Features

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

“There’s a picture of The Green Hornet and Kato on the door,” read the directions. “NOT the recent movie version, but the ‘60s TV version, with Van Williams and Bruce Lee.” A sign over the hallway requests that entrants do not use cell phones. And, at the apartment’s chillest, deepest center, the words “F A R O U T,” spelled out on the slanted ceiling, peering down over a lava lamp, turntable, stacks of books, and what remains a totally sweet LP collection.

Richard Wright stopped seeing Phish around 1989. “Their sound had started to change. They got tighter, a little bit slick, but the main problem for me was that they were getting too popular. There were too many people at the shows, so they had to play bigger and bigger places, and the places got more and more packed, and they were playing louder, and I became overwhelmed by it. I couldn’t really deal after a while.

“Without selling out or going mainstream, I think they wanted to be as successful as they could be. I found it more interesting when they were a bit more sloppy or experimental or going out of their way to prove themselves. When it became like an actual rock band onstage in a concert hall, all of a sudden, I didn’t feel like I was just hanging out with my friends anymore, and I felt like I was at a rock concert. And I don’t really like being at a rock concert. It’s hard for me to enjoy the music at a rock concert.”

He caught them when they played at the Flynn Theater in Burlington in 1997, but thought that they were phoning it in. He caught them again in 2004, and enjoyed it more, though he hasn’t been back. He hasn’t spoken to anyone in the band since then, either.

“I know whenever they play one of my songs,” he laughs, a giggle that picks up steam into a deep cosmic cackle. The royalty checks have arrived more regularly since the establishment of the band’s LivePhish.com. His television is small and the seats in the room are positioned optimally for listening on any of the multiple sets of speakers, including a smaller set for after the next-door neighbor goes to sleep. Wright doesn’t own a car, phone—cellular or otherwise—and uses email at the public library.

His gear is in one corner of the room: a Danelectro electric guitar, a drum machine and a Casio keyboard that first hit shelves in 1985, the same year that Wright briefly tried to sell one of his tapes, A Boy and His Goddess, with the name Nancy written on the spine in Viking runes. Since the ‘80s, he has continued to record on a four-track under various names: Blue Whale, Nigel, Sea Creature, Manta Ray, but most lately, Dick Facebat, where one can also find him on Facebook.
His recordings of “Halley’s Comet” and “I Didn’t Know” appeared on a bonus disc that came with the first edition of The Phish Companion, but most of his music remains unreleased. Recently, his friend Rael played some of his recordings in a Phish room on the user-managed turntable.fm website. “All of them got rejected,” he says, the giggle turning to cosmic cackle again. “All of them.”

Indeed, Nancy’s music perhaps more properly belongs to a lineage of home experimenters and avant-garde pop musicians than to the jamband scene. Nonetheless, there his songs are, lodged deep in the genetic code of the Vermont quartet, and beyond.

“For me, it was this feeling of going to Goddard,” reflects Mike Gordon of Nancy’s music. “It was just really special. You’re nestled away from the normal institutional life of a big college or all the other institutions in our lives. I liked to play Nancy’s tape for people in that same sort of context, where there’s not usually too much to do, maybe at some sort of tucked- away place in the middle of the night. I thought, compared to that experience, that our versions didn’t really do justice. But whether we did justice to ‘Halley’s Comet’ or not, I think our version stemmed from an emotion, not really of the comet itself, or the songwriter, or even the people playing, in a sense.

“I think it’s a lot subtler than the Grateful Dead coming from the whole psychedelic era or Fela Kuti coming from the political turmoil of Nigeria and having a little Mecca in the middle of all the killing. This was a lot subtler but I think it was important—this Nancy tape, the way he acted, the way that he looked kind of created this emotional backdrop and this cultural backdrop that we borrowed from. It made the band what it is.”
Which is to say: Jon Fishman wasn’t the first dress-wearing acidhead in the Northeast Kingdom. “I still haven’t found my real name,” Wright says, “which is mostly why I still go by legal name. I still feel that in some of my past incarnations, I was a woman.” Unencumbered by modern culture’s rush, he continues to work slowly at home, far away in the old, weird Vermont.

Thank you to WFMU, the listener-supported freeform radio station in Jersey City, N.J. that preserved Nancy’s hand-labeled A Boy and His Goddess cassette in their tape archive for over 20 years, and to DJ Dan Bodah for discovering it and recognizing its awesomeness, if not its origins. Please support WFMU.