Mike Gordon

Summary

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin: Mike Gordon

Release Date: November 5, 2025
Host: Rick Rubin
Guest: Mike Gordon (Phish bassist, solo artist, filmmaker)

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Overview

In this candid and sprawling conversation, Rick Rubin sits down with Phish bassist Mike Gordon to dive deep into Phish’s unique culture, the art of jamming, peak musical experiences, creative processes with other artists, and Mike’s own path—including immersive stories of band history, experimentation, and personal transformation. Gordon’s thoughtful, open, and witty perspective gives listeners a rare look inside the world of an improvisational cult hero.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

The Magic of Live Performance & Peak Experiences

• Peak show at Big Cypress [00:02–02:04]
  • Phish's legendary millennium show: 80,000 people, playing from midnight to sunrise.
  • Mike reflects on their long-standing dream of “The LG (Long Gig)”—even contemplating playing for two days straight.
  • Notable quote:
    “So we had an eight hour jam. We had Portalettes on stage because I wouldn’t be able to.” —Mike Gordon [00:02]
• Secret Sets and Festival Culture [02:04–06:28]
  • Early Phish festivals: unique, art-forward, no other bands, inspired by manager John Paluska.
  • Secret 2am sets, including a legendary flatbed truck jam at a Plattsburgh Air Force base:
    “It was absolutely a dream... And our manager... was riding a bicycle along with us at two in the morning with all the fans. And the truck started going a little faster. So the fans dropped off and it was just John Paluska on his bicycle.” —Mike Gordon [02:42]
  • Lemonwheel festival: Pot brownies with his dad—“I realized I was higher than I’d ever been…Apparently 10 minutes later, it hit him and he couldn’t speak. And it was far too much.” [04:25]

Phish’s Fanbase & Live Taping

• Exploring Phish fandom (“Phish heads”) [07:13–08:55]
  • Fans embrace the vast 600-song repertoire, cherish unpredictability, keep track of live “song catches.”
  • “They love what they don’t know. They want to hear something new.” —Mike Gordon [07:22]
• Taping culture & DIY growth [08:55–10:21]
  • Audience recordings key to their grassroots success.
  • Avoiding major label trappings: “We loved the path that we were on.” [10:07]

Early Band Days & Philosophies

• Formation & quitting day jobs [11:05–12:19]
  • Mike had a trust fund; bandmates worked odd jobs: T-shirt printing, chocolate cow painting, maternity bathing suit sewing.
  • Gradual success: “By 91, we were touring nine months out of the year.”
• Philosophy of “saying no” to big support slots to grow naturally [12:07–12:19]
  • “No one likes opening bands. And they’re too much like our influences.”
• Band bonding and lessons from Bruce Hampton [12:50–15:01]
  • Collaboration, improvisation, “vomiting musicians who can really vomit.”
  • Mike’s first film, Outside Out, with Bruce Hampton: “It’s a story about a guitar teacher trying to unteach the student.”

The Art of Improvisation & Jamming

• "Dream world" in artistry [15:46–18:10]
  • Musicianship is a three-part journey: “Listen to everything, transcend influences, then let the muse and universe just play.” [15:46]
• Peak experience: Goddard College [23:16–30:33]
  • The first “religious” musical moment that refocused Mike’s life on music.
  • “I was very transported. I wasn’t in the cosmos. It was being very present with the four other people. I felt like I loved them.” —Mike Gordon [24:33]
• The necessity of physicality and surrender in achieving transcendence [29:03]
  • “The bass was like an amusement park ride that was hovering me through the woods over this new snowfall... I could feel the self-consciousness go away.”
• Listening exercises & collaborative improvisation [31:38–33:49]
  • Developed “the well” exercises to improve communication and reduce aimless noodling.
  • “The listening exercise was a little bit stuck. So we changed it so that we would be complimenting rather than mimicking. And the more we did the listening exercises, the more we hooked up.” [32:14]
• Non-analyze rule & band dynamics [38:44–41:03]
  • Banning post-show criticism to foster creativity.
  • “When we made the no analyze rule, life got much, much better.” [40:35]
• Accepting cliche and finding Nirvana [41:13–44:29]
  • The power of acceptance, even embracing familiar progressions: “When all that kind of thinking goes away and even the cliches are accepted, Nirvana can be reached.”

Collaborations and Creative Practices

• Leo Kotke collaboration [45:09–47:37]
  • “Between the word Ellie Mosonary and those 10 notes of music, we had a career and a friendship together.” —Mike Gordon [47:33]
• Solo career inspiration & “Artist’s Way” [53:04–54:50]
  • Artistic epiphanies and starting a solo band after Phish’s breakup, overcoming writer’s block.

Phish Band Breakup & Rebirth

• Phish breakup in 2004 [53:43–55:42]
  • Main reasons: Drug issues within the band (particularly Trey) and overwhelming management/infrastructure.
  • “I was the one at the meeting who said, actually, I think we're still playing well. I'm disappointed about this.”
• Rain-drenched final festival in Vermont (Coventry) [55:38]
  • Fans walked 20 miles in the mud to attend the final performance.

Musical Eras & Evolution

• Old vs new: transitioning from cover band to unique sound [84:46–88:51]
  • Early years: covers played too traditionally; Halloween albums as a “musical costume.”
  • “There was one… called Kasvat Växt...we created websites that were farcical...and this band had two cousins with a very long name..." [85:21]
• Song development & recording practices [88:53–91:23]
  • Emphasis on live, in-room creation; jams as seed for new material.
  • “I have a little playlist of the original jam where you can hear the little bit that became the song.” [100:09]
  • Steve Lillywhite sessions: “We’d do takes from 5pm till midnight...and sometimes it is the first take...but in the case of that one, it was the one at 4:30 in the morning after the surrender...That’s the good take.” [89:14–90:31]

Brainwaves & States of Flow in Musicianship

• Biofeedback & “being in the zone” [91:23–96:37]
  • Ongoing collaborations with MIT and Bob Weir to measure and enhance musicians’ brainwaves/alpha states.
  • Experiments at Bob Weir’s studio: “We had a switch we could push that would say either I feel like I’m in the zone...”
  • Challenge of movement interfering with brainwave readings.

Influences & Role Models

• Connection to the Grateful Dead [65:33–69:58]
  • Phish and the Dead: Kindred spirits in format, eclecticism, and improvisational ethic—but eschewing their tropes (“We didn't allow ourselves to play a countryish song with a shuffle beat...no Bo Diddley Beat ever early on.” [69:30])
  • “People say, oh, when Jerry Garcia died, Phish took over the legacy of the Grateful Dead. That’s not quite accurate.” [68:08]
• Frank Zappa, Broadway, Impressionism [70:05–76:35]
  • Trey's training with mentor Ernie Stiers; composed “fugues” as initiation rites into deep jams.

Band Member Dynamics & Rituals

• Band member strengths & roles [57:36–62:13]
  • Trey: Supportive, creative leader.
  • Fish: Flows, unhinged, highly disciplined—“His ride cymbal is his best instrument.”
  • Page: “Dad” qualities; moved from varying to repeating patterns over years.
• Playing style evolution: rhythm & groove [96:37–98:24]
  • Early Phish: Guitar-drum axis; later years—bass/drum bedrock, groove emphasis:
    “Trey at the end of the 90s, stopped playing guitar part of the time. He had a percussion rig and an attitude change.”

Personal Growth & Spiritual Practice

• Meditation (Vipassana and TM), dreams, and creativity [105:37–108:12]
  • Mike’s journey from Vipassana to TM, inspired by David Lynch and Jerry Seinfeld. "I hardly ever miss a sitting. Even if it's 3am on the tour bus..." [106:41]
  • Dreams as a benchmark for meaningful musical experience: “For me, knowing that a jam or a set is going to be a deep peak experience, my indication is I have access to my night dreams.” [63:03]
• Acceptance as artistic philosophy [110:52–114:03]
  • “Overall, I think I have an acceptance, especially of my role...Now I really like my role. It's the best job ever...I get to be in a band that likes to have religious experiences with all the fans.” [110:52]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the Long Gig:
  “We were going to try to go two days. We have all these ideas and only some of them get done.” [00:39]
• On transcendence and musical presence:
  “I was very transported...but it was very natural, like doing the dishes.” [25:05]
• On band longevity and dynamics:
  “It’s amazing that we get along so well. I don’t know another band that has that amount of time with being good friends. The communication has just been so flowing.” [41:13]
• On initial success and anti-commercialism:
  “We loved the path that we were on. It was a very organic, grassroots kind of [growth].” [10:17]
• On the evolution of live jamming:
  “Now they'll just go to A minor. It might take 5 or 10 minutes for anything to happen...It's the muse, you know.” [35:45–37:09]
• On creative originality:
  “Being yourself is probably one of the hardest things to cultivate as a musician.” [15:46]
• On cliches in music:
  “When all that kind of thinking goes away and even the cliches are accepted, Nirvana can be reached.” [44:13]
• On acceptance:
  “If I can even accept that...I’m not looking for cool. I’m looking to literally have the feeling of floating over the crowd.” [43:13]
• On improvisation and flow:
  “Listening to everyone else or listening to the whole is much better than listening to myself.” [37:17]

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Important Timestamps

• Phish's millennium show & festival culture: 00:02–06:28
• Musical peak experience at Goddard: 23:16–30:33
• Phish head fandom/taping: 07:13–10:21
• Formation, jobs, band growth: 11:05–12:19
• Band breakup and reformation: 53:43–55:42; 102:18–103:16
• Jamming, listening exercises, non-analyze rule: 31:38–41:03
• Brainwave experiments & role of technology: 91:23–96:37
• Meditation & creative acceptance: 105:37–110:52

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Conclusion

Mike Gordon’s Tetragrammaton episode is a masterclass in the philosophy and craft of improvisational music. With humility and humor, Mike pulls back the curtain on band chemistry, the joys and pitfalls of creative risk-taking, and the ongoing discipline of letting go and truly listening—both in music and in life. The episode is a goldmine for creators, musicians, and fans eager for candid, emotional insight into the life of an artist always searching for the next transcendent note.

Transcript

[Mike Gordon]

Tetragrammaton. Our biggest show was 80,000 people in Florida bringing in the new millennium. The night of 1999. And starting at midnight, we played straight through till sunrise. So we had an eight hour jam. We had Portalettes on stage because I wouldn't be able to.

[Interviewer]

That's wild.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah. Well, we had been talking for years about doing what we called the lg, the Long gig. This was just planned. Well, the LG was going to be something even bigger. But our idea was for that is we play a regular show and before the encore we say we're going to play for a long time. Right now, longer than usual. We're not going to tell you how long. But you know, that was before cell phones. We were talking about this. So maybe if you feel like calling home and telling them, you know, you're not going to come to work tomorrow, now's the time to do it. And then we were going to try to go two days. So we talked and talked and talked about this. We have all these ideas and only some of them get done.

[Interviewer]

That's an amazing idea.

[Mike Gordon]

The lg, the Long Gig.

[Interviewer]

I love the idea. But you did do an eight hour. You played till sunrise.

[Mike Gordon]

Well, let me just say we had some sin ideas too. We were gonna. Because we just like to joke around a lot. We were gonna lock the doors. We were gonna say, you can go out, but if you go out, like the pay phones were gonna be in the lobby. If you wanna call home or call work to say, I'm gonna be late by a couple days, you have to leave and not come back in though. The LG that actually happened was a smaller version of that, but it still worked for me.

[Interviewer]

How many people stayed?

[Mike Gordon]

All 80,000.

[Interviewer]

No.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, these people. So we did our first festival. And festivals meant no other bands, but a lot of art installations and themes. We.

[Interviewer]

So 80,000 people stayed and listened to you play until the sun rose.

[Mike Gordon]

Get this though. So normally at festivals we would do three sets per day afternoon and two at night. And then there's a secret set in the middle of the night. Let me just say that the first one, this was all the doing of John Paluska and 50 artists. He was our manager for so many years. The first one was we would use decommissioned Air Force bases. So it was in Plattsburgh. And the whole two mile Runway would be camping. So people didn't know then that we were gonna have a secret set. Cause it was our first. And the secret set at BIG did you know? Always we Made it a part of our festivals.

[Interviewer]

But when did the idea come? Before the festival started or did you decide at the festival, let's do a gig in the middle of the night.

[Mike Gordon]

In advance. In advance, yeah. It was so beautiful. It was 2am and we had a flatbed truck that we performed on. No singing, just jamming. And we had security around us. It was these on horseback with torches, red horses with red blankets and torches going through the whole parking lot where people were camping. The thing to realize is that when we create special situations, like a New Year's gag, some of them have been incredible or one of these surprise things. It doesn't mean it's going to be good musically. Sometimes it's a special situation, a difference. So it's not going to be good or, you know, or. Or if it's hyped up, it's not going to be good. But some of them are good. And this flatbed truck at 2 in the morning was incredible. It was absolutely a dream. And people started, you know, they were sleeping, some of them, and they started walking along with us and just dumbfounded, half asleep. And then the truck started going a little faster. So they all dropped off. And our manager, who had conceived this whole festival idea, festival with no other bands, which later our festivals were copied by Bonnaroo. And anyway, he was riding a bicycle along with us at two in the morning with all the fans. And the truck started going a little faster. So the fans dropped off and it was just John Paluska on his bicycle. And it was such a beautiful jam. It was one of those ones where it's just like a babbling brook. There was nothing contrived. And we did one several later in. We would go up to this other Air Force base in Maine way in the Tippy Tip of Maine. There's one called the Lemon Wheel. I got to be the namer of some of the festivals. So that was my word, lemon Wheel. And the secret set was a little bit more normal because it was on the same stage and it was just a thousand candles or something. And that was. We just jammed. I had ridden through the parking lot on the golf course golf cart and take in some pot brownies from people. And my dad was willing to try that and his wife and my wife at the time, Cilla. So we ate. I had these two brownies. One of them was actually green because there was. It was like just a mound of pot. And I decided to go for that one because this was a special experience where my dad would be able to take in the music from a different perspective. And so we had three sets. And this was after the first set. It was dinner. And toward the end of that second set, I realized I was higher than I'd ever been, because I still have never done psychedelics. And I couldn't even stand. There were 75,000 people. And I walked up to our drummer, right? He's very easygoing. And I said, fish. I ate this pot brownie. And I think I can't stand up anymore. And he's like, oh, it's okay. Nobody cares. Just sit on the stage. No one even cares. I was able to stand up, but I knew I was higher than I had ever been. And I got off the stage and I saw my dad and I said, are you okay? And he said, what do you mean? I'm fine. And I said, well, that pot brownie was just stronger than it should have been. And he said, don't feel a thing. And apparently 10 minutes later, it hit him and he couldn't speak. And it was far too much. I had some of my incredible experiences with that particular drug, but this was over the top. And then we played the third set. And I didn't peek out with my feeling until the middle of the next day. And then we did the set with the candles. And then I really was. I couldn't speak either. And Trey was taking me on a golf cart ride to get me away from everyone that I knew. And we were trying to figure out again if I had been dosed. He said, maybe you would see grid patterns. Just look at the scaffolding. He was like, no, don't think so. And then Trey got sick of being my host, and I was alone. And we had this radio station called. Whenever we do festivals, it's called the Bunny. And our friend Neil Cleary is the dj just for on site. And I stumbled at the building behind the trailer. There was another truck. And there was a band playing on our radio station. And I just sat there and watched them. I didn't know there'd be a live band late at night. And it was the most insane thing I've ever seen. I think there was someone scratching records and flute and accordion. And I couldn't believe it was happening, but I was out of my mind. It was too far. But that was that secret set. One more thing at a different year, I think it was called it the It Festival. We used the tower because these are Air Force bases. And we played a secret thing at the top of the tower. And we had repellers off the Sides doing some synchronized, the best they could. Dancing to this little thing on the tower. We had these ideas to use at mit. We saw this thing, which is directional sound where you can just talk to one person and whisper in their ear. From the top of the tower, we'd say, hey, what are you doing?

[Interviewer]

Describe the fish heads.

[Mike Gordon]

It's such an incredible fan base. I mean, there's a wide variety at.

[Interviewer]

This point that separates them from everybody else.

[Mike Gordon]

Well, there's 600 songs in the repertoire, or maybe, you know, 300 that we draw from. They know they're not going to have the songs from the new album emphasized unless we happen to be playing them anyway. It's just amazing to see these people that, you know, it's a different experience because they're so engaged. I sometimes can't believe going to other concerts where people are sitting or people are, you know, these things that show lack of engagement, Even if, you know, maybe it's their favorite band and they want to hear the song like it was on the album or. I mean, not that that's always the case, but I see people in the front row who know all the lyrics and who are into it, even if it's one song is the silliest, stupidest song from 40 years ago, and the next song is a recent, very emotional, heartfelt song, and the next one is one of these fugues, and the next one is a bluegrass song that I brought to the band years ago. And they all thread together these experiences, and the people are right on board with, I don't like the sets that are a tour of the worlds. And now we're gonna do a heavy metal song. Now we're gonna do a bluegrass song that doesn't work so much if there isn't a. A thread of a flow. But to see these fans equally engaged for something so old or something new, something they do know, something they don't know, they love, what they don't know. They want to hear something new. They keep track of the statistics of when was the first time something was played, when was the first time that they were there for a certain song that they've been. You know, I've been chasing this song for a while, and now I finally caught it.

[Interviewer]

Like the dead. Do you have a taping section?

[Mike Gordon]

Yep.

[Interviewer]

And is the marketplace of live shows exists everywhere?

[Mike Gordon]

It does. And that was the way that the word of the band spread, because when we did our first tiny tour to Colorado, there were already a few people making cassette tapes back then. And that's how the Word of the band spread from Colorado to some other towns. It was so gradual. I think one of the keys to success with us, I mean, no one knows really why a band that mostly had songs about Unit Monsters and Multi Beasts became so incredibly popular. I mean, for me, it's because of my peak experience and it's because I know that the fans were having that experience beyond the cliches of Grateful Dead meets Frank Zappa. I know that there was a deeper experience and that we were playing because we loved the unknown and we expected the unknown every night. And there was planning and making the set list different. So there's the planning and the contrived mixed with all of the letting go and seeing where it's going to go. And the fans knew that was going to happen. So it grew very gradually from, you know, playing at a slightly bigger club. Our manager, John Paluska, was very smart and thoughtful and had a lot of.

[Interviewer]

Integrity and sounds like patience as well.

[Mike Gordon]

Well, we didn't really want to get bigger. By the time it was time to get a major record deal, we talked a lot more about avoiding it than doing it because we were worried, because we loved the path that we were on. It was a very organic, grassroots kind of.

[Interviewer]

How important were albums in the Story of Fish?

[Mike Gordon]

Depends who you ask. If you ask the fans, maybe not too important, but we loved listening to albums, as with Me and Abbey Road and a few others like that. There are probably more Rolling Stones albums in my parents collection than anything else. And even hearing songs on the radio, hearing hit songs on the radio was huge for us. I mean, it was the 70s when I was carpooling to school for two hours there and back. And we wanted that. We wanted to have a hit song, but we didn't want it nearly as much as we wanted to enjoy this incredible career. We were able to quit our day jobs and have these big experiences and go around doing weird music and.

[Interviewer]

So how long into the band were you able to quit your day job?

[Mike Gordon]

The truth is I had a trust fund, so my day jobs were limited. I was able to just take time and try to book the band and manage the band before we had real people to do that. But we started in 83. I mean, Trey was. He was printing T shirts. Paige was painting white chocolate on brown chocolate cows all day at Champlain Chocolates or whatever it was. Fish was sewing maternity bathing suits all day long. And it was probably by 91, we were touring nine months out of the year. It was a lot of. Lot of shows just get in the van and go. Well, in 92, we did a tour through Europe and through US opening for Santana. We didn't like to be an opening band. This gradual growth thing was a huge key to our success. And we got a lot of opportunities that we turned down. There's a lot of saying no. People would say, do you want to open for the Allman brothers? There'll be 5,000 people. You've only played for 1,000 people. No, no one likes opening bands. And they're too much like our own influences. We don't want that. So by in 94 is when we first were on David Letterman, first on national tv, and first sold out Madison Square Garden on the same day. Actually, Seinfeld was the other guest.

[Interviewer]

11 years into the band.

[Mike Gordon]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

Overnight sensations.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah. Well, that's 94 started selling out places like Madison Square Garden, but even then we had played some smaller arenas with. We never played with other bands, but we did. There was this group that John Popper from Blues Traveler had put together with this Widespread Panic and Phish and Spin Doctors and the Aquarium Rescue Unit and Fish. And we did these. It was called the Horde. I remember the Horde tour. Do you?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Mike Gordon]

Did you know the Aquarium Rescue Unit or Colonel Bruce Hampton?

[Interviewer]

No.

[Mike Gordon]

You would find him very interesting. He's passed away. So just to go on a tangent for a second, Bruce, he had had bands since the 60s as a Hampton Grease band and crazy groups of people. He claims that Jimi Hendrix opened for him, and he's kind of a Southern Captain Beefheart, philosopher, Taoist guy. We opened for the Aquarium Rescue and then they opened for us, and we took lessons from them. But Bruce Hampton is a. He's the visionary. And he would play sometimes this thing they called a chazoid. It's an electric mandolin. He didn't really know how to play, but he had pools of soul. And he would just kind of stand there and let it happen around him. And there was a whole philosophy that he and his band mates would all talk about. And he talked about vomiting musicians who can really vomit. He really liked Bobby Bland, he really liked B.B. king. He was okay with Chick Corea, but he didn't like the Chick Corea Electric Band. He had problems when he found that musicians were not telling the truth. And he was very opinionated about that. And we bonded. He said, these are the Gordon years. And so I ended up making my first movie with him called Outside Out. And it's a story about a guitar teacher trying to unteach the student, this high school student. Wants to get into music school and he has to audition. And he finds Bruce Hampton as his teacher and we used his real name. And Bruce tries to unteach him of all of this.

[Interviewer]

Sounds great.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Was it scripted or was it scripted?

[Mike Gordon]

No, it's just an interesting question because so I learned. I worked on the movie for 5,000 hours. And meanwhile, you know, Trey is so prolific with his songwriting and I had always been writing, but I think I stepped aside from writing songs at that point because it was always already covered and I wanted to just get into film like I had started to. So I spent 5,000 hours on it. No script. There's 100 page outline. I realized why a script would be great to have. I made in one other feature length movie called Rising low. That's about 25 top bass players that happened to be on the same project. And finding out, what do you like about the bass? Why are you the most famous bass player and not other people? What's your success story?

[Interviewer]

Who are the bass players I had?

[Mike Gordon]

Let's see how many can remember. I'll test myself. There was John Entwistle, just a few months before he died. There was Jack Bruce, Larry Graham, Bootsy Collins, Phil Lesh, Jack Cassidy. It was a tribute to Ellen Woody, who was the bass player from the Allman Brothers and Government Mule, who had died. And these were supposed to be his favorite bass players. We had Flea and they had all of the big rock bass players, except they almost got Paul McCartney, they almost got John Paul Jones. They didn't have, I don't know, maybe Bill Wyman would have been nice. Getty Lee. But other than those, they had all the big ones. It wasn't even video, it was film. So I got to film them performing and ask them these questions. What do you like about bass? What was it about you that made it?

[Interviewer]

Same questions for everybody.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah, There was an editor, Sherry Beilander, who, this is ironic, she had worked on Woody Allen movies and this was an Alan Woody movie, spelled the same but backwards. And she helped me figure out this sense of story. I mean, I like in movies what I like in music, which is the dream world that gets created. Dreams are so important to me. And I don't know as much about story probably in songs or in movies. So we, what we came to, it's not so groundbreaking. This is three part theory that these musicians had listened to a lot of different stuff, a lot of different influences and maybe influences outside of music, maybe in the art world or like my mother is my biggest creative influence. And then they had transcended their influences and developed their own voice, like Leo Kaki, you know, within five notes that it's him. And then. And it's hard. It's. Being yourself is probably one of the hardest things to cultivate as a musician. And then they transcend to their own voice and they let the muse and the universe just play the music. But the interesting question about the script, because I've had this idea for my next movie which is going to be a lot better than the first two that I'm going to direct. And I've been writing it. The idea is from 30 years ago. It's called the Sound of Orange. So having a script is going to be very liberating. Because when I made the first movie, there was no script. A lot of it was improvised. And then I couldn't cut from a two shot to a one shot because of that. I did my own editing for 3000 hours on that one. So now I have the script going and I love it. I'll direct it. I'll just tell you that. I'll give you the logline if I can. So there's this very disoriented person, worse than amnesia. He doesn't know if he has a wife because she keeps disappearing or if he's imagining or he doesn't know why people are chasing him and why he seems to be an accountant. And he keeps hearing a song over and over again and he discovers he's just a character in the song. He traces the song because it's only the one repeating thing in his life. And he goes to the radio station and the record company and the recording studio, and he finds out there's going to be a concert. And when he gets to the concert, he realizes that everyone from his life is already there in the audience, and he's just been a character in the song.

[Interviewer]

That's a great idea. I love movies with amnesia.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah, me too. I like when there's a question of which reality is which. It's a little bit related to Stranger Than Fiction with Will Ferrell, where he's a character in a book and some other movies. And we're steering, you know, we're letting it become its own thing.

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[Interviewer]

Tell me your first memories of music.

[Mike Gordon]

I liked anything that felt magical. So for me that was going to be one of three things. Movies Because I am transported to another place. I was interested in electronics and gadgetry because if you push a button and something happens that you didn't expect. So when I went to college it was electrical engineering for a little bit and then music. Which of the magical things connected me to emotions but the closest and I had a whole childhood of crushes and making inventions. My parents had a lot of albums, but Abbey Road, for example was a big one. When I was probably came out when I was six and I also had a crush for several years and the album and the emotion were just entwined. So that was probably music started to become the biggest magic for me of all those things. And then my family was in the Bahamas in 1977, I was 12. There was a band that played in the clubs, but also living in the Bahamas? No, just a trip. And there was a band called the Mustangs. The singer was John Boy. He had a big afro and 75 silver necklaces and they played by the pool. And my dad and I were in the pool and I was just watching the bass and listening to the bass. And I said if I'm ever in a band, I want to play that thing because I like the vibration. And my dad said the same thing. He would also choose bass. So there were these kind of formative moments and then there were a couple concerts. The one that really got me was the Grateful Dead at Boston Garden.

[Interviewer]

Any specific albums you can remember hearing in the house besides Abbey Road?

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah, they had Leonard Cohen. I think it was Skin from the Old Ceremony. And that got played a lot. And there was a who album or two. There was Moody Blues. Something about Abbey Road just got very deep. And see, I was going to Jewish day school and I wasn't able to. I wasn't learning Hebrew even. And we had to study Tanakh for, you know, an hour a night as Homework. And I didn't know what I was doing and I was pulling my hair out. My dad was trying to help me. And. And for me, having crushes and feeling like I'm just obsessing about a person, even in third grade, fourth grade. And these musical experiences, these were the ways for me not to think about homework. These were to have a more, you know, eternal kind of experience, as Joseph Campbell might say, while being in my normal life. I didn't realize what from the Jewish experience was seeping in, whether it's all the melodies that were being sung, but it was very indirect, subconscious.

[Interviewer]

Were your parents religious in any way?

[Mike Gordon]

We went to temple. Not hugely religious, but somewhat religious. Just the various holidays. And when I got to college in 83, I knew I wanted to find a band. And within about two weeks I answered a sign, bass player needed. And that was the same band I'm in now, fish. So that's 41 years ago.

[Interviewer]

Unbelievable. Yeah, unbelievable. Did you know that you wanted music to be your professional life or were you on a path for a different life?

[Mike Gordon]

So I was on a different path at that point, whether it was going to be through my electronics and that kind of thing, making gadgets or making movies. But what I was going to say is my life has been framed by epiphanies and peak experiences. I was thinking about that this week. The difference between it. It's a similar word, but I think epiphany implies a decision that would direct your future, maybe. So that happened two years into playing with the band already. I had switched my major from electrical engineering to designing my own major in filmmaking, communications. And I've kept that going a little bit. But in 1985, I had a peak experience that was a complete self actualization, transcendence, whatever you. It can't be spoken about in words. It was November of 1985. My bandmates were already going to Goddard College. It's a very small bohemian college where, you know, David Mamet went and some people like that. But there were only 50 students. And I was going to University of Vermont and we would play at Goddard College for a school dance or something in this old building called the Hay Barn. So the setup to this.

[Interviewer]

Will you be playing covers? Just. I want to picture this.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah, sure. Well, we all had original material from the very beginning. And even since high school, Trey had been writing songs since he was 8 years old, one a day. So he's very prolific to this day. And I had a bunch. So even from the very beginning there was original material. But yeah, there were covers, so it was a combination. And so the setup to this is that I was an electrical engineering student and I had tests before midterm tests. And it wasn't easy stuff, you know, I was dabbling in electromagnetic field theory and semiconductor physics. And I was very lost. It wasn't my vision for what being an inventor could be. And I was already planning on changing my major to filmmaking. But it was a day in November in 1985. We were going to play at Goddard College. It was about an hour and 10 minute drive. It was the first snowfall. And when I arrived, the snow had stopped and it was very tranquil. I think though the pressure of all these engineering tests that week was part of the equation here. So we had been having gigs, it was only our second year. And we were quintet at that point with the second guitar player. So all of our gigs had perfect starts and endings and changes and parts or great jamming, just free form improvisation. But not both. We never had a gig with both. And we set up in this little spire that night. There's a cafeteria, this old building called the Hay Barn. So it's round. And I've always found that round rooms have a certain mystique to them and a focal point in the middle. And the five of us were in this little round corner. And outside was, as you know, it got to be dark, but the moonlight was reflecting off of the virgin snow. And I could tell immediately that this night was gonna be both. All the free form improvisation and, you know, and then all of the parts sounding dialed in. So we played and there were only 10 people. This is a college with 50 people. And only 10 would come to the dance. And by the second set, there were only two. And the lights were off, so we were playing in the dark for two people. And after the first set. I've not been that big into drugs over my career, but there have been. I smoked maybe one or two hits of a joint and that's it. And for some reason I was very transported. I thought maybe it had been dosed, but it wasn't from this one or two hits. And when we started playing the second set, it was very different experience that I've ever had in my life. And also very natural, like doing the dishes. I wasn't in the cosmos. It was a being very present with the four other people. I felt like I loved them. And it was just jamming. We forgot about the songs and I started jumping up and down to the beat. I found if I got a little before or after the beat, the peak experience I started having wasn't as deep. So I knew I would never be able to put into words because it was intangible what I was experiencing. And after that night, I dedicated all of it, my journals, to figuring out what had happened and how I can do it more. And by the way, I taped it. I had little realistic microphones from Radio Shack taped to the mic stands. And I refused to listen to it because it was so much of the moment. So I walked down the hill. This would have been after the second set. Everyone went in their own direction. And I remember hugging a tree. I'm not really a hippie, but it was the thing to do. And I said, okay, I need to do this. I need to travel around with these people, see if I can have this kind of experience in different cities, everywhere, and live in the woods. And even the filmmaking career I'm about to start isn't as important. Nothing as important as this. I'm actually feeling a little teary thinking about this. I've told this story, but for some reason, maybe it's the jet lag or maybe it's having you here, but it's very emotional seeming. And I didn't want to play again. But they did. They wanted to play a third set. Another one? Yeah. And they were.

[Interviewer]

And you didn't want to because you felt like it was the peak moment and anything would diminish it.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah. That's an interesting challenge for people who have peaks is what will the later peaks be like? Will they be as big or will they be different or. I think, at least for me, you.

[Interviewer]

Talked about jumping up and down.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And do you think the physicality of it is a component?

[Mike Gordon]

Yes, maybe. For two reasons. One is I felt like I really looked stupid now. The fact that we're in the middle of the woods and it's dark and there's only two people doesn't make a person too self conscious. But I could feel the self consciousness go away. I could feel like it doesn't matter what I look like. Even to the other four bandmates.

[Interviewer]

They.

[Mike Gordon]

Just look like my friends in this little circle. So I think transcending that self consciousness 100% was part of it. And then I think maybe the actual movement, maybe it's no coincidence that, you know, in davening, people are moving.

[Interviewer]

In many spiritual traditions, there's movement involved.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah. I felt like the base was like an amusement park ride that was hovering me through the woods over this new snowfall. And over the years, that was a feeling that the Base was just a conduit, but it's also a ride that carries me. And so I wanted. If I switched from playing with my fingers to playing with a pick, you know, would that change the level of the peak that I was having? And it didn't. Anything I tried, the peak was unstoppable. We did the third set still peak. I was worried that it wouldn't live up to the second set. And then we all sat at a table and I said, I had a life peak experience just then. Did you? And they said, well, not really, but we're glad that you did.

[Interviewer]

Have any of the other band members ever reported having that experience besides you?

[Mike Gordon]

That's such a good question. I'm surprised after 41 years and still being friends, that I haven't really asked them, but I will.

[Interviewer]

I'm curious.

[Mike Gordon]

That's. I mean, I know that they've had feelings after gigs where it was just the most incredible thing. And several of them over certain ones. For me, it was sort of a religious experience. I don't know if it was that for them.

[Interviewer]

Do you feel like you accessed something in yourself or outside of yourself?

[Mike Gordon]

I think it would have to be both, maybe starting on the inside. So in later peaks still just freeform jamming, which is very different from noodling. When it works, it's a very focused. It's patterns that are repeating. It's a meditation. We had to go through all these exercises within the band to avoid the noodling that happens and the getting lost in our own separate worlds.

[Interviewer]

I want to understand the process of jamming. Like, do you start with an existing riff?

[Mike Gordon]

So with fish in experiences like that, there were no plans even for whether we'd start with a riff or whether we wouldn't start with a riff. But what happened as we started touring and playing a lot more since early 90s, is people would play a lot. A lot of notes, a lot of ideas at once. And the language used is, oh, no, we weren't hooking up. We were in our own worlds and there was nothing more important for us than hooking up.

[Interviewer]

How long did it take for that to start happening? The hookup as opposed to the well.

[Mike Gordon]

One thing we did is we developed something called the well listening exercises. So we would get in a room at practice. And there are many variations on these. And the first version, it was designed to get us out of our own worlds and listening with bigger ears. So the first simple version is someone would play a lick and then we'd go in a circle and Just copy it often. Maybe a two bar phrase. And even Fishman, the drummer would create something. We very quickly learned that it wasn't only the listening. It was the communicating in simpler ways to be understood. And then we realized, then our gigs ended up having a lot of mimicking where someone would do something and the other person would just mimic. So we realized that the listening exercise was a little bit stuck. So we changed it so that we would be complimenting rather than mimicking. And the more we did the listening exercises, the more we hooked up.

[Interviewer]

How did the idea of listening exercises come?

[Mike Gordon]

I think it was probably Trey's idea, but we just all knew that we were lost because the fans liked that era because it was so experimental. And one of our influences is the Grateful Dead. We were Grateful Dead fans along with a bunch of other things. And with the Grateful Dead, I like how I think it was the Boston Globe put it, they were like a bunch of butterflies in a field, randomly fluttering. Or maybe a worse analogy would be a bunch of people trying instruments in a music store and kind of hearing each other randomly with us. It was described that we were like a herd of buffaloes that would be going at full speed ahead and then suddenly turn left together.

[Interviewer]

How would you know when to turn left together?

[Mike Gordon]

Well, that's what we were cultivating with the listening exercises. It could be a rhythmic shift, it could be a key shift. It could be a pattern. It could be any of the above.

[Interviewer]

Would there be a cue?

[Mike Gordon]

There was something kind of kitschy that we developed back then. We called it the language. So there were actually musical cues where we could talk to each other in riffs. Eventually that was demoted to just a novelty that we did for the fans. We had one that indicated we should fall down, and we all just stopped playing and fell down. And we had a way to describe people in the front row in musical riffs, and we would stop and just point at them. There were some musical cues within that. But by doing these listening exercises, sometimes it wasn't the notes. Sometimes we would just follow each other with tempo or with legato versus staccato or different kinds of key changes. So we got more attuned by doing that and then just by having hundreds of.

[Interviewer]

So in those examples, in a key change.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Does someone change keys? And then everyone follows. And how do you know?

[Mike Gordon]

I'll tell you what, I'm going to fast forward all the way to this era now, okay? Trey loves it when I change keys as the bass player and we practice making sure everyone can hear Clearly. So they can follow you.

[Interviewer]

Wear in ears.

[Mike Gordon]

Now we do. For years, it was very controversial. So we didn't. But now we do.

[Interviewer]

You didn't because it was controversial with who?

[Mike Gordon]

With ourselves. The idea was that. I mean. Okay, I'll say it in harsh words. The band members thought that using in ear monitors. Was a bigger detriment to the Grateful Dead than Jerry Garcia's drug addiction. Because they thought that music is made to. That the sounds are made to collide in the air.

[Interviewer]

I think that's right, by the way. Yeah, I think that's true.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah. What I was also going to say about the current era and what we've grown to.

[Interviewer]

Is.

[Mike Gordon]

The Fish guys are really good at not trying to prove anything. And that's taken to an extreme. There's hundreds of songs, and there are all of these atonal fugues. That Trey wrote with his composing mentor, worked into the songs. So there's songs and there's fugues, and then there's jams. Not in every song, but. But some songs have all three. When we get to the jam part these days, we might just sit on a minor. And there might not be a pattern or a lick or anything planned. Those guys, after 41 years, there's so much relaxation and acceptance. It's incredible what they don't do. They'll sit on a minor and do Nothing. In the 90s, people were doing in the band, were doing everything. They were saying, okay, we're gonna go to a key at Tritone Away. And we're gonna do a triplet rhythm. And it's gonna be the most shocking thing. And we're gonna do it together. Cause we're listening so hard. Now they'll just go to a minor. It might take five or ten minutes for anything to happen. But they'll just wait. And then when it happens, it's a beautiful thing. It's the muse, you know, it doesn't always take off into a religious experience. But I think being so relaxed about it, not trying to prove anything, Is what lets it go more often than not to a special place with no plans, no patterns, no lifts.

[Interviewer]

Will the thing that makes it open typically be rhythm?

[Mike Gordon]

It has to start from rhythm. The rhythm has to be. There has to be a floating quality that is desired and cultivated. So that's the starting place. But it might be a melody we might not know. It might be any of the above. It might be that Fish might. I mean, he practices all day, every day. And he has incredible. All of his limbs are independent as all hell. For better or worse. Because sometimes in the middle of a rock song, that's not what you want. But he's figured that part out, too. He's really the namesake, for more reasons than people would guess. He's a very flowing, relaxed, and yet thoughtful person. And he's crazy and silly and just being himself. So he might have this pattern between a ride symbol and a wood block or something. I might not even be. You know, I always had the observer going, even in these big experiences. But I might not be analyzing it. I might just be hearing it and playing. I love what I don't understand. And I might make up a baseline. I may change the rhythm. So it juxtaposes against that in a way that I don't. Couldn't count. I'm just feeling it. It might be all of those things. A lot of times, listening to everyone else or listening to the whole is much better than listening to myself. If I can stop listening.

[Interviewer]

Absolutely.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Absolutely.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

I think that might be the biggest key to all improvisation.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah, I think so.

[Interviewer]

Listening to either the whole or everybody and not yourself.

[Mike Gordon]

These lessons have to be learned over and over again. Maybe that's why those of us who meditate, meditate every day, and not just sometimes. Because it's easy to fall back into trying to control something that the muse does a lot better controlling than we do. So it's kind of interesting to look at this, Cultivating these religious experiences by looking at what the challenges are. So I talked about noodling a lot, being in our own worlds. Another challenge we had was analyzing. We would get off stage after the first set, and we would go backstage and some comments would start flying around. And Trey would say, well, that's good set, Fish. Everything was kind of fast. And then we would get up for the second set, and everything would be so slow. So we realized that one of the problems was this analyzing and judging that was happening. So we developed something called the no analyze rule. This is now late 90s. And we were not allowed to get off stage and analyze other than saying, oh, that was really good. That's what we could say.

[Interviewer]

How did that happen?

[Mike Gordon]

The second sets were sometimes crummy because of feeling this judgment.

[Interviewer]

Did everyone recognize it or how did it happen?

[Mike Gordon]

I can't remember. So specifically, I will say that we're all visionaries and thinking about some deeper issues in music. But Trey really is a great leader in that. He's the one that's going to step up to the plate and say, okay, we should. Let's try this. So I would say that he probably instigated it. I would get glares sometimes in the first set, and it was always for two reasons. Either there wasn't a bed of solid rhythm to sit on, or the opposite, that I was so intent on laying down the solid groove that I wasn't listening and flowing freely. So that was always a balancing act.

[Interviewer]

So glares are okay.

[Mike Gordon]

Glares were not okay. Well, I crept in after the no. The no analyze rule set the tone for no glares. Less glaring, less judging. When we made the no analyze rule, life got much, much better. Because I would be in the middle of playing and I would think, I'm having the feeling that I want to go here and here isn't expected. But that's my feeling. I wouldn't worry that I'm going to get shit for it later or a glare or even a, you know, side comment later, to be truer to yourself.

[Interviewer]

But could that create confusion musically? If different members have inspiration to go in a different direction at the same time, there's a crash.

[Mike Gordon]

Yep. I mean, they're still gonna be clashing while playing or while talking or. It's amazing that we get along so well. I don't know another band that has that amount of time with being good friends. The communication has just been so flowing and off stage, you know, talking about what we want to do and our goals and these problems of different values, different opinions, different goals. They're just worked through with us. A lot of it also has to do with acceptance. It's been a big theme. Let's say there's a song. Let's say it's supposed to have a reggae groove. And it doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like even the reggae groove, it doesn't feel slow enough. And I'm playing. There's the mode from when I was younger, more often when I would think, darn it, it's not right. If I could just get everyone to slow down, you know, or hit the right hits, then it would be so much better. So not to do that is very powerful to say, this is what it is. It's not what it normally is. And accepting in every way. So everyone has that philosophy where we might later at practice say, when we did this song, it was too fast. Can we just. You know, it's in a humble way. It's not between sets, though, during this experience, that's okay. That's just progress. But to be playing and accepting can lead to some incredible experiences. And honestly. So I think that the for me, one of the hardest things to accept is if something sounds cliche. And my whole career is I'm in a band that's not considered cool. But now some people are coming out in the music business saying, oh, actually, fish was an influence. But generally speaking, it's not a cool thing. We're not following any trends at all, ever. And then there's the cliches within what I hear with what we're doing. So if we're, like I said, we're sitting on a minor, someone might start playing a melody, or I might play a bass line. It might be in itself a cliche as a phrase or a chord progression that we've done so many times. And that feeling of going through the motions of regurgitating something from before is a crummy feeling. But if I can even accept that, that, okay, this is not cool with a capital C. Maybe I'm playing a bass line, maybe I'm repeating one note for half an hour, and that's a peak experience. And if I'm thinking, well, there's bass players out there, they want to learn some interesting patterns and bass lines, for me, it's the opposite of that. It's like, I'm not looking for cool. I'm looking to literally have the feeling of floating over the crowd. And sometimes there's cliches, and if I can accept them, oh, this sounded like something like the Rolling Stones were doing in 1973. Why can't we be more modern? Why can't we do chord progressions that we haven't done? And why do we have to be? When all that kind of thinking goes away and even the cliches are accepted, Nirvana can be reached. So these are the challenges.

[Interviewer]

I feel like even in a cliche, you can find subtlety in it that makes it transcendent.

[Mike Gordon]

There's a book friends with this guy Pat Pattison, is called Writing Better Lyrics. It was the bestselling book on music in all of Amazon. He's an interesting guy. There's one chapter on cliches, and that's one thing that he says as soon as there's a little tweak where it's now fresh, and it's not something that's been overdone. It's not a cliche anymore.

[Interviewer]

And it can be the smallest adjustment, you know, it could be the smallest leaning in a slightly different direction, can.

[Mike Gordon]

It can change everything. Just a serious thing that's right.

[Interviewer]

And maybe even the listener doesn't know the difference. But when you're playing it you can feel. I noticed that the way it bounces off of the other things is new in songwriting.

[Mike Gordon]

It's like that, too. It can take one note in the phrase or that makes it feel fresh. Yeah. Oh. So you had asked about peak experience, these kinds of experiences outside of Fish. And I started playing with Leo Kotki early on, and we have three albums together.

[Interviewer]

How did you come to me?

[Mike Gordon]

So that was another epiphany. I had heard him play, actually, when I was just starting college. All the Fish guys were at a great club in Burlington called Hunt's, and he was doing a set. It was. You know, it's very eclectic. It sounds like classical music for a moment, and it sounds like jazz for a moment. And it's. And, you know, you could hear a pin drop and during the silent moments. And he's so funny and whimsical. So I was attracted to his music pretty early on. And I met him briefly once or twice. And I heard a radio interview, must have been in 1999 or so. And he was about to come to town. It just clicked that this sense of humor would align. He often uses a kind of a groove that's like a train, but he couldn't tell you what he's doing. But then he tweaks it. He doesn't know augmented chord and language like that. So I decided to put together a little care package for when he came to town in Burlington, Vermont. It was. Well, the main thing is I took a piece of his unaccompanied guitar and I added a bass line, which I composed over three months. It was called the Driving of the Year. Now, it was really interesting to do that. I didn't know whether I should be harmonizing to him or doing some lines in unison or just being a more traditional bass player. And I sort of combined all these elements. I made a cassette, and then I brought my first magazine cover on Bass Player Magazine. I'm jumping in the air in Vermont with hills in the background. And then my book that I wrote, which is silly little blurbs, called the Mike's Corner Book. So I gave it to him, and on stage, he referenced a story in my book. He said he really liked it, that I had used the word elliemosynary because he hadn't seen that word since some other book. And it was in a story I wrote only to use big words that I thought were pretentious because who knows what they mean? And then three months later, I hadn't heard from him. And he called me and he said, I Listened to the tape. I finally listened to the tape. And he said, well, you know, a lot of people have given me tapes like this over the years and actually it's a kind of cheesy thing to do. But there's something about your tape that's a little different. So let's get together and jam.

[Interviewer]

And then I'm shocked that anyone else ever did this.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah, I know. It's like, oh, this happens all the time. Puts it on the stack.

[Interviewer]

That's wild.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah, it's kind of like when we met Willie Nelson. For the Farm Aid thing that he does, our guys wanted to give him a Vermont Bud. And we get on his bus, which is so pretty of all the woodwork and everything. And he said, oh, thank you so much, much. And he takes out a huge bucket and throws it in the bucket. It's kind of like that. And like I've gotten lots of tapes. So we went to Trey's barn on a mountaintop. It's a 200 year old barn that's been rebuilt on a mountaintop by our crazy builder friend Mike Larson. And we went there and we played for two or three hours and it was a nightmare. Everything that I tried to do on the base took the mystery out of his playing by anchoring it, by attaching it to a genre. Until we did one lick, it was maybe like a little one or two bar pattern. And that was the ticket to us playing together for the next 20 years. So between the word Ellie Mosonary and those 10 notes of music, we had a career and a friendship together.

[Interviewer]

Can you play me the lick?

[Mike Gordon]

Probably not. I know on the first album we made it was a song called June. I could mimic it, but. Yeah, see if there's.

[Interviewer]

See if we can find it.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah. The first album was called Clone and we just used pots and pans from the kitchen and we were in a little shack. There wasn't even going to be an album. I was getting divorced the first time and I had to go get out of Vermont. And we were in a shack too. Let's let it go and see if there's like a B part that's the best we're feeling. And messed that. It's hard to. I haven't heard this in 20 years. I guess we're just trying to make variations. It'll be this leg, I guess, so entwined. It's hard to know what's what. On our latest album there's a song of his called Ants, which is kind of similar and it modulates to a Whole bunch of different places, but that is a monster on the guitar. And then I figured out a monstrous bass part to go with it. That. That. That's. This seems like the precursor to what was later going to be Ants. Probably something that simple. Even though I can't hear it. Yeah. Even with my other band, which is just my. Goes by my own name. At this point, there was another epiphany. St Albans, Vermont. I live on the lake north of Burlington, Vermont. And I've been building a studio for three years. And now it's done. And my kitchen is pink, modeled after seeing yours at Shangri La. It's beautiful. But before building the studio and before living on the lake, I was in St. Albans, Vermont. It's an old war town. And I was walking around having a peak experience in the artist's way. One thing that people that do the artist's way. One of the exercises is to go on an artist date every week for two hours. You turn off your phone, you go alone, and you go with your inner child. That book's all about developing your childlike sense of wonder again, despite your inner critic. So it might have been that. And I'm walking around St. Albans and I suddenly realized that this person, Scott Morawski, who I had met years and years ago, would be someone I should get in a cabin in the woods and write songs with. So we developed this repertoire and this.

[Interviewer]

How did you meet him?

[Mike Gordon]

He played in a band. Funny thing is, he had a band called Max Creek. He's played with for now 51 years or 52 years. All this happened when I was 18 and went to college. Within one month, I saw Leo Kotki play at Hunt's. I met the FISH guys and I saw this person, Scott Murawski, play. Usually these big changes are supposed to happen in groupings of seven. So I wasn't 21 yet. I was 18. It's not a great.

[Interviewer]

Anyway, it'd be interesting to look at your astrological chart on that.

[Mike Gordon]

I should.

[Interviewer]

That's interesting.

[Athletic Nicotine Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Mike Gordon]

And now I'm playing with all those same people 41 years later. So fish broke up in 04.

[Interviewer]

Why?

[Mike Gordon]

Probably because some people's problems with drug addiction. That's probably the biggest thing. But there were some other tangential things. There were some questions about. The management had grown very big. We were doing everything in house. We had a genius manager, John Paluska wanted to keep control over everything. It got to be too much. Too many band meetings, too much planning.

[Interviewer]

It became too much of a business.

[Mike Gordon]

Would you say I wouldn't quite put it like that. We do these festivals with no other bands. Our manager, John Palisko, started the first one and it would be 12 months of work and art installations. And so it's not just all about the money side of the business or even trying to get to be more popular. It's really even trying to make the experience as original and as all the artistic ideas coming to fruition. Even that part of it was too much. We got together to approve T shirt designs several times a year because we had merchandise in house. And so there was that. And maybe there was the feeling that we had been doing it since we were 18 and with everything going on, with such a big infrastructure and so many fans and so much management, and maybe it was just a lot of everything, A lot of time, a lot of planning. And then with the drugs, especially with Trey, he wasn't in good shape and so he called a meeting and he said, we gotta stop. And I was the one at the meeting who said, actually, I think we're still playing. Well, I'm disappointed about this. And the fans made these shirts that said Mike said no. Which later was attributed to another thing. But so we had our last concert. It was a festival in Vermont, Coventry. And it got rained out. It was a mud fest. It was just on fire.

[Interviewer]

That's interesting. That's like a cosmic message.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah. And people came anyway. So it wasn't rained out. People parked 20 miles away along the one highway that led to northern Vermont, one of the highways. And walked.

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[Interviewer]

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[Mike Gordon]

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[Interviewer]

What would you say each member of Fish brings to the table.

[Mike Gordon]

Well, Trey is an incredible leader because he is really good at bringing out the best in everyone else. That's probably the first thing. And then supportive, supportive, encouraging. I still need my solo career so I can write more songs and see them through, because it's very important to me as a creative person. But the Fish career is incredible to have all those fans. We play at Dick's Baseball Stadium in Denver every labor day and there's 27,000 people in four nights. It always sells out in 10 seconds. And fish, who I started talking about before, he's unhinged. He's very disciplined, like I was saying. But he flows. I think his ride cymbal is his best instrument because he can flow so gently like, you know, waves in an ocean. And Page is an interesting one. Back in the day, he would have kind of like the dad like qualities. He would be the one to if someone needed to be fired or they would get a call from Paige. So he might have a grounding. I think he has sort of a grounding personality. Although with. I don't know if this is a keyboard thing. And when we're doing freeform jamming, I think it was the hardest for him to get into repeating patterns. He was more varying. Go on one tangent this is reminding me of. I had a few experiences that led to this idea that with my own band that we have something called the non varying exercise. And at a sound check, each person has to come up with a lick. And once we come up with it, that complements what everyone else is doing. We're not allowed to vary it five or 10 minutes, which is in eternity during a sound check. And it's the life changing experience. And it sounds like a new song being written every time. By the third minute there's an inclination to, oh, if I just added this note, the 7th or something, or another note here, but not allowed to. And by not varying, I start to hear all of the nuances between the notes. In my band, there's a percussion player, Craig, and I'll hear between two conga hits that there's a world of varying already happening. And by not changing the notes, it's really interesting. It deepens the experience by many multiples because with people who have facility on their instruments to be able to play all the scales and all the ideas that come that can bring us back to that early 90s problem. But by limiting it, it kind of started from this. I was the first bass player in the band which became dead and company with Bob Weir and his friends and John Mayer. And just for the rehearsal, the first rehearsals and all that. And there was so much noodling that week by everyone. Loud, millions of notes. And toward the end of the week, Bobby said. Well, he said two things. He said, first of all, rock and roll is about swinging and being straight. And all rock and roll is based on that's the rock and the roll. So be mindful of that. He was talking about Elvis. In Elvis's band, the guitar player would play straight and the drummer would swing or I think that's how it worked. The second thing he said though is I want to just play this song on the pattern without doing anything. No chord changes, no singing, no soloing, no embellishing. And it was a life changing experience because I had been a Grateful Dead fan and gone to a few shows when Jerry Garcia was live. And this was the experience where the air around me crystallized and became like those incredible concerts I went to a thousand million times than earlier in the week when everyone was playing a million notes just by making it a meditation mantra. So I took that to my own band and even with Phish we did it a little bit forcing the non varying. So that's why when we're talking about the band members and Paige is the one that was the hardest to hear, he brings a grand piano and it's such a dynamic instrument with such range and such dynamics. And if the monitors aren't just right and if he's doing a lot of varying, it's really hard to hear. But he's gotten in the last few years so much better at reaching out with a simple melody and repeating it. And then it's another one of those balancing acts where sometimes the thing to do is to vary and to say, okay, well I'm going to be free and see where my fingers go. And it ends up being a fine line to figure out what to do anyway. Yeah, I would say Paige, he still feels kind of like a dad type. I would say I'll still give him that role.

[Interviewer]

How loud do you guys play on stage?

[Mike Gordon]

Not as loud as some rock bands that I've heard on stage. It got out of control before the in ear monitors and before I started using molded earplugs. There was a lot of mid range in the arenas that would come back at me, just sort of glaring blaring. So I don't know how much of it is from the stage and how much of it is from the front of house. You know, different people have different degree of hearing loss. And so first using the earplugs. But the inner monitors have actually been pretty liberating because we can each control. Same thing with my own band.

[Interviewer]

So you can hear what you need.

[Mike Gordon]

To hear to be able to hear. You can hear, you can mix in ambient microphones and it doesn't feel so taboo anymore. Although we just played at the Sphere. Do you know about the Sphere?

[Interviewer]

Yeah. How was that experience?

[Mike Gordon]

It was incredible.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about.

[Mike Gordon]

Was especially incredible. We had three rehearsal days and we were the first band to play after U2 did their 49s. So for the rehearsal days, we got to go out in the audience. And so visually, there's 180 million LED lights and it's 100 times bigger than an IMAX movie. So you're really placed in a dreamscape. And like I said, dreams are one of the most important things to me. Well, actually, I'm going to go on a little tangent. That's fine. So for me, knowing that a jam or a set is going to be a deep peak experience, my indication is I have access to my night dreams. I feel like I'm actually in my night dreams. And certain ones that are reoccurring, I'm feel like I'm actually there. And not just visually, but the emotion that comes with the dream. So dreams end up being a kind of a benchmark for me to have this access. It's opened up in that way. Now the Sphere is being in a dream because it's the highest resolution screen in the world. Because we don't ever repeat a song over several weeks. It meant that all four nights were gonna be different songs and that the visuals created. We had a team of people work for 10 months making visuals. And each visual for each song is related to the song, but not so literal. And then there's 167,000 speakers. It's a whole new technology. They're all phase aligned. And one thing I don't think YouTube did is make use of all the directionality. And so in the middle of a jam, there might be a synthesizer sound that's going from lower left to upper right and a guitar that's going from the right to the left and just moving all around. And we got to hear multi tracks back from the seats. Plus the seats have vibration, so the bass is actually vibrating seat. And I hear that each seat has smell as well, but we didn't use that. So the whole experience is so immersive. Playing from the stage. There were some more challenges. Visually, there's a Lot of people instead of the visual. So I found myself looking up and looking around. I mean, sometimes we're underwater and way up high, there's little guys swimming like this.

[Interviewer]

And the stage is below the audience.

[Mike Gordon]

Pretty much, except those on the floor. But I don't think the floor is the place to be for, you know, the fans will line up. In the past, they would line up for 24 hours to get in the line, to rush to the front. In fact, some fans would skip the encore to get in line, like in Madison Square Garden, for the next night's front row or hire someone, if they could afford it, to stand in line for them. Then we developed a lottery system, so I don't think they have to. They see who would get up there, but they want to be up front.

[Interviewer]

Talk about the Grateful Dead. Tell me about the first show that you saw. You said you saw them in Boston.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

What the experience was like compared to any other concerts.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah, I mean, the only other two arena concerts I had been to at that age were. The first one was Jay Giles. That was difficult. It was very loud, for one thing. A couple hundred decibels of Magic Dick playing the harmonica. And then the Allman Brothers at Boston Garden, and that was pretty good. But with the Grateful Dead, did you.

[Interviewer]

Go with your parents?

[Mike Gordon]

No, I went with two friends. My friend Dan McBride, who was not to be confused with Danny McBride, the comedian who I met at a fish show. Dan McBride from high school. And our mutual friend Susan Perlstein, who knew nothing about the Grateful Dead or concerts or. And I know we smoked a bunch of pot. I remember there was something hilarious about the person selling hot dogs, though I don't remember what that was, but. But what was great about. I think it was happening on many levels. It wasn't just a singular thing. And there was the way what they did with sound being different. And I got to be friends with Dan Healy, who really innovated a lot of their sound. For example, not having the kick drum be full of sub information, having a high pass so that the kick drum is controlled and things like that. So the sound is very pristine. Mixing a lot of different genres and influences into what they're doing, from, you know, rootsy country and bluegrass to jazz and funk, and just a kind of a melting pot. Well, so Bruce Hampton always used to talk about intention. It's a lot about what your intention is going in. And the intention was to have a transcendent experience that was apparent. They weren't performers, you know, flicking their hair back and that kind of thing. They wanted to share these musical traditions and have it elevate beyond where they're coming from. I really like what Bob Dylan said when Jerry Garcia died. In about nine words. Something like, he is. I'll screw it up. He is the personification of that, which is deep muddy water country and screams up into the spheres. So it was both the traditions and the innovations and. And, yeah, it's hard to be put into words. And with the improvisation, it's just the interplay that was happening. It just wasn't done. It's not often done at rock concerts.

[Interviewer]

There are almost never.

[Mike Gordon]

Almost never.

[Interviewer]

Almost never.

[Mike Gordon]

And then the culture around it.

[Interviewer]

And then. How would you describe the connection between the Grateful Dead and Yew?

[Mike Gordon]

That's very interesting, because in our first few years, when we started doing a lot of interviews and the record company would give us a lot of things to do, one of the questions was always, how do you feel being compared to the Grateful Dead? And we thought musically it was pretty far off. But in terms of some of the values and connecting with the fans and varying each night so that each night's a different experience. There were some relations, but it was so frustrating. And then when they did their last shows before Jerry Garcia died, it was at soldier's field in 95. They asked us to be the opening band, and we said no. And everyone just. That was another example of a great no, because we already had enough to troubles with the passing of the torch. People say, oh, when Jerry Garcia died, Fish took over the legacy of the Grateful Dead. That's not quite accurate. First of all, we already were selling out the arenas the year before. But secondly, if you really love a band and where they're coming from, you're not going to like another band to sort of be a replacement. The real older Deadheads. You had no interest in us. I think it might have started with people who wanted to travel and sell burritos in the parking lot and T shirts. But then whether or not they came into the shows, and if they did come in, they knew that every night was going to be an experience rather than a performance. And that was a paradigm that lends itself.

[Interviewer]

So it's more like the format of the bands were related more than the music, I think.

[Mike Gordon]

So actually, we avoided musical things that they did specifically because we sounded like the Dead. Yeah. For example, we didn't allow ourselves to play a countryish song with a shuffle beat. They did that all the time. And we didn't allow ourselves to play the Bo Diddley Beat the bum bum bum bum bum ever early on. And then once we started playing with the members of the Grateful Dead and that kind of thing, it was a little bit less strict. So.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, it's kind of cool, though, to say that's their thing. We're not gonna do that. Yeah, there's enough other flavors.

[Mike Gordon]

And also, Trey was. He grew up going to a lot of Broadway shows. Now he's one of them that he scored, was nominated for Tony. But there was a lot of that. That element. He had his senior project at Goddard College, which was a musical. And we performed the songs from the musical. And there's just kind of a vibe that's very different than. There's also. The Frank Zappa influence is pretty big in terms of these crazy compositions that I worked into. I mean, before every Fish tour or certain of the shows, I'll have to learn a 10 page atonal fugue that I've been playing all these decades. And there's muscle memory, but there's not quite enough. I have to sit there and just go through it one way or another. It keeps changing keys, it keeps changing where the one is. And we don't play those songs a lot, but enough so that it's another thing. Just like my electrical engineering tests before my peak experience, where it's the winding up of all these notes.

[Interviewer]

Explain what the. I'll say. What's the purpose of a piece like that? Yeah, how does it work?

[Mike Gordon]

Well, well, the intention. It's probably something that Trey got from the Broadway world where there's different acts and there's different parts. So a song itself is like that where when we play one of these fugues, it doesn't sound like what they called the fusion bands in the 70s or, you know, where it doesn't sound like math. It sounds like it's delivered with a carefree approach. Maybe because we're just faking our way through some of the notes that we've forgotten. But just the attitude is it's a looseness.

[Interviewer]

It's not prog rock.

[Mike Gordon]

Not exactly. It's related to it. And there were big Prague influences, especially Trey and Fish. They liked early Genesis and King Crimson and, you know. Yes. And some other more obscure bands. So there's that influence. And I would say in the compositions themselves. I mean, I've written a couple, but the first one I wrote is. I would not call it a fugue, but my song called Mound, Trey calls it the payback song. Because I had to learn so many notes. And suddenly there's these guitar chords in 5, 4 that change. Every chord is a different figuring all across the guitar for five minutes. But Trey's compositions are very beautiful. He had a composing mentor, Ernie Stiers, neoclassical composing person in Vermont. Very interesting stuff. His own material. And he would work on one of these fugues for five years with Ernie just going back each week and tweaking it and then plop it. In a Fish song, we would have some verses and choruses. We'd have the fugue, and we'd have the freeform jam. And in terms of the purpose, again, I think it's a rite of passage into where the jam's gonna be. I mean, I'm not saying that those songs have better jams than the ones that just go straight to the A minor sitting on whatever. But there is a release that comes from having gone through these thousand notes. And because it's a fugue, it's a theme and variation. And the melody will come forward and backwards and juxtaposed. And so maybe it sets up a way of thinking for the brain to allow that kind of thing to happen in the jam. Yeah, it's something that a lot of people don't realize about Fish. That's all this composed music. I'm kind of happy that it's only sometimes that we'll play those. I mean, the song Fluffhead is one that Trey wrote when he was a. Probably a freshman. But it's 22 sections, and often there's juxtaposed rhythms where I'll be on the upbeat the whole time, someone will be in the downbeat. Or we'll have parts where I'm doing three beats and someone else is doing four, and someone's doing five. And then it catches up in the end. It's really difficult stuff.

[Interviewer]

Should we listen to a little bit.

[Mike Gordon]

Just to, you know, what I would listen to as an example? Let me give you a different one, which I think is a great example. There's Trey's piece. It's called All Things Reconsidered. Because it sounds like the All Things Considered theme song. I think it's a really good example of. And it's not one that we play anymore, but it's a good example.

[Interviewer]

Let's hear a little of it.

[Mike Gordon]

SA Theme and Variation by Trey Anastasio.

[Interviewer]

It's really good. It's funny because when you describe it, it sounds like something I might not want to listen to. But in actuality, it's an interesting piece of music and feels very much rooted in the classical tradition.

[Mike Gordon]

Trey was and his mentor Ernie were influenced a lot by the Impressionists and Debussy and Ravel. And I had a couple lessons with Ernie myself. And he said, I want you to give me a four note pattern. And I sang him four notes. And he played it as Bach would have played it. And then he played it as Debussy would do it, and then he played it as Art Tatum would do it. It was instantly making it up on the spot. It's very interesting. So it's coming from a good intention. I just have to tell you a funny story. We've done a few practical jokes as a band. And one of my two favorites, or this I guess I would call my second favorite, when we mixed that. Barry Beckett was the producer, and John Fishman had disliked the drum sounds on some previous Fish albums. I mean, I have my complaints about the bass sounds and some of the early ones. And he especially didn't like it when the kick drum had too much crack to it. He'd just like a puffier kick drum. And we said, okay, the mix is ready. Do you want to hear it? He was watching a movie and he said, no, it's okay. You just do it. I trust you. And so we made a mock tape. Every night we got in a rental car and we went to our little hotel, 20 minutes away, and we made a tape just to get him. And then the tape, he also. It was not too far out of the 80s. He hated having a lot of gate reverb in the stereo. So we made the mix that starts with that incessant drum beat. And, you know, the kick drum sounds like. And there's washes and washes of the snare drum, the gate reverb on the snare drum. And it's pitch dark, and we wait a few minutes. And then Trey says, you want it to put on the tape for the day? It's like, sure. And I'm already trying so hard not to laugh. And it comes on and just like a nail gun going into your skull. And Fish waits maybe a minute and he's like, I fucking hate this. It's like, oh, why don't you like about it? The drums? It fucking sucks. Well, why didn't you come in and listen to the mix? That was a good one.

[Interviewer]

It's amazing. Would you say there are any allegiances within the band? Are there like factions?

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And have they changed over the course of the 41 years?

[Mike Gordon]

Only a little. Trey and Fish are very aligned. It's hard to put into words. Maybe they had a band together. In the 80s, where they just did, like, a improv duo in restaurants, and it's insane.

[Interviewer]

Were you the last member to join?

[Mike Gordon]

No, I answered this ad for Bass player needed. And I went to a dorm lounge next to Trey's dorm at uvm. And there was Trey and Phish, and Jeff Holdsworth was our other guitar player, and me. So I guess I was the fourth. And then Jeff left, and then the idea to get a keyboard player was a couple years later, but there were already 25 people dancing in the little dorm lounge. They were playing cover songs.

[Interviewer]

And how much of a role did drugs play in the band? Over the course of the band, it's.

[Mike Gordon]

Been in eras, I know different people had done some dabbling, starting in high school and then college. Not as much me, and certainly some psychedelics. So I've never done any psychedelics. I still intend to. And I want to sort of ritualize the experience. And people that know me think that it will be my drug of choice. I am so into dreams. My thing is, I would, back in the day, eat a couple bites of a pot brownie and play music, even for 80,000 people at one of our festivals. And sometimes get to the point where I can't even form words or hardly stand up. But for me personally, it was a great experience. It changes my appreciation and my attitude, and I feel like the stage is my home, my living room and my playground, and I don't want to be anywhere else. It makes me very, very present and experimental. And in the 90s, when we first had a tour bus, the thing to do is we would play chess all night to sunrise. And by the end of the 90s, it changed a little bit where some drugs were coming into the picture. And, you know, whether it was a little bit of cocaine and having a nitrous tank around and having these parties on the tour bus cranking old James Brown recordings or Sun Ra or whatever. Oh, Fish and I met Sun Ra in his hotel room. That was an incredible experience. Tell me about that, Sunra. Well, he was a big influence, and maybe he's a big influence on anyone who wanted to be different. You know, avant garde. He was playing at the Regatta Bar in Boston at the Jazz Club. And we've actually since then played with some of those people. Marshall Allen, I think, is still alive. He's almost 100 years old. And Michael Ray, but then we didn't really know them so much. And it was three nights and Fishman had already met Sun Ra. Sun Ra was talking a lot about this thing he Called the Book of Information that had been beamed from outer space to Istanbul between every song. And he had xeroxed it for Fish after the first night. I was only there on maybe the third night to give it to him. So we went back to the hotel room and they had the Book of Information Xeroxed for him. And it's all about these different numbers and numerology and spirituality. So we went in his hotel room and we sat there for five hours until five in the morning, me and Fish and Sun Ra and this really annoying Jewish guy who's like the uncle you don't want to be next to at a Passover Seder. He was saying, so Sunra, when you said, did you mean that? You know, that kind of annoying personality? But he said all of these things. Sun Ra for hours that were mind blowing. He said he divided out the different religious centers by numbers. And he said, number five is Jesus Christ. And he said, just look at Doremi fa. So the sun. And he said, just look at our country, which is a Christian country. And right in the middle of our country is the Pentagon, which is five. And what is the Pentagon surrounded by Virginia and Maryland, which is the Virgin Mary. And this went on for five hours, like that sounds great. Yeah. And he said, look at the middle of Jerusalem as usa. That's not a coincidence. And he went on a tangent around that. And then, yeah, at 5 in the morning he was tired and he went to bed. He was wearing a tie dye T shirt at that point. And his bandmates brought his synthesizer in bed and tucked them both in under the covers and he was still talking and they just faded out.

[Interviewer]

How old was he at that time? Would you guess?

[Mike Gordon]

It's hard to guess when someone was born on Saturn. Yeah. Later he had the stroke. And my first girlfriend who I went out with for 10 years, Becca Bucksbaum, Becca Simons, her sister at UPenn, was Sun Ra's psychiatrist when he had a stroke not too long before he died. He still had a lot of. A lot going.

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[Interviewer]

Describe the different eras of the band musically.

[Mike Gordon]

Okay. Well, yeah, the first few years there were more covers, old covers from some of our influences. All of our influences sprang up.

[Interviewer]

Did you do the covers in a traditional way or would you make them yours?

[Mike Gordon]

I think it was in a traditional way to a fault, actually. I mean, we play, you know, a Led Zeppelin song and every note is. I always wish they would vary a little more. Maybe the jam part would be a little more like ourselves. And as we. I mean, one thing we've done is every Halloween we cover an album by another band as a musical costume.

[Interviewer]

That's a great idea.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah, well, we learned so much for spending a few months. So the first one was the white album in 94. And then we did Remain in Light and we did Loaded and Waiting for Columbus. The Little Feet live album was one that we liked. We did that. We actually had the Tower of Power horns. And then in more recent years we've had Alter Ego albums where we make up an album that supposedly existed. Yeah, there was one. The first one of those was called Kasvat Voxed and it was supposedly these guys who were scientists meeting in some Nordic country and making a legendary album. And we created websites that were farcical and packed, dated. And we have an Emmy awarded comedy writer, Steve Waltine, and he was helping us write the backstory. And this band had two cousins with a very long name, same last name. That was great. Kzvat Voxed because we were writing from jams and wanting to have dance music and simple grooves that people could dance to.

[Interviewer]

That's One night would be the only time you'd play that material.

[Mike Gordon]

No, we actually after all of the Halloween albums through. Oh, the second one we did was Quadrophenia. They're always albums and the first few were double albums.

[Interviewer]

You play a double album but you don't release the album because those albums exist. No, but what about for the ones where it's new material?

[Mike Gordon]

We did release that. But what I was gonna say is whether it was the COVID albums or the original ones, a few songs would stay in the repertoire. And kind of influence, you know, like by being in the mind of the who for four months, it really inspires. And then with our own albums, because they were created in this way or our own alter ego albums, but it's created in a way with grooves that we like. And then we actually did some writing together. I actually. We took one of the exercises in that book I was mentioning, writing better lyrics. And we did it as a band where we're. It's designed to have stream of consciousness by doing some stream of consciousness stuff and actually writing together. But much more often over the years, Trey would just have a lot of material, and he would bring it.

[Interviewer]

When Trey brings in material, does it sound like Fish or does it sound like an acoustic song?

[Mike Gordon]

More like an acoustic song. He's very.

[Interviewer]

Does it have all the parts?

[Mike Gordon]

He's very creative with what used to be four track machines and onward. Yep, it has parts. There's so many varieties in the Fish repertoire that there isn't one answer. But he. Often. There'd be drums and bass and with the more complicated pieces, usually he would bring written music that's, you know, only sometimes that there's one of those fugues. But there are some more complicated pieces where we were encouraged to make our own parts. There was one song called Reba, and there's one song called Gayudi. It's a lot of tricky music to play, but I came up with my own bass lines. Often we would do it for a couple bars at a time. He would say, okay, I'm going to just loop this little guitar pattern, make something up until we all like it. But many more times over the last couple decades, it's just a song. It's a simple song.

[Interviewer]

How much of that. Let's use that example of looping it up and coming up with a bass line. Would that happen live in the room playing, or would that be too recorded?

[Mike Gordon]

Usually live in the room, in the practice room, playing together.

[Athletic Nicotine Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Mike Gordon]

A lot of what Fish does is live and in the studio. And there's sort of a mythos around. So much is done with looping and layering these days and pro tools, et cetera, that we have such a telepathy as a quartet that it's worth harnessing that.

[Interviewer]

So it's essentially live band in the room, documented digitally for the most part.

[Mike Gordon]

Well, for writing. Yes, exactly.

[Interviewer]

And then for recording.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah. And playing a lot. I'm very impressed by how much those guys want to get, whether it's in the studio or at a sound check and just jam and if you were.

[Interviewer]

To record in studio and the song's written, how different would it be take to take? Oh.

[Mike Gordon]

Pretty different. There's differences in terms of decisions around what's the tempo gonna be, Is it in the right key, Is it the too many sections? And then there's differences in how good the take is. We recorded a couple albums with Steve Lillywhite and we would start at 5pm, we'd go to 5am and I remember the song Free. I really like the way it came out in that album. The album's called Billy Breathes and I remember. So we would do takes from 5pm Till, let's say, midnight and then take a break. Maybe we'd have a dinner break. And then we used to go to this place called the Pine Crest near Woodstock there in the backwoods. It was like something straight out of a David lynch movie. And I remember also Evan Dando from Is it Lemonheads was also recording in town that whole summer and he was there. So we would see him at the Pine Crest and then we'd go back at 3am and I was the one that was staying on an earlier schedule, so I'd be a little pissed at that. But let's say we've done 30 takes of the song free and sometimes it is the first take and I'd be lying on a couch and they'd say, okay, we're just going to do a couple more takes. And it's not. It's two more hours till 5am the sun's coming out. But in the case of that one, it was the one at 4:30 in the morning after the surrender of. After, like Beaten my soul, I can't fight it anymore. That's the good take. So sometimes would you ever come back.

[Interviewer]

The next day and hit it again?

[Mike Gordon]

Or rarely we would hit it again. That album, Billy Breathes, I think it's a good one from the early days. We weren't going to have a producer. We just were going to go in by ourselves that time. And we went in and we decided we would make this thing called the Blob. We were going to take. It was all two inch tape and it was going to be 45 minutes of one and a half tapes. And we were just going to add. Each band member could add something to somewhere in that 45 minutes anywhere, and someone else could add something to that or somewhere else. And we were going to create a blob of music. And after two weeks we realized we were lost and we decided to get a producer named Steve Lillywhite and that thing that was the blob. This creation is in the middle of some segues. Toward the end of the album, it was still used, but then we were doing the 30, 40, 50 takes of songs. And band members were encouraged to bring their own songs at that point, which is often how it works. Usually people bring their own stuff.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about your brainwave research.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah, so I had an experience with biofeedback that sort of worked for me.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about that experience first.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah, I remember there was a. It was just like a store in Boulder, and I spent some time there, and there's a biofeedback machine, and the idea was to get it to an alpha state. And that's the state where we're half awake and half asleep. It's very creative. A lot of composers said they did all their writing in that state. The idea was to make a gadget that would allow someone, while playing music to get into that state using biofeedback. And the feedback loop would happen because if they're playing guitar, it would start to maybe chorus or flange or something when they're in an alpha state.

[Interviewer]

Oh, so it changes the sounds depending on your brain. On your brain state.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

That's really interesting.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah. And that was what worked for me. Usually, I mean, it takes some practicing with biofeedback, but that first experience in Boulder, I gave it some time in the shop and it really worked. So I got together this team in the last few years of neurologists. There's this guy from the MIT Media Lab who runs what's called the Dream Lab. And it's an interesting group. They've changed over the years. There was someone in Seattle, actually, who allows quadriplegic people to play music just by thinking they can get specific notes with only a 60 millisecond delay and have two people jamming together. 60 millisecond isn't great, but for people who can't move their arms and arms and legs. So we had a great team of neurologists. Bob Weir got involved because I've known him for a long time, but I had read an article where he talked about how important dreams are to him and everything he does. Creating music and writing his book and creating an opera. And I thought, oh, I have to get him involved. And so he was involved on the zooms for a while. And this one person from the MIT Media label, he's a young genius. And his group isolates nine levels between being awake and being asleep. And they want to keep artists in the middle 4 and 5 levels. 4 and 5, using technology. I don't know what their technology is, but they've been successful at it. So we wanted to do some research to figure out whether this is doable because there's a lot of challenges. And one of the challenges is if a musician is moving, usually movement gets in the way of reading the brainwaves. But the technology has gotten better over the years. So we did a few experiments. I was actually recording one of my albums with Sean Everett. He's wild, wild man, you should know about him. He's kind of the go to indie, crazy guy producer, but he's very outside of the box looking for interesting sounds. And we were mixing in his place in downtown la and we decided to do this, the first brainwave experiment. And I had 27 electrodes and we decided to bring in someone who makes beats for like Kendrick Lamar and whoever. And so we had a jam with bass and beats with me wired up. And I was supposed to indicate when I feel like I'm in the zone. And it was partially successful. The readings were good, but the correlation was iffy. It was a very interesting group of people because Sean is crazy and creative and he was just recording. But you might know Michael Burial, who's David Lynch's assistant, and he was there filming on a black and white surveillance camera from one of my dad's stores I had given him. And Paul Dano, the actor, was there. It was just a tiny room with some interesting people. This jam, we're trying to get some correlation between feeling like we're in the zone as musicians and there being an indication that we can create to a binary on, off thing that would turn that flanger on and off. So the second one was with Bob Weir at his studio. And this time we had wireless brainwave helmet. We had five neurologists. And we had also another device that was measuring not brainwaves, but body metrics, heart rate and things like the skin temperature. Because the idea is that if we could do it without brainwaves, that would be even better because it's cumbersome to get that working right with the eeg. And Bobby and I each were wired up and we had a switch we could push that would say either I feel like I'm in the zone now or I just have been over the last 30 seconds. They actually made a wall between us so we couldn't see what the other one is pushing. And then we three members of our team, Jared Slomoff, I've worked with for years and scientist friend John cone and then one of the other neurologists. They were wired up as well because even without any of the wiring, just to know who is choosing when is the special parts is fascinating. And we could see all the results on one screen. So the experiments with Bob Weir were really fun. I got to stay with him in his beach house too. So we had a lot of interesting bonding, which I'm very thankful for. So it was fun, but I don't think it was helpful for us so much. I think that the situation of just playing with the two of us and singing was a little bit out of our comfort zone. And when we got there, he said we should have a drummer or a drum machine. And I was very proud of the fact that my groove was steady enough that he felt comfortable that we didn't need that. But in retrospect, I think he was right because we're used to playing with drummers and playing less. It's really interesting with Fish, when we switched from five people back to four, how I felt like I had to fill in 150, 50% of the bass notes or whatever to make up for the lack of the other person. How that happens.

[Interviewer]

Do you think of you and Fish as the rhythm section? Do you think of it that way?

[Mike Gordon]

Well, that's a great question. It was a little non traditional for our first, let's say, decade, because you were talking about different factions within the band. And Trey and Fish have a similar crazy connection. And so Fish would listen to Trey more than the rest of us and play off of what's happening on the guitar. And the bass and drums were not filling a traditional role. And that was actually frustrating for me.

[Interviewer]

So the guitar was leading the charge.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

By the way, there's not a right way. Every band has a way of operating.

[Mike Gordon]

I don't think it worked for us as well as it could. And what happened in the end of the 90s is we were listening to a lot of groove oriented music and these obscure James Brown recordings and some other things like that. And we covered the Remain in Light album. And so we really wanted to lock down the low end and we were doing less jamming, where we changed keys a million times and really wanting that solid bed of groove. So Trey at the end of the 90s, stopped playing guitar part of the time. He had a percussion rig and an attitude change in the individuals and maybe in the whole. But where the bass and drums could lock and become that bedrock that is needed. And honestly, it was a lot more satisfying for me.

[Interviewer]

In your catalog, would there be an album where it changed?

[Mike Gordon]

I wonder when Story of the Ghost came out, because that's an album where we jammed all day long in the studio. Studio A at Bearsville for 12 hours a day. And we took the best parts and then we wrote to them together. I really liked creating that album. This is called Story of the Ghost.

[Interviewer]

Is that the only one you've done that way?

[Mike Gordon]

No, there's been more. Well. Oh, and that one created an all instrumental. There's also an obscure one called the Sikit Disc. John Sikket, the engineer, was. We named it for him later. I was the one who. I'm a archivist by nature, for better or worse. Possibly worse. And I have cataloged all of my journals, but I also have my favorite jams from a band practice. Now, what I do on stage, I have a button that'll record a little bit. And even while we're playing, even in the middle of a peak experience or something, I'll hit it for a minute and then turn it off.

[Interviewer]

You always remember to turn it off?

[Mike Gordon]

No, I very often leave it on for two hours.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, that sounds right.

[Mike Gordon]

I know to listen near the beginning and near the end because it's probably wanting to hit it again makes me realize that it had been on. So when we.

[Interviewer]

Does it light up?

[Mike Gordon]

Yes, it lights up. That's one of two esoteric boxes I have. The other one is my daughter's Tessa. She's 15, and we've actually been singing together publicly since she was nine. And she's incredible. She's my best singing teacher because she has such a pure heart. You know, families, when they mix their voices can have a special thing. So. Trey had said one of his daughters was sad when he was on stage that he couldn't be reached. And I decided to make this thing called the Tessa Box. So on her lanyard, there's a fob, and she can blink. With both of my bands, she can blink a light that's very bright that gets my attention. And then three, one to tell me if she's stage left, front of house, or stage right. And then if we see each other, we give each other a little signal.

[Interviewer]

So cool.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah, beautiful. She knows that if I'm in the middle of a fugue or maybe a big jam, that that's not the time. Yeah, but the. The recording is. I've really liked writing from jams because it's naturally where the fingers are wanting to go without me being part of the equation at all. It's just the Muse.

[Interviewer]

Would you edit the jams ever?

[Mike Gordon]

Oh, yeah.

[Interviewer]

To turn it into a song.

[Mike Gordon]

Oh. Especially on my own stuff, I've done that a lot. But then when Phish got together with. We did two albums with Bob Ezrin that involved a lot of writing by ourselves. And I had cataloged a bunch of jams over the years. And one of them is a band practice from 1993, and one of them is a huge show, maybe the soundcheck and just these little bits. And so I think our album Fuego has some of those. And then one other album. Anyway, I have a little playlist of the original jam where you can hear the little bit that became the song. It's just really natural to. When it falls into place by itself. So a lot of times. So Trey's had his own band, Trey Anastasio band, for 25 years, and a lot of times he'll flesh out his songs with that band. So I'll get a bass line that didn't come from my own soul. It came from his bass player who passed away, Tony. And it's a little awkward. So when Phish broke up, we broke up in 04, and I had some work to do with Leo Kaki and with the Grateful Dead drummers. And then it was time to write my own repertoire and my own solo career. I wanted to write three albums or 50 songs and start my own band. And I did. And the first song just came right out. And I decided I was just going to improvise in this kind of way, like sitting backstage with the bass. And I loved the way that came out. And then it was writer's block for three months. And I thought, oh, shit, this is not as easy as I thought. And I called Trey and he said, you should do the artist's way. And that changed my life.

[Interviewer]

Beautiful.

[Mike Gordon]

I haven't had writer's block since, and that was 07. So I got back into it. But this idea of creating from what naturally falls into place. And same with lyrics, too. My experience with that. I had this fantasy for years that I just want to write how Paul Simon probably writes by sitting in a room with a guitar. And then when I read the Rolling Stone interview, it said that all he's been doing for 20 years is taking beats, African beats or whatever, other kinds of beats, and using that as a bed. And then. And some random thing like a billboard that he sees inspires without knowing what it means, never sitting and starting with the intention of a story or concept. So I felt a lot more validated at that point.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about any changes from the breakup to the Reformation.

[Mike Gordon]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

When did you reform?

[Mike Gordon]

In 08 and we played again in 09. So four years off, I gotta say. Let me trace that a little bit. So I was the one who said no. It was a big grieving process. And the music is so inspiring. But the friendship. Not just the friendship. The experience of the travel, of the adventure. I had dreams every night about being backstage. There's this guy, Brad Sands, who used to drive with us on the band bus. And so Brad would be there often. It would be a hillside with a few thousand people and just grass. And then backstage, behind the backstage, there's a river. I think it was like the river of my soul or something. And we'd be going up and down the river in gondolas before playing. And that was a huge grieving that that wasn't gonna happen anymore. This bonding.

[Interviewer]

Did that place ever exist or only in dreams?

[Mike Gordon]

Only in dreams. There might have been places like we play it now. We're about to play three nights at Alpine Valley. That's all grass. Well, I guess there's a little pavilion. There are places that are all grass. It's a little bit more in dreams. And I'm usually arriving. I'm the one who goes out and drives through the parking lot in a golf cart and hangs out with the fans. So I'm usually arriving with all the fans down a road. I have even more dreams still with my own band because it's smaller and we're in this little car and we're going from town to town. This sort of stuff outside of the concert is very important. It's the whole experience.

[Interviewer]

Do you have a pre show ritual?

[Mike Gordon]

Yes, I usually run through some scales to get my fingers. Just knowing that it's not only the physicality and the stamina, it's also framing that there will be rhythms and patterns. And then I do some vocal warmups. I can't drink anything because I'll have to go to the bathroom during set. And so that's not gonna happen. When I started hanging out with the Grateful Dead, one of them asked me a question. Is there a recipe for a good gig? Do you find that? There's a recipe. And I made a list. I wouldn't say being well rested because some of the best ones are on zero minutes of sleep, but being somehow balanced emotionally. If I have lunch with an old friend and it feels good, that will make for a good gig. And liking my shirt is important. It doesn't have to be a Fancy shirt. But it has to feel sort of inevitable, comfortable, like I'm not trying too hard, but nor am I wearing what I wore during the day. It has to be just the right comfort level.

[Interviewer]

So you change clothes for the gig typically, or at least shirt.

[Mike Gordon]

If I'm thinking in advance, I'll put on the one that I want to wear for the show to get used to it. But if it feels like, if the shirt is trying too hard to make a statement or uncomfortable, that's not going to make for a good gig. So we'll always play four nights, usually in Madison Square Garden leading up to New Year's. And New Year's is going to have a big gag that's been planned for six, at least six months with extra performers and et cetera. That's not always the one with the peak experience jams because there's a lot of hype. Although I think even these days we've let go of the worrying around that. Actually, TM for me has helped. That's my. Sue was my second wife. Once I started doing tm, she said, now you don't get stressed before tours. And that was huge. And the stress comes at four in the morning. Oh no, I'm going to have to do this and I'm going to have to do that.

[Interviewer]

When did you first get into meditation?

[Mike Gordon]

My mother brought me to a Vipassana. Actually it was the Cambridge Insight Meditation center when I was 15 and for 25 years I did, I guess we would call it mindfulness. When life got hard around my first separation from Scylla, I started doing some silent retreats. I did a 10 day silent retreat Vipassana. In 2015, I saw David Lynch's 8 minute thing online about what TM has done for him. And then I also saw Jerry Seinfeld's that night that we were on national TV the first time. Jerry Seinfeld was the other guest and we had watched all the Seinfelds on our tour bus and you never meet the other guest, but they shoved him into a little closet that we were hanging out. And he said, okay, here he is. And they closed the door and they were saying the opposite things. David was saying, you know, when you wake up, your consciousness is like a golf ball. We just want to expand it to be like a beach ball. So it seemed to be around creativity and possibilities. Whereas Jerry Seinfeld was saying that he had a hit show in the 90s and he was the actor and he was the writer and he was the producer and there were 200 people on the set. And it was a huge amount of stress. And if he hadn't stopped everyone for 20 minutes to do his meditation, he couldn't have gotten through it. So I started, I got trained, and now it's been nine years. I hardly ever miss a sitting. Even if it's 3am and it's on the tour bus and I haven't done my second one, I'll still do it. And now I'm going to sleep less. It's been great.

[Interviewer]

How would you say the difference between the TM and the Vipassana for you have been?

[Mike Gordon]

So what I like? There's something about Vipassana, you know, I guess the idea is to become mindful about everything that we're doing, whether it's chewing or walking. But a lot of concentrating on the breath is done to build up the mind power and the focus power. That felt particularly organic because we're breathing anyway and particularly helpful during stressful times. What I didn't like, it's very simple. In Vipassana, the general message is, this is going to be difficult. It'll probably take 10 years before you can concentrate on the breath for even one minute without a distraction. Not that the distractions are bad. There's no judgment and they don't tell you specifically how much to do it. I love with TM that they say this is gonna be easy and if it's not easy, then you're not doing it right and you have to do it 20 minutes, twice a day, plus the line down. So that structure has been just great for me.

[Interviewer]

Any genres or styles of music that have caught your ear lately where you're doing a deep dive in something that you didn't spend a lot of time with before?

[Mike Gordon]

Well, I've always been into West African music, King Sunny Ade. And so that's not new, but it's a continuing discovery for me. And then I like what happens on Spotify, where I have some friends and it's late night and it goes onto the tracks. If you liked that, then you'll like this. And new names keep coming up. And actually the connection between West African music and Caribbean music has always resonated. That first trip to the Bahamas, kind of, they were playing calypso, what they called Rake and Scrape. And I had never heard music like that before in the 70s when we were in the Bahamas. And then later it kind of just. I went back and it was transmuted into other. But when I hear that kind of tropical, I just got to play with vampire Weekend, my band opened for a week. So how was that new year? Yeah, it was great. It was just really great. And I got to sit in with them, and they have some of that ska influence, and some of that. It resonates. Yeah, it was really inspirational, actually checking out their sets, and I loved our sets.

[Interviewer]

So how far from the recorded version of a song on a Fish album? How different might that song become live?

[Mike Gordon]

Very different in two ways. First, we're discovering the nuances of the groove and what makes it work.

[Interviewer]

Will it always be recognizable or not?

[Mike Gordon]

Maybe not. But then there's the way it expands and that it gets fleshed out with a jam. There have been songs that I've maybe played 800 times, and it's always frustrating. One section that just doesn't sit right in the bass. And then after 800 times, I'll realize, wait a minute. I don't have to do it that way. I can just let it be a way that feels good. And then a door opens. So fans might not realize that Fish shows are so different from one to the next. And people look at the set, listen, they say, it looks like you had a good show. That for me, it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with other factors. You know, one might sound like a band trying to be jazzy all night, and the next one might be something like a band trying to be a rock band. And the whole theme and vibe changes. And I don't like them all. I might like you know, half of them or something. And so if I have a new friend that wants to check out the band, I say, you should probably come two or three times because you'll get three different experiences. So different. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

How would you say your relationship to the music has changed over the years?

[Mike Gordon]

That thing that I was saying about accepting has gotten a lot better because my attitude, for some reason, is very varying from being having a bad attitude and thinking, I don't like the way this sounds, I don't like my role, and all kinds of things like that to. And that's why for me, eating a little bit of marijuana, that changed my attitude. As one way. These days, it's not often I'll usually be sober, but overall, I think I have an acceptance, especially of my role. Having a mother who's an artist, et cetera. I've been very creative. Making things is what I enjoy. As I'm saying things, I'm remembering dangling parts of our conversation from a little bit ago, because I was saying, with peak experiences, my goals are not Always to have peak experiences. The idea of writing and recording a beautiful song and that kind of experience is a different. It's not exactly a peak, but it's now even more of a goal of mine. So the goals change. And with my role with fish, you know, if I write 50 songs, if I'm having a prolific era, I know that we're only going to play a couple of them with Vish. So Trey is always very encouraging and he'll say, bring songs. And that's the way it works out. That's the way that it works out. But I don't mind that now. I really like my role. It's the best job ever. I've told people I have the best job in America because first of all, I get to be a rock star. But second of all, not in the traditional sense. I get to be in a band that likes to have religious experiences with all the fans in the band having these religious transcendent experiences. And I get to be the bass player. And as the bass player, I don't have to solo. And as not the band leader, I don't have to make a set list or make decisions. And that allows me to get in the flow even more. It just saves more brain power for, oh, I'm just going to play these notes and guess what? I'm not even going to be the one to decide them. The universe is going to decide them. On a good night. And I make enough money to support my other ventures, my own career, and my movie ideas. And I have this one note that I've been keeping since 92. I call Bass playing Thoughts. And on the plane, one of the many plane rides to get here, I reviewed it. Just some highlights. I do that from time to time when I want to just think back of what's been the high points or the philosophical points ebbing and flowing. So I get a lot of inspiration still at these Fish gigs. And I'll write in my journal. I'll write to the the members of my other band and I'll say, I learned that music can be this. If we do this. Let's try it. Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge.

[Athletic Nicotine Advertiser]

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[Mike Gordon]

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