Without Phish, Bonnaroo might not exist: How the jam band created a blueprint for the festival

Tim Ackerman has gone to Bonnaroo every year, and at this point, that’s really saying something.

Seventeen years on, he has spent more than two months of his life on the campgrounds of the Manchester, Tennessee, music festival.

In those early years, when he would see Tom Petty, Neil Young and Widespread Panic playing on Bonnaroo’s giant stage, he’d dream about seeing his favorite live act there one day.

"I always thought, 'Man, it'd be great to see Phish here,'" Ackerman recalls. "Because I feel like they were the cornerstone of this whole thing."

Phish, if you’re unfamiliar, is a hugely successful “jam band,” established in Vermont in 1983, and second only to the Grateful Dead in terms of success and influence. They eventually played Bonnaroo in 2009 and 2012, and return for the third time this weekend.

Also, it’s safe to say that Bonnaroo probably wouldn’t exist without them.

“There's no underplaying the significance that Phish had, as a band and as an organization, in the direct development of Bonnaroo,” says festival co-founder Rick Farman.

Believe it or not, there was a time when music festivals were few and far between in the U.S. — major concert promoters had opted to build amphitheaters instead. 

But in the ‘90s, Phish dared to dream, holding epic, ambitious and fiercely independent gatherings in remote corners of the country, and bringing up to 85,000 fans along with them.

“There were no festivals,” recalls the band’s Trey Anastasio. “And I mean none. It was not something that had a blueprint. The only festival that we could have conjured up in America would be Woodstock — the real one — which was logistically, an unmitigated disaster. So when we started planning our first festival, the first thing on our minds was to make it really comfortable for our friends, which were our fans.”

With their winning approach, Phish actually provided the blueprint — one that was followed closely by Bonnaroo, and many of the countless festivals to sprout up afterwards. As the band prepares to return to Bonnaroo for the third time, Anastasio says, “We feel a kinship. We feel like if we had some part in the stream of this continuum, that makes me feel honored.”

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It began on a friend's farm

Without knowing it, Phish began planting the seeds of Bonnaroo 11 years before it started. In 1991, they invited fans to see them play a free concert at “Amy’s Farm,” a 255-acre horse farm in Maine owned by friend Amy Skelton. Several thousand showed up for the now-mythical show. 

But that was just a warm-up. In 1996, the band put on the Clifford Ball, a two-day camping festival that drew a Bonnaroo-sized crowd of 70,000 to an Air Force base in the small town of Plattsburgh, New York.

It was the first of five massive outdoor events the band would hold independently in the '90s, each one attracting huge crowds, few incidents and positive PR.

In the wake of that success, they sometimes had to fight off other interests, and insist on running things their way. After Clifford Ball, Anastasio says there was a suggestion to hold the next one at Randall’s Island — a popular outdoor concert site in New York City.

“My response, and the guys in the band, was 'I don't want this thing that's so precious and beautiful to get eaten by this industry that we don't believe in,’” he says. 

“…So our solution was, 'Not only aren't we gonna go to Randall's Island, we're gonna go as far away in the continental United States as is humanly possible.' We put the next festival in Limestone, Maine. You really need to look at a map to see how far north that is. It's way further north than the Canadian border. And lo and behold, 70,000 people came for one band. Clearly there was a hunger for something, and we kind of tapped into it.”

Their success became even more striking in the wake of the disastrous Woodstock '99.

That event —plagued with overcrowding, overpriced concessions and corporate interests— famously descended into riots, arson and assaults. For years, much of the U.S. concert industry was too spooked to plan any more festivals.

But just five months after Woodstock, Phish held their most successful fest ever: Big Cypress, which brought 85,000 enthusiastic, peaceful fans to a Seminole reservation in Florida to ring in the year 2000.

"Phish had actually established that it was possible, that there was an audience out there that embraced the festival experience," says Bonnaroo co-founder Ashley Capps.

"And they did it in a way that was imaginative and professional, and really captured the hearts and minds of their audience. That inspired us."

Big Cypress left an impression on the band, too. Anastasio calls it “the home run of all festivals.”

“We went to a sovereign nation. Not one cop. No press. No advertising.”

Also, almost no media attention — even though it was the largest ticketed concert on Earth for the new millennium celebration. That didn’t bother Phish.

“We thought it was cool,” Anastasio says. “We managed to get completely off the grid with 80,000 of our friends.”

But soon after, Phish and their festivals vanished. The band went on hiatus in the year 2000, and their absence unwittingly paved the way for Bonnaroo.

The road to Bonnaroo

Around that time, several of Bonnaroo’s future co-founders were finding great success promoting jam band concerts in New Orleans. When they booked Anastasio for an appearance at Jazz Fest, Farman got to meet several key people in the Phish camp, including manager John Paluska and tour manager Richard Glasgow.

Soon enough, when Farman and his partners started dreaming up their own festival, the band’s team was an invaluable resource.

“As soon as we started down the path of (Bonnaroo), I started calling John and Richard up and saying, 'Hey, do you happen to know anybody that does water systems,' or does this or does that?” Farman recalls.

“And they were extremely gracious. Part of the reason that it was convenient for everybody was that Phish was not working at that time… at that point, they were looking for ways to keep their team busy, and keep money in their pockets. Part of their interest, too, was that they had some resources that we could rent, essentially, from them. They were as gracious as could be, in terms of (saying), 'Call this person.'"

In the end, a ton of people from the Phish festival team came on board for Bonnaroo, from the heads of concessions and production to their “Clean Vibes” cleanup crew and visual designer Russ Bennett. And they’re all still at Bonnaroo today.

'Put the fans first'

Of course, Phish’s festival success wasn’t just about who they hired, but how they operated. Asked what lessons Bonnaroo took from Phish, Farman has no shortage of answers.

Chief among them: “They really put the fans first.”

“A lot of what we had going on in the industry was people fed up with high ticket prices, bad concessions at high prices, overblown sponsorships. We saw that as consumers, and we saw how Phish was doing it differently, for sure.”

“I remember sitting in our managers office, and saying, 'What's the formula for Port-A-Lets (at an event?)’” Anastasio recalls, thinking back to their first festival. “And he said, 'Well, it's one Port-A-Let per 100 people.' And I said, 'OK. Well, let's do one for every 75 people.' Everything was, 'How can we make this more comfortable?’”

But perhaps most crucial — especially in light of Woodstock '99 — is how they held their audience accountable, too. Like the Grateful Dead, Phish had a huge group of diehard fans that would follow them on tour.

“That puts a certain stress on (the area) when that kind of traveling circus shows up,” Farman says. “So they were very progressive about making sure they communicated with their fans, in a way, to say, 'Hey, we're visitors here. Be cool … Act this way. If you do, we'll be allowed back.’”

That paid off in 2002, when 70,000 jam band fans made the trek to see Anastasio and others play the inaugural Bonnaroo.  They were greeted by a massive traffic jam. A 30-minute drive on I-24 turned into a 10-hour excursion. But The Tennessean noted an “orderly” crowd, and an event “without any major glitches.”

'A huge push over the top'

Of course, it’s been a long time since that first Bonnaroo — literally a lifetime for its youngest attendees. Phish’s hardcore fans are older now, and judging from message board chatter, they’d prefer to see the band at their own concert than at a festival.

Still, Farman believes Phish is “a huge push over the top” for casual fans who’ve gone to Bonnaroo for years, or may have taken a few years off.

And there's now an evident generation gap in the Bonnaroo audience. When the lineup was revealed earlier this year, a tweet from a 20-year-old woman went viral.

"Don’t attack me but who tf is phish and why does he have 3 different sets," she wrote. After receiving (mostly) good-natured encouragement from Phish fans, she's pledged to check them out at Bonnaroo.

Anastasio laughs when he hears about this, and jokes that the band’s mission to stay off the grid has continued.

At the same time, there are also younger devotees like “Wombat” Matt Nickel, who’s been going to Phish concerts since 2010. He was at their last Bonnaroo appearance in 2012, and appreciates a more laid-back environment, without “no-nonsense” superfans battling over prime viewing spots. 

“At Bonnaroo, the front is full of fresh young faces, and people are all there to have fun without the drama,” he says.

“Also, the stage is so freakin’ massive!”

Back in 2002, when Anastasio was sitting on that massive stage alone with an acoustic guitar, he was overwhelmed by the sight of 70,000 fans in front of him. 

"While the world is thinking that good, positive gatherings of people in the form of live music is something that's going the way of the wind, I actually feel quite the opposite," he told them.

Thinking about that night now, in 2019, Anastasio says he feels even more strongly about all that.

“Bonnaroo, to me, I feel like I'm part of the family there. And I like that feeling. We kind of just keep coming back.”

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