If there’s one thing the Beatles taught the world that Phish perfected, it’s this: You can be as silly as you want as long as you’re really good. So much of Phish’s early music, at its best, was a four-piece rock act playing with a classical sensibility and free-jazz abandon. And in the era of Phish’s fugues and rock opera fantasy the lyrics were sparse and aesthetically random, minus the detailed exploits of the fantastical characters of Gamehendge. A large selection of the songs that would be Phish originals in the now-closed body of work were created by the songwriting team of frontman Trey Anastasio and high school pal Tom Marshall. More and more often as time moved forward, the Anastasio/Marshall compositions became dark (though successful) little allegories.

Tom Marshall – who is an IT manager at a major insurance company in his other life and the frontman for Amfibian in his somewhere-in-between life – and Trey Anastasio first crossed paths in junior high. Tom was one of the new kids in Trey’s eighth grade class. “All of my friends were always sort of into music and we all sort of congregated at parties, during free time, at lunch and it kept building from there,” Marshall says. One of his earliest striking memories of Trey was imprinted when the young Anastasio abandoned his drum kit for the instrument that would become his signature.

“Probably sometime in 1979, when Trey and I were in ninth grade, he had switched from being one of our class’ few drummers to one of many aspiring guitarists. I remember a specific moment in Princeton Day School classmate Barry Lamb’s basement where a bunch of the school’s guitarists were gathered in a corner teaching each other riffs – like ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Hoochie Coo’ and ‘Smoke on the Water.’ I walked over to the other side of the basement, and there was Trey, sitting alone with his guitar. I sat next to him thinking, ‘What the hell is he doing with a guitar? He’s a drummer!’ Then I listened to him playing Allman Brothers riffs and realized that he, after playing for about two weeks, was leaps and bounds better than several guys who had taken lessons for many months, even years. I asked him, ‘When did you learn to play?’ He just said, ‘I always sort of knew how.’ I never questioned that statement – because it was irrefutable.”

With Trey off at prep school, Tom spent many evenings at his sacred Rhombus with musically inclined buddies Marc Daubert and Dave Abrahams. “Those two guys figured into a bunch of early Phish [material] and we were inseparable junior year of high school, this would’ve been 1981-82, and, if Marc could score a six-pack, our place was the Rhombus. Which was a special place that no one knew about. It was this really cool sculpture in the middle of…?” He trails off, still desiring to protect the spot that has seen some of his most creative moments.

“I’ve already given it up, but why give vandals anymore to tag?” He continues, “And we would have the mounting of the Rhombus ceremony, which was tough, ‘cause at night after the dew fell it was wet and it has very steep walls. And once you’re on top, the thing is a great drum. Something changed about it, but it used to be this pretty intense echoing drum, but the drumming was limited to how long you felt like smacking half-inch steel with your hands, but we always did it anyway. We would lay down on it and look up and it would seem like it was echoing off into the heavens, the sounds that we made, and that was accompanied by guitar and humorous lyrics.”

Marshall and Anastasio had fallen out of touch for about three years when they found themselves mutually excused from Carnegie Mellon and University of Vermont, respectively, and literally crossed paths at Mercer County Community College. “Trey wasn’t worried about college because he had this thing called Phish that he was really intense on; he just wanted to get his ass back to Vermont to play and he wanted to write songs for this band,” Marshall recalls. “It was probably the luckiest thing that’s happened in my life. We didn’t know each other was there; he wouldn’t have thought to contact me.”

In the intervening time, Marshall had mailed Anastasio a story, not a poem, called McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters, all of whose characters soon found their way into Anastasio’s Gamehendge saga. “He was on his way to class and I was on my way from and he just turned around and walked back with me and we started recording, picking up where we had left off three years ago. And that was it.” Tom and Trey recorded on a four-track and laid down songs such as “Letter to Jimmy Page” and what would later be called “Divided Sky.”

“He was great, like Duane Allman, kind of like a Dickey Betts sort of style. I didn’t see the Jimmy Page thing that he said was there from early on. I kind of saw him as a Southern sort of rocker in a way ‘cause he would string together great solos. Trey, to me, was a Southern-influenced soloist. We recorded a whole album with Trey called Bivouac and that was kind of the name of the band: Marc, me and Trey. And that’s where ‘I Am Hydrogen’ was first created and ‘The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday.’ That was an incredibly creative period.”

The length and depth of the relationship between the two has allowed a certain innocence to remain between them. This maintained innocence, along with a maturing of styles, craft and editing, began resulting in songs containing complicated lyrical images that always seem brutally specific, but the details come across in such a way that they have a widely applicable undeniable allegorical quality.

“Over time, Trey and I wrote songs in many different ways – I have faxed, phoned and emailed lyrics to him. Songs like ‘Squirming Coil,’ ‘Horn’ and ‘Julius’ were born this way. Then we had the write-by-phone sessions, him in Vermont, me in New Jersey: hours spent writing songs like ‘Lifeboy’ – Trey playing and singing, me penning, crossing-out, re-writing. These methods took us through Hoist. I then compiled a whole bunch of poems that my friend Scott Herman and I had collaborated on into a book called The Salamander Prince, which became the basis of the next several albums following Hoist: Billy Breathes, Ghost and Farmhouse. However, we had created a new method of writing shortly before Billy Breathes: the songwriting vacation. The first of these was a scuba-diving trip to the Cayman Islands, and that water theme is quite evident in Billy Breathes, and has followed us around quite a bit since then.”

With these songwriting vacations the Anastasio/Marshall songs were for the first time being crafted by Tom and Trey simultaneously. “The Cayman Islands trip marked the first time when Trey really turned over quite a bit of the melody creation and harmony formation to me. It became a true collaboration in every sense with Trey helping with the lyrics, and me helping with the song structure and vocal lines. ‘Waste’ was our most ambitious product of that island trip. All trips were a success, I’m happy to say, and each different location has left its own discernable mark on the songs that were written there.”

While these songs, written on beaches and in farmhouses, were the product of two creative individuals doing the things they’ve always done, the songs and their meanings took on whole separate lives in the context of the Phish show. Regardless of intent, these songs were delivered from huge stages to masses by structural icons. And in that context, every song can sound like it’s being sung directly to you out there in the crowd. No, not you, six rows back and three to the left. You! Right there. Under the lights, middle of the night, couldn’t get it wrong. You! With the ticket stub in your hand! And, in this context, words can take on many lives at once. It’s from this angle that certain lyrics in songs like “Down With Disease” and “Birds of a Feather” have rubbed some fans to chafe.

“I really did have mono when I wrote ‘Down With Disease’ and I really was three weeks in my bed and the third week I wrote the whole thing in one sitting in five minutes.” It seems unnatural for Marshall to pull apart the songs in this manner, but he indulges the notions to a certain distance. “I think I was happy at the image of a thousand Bedouin children outside because I was thinking that, when Trey read it, he was gonna love it because it was the Phish crowd. So they’re right about that. But ‘stepping on my rhythm and stealing all my lines’ could have been, I think, probably a girl who I blame for a lot of my life’s woes, who probably at the time had stepped on my rhythm and stolen some of my lines. The funny thing is, once I sing something to someone, the rest of the song has to be to them, but in that case it was actually that the channel had switched.”

Though Marshall vehemently asserts that he and Anastasio rarely discuss the meanings of songs until after the fact, if at all, and their respective meanings are rarely the same for the same songs, outside interpretations fall in all directions. As for “Birds of a Feather,” “That one is a reaction to things kind of going bad in the scene, I think. But to me, it was a specific group of people not fitting in and I’m that person also, so I should be offended, too.”

“After a while, of course, a pattern emerged and I realized, ‘Hey, I guess that’s what some refer to as a ‘STYLE’… I have a style!!!’” Marshall doesn’t laugh like a man who relishes his secrets held. And if a song was written about a dream he had, or about a fight with his wife, or about the uncertain scientific base under the physical nature of light, he’ll tell you.
“Honestly, I’m fairly blind about what I’m writing as I write it. Often there are songs which simply spill out. I have to look back later and figure out what was going on at the time – sometimes a meaning will emerge months later. As far as self-analysis goes, I don’t really do it – perhaps because I’m not very good at it, or just don’t want to? For whatever reason, I’m happy to continue writing and let others enjoy… and analyze if they so desire. That’s my style.”

But, in the end, what we seekers seek in these songs is what we seek in all viable art and life experience: parts of ourselves we didn’t know we had.