18. Phish and the Internet: Growing Up with the World Wide Web

In the early days, the early 1990s, Phish was only just beginning to play 1,000-person-capacity rooms. In October 1991, Phish played The Cubby Bear, a small sports bar across the street from the storied Wrigley Field. Fifteen years later, Phish sold out two nights at the Cubs’ 40,000-capacity stadium.

Similarly, in 1990, the World Wide Web was only just born, and today the Internet has nearly four billion users.

As Phish’s fame and popularity grew across the United States, so did access to the Internet. Phish and the Internet basically grew up together. Like neighboring children in the suburbs, Phish and the Internet dared and encouraged each other to explore and experiment, ultimately developing into handsome, successful individuals who now perhaps reminisce about their childhood and the innocence and privilege of youth.

In the 1990s, Phish’s fan base, and the early adopters of the Internet within it, worked as missionaries spreading the good word to the farthest corners of the country via message boards and newsgroups. The very nature of Phish’s live performances, unique setlists and musical teases—all that data!—begged to be archived and made freely available to all.

The proliferation of Phish setlists, live shows, and gossip on the Internet surely gave rise to this band, beyond mere grassroots growth through touring. Hell, Phish certainly wasn’t played on the radio!

“I came across Phish in 1993 and wanted to learn everything I could about it,” says Scott Bernstein, editorial director of JamBase.com and founder of YEMblog.com. “And I realized that to do that I would have to connect to this thing called the Internet. Fans who were either at college or otherwise had access to the Internet started a newsgroup, rec.music.phish, and that was the first real foray. Anyone who had access to the Internet could get to this newsgroup.”

A newsgroup, for younger readers, is effectively an online message board where anyone can post or respond to posts. At the time, that’s mostly what the Internet was: email and message boards.

This small group of Phish fans obsessively collected and confirmed setlists and jam teases from every Phish show. Their goal from the very beginning was to become the ultimate fan-produced guide to Phish and initially operated as a group of independent contributors. At the show? Write down the setlist and share on rec.music.phish.

At the time, the Internet was still a strange frontier. In 1995, America Online would add the Internet as a feature to its service, and that’s when things really took off. Suddenly, other Phish-related sites appeared on the frontier landscape, including Andy Gadiel’s Phish Page.

“Andy Gadiel launched Andy Gadiel’s Phish Page in 1996,” Bernstein says. “And that became a central repository for Phish fans on the Internet. He had links to anybody else who had a Phish page, he would have setlists that night. And people would literally call him from a pay phone after the show and tell him the setlist and he’d put it on the site. Then you get to ’97, ’98, when the majority of Americans started to get the Internet... that’s when Phish.net launched their site.”

Phish.net focused on tirelessly cataloging and archiving Phish’s setlists, ultimately publishing a book, The Phish Companion, now a massive tome in its third edition. And they incorporated The Mockingbird Foundation, a nonprofit organization that donated all proceeds from their book sales to fund musical education (see chapter 99).

But where does the band fit into all of this? What about Phish.com?

“They launched Phish.com in 1996,” Bernstein says. “It was very basic; just had the tour dates. And then in 1997 they made the site a lot nicer, added a minisite for The Great Went, and by ’98 it was a full-blown thing with all sorts of information about the band and Dry Goods and people were more using the website than Doniac Schvice [the now-defunct Phish paper newsletter].”

People were also using peer-to-peer FTP sites to exchange audio files, both soundboard recordings and audience recordings of live Phish shows. And in 1999, PhantasyTour.com launched, which would become the main message board for fans. “It all just spawned from there,” Bernstein says. “And it all started with rec, a newsgroup that maybe 100 people had access to when it premiered.”

Then, Bernstein himself came to be a valued pioneer on the frontier. Through his postings about Phish in a private message board, he came to run a blog on Glide Magazine called Hidden Track, which he grew from 2006 to 2010 to include an annual readership of more than one million people. He then moved to JamBase.com (founded by Andy Gadiel), where he remains as editorial director. In fact, in 2017, Trey Anastasio only gave a handful of interviews, and one of those few went to Bernstein at JamBase.

But in the middle of it all, circa 2008, Bernstein also founded and launched his own website dedicated to Phish called YEMBlog .com. “The idea was to have this website where I would share all this new Phish content I was finding,” says Bernstein. “But what really hit was the Twitter feed.” In 2009, Bernstein, or a trusted friend, would live-tweet the setlist from the show. Followers could follow along in real time. “It was the beginning of Twitter,” Bernstein says. “And it just blew up. All of a sudden I had 10,000 followers, and all these years later [I] now have 35,000 followers.”

Of course, now the technology is more readily available, and social media is more accessible than ever. “There was a long period of time where you had to be technologically inclined to talk about Phish online and connect with people online,” Bernstein says. “And now social media has brought that down to make it so that anybody can easily talk about Phish and meet people through the Internet.

And so in 2011 Scott Bernstein stopped live-tweeting Phish show setlists. The demands of the practice began to take away from his Phish show experience. It wasn’t fun anymore. “I said, ‘enough,’” he explains. “There are enough people on Twitter and elsewhere; we don’t need to be the source for the setlists anymore. And quickly after that Phish started tweeting the setlists themselves with Phish: From The Road (@Phish_FTR).”

Another premier figure at the time (circa 2009) was a writer and blogger known as Mr. Miner who published extensive reviews of every single Phish show on his website, PhishThoughts.com. In 2011, he too published a book—Miner’s Phish Thoughts—a large compilation of his reviews clocking in at nearly 700 pages.

And it doesn’t stop there. Today, Phish.com, Phish.net, PhantasyTour.com, Reddit.com/r/phish/, and YEMblog.com are all fantastic, active resources for everything Phish. And there are a few Facebook groups, as well—Addicted to Phish and Phish Tour 2014 (named for the year it was founded) both have around 25,000 members. Just beware of the Facebook group Phish Tour 2017; that’s where the trolls live, watch out!

Phish Memes

Phish memes have grown popular—as have all memes in our modern age, particularly on Instagram. Check out #phishmemes and Instagram accounts @thingsyouseeatphish, @phishshit, @phishchicks, @phishmemeisreal, and my personal favorite, @phishdanceparty.

Or, better yet, make and share your own Phish memes!