Music Department’s Parke Puterbaugh Publishes Biography of Phish

Former Rolling Stone senior editor and music lecturer Parke Puterbaugh’s new book Phish: A Biography, was published Nov. 24, and is available at Barnes & Noble and online book retailers.

Puterbaugh, who has taught the music department’s popular History of Rock ‘n Roll course for almost four years, first wrote about the Vermont-based jam band for Rolling Stone in 1995. Although Phish was founded in 1983, “the world was just waking up to them” at the time, Puterbaugh says. “What really changed was when Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead died in 1995, the year I started talking to them. There was a transfer of fans and interest I think from the Grateful Dead to Phish.”

Puterbaugh met several times with band members, eventually becoming their in-house writer. “We got along well enough that they started using me to write for them, doing press releases, artists’ bios and stuff for their Web site. So for the next almost 15 years I talked to them pretty often… I was building this library of interviews. I had access to talk to them like nobody else did, really.”

After Phish broke up in 2004, Puterbaugh learned that De Capo Press was looking for a writer to pen a biography of the band. “They approached me with the idea, and I said, ‘If anybody’s going to write about Phish, I’m the one to do it because I’ve got all this stuff,’” he says.

Though he had more than a decade’s worth of interviews with the band, a comprehensive biography needed more material. “I’d always been talking to them,” Puterbaugh says. “Now I was talking to everybody that worked with them – manager, road manager, everybody in their organization.” Phish was “the ultimate do-it-yourself kind of band… Not a lot was known about them because they weren’t interfacing with the rest of the world like most bands are.” The interviews eventually totaled half a million words.

By coincidence, Phish reunited this year for a tour and put out a new album, Joy. “This wasn’t anything that was in the cards when I began writing the book, but it made the perfect ending. They’re having an amazingly successful year – more fans than ever, playing better than ever. It was the happy ending that I could’ve hoped for but couldn’t have planned,” Puterbaugh says.

In addition to the Phish biography, Puterbaugh also co-writes (with Alan Bisbort) a series of travel guides. Both Florida Beaches and California Beaches published their third editions this year.

Puterbaugh says he’s enjoyed getting to know personally a band with such a devoted fan base. “They’re very personable guys, and great people. I think [guitarist] Trey [Anastasio] is a bona fide genius. In their ways, they all are. I can’t think of a better band that’s extant right now. I think they’re a very important group.”

Dec. 14, 2009