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Everyone Knew Him as Nancy: Richard Wright and the Old, Weird Phish

Over Halloween, Phish was booked to play in the Sculpture Building, a student-designed structure that included catwalks and spires. The band’s guitarist introduced himself to Nancy.

“Are you Nancy?” the guitarist asked him.

“Are you the guitarist who sounds like Frank Zappa?” Nancy inquired.

Trey Anastasio laughed. Phish had recently debuted a cover of Pollock’s “Dear Mrs. Reagan,” and Anastasio asked Nancy if they might cover “Halley’s Comet.”

Nancy didn’t see Phish perform that night. He had his own business. The demon had gotten bad. “It just didn’t feel right,” he recalls. “It was stealing my energy, and causing me to steal energy from other people, and I just didn’t like being in that position.” Dressed in a green monster mask and green monster gloves, Nancy went back to his room and listened to the recording of a musical exorcism he’d DJed on his radio show.
Phish didn’t play anyway. The LSD-spiked apple cider they drank had come on too strong and, as Nancy flushed the evil spirit from his body, across campus, Phish freaked out.

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“It was like being part of a secret society or something, being culturally off the grid,” remembers Phish bassist Mike Gordon, the only band member who didn’t transfer in to Goddard soon thereafter. McConnell received $50 per head for recruiting of Anastasio and drummer Jon Fishman. “Everyone there was self-structuring their educations, and into unique stuff,” Gordon says. “There was Bruce Burgess, who was doing poetry, and who could only speak in poetry and not in English, as far as I was concerned. One thing they told me early on about Nancy was that he was hydrophobic. He didn’t like water at all. He always had that kind of look, unfettered by cleaning fluids that rob most of us of our natural oils.”

Though he’d found his path in music, Nancy wasn’t enrolled any longer. “I’d gotten to a point where I didn’t trust any of the faculty or staff at Goddard, so I wouldn’t talk to any of them. I didn’t care if I got college credit or not, I just wanted to be there and use the resources they had there. And they were like, ‘You can’t be here if you don’t care about college credit.’” He hung around anyway.

On the earliest known Phish recordings of “Halley’s Comet,” taped at an April 1986 show in the Haybarn, there is an audible cheer as the song begins: already a hit. The band arranged Nancy’s layered vocals for themselves, with Gordon singing and playing two separate basslines. They picked up new skills in the process, and the song’s inherent strangeness—a perfect musical expression of its author—reinforced the band’s growing identity as a product of the deepest, weirdest Vermont. Often, Nancy himself would join the band to sing the song.

“Musically, I was really inspired by the Nancy stuff,” Gordon says. “‘Halley’s Comet’ had this incessant groove to it. People should hear the original version, because I don’t think we ever quite did justice to it. It’s just the way the bongo just starts and goes and goes and goes and goes, and another verse and another chorus, and whistling and singing. People’s four-track tapes maybe often turn out like that, but this one never lost interest to me as it kept going. Somehow, he made this bongo groove that was really convincing for me.”

Not long after they debuted “Halley’s Comet,” Nancy—somewhat audaciously, no doubt—wrote a new song for Phish to cover titled “Snootable Snunshine.” More than 12 minutes of woozy keyboards, complex drum fills and nonsense lyrics, the song contained a surprisingly innate sense of the band’s early compositional whimsy, sounding like a lost, lo-fi Phish classic. Anastasio and Fishman fell into hysterics after hearing it.
Nancy became friends with the band and a regular at shows. In 1987, Phish added “I Didn’t Know” to their setlist, as well—the band’s first foray into barbershop—and something they could perform without Nancy. And when Phish left Vermont, they brought Nancy’s songs with them. “I Didn’t Know” remained a staple, even more so when Fishman introduced a show-stopping vacuum solo to it—which, in retrospect, may have distracted from the vocal arrangements and lyrics.

Nancy accumulated recordings and sold a tape or two, but mostly just kept circulating them by hand. He never performed live. How could he possibly recreate the multi-part vocal cover of Frank Zappa’s “Peaches En Regalia” he’d done? Or “Super-Delicious Crunchy Forest Critters,” a 14-minute exercise in layered, wordless vocals, pitch-twisted into a Frippertronic wonderland. “The Formidible Poseur” layered distorted keyboards into a wild drone. “Silver Flu” continued the barbershop streak, a tribute to The Fugs’ “Supergirl.” “Passive/Aggressive,” played on an open-tuned acoustic guitar,” nailed “If I Needed Someone”-era George Harrison to a tee.

In 1990, around the time that Fishman finally completed his graduation requirements, Nancy realized that he was no longer Nancy. “I met a psychic who told me Nancy was the name of a lover I had in a past life,” he says. He was Richard again.