? And your friend Scott would also be editing your stuff?
Well, Scott was involved only with me. Scott and I would collaborate and Trey and I would collaborate. It was never Scott and me and Trey.

I’m guessing that you weed stuff out of your own work that you don’t necessarily want to pass on.
Oh, definitely.

Would Scott then also edit your work? I’m trying to get an idea of the flow of how these things get to where they’re going…
I would write a bunch of stuff on my own on paper and then the email medium became convenient, the way Scott and I worked at the same place, so after a while we would just ping-pong stuff back and forth all the time. After a while we had this whole reel of bizarre little clips that when you read them as a whole and put them next to each other, they were actually pretty humorous and some of them were quite good and I knew if anyone could piece them together, it was Trey, and he did and we put them all into that first book, The Salamander Prince. As far as editing Scott’s contributions, I would decide whether they helped the poem or not. He would sometimes be the impetus and start the poem as well. It wasn’t always like, ‘here Scott, check this out.’ Sometimes he would write a whole half of a poem and I would write half; stuff like that. Like “Scents and Subtle Sounds,” that whole first part, Part 1, is Scott and the whole second part is me.

Can you think of the earliest example of something that Scott sent you that made it through?
Yeah. The first part of “Squirming Coil”: “I saw Satan on the beach,” a squirming coil of sunset is mine, I keep within my reach. “I saw Satan on the beach, trying to catch a ray…” He wrote that whole stanza.

What was it about the squirming coil image that you dug at the time?
Well, I came up with that image… tons of physics and chemistry stuck in my head from school and I think that was sort of a wave particle duality thing, where light can be represented as either a wave or a particle and I was thinking that the coil was the average to me between theories.

Your regular life seems pretty far removed from your Phish life. Are there times when you see greater structural parallels between the two?
Parallels between them? Well, no. There was a while when I definitely was trying to keep my two worlds from colliding. I had my Phish friends and I had my non-Phish friends. What finally kind of collided the worlds was when I had kids and Trey had kids and then our kids got along and hung out and then our wives hung out and the whole family came to a show and then another show and then they became inseparable, the lives, for a while. I couldn’t get away unless they all came to a couple of shows. They merged for a while, but then they sort of withdrew again. I sort of do have a music life and a normal guy life.

It seems like you’ve got this Thursday night music thing going on? Has that always been?
Yeah, the Thursday night music has been going on for a long time. Maybe six or seven years ago my grandmother died and left my mom this amazing farm about 20 minutes from where I live and my mom and I would sort of treat it as a vacation house and I would go up there Thursday with my pals and we would just go into this 120-year-old farmhouse and we took a room, and found old lights around the house, and I brought in my studio equipment and that became an amazing hangout; everyone started stopping by. I was involved with The Saras, and they recorded there and I recorded there. It was mostly recording demos; nothing really ever came of it. Although I did release the better versions of some songs which became my first album, which is called Amfibian Tales, and you definitely hear the collaboration and the party atmosphere in there… for a while I was trying to sneak away two nights, Thursday and Fridays until the whole kid thing actually became a lot of work and I gave one day back to the family, but I decided that if I give both back I’m never gonna have it again, so I stuck firm, dammit! It’s sort of a tough thing now and then, but it’s been nearly ten years now, so…

It’s clearly a part of yourself you’ve worked very hard to hang onto…
Yes, definitely. It’s sort of a tough thing, now and then, but it’s been almost ten years.

So Thursday nights are indefinitely Amfibian practices?
Yes… Actually ten years is wrong because my grandmother died six years ago.

What’s your relationship with the Phish organization been like?
Pretty darn good. They have a really good manager who definitely has his and the four of their interests so far above mine that sometimes I feel like I’m just a pain in his ass when I’m asking for stuff, although John Paluska has always been super professional and handled requests. I’ve always felt like an outsider in certain ways; in many ways. I don’t tour with the band. I show up on tour sometimes and I’m always the only guy that’s on tour not working, so I’ve always sort of been the outsider, which is fun. It’s kind of how I like it to be. I think Trey and my relationship benefits from that too. I think some people try to be inside a little too much, without naming names, and I think they kind of find themselves bounced to the outside.

Do you think that’s more of a business control thing, rather than being specific to this organization?
Maybe. I think maybe that if more thought had been given early on then I would have possibly been more accepted into the fold. There’s my relationship with Phish and there’s my relationship with Trey and the latter is what matters to me. And the former is one where there’s money involved and it’s a thing that is necessary to business. And if my relationship with the band or the organization suffers a little bit, but my relationship with Trey stays strong, I’ll be happy with everything. Over the years there has been pressure from other people saying, “Maybe you should do this with Phish, or this or that.” I was sort of reluctant to approach them with any sort of business proposal for that reason. I didn’t think it was really my place to take advantage of that and perhaps compromise my relationship with Trey. So, I’ve always been outside, but as time passed more and more comfortable with my outsider status.

Let’s step back in time again. I was hoping you could conjure up some early Rhombus happenings for me.
There was a while there—I think it was primarily junior year of high school—where Trey had already gone to Taft and I’m saying junior year because that’s when my friend Marc Daubert got a car and was the only guy who could drive, so at that point Dave Abrahams, who is featured in “looks too much like Dave” in “McGrupp,” and his mother, who unfortunately is not with us—Guelah was her name—“Guelah Papyrus” was written about her, just the name, it’s not really about her, and Elihu, who is in “Sample in a Jar,” is his dad’s name, so the only person I’ve never gotten into a song was John, his brother, but everyone in his family is into a Phish song.

Is John still bucking for a lyric?
Maybe he’s sad that Phish is gone and it can’t be… But, we wrote “Runaway Jim” with Trey and the three of us figured out parts of “NICU” and parts of “Fast Enough for You,” although not enough for him to have credit.

How does that work? What constitutes a credit?
Well, I think that Trey and I had the song “Fast Enough For You” and Dave said “stumble into view” and later we sang it that way and gave Dave the nod. And he was there for “NICU.” So was Daubs, actually, Marc Daubert was there and wrote “The Curtain” with Trey; actually he was in Phish playing percussion back when Jeff Holdsworth was in the band. Some of the Nectar’s shows had Marc playing xylophone and bongos. Those two guys figured into a bunch of early Phish and the two of them and I were inseparable junior year of high school—this would’ve been 1981-82—and our place, if Marc could score a six pack of beer, our place was the Rhombus. Which was a special place and no one knew about it. It was this really cool sculpture in the middle of… I don’t know if I should say exactly where it is. It’s remained a secret. It’s somewhere in New Jersey.

Can I say somewhere in Princeton or is that too much detail?
That’s fine. I’ve already given it up. I’ve let go. But why give vandals any more to tag? And so sitting up there with Marc and Dave, Marc or Dave, they could both play guitar and either one or both would bring a guitar pretty much every time. And we would have the mounting of the Rhombus ceremony, which was tough, ‘cause at night after the dew fell it was wet and getting up the thing… it has very steep walls. You can imagine that if someone sat down on a cube and it kind of started to squash in one direction and all of its surfaces are diamond-shaped basically… you have to get a running start and run up it. Some of my friends would pull themselves up on the back side, the overhanging side, but usually we’d run up the side and once one person was up there, it was much easier. And once you’re on top, the thing is a great drum. Something changed about it, but it used to be this pretty intense echoing drum, but the drumming was limited to how long you felt like smacking half inch steel with your hands, but we always did it anyway. Sometimes we would lay down on it and look up and it would seem like it was echoing off into the heavens, the sounds that we made, and that was accompanied by guitar and humorous lyrics and it would make the night that much better.

Were there any horrible rhomboid accidents during any attempted mountings?
[Laughs] There were no injuries, but there were weird occurrences. Once, a guy who was meeting us there… when we got there he was on top of it, shaking like a leaf and he said he had seen a cat-type thing, extremely large—like German Shepherd sized—descend out of a tree directly in front of him and it was white, solid white and it came up and hissed at him. He hadn’t gotten up yet, he was waiting for us and he said somehow he pulled himself up as the thing was hissing at him and he said he didn’t know what would have happened had he not. He was really shaking like a leaf and we kind of looked around for tracks, but we didn’t see anything. Who knows?

What had he been up to that evening?
Exactly. When Trey started coming was when we found each other at Mercer County Community College; after that first year of school, of college, I went to Carnegie Mellon, he went to University of Vermont—we were kicked out for different reasons.

What did you do?
I just didn’t do anything, I didn’t go to school.

You just didn’t go? You should have gone to Kenyon, no one would have noticed.
Well, someone notices, right? Parents maybe when they see your grades? Well, someone noticed in my case. And I wound up kicked into Mercer County Community College by my dad who was saying, “Before we spend another penny on your education, you have to prove that you can get straight A’s,” which I did. I went to Mercer and got straight A’s. I was pretty happy with myself. But Trey got kicked out for other reasons.

You have to appreciate that level of morbid creativity.
That’s some serious revenge; just awesome.

It’s up there in the hall of fame.
You’ve got to hand it to him for that one… and [Trey] he was at Mercer County, too, and he wasn’t as serious or worried about college because he had this thing called Phish that he was really intense on; he just wanted to get his ass back to Vermont to play and he wanted to write songs for this band. He and I saw each other, luckily—it was probably the luckiest thing that’s happened in my life. I was walking out of class, we didn’t know each other was there; he wouldn’t have thought to contact me, we had dropped out of contact for about three years although—put a little asterisk there—I had sent him some stuff which I’ll tell you about in a minute. He was on his way to class and I was on my way from and he just turned around and walked back with me and said, “Let’s go to my dad’s old recording studio,” and we started recording, picking up where we had left off three years ago when we used to record songs all the time. And that was it. We went to his dad’s place and there was a room that was framed out to be a room, but was never turned into a room, and we just hammered carpets all over it—like carpet scraps, ‘cause the place was still under construction so we could go nearby and find just heaps and heaps of carpeting that we hammered up to make this soundproof cocoon for ourselves and somehow Trey had this really amazing Tascam 4-track and on this he worked non-stop day in and day out and wrote those amazing songs like “Letter to Jimmy Page” and “Divided Sky.” So, Trey and I are back together now, spending a lot of time together at the Rhombus and Dave Abrahams was at school at Penn and he would come home on the weekends and Marc Daubert also got kicked out of school, so he was around, so the four of us would still go to the Rhombus, and now with Trey in the picture the songwriting stepped up a notch, with his guitar there, and we would actually write songs.

How good was he at that point?
He was great, like Duane Allman, kind of like a Dickey Betts sort of style. I didn’t see the Jimmy Page thing that he said was there from early on. I kind of saw him as a southern sort of rocker in a way, ‘cause he would string together great solos. I couldn’t believe we knew someone that we would record with that would put real solos onto our music. Dave Abrahams was good, but he’s not a great… Trey added a whole different dimension to our recording. We recorded a whole album with Trey called Bivouac and then he called that other one Bivouac Juan. Bivouac was kind of the name of the band: Marc, me and Trey. And that’s where “I Am Hydrogen” was first created and “The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday”; the name came from there and a bunch of other things. Trey, to me, was a southern-influenced soloist. That was an incredibly creative period. Also, I was gonna say, when Trey and I were off on our first years of college, I would randomly create stories, not poems; one was “McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters” and one was this other weird thing about witnessing my parents arguing or something, but the one that obviously stuck with him was “McGrupp.” He used all of the characters that I created in there as characters in Gamhendge, his rock opera.

Do you still have the original story?
No, I don’t have the original. I would keep things now and then; I have some real old stuff. I have a box I haven’t yet mined to the bottom of that says “Phish Collectibles” and I’m excited to get to the bottom of that. And I can make a lot of money on eBay. And I’ve got like 20 T-shirts that I’ve never worn that are vintage.

I’ve heard of kids paying hundreds of dollars for pre-’94 shirts.
Oh good. I’m in.

Let’s jump ahead a bit. You’ve explained that a good number of your songs were dreams, things you wrote down shortly after waking up; what percentage of your material do you think is dream-related?
The ones that I really had a clear vision when I woke and just said, I’ve gotta write this down, I think would account for less than 5% of my songs. Clearly remember, actually remember the song and knowing the words when I woke up; but then there’s probably another 15% of poems where I would just wake up with something in my head and scribble it down and then that would eventually turn into something. “Bouncing Around the Room” came out like that and then later I wrote about that realization, that song “Sleep,” which is about that.

People seem to have some pretty different interpretations as to what “Crowd Control” might be about. How was the image, as you saw it, right before you wrote it down?
Well, what the actual dream was… it’s sad that I could only remember one or two verses because I knew the whole song in the dream and I was singing it when I woke up and I had the whole thing and I had the tune, the tune is different, but I had it. I don’t know it now. It was weird, I was in a festival, like a Clifford Ball or a Great Went, watching Phish with all Phish fans, having a great time, during the day. And Phish was singing this song and to illustrate some point to us they had turned around. Page was not facing us, his back was facing us, the only one who was facing us was Fishman—he couldn’t turn around and play the drums.

And when you say “us” you’re in the crowd?
Yeah, the crowd… and Mike and Trey were turned around too and they were singing this to that entity that we were all looking. I think what they were trying to say was that they were also in the crowd asking this, for us as a whole, “show us why we came here.” So, when I first heard people say that they thought this is obviously political, I said, what are you talking about? But I see their point now and the amazing thing is that it was written pre-breakup and it’s perfect, the words fit perfectly for the breakup.

Yes, oddly. There are some other lines in there… Especially with you explaining that this was something you were dreaming as a Phish happening; can you see how maybe a kid could be, say, stoned out of his gourd and he is in the middle of the floor and he’s real tuned in and let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that they get to the part where it goes, “Sisters, brothers all around, there’s a devil in the crowd” and again, hypothetically speaking, that kid may have been chased out of somewhere by undercovers at some point or seen perhaps a DEA recon mission, which occasionally goes down at major festivals… there’s maybe something of that deliberately in there?
No. The lyrics at the time didn’t have to do with the cops or anyone. There’s more something evil about the fact that he would have to meet your eyes and to meet your eyes, he would have to turn around, so that would identify who the devil was because he would be the only one facing, because we were all facing the other way… except for Fishman, so maybe Fishman is the devil; I didn’t think of that.

Because he was the only one who was facing you?
Yeah, because he was the only one we could make eye contact with.

And he does sometimes wear horns.
That’s what the dream was trying to tell me; you just helped me figure it out.

Glad I could help. That’ll be twenty-five hundred dollars, sir.
That’s wonderful. I’ve never thought of that. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t him. I think it was directed at someone random, the actual devil.

The real one; the actual physical embodiment of evil?
Right.

But again, to a stoned kid, that’s any authority figure in blue.
Possibly, yes.

I guess reduced to the allegorical level, it can be applied wherever.
Yeah, right.

You’ve said that often Trey has his own meanings for your songs. Since the songwriting vacations began, can you think of an example where you maybe changed a song to deliberately fit multiple realities?
No, definitely not. Most of the time, we wouldn’t really discuss the meanings in the writing context; they would come out later during discussion or even when we’re listening back when the songs are done. It wasn’t something that we would change to make happen. “Secret Smile” was written for a long time… and it was focused on this relationship between a man and a woman and he goes, “Oh man, it is so not about that for me.” What? How could it not be? And I said, “What’s it about for you?” And he gave me… it was a much heavier thing for him. I kind of don’t know exactly what he told me the meaning was for him, but it had nothing to do with a couple sitting enjoying a glass of wine and enjoying the sunset. For him it was much, much darker than that.

Have there been other ones where there have been divergent meanings?
On almost every song we have totally completely different meanings. I don’t want to keep harping on “Walls of the Cave” but that was one where Trey was one of the first people to tell me what it was about and I didn’t necessarily agree until I started reading the PhantasyTour message board.

Oh, you shouldn’t do that. That’s not good for anybody. There are whole threads on that thing regarding what to do with head of Jesse Jarnow.
There was a while when he was the one who made Phish breakup because he wrote things about them becoming caricatures of themselves and then that phrase was in Trey’s resignation letter.

There were a couple of lines that were right from Jesse’s article. And Mike Gordon told Jesse himself at Coney Island—they were having a conversation about something completely unrelated—and Mike told him that his review had come up in their last band meeting and Jesse attempted to apologize and Mike said something to the effect of, “Hey you were honest and you said what you had to say.” And they moved on with their conversation.
Well, maybe he is the guy that made them break p. I can sleep better then. I’m not the guy.

You’re not the Yoko. John Pareles calls Jesse “Yoko.”
That’s phenomenal. John Pareles is a great writer. … By the way, I liked the Dan Bern stuff, man he… right away… like Dylan, like you said in your article, but you didn’t say it yourself, you had him say it, “Do I really sound that much like Dylan?”

That’s how it happened. I knew what people had been writing about him and I asked him straight out how he would like to be portrayed in print.
But there were things that didn’t happen in that article, too.

Well, that’s part of his thing, because he writes really autobiographical stuff, but he might do that and then get to a bridge and just make something up, so I wrote the article the way he writes a song.
About the kidnapping and the throwing him in the car and stuff.

I did actually drive him from Portland to Seattle and did the interview in the car on the way, but I didn’t actually abduct him.
But it was actually planned, he didn’t really miss the gig.

No, the show was great that night at Roseland. I have pictures to prove that it happened.
Ya know, I was going through that box of Phish stuff and I found the Prolcaimers CD, back from when I did 500 Miles with Phish.

That record is one of my guiltiest all-time pleasures. There are a couple of great songs on there. That song, “My Old Friend the Blues,” is one of the prettiest things I’ve ever heard.
It’s funny you should say that because I listened to that whole disc and song number one, you know, “500 Miles,” is kind of a political thing with “But I can’t understand why you let someone else rule our lives.” And that one’s good and then three, I don’t remember, it’s also okay, another demonstration of a decent song and four, “My Old Friend the Blues,” I can’t believe, I mean, did they write it?

I don’t know. I have no idea. I was about to say I was pretty sure they did, but that might be wishful thinking. [It turned out to be an old Steve Earle song.]
I’ve gotta check. I was kind of joking with myself when I was hearing 500 Miles for the first time in, I don’t know, is that 15 years? First time in a long time I was thinking, you just have to do this. But then when I heard “My Old Friend the Blues,” which I never heard back then—I only heard “500 Miles”—I was like, “Wow, we’ve gotta do this, do you hear that harmony?”

I’ve only got about ten more minutes of tape here, so back to your songs. I want to get into a few more specific songs and talk about where they came from. “Twist” is another song that has one of those great images that if you listen to just one line at a time it seems completely disconnected, but taken as full stanza, it’s one of those just barely missed moments that you portray well.
It’s kind of the chick whose name, you’re talking to the girl, so I guess I’m talking to the girl and that your name wouldn’t have gotten twisted around like that, right?

Sort of. I don’t know. You tell me. I have my own thoughts on it. What exactly did that image come from?
If you were here more of the day then your name wouldn’t get twisted up inside my mouth, if you were here more often.

But that’s another one of those allegorical moments where it could apply to anything, because if you were here more of the day, if you had a larger piece of any given picture, then you’d have the blanks filled in.
Right. It could be anyone singing to the person that they miss. And that’s sort of what it was.

Let me ask you about “Heavy Things.” That’s one of those songs where if you’re not listening to the words, it sounds like a happy little pop tune. It’s got the “Sparkle” thing going on. Can you tell me what those heavy things are about and how it became a goofy little pop tune?
Well, did you say “Sparkle,” because you’ve heard that Trey and others have said it’s the most depressing thing ever…

So make it sound as happy as possible.
We came up with that together; it was never that same kind of intent that he had with “Sparkle.” It was just kind of a cool tune that [Trey had] and I was just thumbing through stuff that I had written down and just sang, “Things are falling down on me,” ‘cause I already had that song written, so the fact that it matched there was just one of those circumstance moments. I needed some words because he had a great tune running through his guitar and they fit.

Then tell me about that poem that was already written. There are multiple images of females borrowing everything you own and simply running away. It sounds like there’s some pretty heavy abandonment shit going on in there.
This is another great Scott Herman lyric. His was the first stanza; Mary was a friend I’d say, he started it and if you look at the songs, the verses are in order, Scott, Tom, Scott, Tom, and I was trying to one up him and he was trying to one up me. I don’t think that was necessarily… this is why I don’t like letting the meanings out sometimes or the secret because someone who got something out of it might be disappointed that it was just an exercise or batting a tennis ball back and forth.

The reason I do what I do and the reason I wanted you to check out the Dan Bern article is because what I get off on in this whole ridiculous thing that I do is the perpetuation of Myth. I understand that the facts don’t always make the best story. And in the instance where and anecdote is strictly for the purpose of giving away a secret, I’ll make it more interesting. I tend to skip the revealing of secrets for it’s own sake.
Do you remember that scene with John Lennon, I think it was from [the video] Imagine, but it was also, I think, in Let It Be where that sort of stoner guy winds up on John Lennon’s property, that pseudo-soccer-freak-guy, and he asks John, “Hey, ya know you wrote ‘Carry That Weight’ and he goes, ‘No, no, Paul wrote that.’” And it meant the world to that guy and John says, and I hated him for it, “These things don’t mean anything. They mean nothing. I would something like that on the toilet,” or something like that and the guy was shattered, but then he took the guy in and gave him some food and was nice, but still, the fact that he said that kind of shattered it for me.

But Dylan says shit like that all the time and you never know when he means it. Maybe not.

So, the two names that get dropped in “Heavy Things”: Are those your heavy personal heavy things that you don’t want specified?
[Laughs] Uh… no. But Luce and Lil in “Sparkle” are real people who I will identify.

We’ll move on then. Let’s talk about some of the imagery in “Down with Disease,” which is one of the first songs I ever heard fans take offense at. Quite frankly, that made the whole thing more interesting to me when people were getting offended with the lyrics.
That one just says, one thousand Bedouin children outside dancing on my lawn, which isn’t bad, that’s kind of a cool image.

But aren’t they also stealing all his lines?
Oh.

There’s certainly imagery that could be taken as…
Stepping on my rhythm and stealing all my lines.

That sounds like, “I’m trying to do my thing and you guys are anticipating and taking a dump on it.” So, tell me how it really came about.
I really did have mono when I wrote it and I really was three weeks in my bed and the third week I wrote it and sent that one up to Trey somehow, but I wrote the whole thing in one sitting in five minutes.

It just fell out.
Yeah.

So none of those words mean anything to you?
Well, I won’t go that far, because… like the image, I think I was happy at the image of a thousand Bedouin children outside because I was looking out my window and I was thinking that when Trey read it he was gonna love it because it was the Phish crowd. I knew that it was the Phish crowd, so they’re right about that, but stealing all my lines and stepping on my rhythm could have been, I think, probably a girl who I blame for a lot of my life’s woes who probably at the time had stepped on my rhythm and stolen some of my lines, so that, funny thing is, of course, once I sing something to someone the rest of the song has to be to them, but in that case it was actually that the channel had switched.

But you can clearly see how that could be taken.
No, I clearly never really did.

You’ve got to work with me here, Tom.
No, honestly, you surprised me when you said some people were offended because I always thought, “they’re with me” here.

It’s one of my favorites, but that’s as much for the lyrics and bassline, the places they take it to live. But I’m a big fan of the Pink Floyd stuff they wrote when they hated the shit out of their audience. In The Wall they were building a giant wall between them and the crowd. They put up the last brick, they turned on the house lights and they told you to go fuck yourself. That’s rock ‘n’ roll. If you can feel that way about your audience and sell out stadiums, that’s rock ‘n’ roll.
Okay, now here’s maybe where I differ. You’re just happy because it’s just safety in numbers and I’m not saying it to you. But I am singing to you, plural, and you’re in a crowd, so you’re not offended because he’s not actually grabbing you and yelling at you. But to me, I never thought of it as the audience, I always thought of it just as the world. In reading his lyrics, Roger Waters clearly in pain, at least the character, probably him too, I just thought the wall, ya know, the mother isn’t really out there helping him. I never really thought that it was me.

I never took it personally, but structurally there was this other truth that applied.
When you see it live…

He’s at the top and then the lights are on and then there’s no encore. And then “bye.”
Okay, I’ll buy that.

And quite frankly before the hiatus, Phish’s last show was not unlike that. There was all this expectation and speculation and then they came out, played one complete 60-minute Phish set, which they rocked, played a one-song encore, said goodnight and they left. And while it wasn’t a majority, there were people yelling at the stage. Of course, those were probably people who paid five hundred bucks a ticket and expected the heavens to open.
Really? I thought they played a good show.

I thought it was a great show.
And “You Enjoy Myself” was like their goodbye in the most eloquent way you could say goodbye, much better than they said goodbye at Coventry. And the “Let it Be” being played or “Imagine” or whatever the hell it was…

“Let it Be,” that was huge.
Yeah, and then there was this huge round of applause for the crew, it was just amazing.

Well, there were the jackasses yelling and I was sitting near most of them, but that’s part of the whole duality thing… There are two more songs I want to get after here.
“Bug”—there’s some amazing imagery there. I just wanted to ask you where that one came from, whose collaboration on which parts…
That one was all me. I wrote that one. [sighs] It’s really, honestly, I don’t think I can add to your enjoyment of it and I don’t know if I really should. That one didn’t really come from anywhere. It was just like images to me. I never saw it as a whole story and I don’t know how anyone can.

It’s not necessarily a complete story but the beginning of it definitely sounds like a whole thought on spirituality.
The runway, I remember that from saying goodbye to someone leaving in a plane, but not that dreadfully bitter a goodbye, just sort of a goodbye and I just remembered it and kept it in my head on the ride home from Newark and made it into a song.

It’s actually the image before that one that interests me.
Okay, then tell me your favorites.

Right from the beginning: “There’ve been times when I wondered and times when I don’t.”
Oh, it’s the God thing.

There are these images that clearly say, I have opinions on these huge things and then the fuckin’ resolve is that I’m not going to tell you and it doesn’t matter.
[Laughs] Which is essentially what I’m getting at.

Well, don’t just laugh man, talk to me here.
The answer’s in the song. The answer is, it doesn’t matter. That’s the real answer.

And it’s overrated? No, no, you’ve gotta do better than that for me. Even if I have to go home and get another tape because I’ve only got about four minute left...
That explanation would take so much longer than four minutes I shouldn’t even begin…Well, there was a time when I was actually severely anti-religious, brutally atheist and would love getting in Jesus arguments and I was kind of anti-Christian and anti-Catholic especially for a while. And it kind of came out of that period, but I’ve grown so far beyond that now and it’s weird to discuss the lyrics from this weird stage of my life.

That’s the best I’m going to get out of you on that one?
That’s all I’m going to say.

That’s a big one, that song, as far as I’m concerned.
Really? Because I said the word God in it.

It’s not because you say the word, obviously that is a very singular spiritual reference, but it seems like that very artfully put-together image says, I have opinions on these things, but you can’t have them and it doesn’t matter.
I can’t say it any better than you just did.

Man, you’re an asshole, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.
[Laughs] Thank you. You know what? I’ve done this before.

I’m sure you have.
I’ve been through this before with Richard Gehr, with interviewers, with tons of people. They find depth in the song and then don’t find the depth they’re looking for in the songwriter; it’s taught me to kinda keep my mouth closed.

Well don’t do that. No closing the mouth.
Okay.

Okay, how ‘bout “Birds of a Feather”?
[Laughs] Bye-bye.

There is a reason I saved that one for last. If you give me nothing on that one, I’ll have to dissect the hell out of it and make it look evil; I have to.
Can I help you in your dissection? Let’s do it that way, maybe, rather than have you just say the song and have me start talking. Give me a line.

Give you a line? Okay, how ‘bout the central image? They hang on emotions they bottle inside they peck at the ground and strut out of stride. I’ve been to Phish shows, man, that’s what the kids look like.
Yeah, that was. That one is a reaction to things kind of going bad in the scene, I think. But to me, it was a specific group of people not fitting in and I’m that person also, so I should be offended too.

END OF TAPE

Subject: don’t know...
Date: September 8, 2004 2:15:54 PM EDT
To:

Hey

I don’t know what more I can add...
I will look at your late-night email one more time tonight
but I was also thinking

you *could* put in an amazing thing that happened while we were in the
middle of recording “Letter to Jimmy Page” and “I am Hydrogen”...

======================

We had ingested some funny fungus—me for the first time in my life— and smoked some funny herb… and were feeling pretty darn good when a couple of friends from high school called and I asked them to come over—one of them, Molly, was an old girlfriend of mine, and the other, Lauren, was an old girlfriend of Trey’s. At this point they hadn’t seen Trey for several years, but I had stayed in touch with them. So they asked me what he looked like—and I said “he’s pretty much the same...” but then I fabricated a story about some “dental surgery that he’s very sensitive about.” The girl’s maternal instincts seems to perk up about this last detail and the lie just kept getting bigger and bigger. “Is it visible? Did the surgery alter his appearance?” “Well...yes, it is visible, and has altered his appearance.” Remember, I was in the throes of several strange brain chemicals, so maintaining the lie wasn’t all that easy— and I kept getting myself in deeper. “...in fact, sometimes I can’t understand what he’s saying...” The girls, now intensely interested about this, got in the car to come over. Trey meanwhile who had been thrashing on guitar, hadn’t heard much of the conversation, but decided to go along with the joke. So we went into the kitchen and opened drawers, looking for something that Trey could use to simulate dental surgery gone horribly awry... when I wasn’t looking, he had found a large metal cookie-cutter which he shoved into his mouth. It barely fit, it was so huge—and when he talked, it sounded like his tongue had been cut off. As an added bonus, he began drooling profusely. We both fell down laughing—myself partly at the fact that Trey’s laughing actually seemed to pain him with this hunk of sharp metal in his mouth. I don’t know how much time passed, or how many ounces of tears, sweat and drool were on the kitchen floor when the doorbell rang. Of course I wasn’t in any shape to answer the door, so I poked my head into the hall and watched Trey greet our friends from long ago... his performance was genius. He didn’t laugh -- he attempted to say their names and invite them in, but huge spit-strands were flowing out of his mouth. It was an extremely tough moment for the girls as well, not expecting a dental monstrosity of that proportion despite my earlier warning. In fact they hugged him and were attempting small talk when my laughing and choking and gasping for air became audible from the kitchen, and Trey could no longer maintain composure and he finally burst into laughter—coating our guests with a fine spit-mist... They finally realized they had been the brunt of a rather cruel joke, and shared in our hilarity it seemed, but most likely were plotting an ugly revenge. With them there we recorded several songs including “Icculus” and a bunch of jams where kitchenware was played liberally.

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