You just mentioned Inside In, which accompanied your film Outside Out. That leads me to the videos that you’ve made to announce your recent tours. You clearly place a lot of thought and energy into those. To what degree have you considered integrating film into your live performances? Or do you like to keep those two forms discrete?

I like to keep them discrete but I do like to have a visual element and clearly with the light boxes and the projections that we’ve had in the past with this band and more recently with Phish I think that there’s room. The audience is looking at something and they’re either going to look at people playing or some props or some projections and I really like the idea of challenging peoples’ expectations of a jamband or of me or whatever.

I like to keep it abstract. I feel like having forms and themes gives the audience members too much. It steals too much from their imagination potential. There are exceptions, though. I’ll always have a lot of ideas brewing that we haven’t had time to explore. There’s always a list.

There was an idea early on to make a fake video where it seems like it’s happening live where somebody is playing the Reel in the front row but then they’re flying through the air in other cities or other settings and it becomes clear that it’s been concocted.

I also like the idea where we show the concession stand or the street outside the venue and we’re playing to that. I saw Radiohead one time and there were a lot of video cameras mounted on people’s heads. Peter Gabriel has done this too, aiming the cameras at each other’s mouths or down at the keyboards, working with what’s already there rather than putting imagery in people’s minds. But this is all on the brainstorm list. It’s not that I need to keep them separate, it’s that I tend to be cautious about saying, “I like film, let’s just play some films.”

I do love making those tour announcement videos though and I do want to pursue that on its own more as time goes on.

Can you describe the process of creating this most recent video?

Well the shoot was all in the afternoon one day. It took a couple of hours but there was a lot of planning and editing and all that kind of stuff. It was pretty quick in the grand scheme of things but we had quite a few ideas from the brainstorming process.

Here’s how my brainstorming works: I’ll be traveling in a car or tour bus and I’ll make a voice note of an idea. Then I transcribe all my voice notes into lists and I’ll be sitting in a coffee shop—“Here’s a few ideas I had about tour announcement videos” and we’ll talk them through. Then we have a director—our friend Neil Ryan—and he’ll provide feedback.

I love coming up with ideas and I love the creative process but I don’t want all the ideas to come from me, I’d rather work in a team. In this case it was Julia Mordaunt’s idea—she’s my stylist as well as 10 other things—so she picked the 80’s outfit and then we had to find a location and my assistant Gretchen, who helps me with so many things, helped with that.

I love film shoots because there’s so much focus on the different aspects and you usually have to get it done quicker than you thought. Everyone was rushing and objects were being thrown across the room. There were more than were shown in the video. There was a table with 50 objects on it and then I tried to hit the ball.

I do love ping-pong and I’m okay at it. Recording studios usually have ping-pong tables. With Phish we’ve always had them. When you’re sitting around, it’s a way to get your blood flowing and your limbs moving.

I also like that it’s really mesmerizing—the way the ball goes back and forth but it’s contained within that rectangle the way that a movie is contained within a screen and a band is contained within a stage.

I loved that Johnny was able to come over and be part of it. He’s living in Vermont now. I love what Robert Walter did with the 80’s style soundtrack. It just came together quickly and the editors got to work and then we saw a couple revisions.

I met Barbara Eden so I had to put in the Jeannie blink. I try not to bother her too much but she said that she and her husband watched it more than once and they laughed, so what more could you ask for when you’re putting a Jeannie blink into something.

How did you meet Barbara Eden?

My daughter and I watched every I Dream of Jeannie episode. I was trying her out on some older shows and for some reason that one is the one that stuck, more than say Bewitched or Get Smart or Star Trek. We both got addicted to it as a before bed ritual. We watched all the episodes, something like 120-130 of them, all five seasons, more than once. Then I started to see that she was online and she was wearing the outfit sometimes and she was tweeting. So then I read her memoir, which I loved—she wanted to be a singer and then she switched and it’s really inspiring. After that, I gave Tessa the replica bottle from the second and third season as a Hanukkah present.

Then we made this incredible picture of Tessa wearing a nice dress and blinking next to the bottle out on the lawn. Our friends Photoshopped some pink smoke and it’s really cool because the smoke is so contrived and her expression is so blasé.

So I wrote Barbara a letter saying what an influence she was and letting her know we were going to be at the L.A. Forum. I said, “If you don’t want to come to a rock concert it’d be great to meet you.” We ended up having lunch with her. In her memoir she said she liked elephants so we spent over 100 hours with some helpers making a ceramic elephant named Tiger after an elephant in one of the episodes. Pink smoke comes out of the trunk and it makes the blink sound from the episodes. We were trying to give her the best elephant ever.

While I was traveling across the country on Phish tour, I would go to art galleries with Tessa on the back of a bicycle looking at elephants. We used all those to make a card and then we spent the other part of the card explaining how she’s so inspirational in her acting and in her career and how nice she is to her fans on Twitter. And then behind the writing there was a secret panel with a collage of us making the elephant.

My light-up guitar builder, Ben Lewry was the last guy to help. He had to shrink the electronics even more, rebuilding the smoke machine. While I was on stage at the Bill Graham Civic Center playing the third gig, he was still working on it in Berkeley during the second set. We were going to fly that night and meet Barbara the next day for lunch and he finished it. Then he rushed it over and we took a couple pictures of it and I flew it to LA where it worked beautifully.

Rachel Eng is this incredible ceramics artist who works with children and helped us make the elephant. We worked with her when Phish was in Boston and we were using Boston as the hub for our shows. It took several days and then we had to drill the trunk out even wider to get the wires in for the smoke.

We presented the elephant to Barbara and she was really nice. She gave Tessa a Jeannie Barbie doll and she signed it. Tessa was so happy, so I couldn’t resist putting the Jeannie blink in the tour announcement video.

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