The “Down With Disease” video recorded in part on 12/31/93
Phish returns to the road for a five-night New Year’s Run on Monday, December 27 at Worcester’s Centrum, now known as the DCU Center. The itinerary includes three nights at Madison Square Garden, featuring their first New Year’s Eve at the venue since their return from their first hiatus on December 31, 2002. Jambands.com celebrates yet another NYE run, which can be viewed via webcast for the first time in Phishtory, with a two-part conversation with David “ZZYZX” Steinberg. The Mockingbird Foundation board member (a charitable organization setup by fans to distribute funds generated from the Phish community) was on hand at the very first Phish New Year’s Eve event (12/31/89) and has been back ever since.
David Steinberg is the original unofficial Phish statistician (aka The Timer) who created the web-based resource PhishStats, which compiles numerous variations of data for each individual fan to generate their own personal song and show statistical database. His work also found an important home in The Phish Companion tomes, when he wasn’t writing a column for over twelve years at Jambands.com, offering poignant, sharp, humorous and, occasionally, controversial opinions as his latest stand criticizing Phish’s Halloween costume attests.
Steinberg earned his Master’s degree in Mathematics from New Mexico State University in 1994, and is currently a computer programmer in Seattle. Part I of our discussion features his introduction into the world of Phish, and concludes with a look at the Vermont Quartet’s first gig at Madison Square Garden on December 30, 1994. Part II includes Steinberg’s commentary about the next night of that 1994 NYE run, while tracking the rest of the legendary dates along the New Year’s Eve trail and beyond through the years as we venture back with a celebratory nod towards the rich and memorable history of our beloved Phish from a legendary longtime fan’s perspective.
RR: Let’s go back to the beginning. I believe your first Phish show was October 28, 1989. Appropriately, your first song was “I Didn’t Know,” right?
DS: “I Didn’t Know” and “You Enjoy Myself” were the first two songs I saw Phish do.
RR: What was your knowledge of Phish at that point in time?
DS: I went to Bard College [Annandale-on-Hudson, New York]. At the time, they had this massive Halloween blowout party. But the school didn’t like having this big thing; Bard was a hippie school, and a lot of people were doing stuff that the school didn’t want associated with them, so they were trying to crack down on it. Phish were playing a pre-Halloween show the weekend before, and so a friend of mine was promoting that thing: “Hey, if you don’t want to go to the lame and new version of the party, here is something else you can do.” And I went mainly because of that, and mainly because I liked the opening band, which was a Bard band. I went in knowing nothing. I hadn’t heard a song. I heard people say that I would like them, and the description that “[Phish] sounded like Steely Dan covering Camper Van Beethoven.”
The entire show didn’t do that much for me. I remember during the “[Colonel] Forbin’s” just taking note of a normal song and Trey saying, “Hey, some of you might be confused right now,” and then, he started to tell the story, and then, I got confused; I was like, “Wait. What? ” because I couldn’t understand or follow the story. They closed the second set with “Harpua,” and there’s all this wackiness like Trey saying that “Poster Nutbag had jumped off the white corduroy shelf.” I thought, “What?” The whole big build up to Poster Nutbag’s name—“Poster Nutbag?! You’re going to build up for ten minutes to Poster Nutbag?” I was just blown away by that. During that whole big build up, one of the things he said was that Poster Nutbag’s name “is not fluff.” So I went to the merch booth and bought Junta because I saw “Fluffhead” was on it and thought, “It must be that song—otherwise, he wouldn’t have said it was about fluff—“Fluffhead.” And then I fell in love with “The Divided Sky” off that tape, and that’s where it all happened.
RR: And your first New Year’s Eve show was in Boston in 1989?
DS: Yes, that was the first New Year’s Eve show Phish had done.
RR: Right. A couple members of Phish [Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell] had played on New Year’s Eve as the Phones in 1986, but not Phish, per se. Did you wear formal wear to that 1989 gig? I know it was encouraged on that night.
DS: I did wear some creative formal wear. I was in this weird band when I was at Bard. Part of my performing outfit was a suit jacket with art on the back of it, and I wore that.
RR: Phish had a gradual ascent to the plateau that they would reach in the 1990s. What was it like to see them on New Year’s Eve after your first show in October?
DS: I had a bunch of new friends and we were all like “Hey, it’s a new decade; we’re going to have new bands.” At the time, it was just something fun to do because the Grateful Dead played on the other coast, and no one wanted to go all the way to California. New Year’s Eve wasn’t that big for Phish. It wasn’t that big of a deal back then. It was pretty much another show. It was a two-set show. There wasn’t any big spectacle. There were no antics or anything; it was just another show.
RR: And Trey and Page came out in formal wear, and, then, of course, Fish came out in non formal gear [top hat, g-string with tuxedo tails].
DS: Yes, some things you don’t forget [Site editor’s note: No matter how hard you might try].
RR: 12/31/90. Same venue—Boston World Trade Center Exhibition Hall. It’s a year later. You were still in college. What were you doing as a fan? Trading tapes? Going to more shows? What was the vibe like on New Year’s Eve that year?
DS: Ahhh… the 1990 New Year’s Eve. The infamous one. I know I can rant about this one.
RR: I want you to rant about this one.
DS: Chucklehead. I was trading tapes by then. The first time I remember actually hearing something outside of Bard—because Bard was right near Vermont, so there was a core group of ten, fifteen people who would go. They played at Chance [in Poughkeepsie] a lot, so tapes were starting to circulate a little bit—I do remember at a Dead show in Raleigh hearing someone playing a Phish tape, and thinking, “Oh, wow! Someone’s playing Phish!” And that was kind of exciting because it felt like an underground club, and not something that people knew about very well. It was a secret society.
New Year’s 1990. Yeah, that was the year where they didn’t announce an opening band, and suddenly Chucklehead opened and played at least as long, if not longer, than Phish. They just wouldn’t stop. They were doing these long call-and-responses like “What’s my name? Chucklehead. What’s my name? Chucklehead.” (laughter) And, oh my God…I had just seen Phish in Providence two nights before, and that show was amazing. The other thing I remember is that they go out and play a lot of the same songs, and, also, they’re huddled behind stage for the encore and the venue turns the light on them.
RR: No encore because of Chucklehead.
DS: Yeah, I’m still bitter about that. Actually, there’s a little funny story about that. I found that Chucklehead show on archive.org. Some of the things I remembered them doing, they didn’t actually do. Some of them, they actually did. I don’t remember which anymore. I wrote some rant about it on my Live Journal back when I used to have my Live Journal, and, suddenly, a year later, I got discovered, and all of these people started commenting on that—these Chucklehead fans started commenting on that Chucklehead post. It was really bizarre. There are still people that are upset that I was unhappy about Chucklehead opening for Phish. It was an interesting experience re-hearing that tape, nine or ten years after it destroyed my New Year’s Eve.
RR: When did you start taking notes and jotting down stats? Obviously, that evolved into a much larger entity onto itself in later years.
DS: It started around ’90, ’91—I was still in Bard—when I realized that this band had potential and no one was doing it. No one was being careful about taking down notes at
these early shows, and I figured I better start because this is information that people might want later. So I started keeping setlists in a notebook. I went back and found my old setlists and started transcribing them in as much detail as I could remember because I figured it was something people would want. I started timing shows and the whole sets—when the set starts; when the set ends. If you are wondering, that actually started as a joke. I got a new watch for Hanukkah in 1991 right before the New Year’s Run: “Oh, this watch has a stopwatch on it. Why don’t I time the songs?” That’s how that all started.
RR: And how was that New Aud show in Worcester on December 31, 1991?
DS: The first thing that comes to mind of that show was that they actually had a barrier between the crowd and the stage. I’m sure it had happened before but that was the first time I’d seen it at a Phish show. It kind of freaked me out a bit. Normally, you could just walk up to the stage, and put your hands on the stage and use it as a table for your setlist if you needed to, but I thought, “Wow, this is a real venue. There’s actually a barrier there.” It was really cold, seasonally cold, and the show had sold out and a lot of people had tried to use their first night buttons to get in, which didn’t work.
It was the first time where it felt like they were trying to make an event out of New Year’s Eve. I think some of that was frustration about 1990. They played three sets for the first time. They played “McGrupp,” which was my first one, and it wasn’t a bust out, but it was rare at least for the time. Trey had that little insult box during “Wilson,” which was amusing. It started to feel like this isn’t going to be another show; this is going to be something different.
RR: What was the scene like outside the venue? Was it more controlled back then?
DS: It was very controlled. It was still very small. There was not a huge line to get in. I had to show up very early because my friends kind of forgot to get me a ticket, so I had to find an extra. I was there working on trying to get an extra, and finally found one. And I was the only person doing that until around an hour or so before the show.
RR: Where were you at in college in late 1991?
DS: I graduated in the fall of ’91. Then, I took about four months off and saw shows for a while, and then went to grad school in the fall of ’92 in New Mexico.
RR: At that point in time, did you feel that what you were doing as a hobby and what you were pursuing as a career would ever intersect?
DS: No, not at all. Actually, it had been a running joke at grad school. I’d come back from a show, and give lots of details about the set, and then say, “Now ask me what the fundamental theorem of algebra is.” When someone would, I’d answer, “I don’t know.”
RR: The crowd capacity for the 1992 New Year’s Eve show expanded even further to 6,000 when Phish played Matthews Arena at Northeastern University in Boston.
DS: Actually, I can tell you exactly what it is because I have the snap sign on my wall. I have the snap sign, and I also have the exclamation of what the snap sign is. On it, it says, yeah, 6,000 people—“hearing 6,000 people screaming in terror.”
It was definitely starting to get bigger. I had been in rec.music.phish for about three months. Once I went to grad school, I had access to the Internet. That changed things. That started to feel like more of a community. You’d go there and you’d meet up with people. You wouldn’t go there alone as much. “Oh, you’re going, too? O.K. Cool. Let’s meet up.” I remember it was a big deal because I saw Shelly who was walking outside the show: “Hey, it’s Shelly!” [Shelly Culbertson worked with Phish’s management company, Dionysian as an Internet liaison and helped develop the Phish Tickets By Mail and ticket distribution system, while also managing the gateway for the original Phish.Net Digest.] There was already a sense that certain people were becoming noticeable. It was definitely starting to get bigger. There were people sitting outside to get in the front row for five or six hours before the show for that one. So it started to become a more interesting thing. They threw those signs out into the crowd, and a lot of people wanted them.
RR: Brad Sands was dressed as the Famous Mockingbird.
DS: Yes, and he was dangled from the ceiling. The Dude of Life came out on stage wearing a Ronald Reagan mask, pushing a lawnmower, and singing “Diamond Girl.” That was the bustout of “Kung,” the first one, I believe, since the 80s [11/2/89]. So, it was starting to become a bigger deal. There were starting to be actual antics.
RR: You mentioned the Internet. Obviously, the Net and Phish’s community developed at the same time during the 1990s. At that time, did you feel this Internet connection was going to push the band forward, or did you feel it was just a social network and a means to stay in touch with other fans?
DS: I actually saw that it was doing that job. The fourth band to get a user group in the rec.music hierarchy was rec.music.phish. There was rec.music.beatles, rec.music.gdead, and I believe the the next one was rec.music.phish [after rec.music.dylan].
RR: Which was quite an accomplishment at that point in time.
DS: Yeah, and a lot of people were mad. “Who is this Phish band? Why should they get their own rec.music-level news group? I haven’t even heard of them.” I definitely felt it. There’s that thin line there. I think the Internet destroys bands now. There were times when all it did was promote. They got so lucky.
RR: 1993—suddenly, Phish is playing to 14,000 at the Centrum on New Year’s Eve. Were you thinking that the peak was reached, or it would keep getting bigger?
DS: Well, I had no idea when it was going to stop. Put it this way—do you know how I thought it was going to grow? That New Year’s run was the first ever mail order, and it was tapers’ tickets only. I had this really bad tape deck that technically recorded tapes. The heads were out of sync, so you had to re-record a second copy off of it before you could listen to it on any other deck. It only recorded in mono, and whenever the counter hit triple zeros, the Play button would pop out. You would sit there and constantly watch it, and when it hit 95, you’d hit the reset button, so it wouldn’t get to 100 and stop recording. It was really wonderful. This is the deck that you want to have in the tapers’ section to give you a lot of street cred. I actually mail ordered for that run just because I figured I better mail order for this to get an early mail order number because Phish is, obviously, getting big. I thought it was like the Grateful Dead mail order like the earlier you were in, the more tickets you get. But, obviously, they chose not to go that route. That’s a good idea of how it was looking like they were just growing and growing. It was obvious that this was not the peak; it was going to keep growing from there.
RR: And it was quite a show, too.
DS: Yeah. Yeah. The things I remember from that show—first, security was really rough. I don’t know if you know this or not, but getting into that show, I got into line the second doors opened, and I plugged in my deck about ten seconds before lights went out. They had separated lines into men and women, so suddenly you’d get close, and they’d tell you that you’d have to go into another line. At one point, Trey asked if everybody was in yet. That’s why. The 30th, obviously, was the highlight of the run. God, it was cold that day.
The weather story during that run. It snowed big time right before the 28th. People in Maryland can’t really handle snow. It was a good four-hour drive from my parent’s house in Baltimore to D.C., and a ten-hour drive from Baltimore to New Haven the next day—if you can picture taking ten hours to go from Baltimore to New Haven. And then in Maine and Worcester, it was just cold.
The main thing that comes to mind from that night were all the “Peaches [en Regalia]” teases. After Frank Zappa had just died, they played “Peaches” three of the four shows, and they kept on playing “Peaches” that night. There was also a jam on New Year’s Eve that no one knew what it was.
RR: Yeah, the “Down With Disease” jam.
DS: No one had ever heard this thing before. “What the hell is this? I don’t know what the hell it is, but I like it.” I was working at a radio station at grad school then, and the CD single came out. They had a rule that whenever an album came in, you couldn’t play the same track on it twice. The CD single with “Down with Disease” came in, and it only had one track on it, so they couldn’t do anything with it, and they gave it to me because they knew I was into Phish. That came out in March or April of 1994, but [on New Year’s Eve] no one knew what it was. Eventually, I think Shelly came out and said, “No, that’s called “Down with Disease.” That really blew people away—this beautiful jam with one of Trey’s signature licks that no one had ever heard, coming out of midnight. That was completely insane.
RR: Speaking of insane, suddenly, Phish played at Madison Square Garden on December 30, 1994.
DS: What made that so weird for me was that six months earlier, I was seeing Phish in the Moore Theater in Seattle and the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver, and all of these tiny, tiny places on the West Coast and in the Southwest, and, all of a sudden, they’re at Madison Square Garden. The contrast between the late spring tour and the winter—I think that’s very much a dividing line for me with Phish. After that summer ’94 tour is when Phish stopped hanging out in the parking lot after shows, having jokes with fans, and they had their guard up more. In the spring of ’93, there were about seven or eight people doing the tour. By summer ’94, there were at least a couple dozen. Small enough that someone could throw a party at the end of tour and we could all fit in someone’s house, but it was already starting to change. More people were starting to do it. By fall of ’94, that’s when the scene really started to blow up. It was before Jerry died, actually, where I make the divide.
RR: Yeah, the ’94 summer tour ended with a great show at Sugarbush in Vermont. Do you think the band also knew that a change in eras was taking place?
DS: I don’t know. I think for them the change may have occurred when they hit the East Coast on that tour. If you look at the venues, they change massively. It’s like theatre, theatre, theatre, and, all of a sudden, it’s the Mann and Great Woods. After that Mann show—which was the last show I saw on that tour; the next time I saw them was Halloween—it just felt much different. Halloween was insane; people were just breaking into the venue. So, yeah, Madison Square Garden, while surprising, it did feel like where they were going. The small venues were over, and here you go. I think that is why that whole “Wilson” was so powerful—the “Wilson” jam. It was like looking around, and realizing just how many of us there were.
Part II picks up from where we left off with a look at 12/31/94 as we cover the years between that date and the 2010 New Year’s Run with Jambands.com columnist, Mockingbird Foundation board member, and Phish statistician, David Steinberg.
