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In February 1997 Phish followed their first all-arena tour with a fourteen-show run through Europe, the group's first headlining tour on the continent. The band and a pared-down crew relived their first years together by working exclusively in clubs and small theaters, playing to a funny melange of locals and itchy-sweatered Americans abroad in assorted venues, many of which converted into discos as soon as the musicians left the stage. The tour offered Phish the long-awaited opportunity to perform "You Enjoy Myself" in Florence (2/21/97), the city that inspired the song's most inscrutable lyric. Stuttgart (2/25/97) was a hard-core fan satisfier that included such scarcities as a "Camel Walk" opener, "Tube," and "Magilla." The show in Hamburg's Markthalle (3/1/97), on the other hand, was momentous for the band, marking a musical turning point that was edited down and released in October 1997 as the album Slip Stitch and Pass. . . . Seeing Phish in a Rome theater or a Florence disco during the February 1997 European tour, I thought while savoring these shows, was the perfect way to experience the band as they might have appeared a decade earlier. Only better. In Europe Phish toured exclusively in clubs and small theaters for the first time in more than five years. When we spoke afterward, the band members reflected on some of their earlier forays outside the Burlington area.
Mike: My fiance Cilla Foster was responsible for our first tour. In 1988 she was waitressing in Telluride, Colorado, for a guy named Warren Stickney. I didn't know her very well at the time, but one day she called and said Stickney wanted us to come play in his bar. We'd never played further away from home than New Hampshire at the time, but Stickney promised to book a monthlong tour across the country. It took another six months to get him on the phone again, but I finally spoke with him about a week before we were supposed to hit the road. He said something like, "I don't know if I can get you any other gigs, but you can play my place and I'll pay you a thousand bucks." I couldn't get him on the phone after that, so the six of us--including Paul Languedoc and Tim Rogers, who was doing lights--decided to go for it anyway. We finished playing a Nectar's gig at 2 a.m., took a vote, and decided to head west then and there. Our friends Ninja Custodian subbed for us the next night at Nectar's, and we took off across the country with turkey ham, cheese, and apple butter. It was the middle of summer, and we were traveling in a windowless truck with only a foam mattress on the floor. We didn't even stop at a rest area for forty hours, so the truck got pretty disgusting.
When we got to the edge of Colorado, maybe eight hours away from Telluride, we met some people who'd heard of Stickney, and learned about his reputation as a guy who didn't pay either his workers or his taxes. When we got to Telluride, there were posters with pictures of him all over town that said baby huey go home. Everyone wanted him to leave, but he wasn't even around and we didn't know if we had a gig or not. So we made our own posters advertising us as new england's most naive rock & roll band. we drove 2,000 miles because warren stickney promised us a thousand bucks. Stickney seemed kind of bummed about them when we finally met him, but he admitted that, given his reputation, we had a point. He ended up actually paying us a thousand bucks--except for a $155 check that bounced--but we had to play ten nights to earn it. We stayed on the floor in a house called the Purple Palace. Cilla had lived there, but she'd moved away before we arrived in town.
Fish: We played to the same dozen people at the Roma for ten nights. The whole town was boycotting the place because of Stickney's reputation. We didn't realize the impact the boycott was having until someone said, "A lot of people want to see you, but they won't go to the Roma. We're not boycotting the Fly Me to the Moon Saloon, though. Why don't you play there?" So on our day off from the Roma, we carried our equipment across the street and played at Fly Me to the Moon, which was owned by somebody else. It was a weeknight but the place was completely packed, and they ran out of alcohol during the evening. The next day we moved our gear back across the street to the Roma and played the rest of our gigs there to more or less empty houses.
Mike: Stickney managed to get us a gig in Aspen on our way home. We stayed with a friend of a former roommate of Fish's, but we made the mistake of leaving all our money in a folder in the kitchen, and someone stole it. Other than that, our first tour was a raging success.
