Phish Resurface

And there was the Big Ball Jam. "We each had huge exercise balls we threw into the audience," McConnell, 39, explains. "You had to play rhythmically with the way your ball bounced around in the crowd." He grins sheepishly. "That's how our whole career has been -- stupid ideas that work."

Then success got in the way. With the death in August 1995 of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, Phish -- already packing arenas on their own -- became the box-office heirs of a huge concert audience stranded by the end of the Dead. Phish inherited the stress, as well. Gordon, 37, recalls watching Anastasio stalk offstage, "fiercely angry," after Phish's first set at the Great Went, an outdoor festival the band put on for 70,000 fans at an old Air Force base in Maine in August 1997: "He thought we were caught up in the bigness of the gig and worrying about, oh, I don't know what -- but not playing music."

By the fall of 2000, Phish were one of the biggest acts in rock, grossing more than $61 million in ticket sales in 1999 and 2000. Phish had the infrastructure to match: an expanding management-and-merchandising office on the first floor of a former cereal factory in Burlington; roadies on year-round salaries. Business meetings started outnumbering jam sessions. "We were doing things that required a lot of energy and weren't about music," Anastasio says irritably.

So on October 7th, 2000, Phish broke up. After a long encore of Junta's "You Enjoy Myself" at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, Anastasio, Fishman, Gordon and McConnell went right into a dressing-room trailer backstage and locked the door. They let no one else in; that included longtime manager John Paluska, road manager Brad Sands, wives, children and even Anastasio's father, Ernest. The band stayed in there for four hours. "It's incredible how deep that got," Anastasio says. "There was a sea of people outside: 'I know they're not letting anybody in, but that doesn't mean me.' Years later, people complain to me about it. But it had to be the four of us. We had to go out that door with the understanding that we might not be a band anymore."

"We sat there and smoked some pot, drank champagne and cried," Fishman says. "It really felt like the end." Phish soon had another powwow, this time in Burlington, to discuss the immediate future: financing solo projects, downsizing the office. When the meeting was over, Fishman and Anastasio paused in the parking lot on the way to their cars.