Parke Puterbaugh and I have at least a couple of things in common. We’ve both covered music for some of the same magazines, and we’ve both written books either with or for or at least tolerated by Phish.
The Phish Book, published in 1998 and, ahem, currently out of print, was a collaboration with the band, who kindly submitted to long hours of interviews in order to let the band tell their its story in their own words amid a lot of stunning photographs.
Parke, on the other hand, went the biography route, having previously worked as Phish’s unofficial in-house writer for album-release biographies, press releases, and festival playbills. His new book Phish: The Biography, covers the band’s earliest days through its breakup and subsequent reunion last year. Where I caught the band at what many still consider to be the peak of its career, Parke carried through the trials, tribulations, and unexpected redemption. It’s a terrific tale, almost a love story, about a band, its community, and the forces that draw them together and/or tear them asunder.
We two helping, friendly chroniclers spoke recently about our respective tomes and the ever-evolving nature of all things Phish.
Richard Gehr: You write in Phish: The Biography that Rolling Stone didn’t run the Phish feature that they’d assigned you for nearly two years, which must have been frustrating. Why do you think the mainstream music press resisted reporting on the band for so long, despite their obvious popularity?
Parke Puterbaugh: I got the assignment in 1995, at which point they were ready to do something big on the band. Between assignment and delivery, however, there was a shakeup in the music department and the new guys who came in – Keith Moerer and Jim DeRogatis – their orientation was much more indie-rock. I think Phish were somewhat of a victim of indie-rock snobbery. Even so, they realized they had to run something on them, and every half-year or so Moerer would call up and say, “Hey, I think we’re going to run that Phish feature after all. Can you freshen it up for us?” And I’d be sent off to some big event of theirs, like a New Year’s Eve concert, and totally redo the story and bring it up to date.
It was a blessing in disguise, as it turned out, because I really got to know them and it laid the groundwork for doing the book by giving me the opportunity to write for them. Every so often their management would call me to write an album bio or “Phishbill” or something along those lines. I did that two or three times a year starting in ‘96, and basically continued through the breakup and even afterward with some of the solo projects. So I have no complaints about how that Rolling Stone episode turned out, because when the piece ran, it was an enormous story. It may have been one of the last huge rock ‘n’ roll features in the magazine. It all worked out, oddly enough.
Gehr: I always felt that few bands were as indie as Phish were during the nineties. I wrote a piece about the Grateful Dead for the Village Voice in the eighties, and my take was that the Dead were unfashionable for all the wrong reasons, because no band is more indie or do-it-yourself than the Dead had been when they had their own label. And I always felt the same way about Phish even though they were on Elektra. You can tell that their relationship with Elektra was almost completely on their terms – and practically invisible except for Elektra distributing their albums. They did their own tour support, didn’t make videos, and existed in their own cave within the Warner Records empire.
You also write books about wetlands and beaches. How does that overlap with your music writing?
Puterbaugh: I double-majored in English and sociology as an undergraduate, but I’d always been interested in the environment. So I got a Masters degree in environmental science, which was an outgrowth of some travel books I’d been writing about beaches. I was fascinated with the notion of development at the beach, about why it’s a bad idea. I didn’t really understand the science of it, so that propelled me to get my grad-school degree in environmental science with a concentration on coastal-zone management, coastal geology, barrier island formation, that kind of thing. It was wonderful; I really loved studying that stuff. I was starting from scratch and had to take two years of undergraduate science courses just so I could qualify to enter grad school.
So I was writing books on the California and Florida coastlines concurrent with music writing. In fact, I was in grad school when the whole Phish assignment started. I’ll never forget coming back from seeing them at Red Rocks, going to a class and the professor saying, “Parke, I understand you write about rock ‘n’ roll. Have you ever heard about this band called Phish, but it’s not spelled with an ‘F’?” and I said, “Yes, coincidentally I’m writing a story on them at the moment and I just got back from seeing them play. Why do you ask?” And he said, “One of my students is the sister of somebody in the band.” And it turned out to be Kristy Manning, Trey’s sister. So he got us together for lunch and I got to know Kristy independently of this Phish assignment. These strange coincidences happen all the time with Phish. Read the rest of this entry »
Run Like Hell 7) Aceetobee 6) Vassillios 5) Mr.Don 4) Above the Waves 3) Munchkin Invasion 2) Crickets 1) Basis for a Day – into something that looked a lot like this:
