Did you know that Fishman's fall back career to drumming was long haul trucking? On this Mini-Cast, Fishman and Lamont talk about his love for both driving & dj'ing!
Kyle:
I'm Kyle Lamont, host of Concert Cast, a podcast about road tripping to America's best music venues, and one of the hardest things about producing each episode is the editing.
The solution minicasts bite-size morsels for your ears conversations that didn't make the full length episode. Our first mini cast is with Jon Fishman, the drummer of Phish, who I had the supreme privilege of hanging out with after his radio show in Belfast, Maine.
This man loves music. It's an every fabric of his being. He also loves to drive so much so that he contemplated long haul trucking as a fallback career to drumming.
Fishman:
I have definitely along the way had that thought like if this doesn't work out, I could drive a truck, I could go to truck driving school. No seriously, I was as good at it. I liked getting to the other end and setting up drums and playing and packing up and leaving again Yeah. But I thought if that part wasn't it for whatever reason, no one was paying me to do that. I could I could make a living as truck. You know, I thought going to semi school might be kind of cool or had you know, in hit that I was a cab driver in Burlington. That was like my part time job was a cab driver because like that was easy, that it was a high turnover job. I could go two three or four gigs or do a small tour and come back and get my cab driving spot back and send me back to the bottom of the ladder. And they'd say, well, you got to drive the night shift again in cab 13, you know, after I'd worked so hard to get to cab eleven and, you know, in the evening shift. But OK, so now I get the crappy cab again and I'm in the middle of the night. But I still love to drive.
But I did. I did. I liked it. And I thought I could. I thought I could probably do that if I had to.
Kyle:
Like Fishman to a drumstick. In the early 90s, he gravitated to the steering wheel and was the go to driver while on tour.
Fishman:
Ok. So I remember I drove straight from Minneapolis to Seattle once. I think that was the longest one. That was like nine tanks of gas. I used to go by tanks. I why my bandmates let me drive that much. It's like, you know, they were I think I was a pretty safe driver for the most part. They didn't feel they were taking their life in their hands.
So I guess they are. Maybe no one else wanted to do it. Page did most of the day drives, you know, like we did. Check out the hotel at 11:00 and, you know, from 11:00 to be at the venue by 4:00. So sometimes it was like a long drive. We do, you know, half of it pull into hotel, sleep for five, 6 hours, wherever, and then, you know, check out and do the rest the next day. So I did. Minneapolis, Seattle. I did Fort Collins, Colorado, to Austin, Texas, which and that was a great one. We drove straight from Fort Collins. Remember, there was a measles outbreak. Mike thought he got the measles. He actually psychosomaticly, gave himself bumps on his skin. It was incredible. We were like “Wow power of the mind! That’s amazing.”
Kyle:
And all that driving, of course, means listening to lots and lots of music.
Fishman:
You know, you didn’t have CD players and all that stuff. So, you know, it wasn't that long ago. But, you know, we would wear we listened to, like the best of Patsy Cline endlessly. We listened to a Superfly like over and over. Curtis Mayfield, Chocolate City, P-Funk, Chocolate city. What are some other ones that were like an endless repeat?
Kyle:
So you were the DJ?
Fishman:
Well, I wasn’t really. It was like we had four or five cassettes laying around in the van and somebody else would pop in, you know, whatever the next thing was. But we've we've listened to these albums
Kyle:
From the driver's seat to the DJ booth his love for playing music over the airwaves started at Goddard College. Today, it's in Belfast, Maine, for his weekly show called The Errant Path.
Fishman:
There you go. That's the last track on. I know, I know I already signed off. I'm just going to say the last couple of things about that. So from that album where I'm coming from, Stevie Wonder's Transitional 1971, where he sort of got outside the grip of Motown. You could hear those first two tracks were really it was just him on a clarinet. And then do yourself a favor.It was him and playing everything except for a bass.
Kyle:
It doesn't reach millions of listeners, but it's a way for him to fulfill his insatiable interest of music without parameters.
Fishman:
We were on Stevie Wonder tonight, for example, and I'm sure I'll get into this. You know, in my Stevie Wonder Part 2 installment, but like, almost nobody knows that the guy that wrote Ghostbusters, Ray Parker Jr., got his start playing guitar on Stevie Wonder's interventions album. Did you know that? No, you didn’t!
So still a lot of people. So I'm just thinking like one little example would be that.
And somehow my brain retains a lot of those little minutia things. So so far you start to realize some of them are maybe now's the time to do the radio show cause some of them are starting to. I do find myself drawing a blank. More than I should. In the middle of my show, like, oh, I know this and I forgot. You know, what year this came out or whatever. So, you know, aging is starting to occur as I got to get on it now. I've got While the Getting's Good, the particular show I like to do, the Errant path is a little meandering that way. If I wasn't focusing on Stevie Wonder tonight, let's say today I I kind of stuck to the artist a lot. But a lot of times I'll start off with some sort of guide like that. Like, this will be my featured artist and then it'll meandered down. You know, I'd end up falling Ghostbusters or whatever down that path for a while and come back to Stevie Wonder and then somebody else that play with him or, you know, it could have branched off into a whole Motown thing, other Motown artists. I never really know where it's going to go, but I usually have a little bit of a start. There's something about the hands on. You know, I had opportunities and offers to, like, put together radio stations at home where I I just do. I kind of edited it. They they'll they'll put it all together. Like I say, well, this is the song list. And here's the things I want to say. And then they you know, which and I might do that was Sirius or some other things. But the hands on, you know, coming in here just screwing up. And, you know, it's all part of the fun.
It's Jonathan Fishman's signing off. You're listening to the Errant Path on WBFY 100.9 F.M. Belfast's Finest Community Radio. Thank you for listening. See you in a couple weeks. I guess I should turn the Mic off first saying. All right. So I should turn this off. Right.
Kyle:
Subscribe to Concert Cast the Podcasts on your podcast app of choice to listen to our full length episode where Fishman and I talk about his favorite music venues.
Fishman:
There's this place. Blossom in Ohio. That's just it's like you're on the inside of it, upside down ship that the shell inside is this wooden knee. Looks like the inside of a wood, hull of a ship.
Kyle:
And we even have a late night studio caller.
Fishman:
WBFY I guess I got to answer it first.
Kyle:
This has been a Good To Go Studio's production made in Maine. Tyler Gardner of Digital Lives Audio is our engineer and Mark Tekushan is our resident mastermind. Special thanks to John Fishman. WBFY100.9FM Belfast Community Radio Station. Eric Klausmeyer, Chris Casares. And thank you for listening.