RR: Let’s talk about the Mockingbird Foundation and how you became an important part of its creation and influence to this day.
DS: The Mockingbird Foundation is two-fold. On one level, it’s a charity which gives money to music education for children. So, basically, the questions are “What is the Mockingbird Foundation and what do we do with the Mockingbird Foundation?” What we do—what helped create all this money, is that we are people who, to a large degree, it isn’t the only project we have, but it’s the main one—is to keep the most accurate possible set of information about Phish and their history and their songs. It’s all on Phish.net now, but we tried to have a very well-written song history for every song—who it was written by, maybe some analysis about what the lyrics mean, and they are all written by different people, and everyone can go on a tangent however they see fit.
What we try to do is we try to have as much factual information that we can get about the band, and we’re still discovering new teases in songs, and say, “Hey, we don’t have in our setlist from 3/12/93 that there was a “Careful with That Axe, Eugene” tease in “AC/DC Bag.” There is one, by the way, and I was actually stunned we didn’t have it in our setlist and got very mad that it wasn’t in our setlist: “How could you miss that?” It’s a group of people that, whenever I listen to a tape, part of me is subconsciously listening to teases. Actually, New Year’s ’93, when I listening to it the other day, I just found an Odd Couple tease in the intro to “Harry Hood” that we had to document. There was also a “Smoke on the Water” tease or something like that.
Our goal as an organization is to raise money for children. We’ve given to some pretty impressive groups. My personal favorite is a group in Alaska that was recreating Alaskan Native American instruments as the entire culture was about to die out and it kept it going; traditional instruments and songs—that’s one that really stuck with me. A large part of what we are doing is we are trying to keep this history, and trying to get this knowledge out there.
What do I do for them? I write a lot of song histories. Obviously, I do the stats, which is not an official part of Phish.net, but we’re kind of affiliated these days, and I get the setlists from there, and I feed from Phish.nets to a stats page. I also write song histories. I help try to get new information. I still like discovering old teases back from shows that we’ve missed. “Hey, back in ’93, here was this old tease that no one noticed before, check it out.” We’re trying to get an exceedingly accurate setlist file, and use it to power things like stats. I’m always trying to get new things.
RR: Let’s skip forward to the New Year’s Runs in 1998, 1999, and 2002, which are three vastly different timeframes and events. 1998 featured four shows, Phish’s longest-running stand at Madison Square Garden.
DS: To be honest, that’s kind of the forgotten New Year’s Run for me. I think it’s partly because of the stunt. I finally found out years later that it was supposed to be the four seasons, or at least that’s the rumor I heard. That’s what the whole thing was supposed to be—the plants on stage that grew at the end. The report on rec.music.phish was that at the end of the fourth day it will all make sense what was going on. It didn’t. It was all of a sudden gone [after the first night, 12/28/98], so it was weird. There were really no stunts, other than the passing around of the glow rings. I think the idea was that some people would throw glow rings, instead of glow sticks. But, instead, people made this giant chain that went all the way around the Garden, which was pretty cool.
The first 45 minutes of the first set of New Year’s Eve are actually really, really, really good—“1999,” “Mike’s>[Hydrogen>]Weekapaug are really strong. But, other than that, there was a “Quinn [the Eskimo on 12/28/98]” bustout; there was a “Been Caught Stealin’ [12/28/98 encore]” and “The Divided Sky” encore [on 12/29/98]. The New Year’s Run was kind of…it was just there. Do you ever listen to that New Year’s Run? I mean outside of “1999,” do you ever listen to any of the rest of the run?
RR: That’s a tough one. I really enjoyed ’95 and ’97, and ’96 just felt…well, it was planned out, wasn’t it? It always sounded that way, and that’s how it was done. New Year’s Run 1998? I don’t have anything against it, but I don’t listen to it much.
DS: The balloon drop in ‘96 was just over the top [Author’s Note: arguably a world record]. Do you remember that the people noticed the balloons the first night?
RR: Yeah.
DS: I had a DAT tape, and I was taping those shows, too, but with a real tape deck, not my Marantz mono ridiculous deck. One thing I’ll remember, I’ll never forget, in ’96, people had the one day to notice that the balloons were about the fall? And people had umbrellas for their [gear]? One taper had on his T-bar a giant cardboard hand and he could spin that thing around, separately from his mikes, and swat balloons away. That’s the thing I remember about ’96—people were prepared for those balloons.
In ’98, there isn’t a big spectacle, there isn’t that legendary show that stands out that everyone talks about, and, yet, they busted out “Grind” on 12/30. No one talks about that. It just seems to be the one that falls through the cracks a lot because that was the one year there really wasn’t that big thing. Although, the cool thing was the mail order tickets; that’s the one thing I do remember. There was a subway train, and each night, the train was a little bit bigger. The New Year’s ticket was so big that, even ripped, it barely fits in the back of a CD case.
RR: Unbeknownst to pretty much everyone, that would be the last Phish New Year’s Eve at Madison Square Garden for four years. Moving forward one year to December 1999, we come at long last to Big Cypress. I still believe that you wrote the definitive study of that run, especially the legendary 12/31/99 show, for this site, which appeared to me to be the epitome of what that experience was like. Is there any other way to quantify how important Big Cypress was to you, personally, the band, and the fan base at that time?
DS: Sometimes, festivals work. Sometimes, they don’t.
One thing it means to me is that I never have to think when someone asks me what the best Phish show I ever saw. It’s instinctual—Big Cypress. You don’t have to think about it. It was a weekend where everything…other than the traffic, other than getting in and getting out, which didn’t work at all according to plan, everything just kind of worked.
The weather. One thing we saw from the Miami New Year’s Run [2003] is that the weather isn’t automatically 85 degrees and sunny on New Year’s Eve in southern Florida. In 1999, it was just perfect. On that entire day, I don’t know how New Year’s Eve could have gone any better.
Some people bitch: “Oh, they could have played “Harpua,” or they could have busted something out,” and I could see that a little bit, but, in terms of the way they were playing, the style of the jams, the jams, especially later in the night, especially the “Roses Are Free” jam, you can tell the hour just by listening to the quality of the jam. You can tell it is four in the morning.
Phish were just building up to that, and building up to that, and building up to that. And then, they did it, and I understand why they broke up. There’s nowhere to go from there.
It was that perfect moment where everything worked. And even when things weren’t working, they ended up becoming part of this amazing story. You also have all of these mythic elements. Here you are, and no one knows if the world is going to be around next week. We’re on this Indian Reservation. There were no newspapers coming in. We had our own power, so for all we knew the grid melted, and the only power that existed were these generators on this Indian Reservation. No one had radios with them at the show. We had no idea what was going on. It was this completely self-sustained moment in our community. Now it wouldn’t have worked. Now, everyone would have cell phones, and people would text them: “Hey, no Y2K problems; everything’s good.”
We were completely isolated ourselves from the rest of the country, and went to this weird place in the middle of an Indian Reservation, no less—not just like a military base, but an Indian Reservation, so there were all sorts of spiritual components to that, too.
There were mythic elements to the whole thing—the millennium, where we were, New Year’s Eve, for that matter—that it’s very hard for me to be rational about Big Cypress. It always will be the peak event of my Phish career, barring who knows, this Madison Square Garden run will completely blow it away somehow. But I don’t know how. I guess Telluride could have [Summer Tour 2010]. It’s not just the music, but the fact that they played all night to sunrise, which they will probably never do again.
RR: Now, like you said, it made sense that less than a year later Phish would take a break. No one really knew what was going to happen. All that was known was that Phish was contractually bound to deliver two studio albums to Elektra Records. But, then they came back on December 31, 2002 at Madison Square Garden. How difficult was it for you to get a ticket to that first post-hiatus show?
DS: Oddly enough, I didn’t have any problem with it at all. (laughter) I was getting friends in all four nights. That was the peak of my Ticketmaster skills, actually, when they first came back and the following spring. I had extras to all four nights. For the Hampton [shows], there were constant re-releases where you just thought, “I haven’t gotten any 1/3[/03]s yet, maybe there’ll be a re-release. I’m going to make a phone call and see if there are any.” Ticketmaster online didn’t quite have their act together yet. There were all sorts of loopholes that could be exploited. I do remember that I got a pair of tickets when they were on sale for New Year’s Eve. I didn’t have a mail order come through, so I was actually in chaos with a group of friends, and then, I thought I had lost them, and tried to figure out what was going on. That was when I discovered Ticketmaster didn’t send you the final step, but it still went through—remember those?
RR: Yep.
DS: Even though I got very lucky for the run, I do know how hard it was. My [future] wife was living in Virginia Beach at the time, and could only go to one of the three Hampton shows because that’s all she could get. I know it was a really difficult ticket. It wasn’t as hard as the return show—the 3/6/09 show—but, after that, they were probably the next hardest.
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