"Life Is Not A Waiting Room" (2008) Wolves At The Door Hair Of The DogDEAR TIM: Four of the six bulbs in the recessed lighting in our kitchen ceiling keep burning out. I just replaced one and it burned out in an hour. I am using 65 watt bulbs. Our house is only 3-years old. Are the bulbs the wrong size? Is there a problem with the wiring? Cory Dixson, El Dorado Hills, CA DEAR CORY: The problem with the premature failure of the light bulbs has nothing to do with the wattage or the wiring. My first guess is that it can be traced to the person who has installed the light bulbs or previous owners of your home. I think they are twisting them into the socket too tightly. The flickering of light bulbs in lamps and fixtures can also be caused by bulbs that have been installed too tightly into light fixtures. At the base of light fixture sockets you will find a brass tab. This tab is bent at an angle when the fixtures are new and will spring back and forth if depressed slightly.

Do not ever stick your finger in the socket to test this, as you can get shocked if the power is on to the fixture. Take several new light bulbs and inspect the base of each one. You will quickly notice that the bottom of most light bulbs has a small droplet of solder in the center of the base. More importantly the size of this drop of solder is not consistent from light bulb to light bulb. It is close in size, but not always the same size or height. If the brass tab at the base of the socket does not make firm contact with the bottom of the light bulb, a small electrical arc can happen that starts to melt the solder. Over a period of time, the solder can deform and the gap between the solder and the brass tab gets larger. When this happens, the electrical contact between the brass tab and the solder is broken and the light bulb acts as if it has been turned off when in fact the switch is on and the bulb is still in working condition. To prevent this arcing you must be sure the brass tab is always at about a 20 degree angle inside the bottom of the socket.

People who twist bulbs in tightly will depress and flatten the tab so it does not spring back when a bulb is replaced. If you discover the tab is flattened, then you must turn off the power to the lights, and as an additional safety safety measure, turn off the circuit breaker to the lights. Use a needle-nose pliers and carefully grasp the sides of the brass tab and slowly pull it up so the end of the tab is about one quarter inch off the base of the socket. When you install a bulb always do so with the power on and the light switch on. As soon as the bulb comes on, only continue to turn the bulb one-eighth of a turn. If you screw the bulb in too tightly, you will once again flatten the brass tab.“For me, from a pretty young age up until about 21 years old hallucinogenics had a huge place in my life,” Fish will tell a journalist later. “There was a year where pretty much I woke up at 5am, you know, set my alarm for 5am, dropped a couple of tabs of acid and went back to sleep.

It would wake me up at 7:30 and I’d go to school. I got my best grades that year and I had a good time. For me, it was like a sense of humor kinda thing. When Phish started, for the first two years that we were together, I pretty much tripped for all our gigs. We didn’t have that many gigs, granted. We mostly spent our time practicing. I was never high for band practice. I never really did smoke much pot.”Just as Anastasio lays off the Dead, the rigorous drummer lays off the LSD as the band clicks into gear. chandelier gleitschirmBut, he insists some twenty years later, “I still play with the feeling I got from those experiences, trying to generate wind and fire.” chandelier hildesheimHe loves heroic doses but doesn’t hear Terence McKenna’s name until Anastasio brings it up.“chandelier sketch only fools and horses

I loved learning multiple rhythms that moved my body in abnormal ways that quickly became normal,” he says. It is Fishman that makes Phish’s music sound weird from the ground up.Almost immediately after transferring to Goddard in 1986, they stop playing Grateful Dead tunes altogether. The band absorb their lessons, though, as well as everything around them, including covers of songs by fellow Goddard students, like Jim Pollock’s “Dear Mrs. Reagan” and Nancy’s “Halley’s Comet,” and nonsense poetry borrowed from Anastasio’s high school friends and even the band’s recently departed second guitarist. Though Anastasio’s scored-out songs and the band’s fondness for play have far more to do with Frank Zappa than Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead’s culture is as much a part of Phish as country music is to a young musician growing up in Nashville.The lyrics to “Fluffhead” that had triggered the Acid Test meltdown came from a poem by a friend of Anastasio’s about seeing a cancer patient at a Dead show

, dancing down on the venue floor, bald head covered in cotton balls. They do have an instrumental called “Jerry’s Beard,” an odd bit of composed atonality, but the Dead’s influence will emerge in dozens of ways. Around Goddard, they quickly become stars.On the earliest known Phish recording of Nancy’s “Halley’s Comet,” taped at an early October 1986 show in the Haybarn, there is an audible cheer as the song begins: already a hit. They’d debuted it a few months earlier and usually Nancy himself joins in, coming onstage to hand-deliver all the couplets about “Cadillac rainbows and lots of spaghetti and I love meatballs so you better get ready.”But, on this night, Nancy isn’t there. The band arrange Nancy’s layered vocals for themselves, Gordon singing and playing two separate bass lines. Phish absorb new skills as they learn to play it, and the song’s inherent strangeness — a perfect musical expression of its author — re-enforces the band’s growing identity as a product of deepest, weirdest Vermont.“

When I was looking at colleges, I visited 12 of them with my dad, and none of them were like [Goddard],” bassist Mike Gordon remembers, the only member of Phish who doesn’t transfer in, though he commutes to Plainfield a few times a week. “It was like being part of a secret society or something, culturally off the grid. Everyone there was self-structuring their educations, and into unique stuff. There was Bruce Burgess, who was doing poetry, and who could only speak in poetry and not in English, as far as I was concerned.”Fishman befriends a metalhead named J. Willis Pratt, another divergent personality with a singular musical voice that might sound grinding and odd to many. The numbers on the campus start to swell. There is something happening out there in the woods, something born of the New Earth, and Phish tap into it.By that time, Nancy Bitterbug Voodoo Coleslaw is no longer a Goddard student. “I’d gotten to a point where I didn’t trust any of the faculty or staff at Goddard, so I wouldn’t talk to any of them.

I didn’t care if I got college credit or not, I just wanted to be there and use the resources they had there. And they were like, ‘you can’t be here if you don’t care about college credit.’” He pretty much sticks around anyway.Nancy sees Phish whenever he can around Goddard and Burlington, which is plenty, and keeps recording whenever he can, too. He remains a figure around campus, his influence fully accepted into Phish’s music alongside Frank Zappa and Jerry Garcia and others.And, unlike the Dead songs, Nancy’s music will stay in Phish’s repertoire more or less permanently. When Phish leave Vermont and grow in popularity, as they will, it is Nancy’s songs that most communicate the place they come from.“I sang [‘I Didn’t Know’] with them once, while tripping on mushrooms,” Nancy says. “It didn’t work out so well, so from then on they either did without me or with me on drums.” He never gets totally comfortable on stage. He’d sung in choirs in high school, as well as with his friend’s cover band.

But that was it for his live performances. He wouldn’t make a compelling live performer, anyway, he thought. How could he possibly recreate his multi part vocals? Or synth-feedback epics like “The Formidable Poseur?”Not long after Phish debuts “Halley’s Comet,” Nancy — somewhat audaciously, no doubt — composes and records a new song for Phish to perform titled “Snootable Snunshine.” Over twelve minutes of woozy keyboards, complex drum fills, and nonsense lyrics, the song contains a surprisingly innate sense of the Trey Anastasio’s compositional whimsy. Anastasio and Fishman break into hysterics upon hearing it, Nancy’s most epic creation yet.One of Phish’s new songs, the mushroom-inspired “Divided Sky,” includes a long palindrome with the band playing in odd times backward and then forward (or is it the other way around?) culminating in Gordon and Anastasio jumping up and down in 4/4 counter to the band. But with its hyperspeed time and section changes, Nancy’s “Snootable Snunshine” is even more unlearnable, let alone playable.

Still, not long thereafter, Phish add Nancy’s “I Didn’t Know” to the repertoire, too, their first foray into barbershop.“I always thought the interesting cast of characters — there in Plainfield and others in Burlington — gave [Phish] its flavor,” Mike Gordon says. At early shows in Burlington, their friends from the UVM radio station bring six giant speakers and mix sound effects throughout the basement of the environmentalist dorm. Vermont seeps into Phish’s music in every way, their oddness as much as the majestic sweep Anastasio conjures with his guitar, a soaring jam-happy variation on Robert Fripp’s sunshine bursts from Brian Eno’s Another Green World.The gigs keep coming, and Anastasio makes sure the band is always on to something new. They play house parties and Burlington bars (especially Nectar’s) and the occasional commune. One night, they load up Gordon’s hatchback with mini-amps and show up unannounced at University of Vermont frats and perform in their kitchens.

Nancy accompanies the group on a road trip for a show that will go down in band lore as the “Sex Farm” gig, in reference to the Spinal Tap song, though Nancy remembers only the room’s “dry acoustics.”“Sex farm” is probably not how the members of the Quarry Hill Creative Center, founded in 1946, would describe their life, but it’s another place that Phish pass through. The band’s Deadheadness, in some ways, allows them access to this other Vermont.Before the band break for the summer of ‘87, they celebrate Mike Gordon’s graduation from UVM with a party at their friends’ place in Shelburne. They set up in the backyard underneath a tent, in front of tie-dye tapestries while their friends sprawl out on the lawn. Others watch from the roof. Mike Gordon’s parents had financed a PA for one of his high school bands, and he puts it to good use with Phish. Even the drums have microphones.With their own PA and light show and soundman (who doubles as a luthier and guitar repair guy) and audience of Vermont hippies and Deadheads — plus families to fall back on if their career fails — Phish are fully independent.

Their situation and particular crossroads in American culture are unique. Because of so many unrepeatable factors, they begin to carry forward various threads of the countercultural narrative, half accidentally and perhaps without understanding it entirely.There are some people dancing at this backyard party, not a lot. It could be the vibe of the afternoon, but probably Anastasio wishes there were more. Those who dance do so like they might be at a Dead show. Phish don’t look like the kind of guys who might go out dancing. Or even throw down too hard to the Dead. But dance music is what they’re after, it seems. That’s Anastasio’s goal, and it seems no less audacious or surreal than his fugues and atonality and charted compositions and mushroom tea jam sessions.He rents a cabin up in the Northeast Kingdom for the summer, moving in with his golden retriever, Marley, and sets a goal of writing music that is both harmonically and rhythmically strange but still danceable. Trey Anastasio has a very specific idea about what makes audiences dance.