four.) Before doing so, he gave me a leg up so I could grab a corner and hoist myself to the top.
“So this is the magical Rhombus,” said Marshall. “A lot of the energy of the Rhombus came out when you hit it, and we’d ruin our hands by slamming into the late hours. But when you’re laying back on it, it feels like it’s echoing up into the solar system. It’s an incredible feeling. It’s definitely a power source. There’s enough room to get four or five people up here, and you all chant and sing, and there has to be a guitar and a six-pack to do it right.”
In my notes from that day, I wrote, “Birds twittering, Rhombus rumbling, geese honking, wind howling.”
There was something alive about the Rhombus. The steel skeleton seemed to vibrate with an elemental energy. The Rhombus is where
the chant for “The Divided Sky” originated, inspired by a phenomenon Marshall and Anastasio witnessed one night.
“We’d always lay on our backs and start with a drum pulse,” Marshall recounted. “This one night, we noticed that half the sky was dark and half was light. It was an effect that came from the clouds being really low and the institute tower being lit in such a way that one-half of the lighting appeared to be off. It cast this incredible beam of light right over our heads. Half of the sky was fully lit and the other half was completely black. And we began chanting, ‘Divided sky, the wind blows high.’”
Marshall got married in 1992, and he held his bachelor party at the Rhombus. Phish were almost nine years into their career at that point, and it was a pivotal time. That year saw the release of their first album on a major label ( A Picture of Nectar , Elektra Records); the re-release of their prior indie-label albums ( Junta and Lawn Boy ), and the recording of the concept album Rift —which, in part, addressed Marshall’s marital jitters. (Just listen to “Fast Enough for You.”) Phish also gigged 112 times in 1992. Amid this bustle, Anastasio returned to Princeton for Marshall’s marriage. At the wedding ceremony, Anastasio and Dave Abrahams performed a Bach processional on acoustic guitars. The bachelor party was somewhat less sacrosanct, ending with a fiery, heavy-metal exclamation by the Rhombus.
“There were six or seven of us,” Marshall recalled. “Trey had his guitar, and we played and drummed and smoked and drank. At the end of the night, we had quite a lot of garbage—six-packs and bags and shit. My resourceful friend John Sprow opened the hatch of the Rhombus. It has since been welded shut, but back then it was just held down by gravity and we knew how to open it. He threw all the bags and stuff into it, which was blasphemy for us since we’d always treated the Rhombus nicely. Here’s a guy who didn’t know our ceremony and just figured, ‘Oh, wow, what a nice garbage can.’ Then he threw a lighted match on top of it, and before long our butts were getting hot.
“This is a quarter-inch or more of solid steel, and the heat was becoming an issue, so we threw the door back down on top of it. All of
a sudden we heard a howling, and it really was howling . Each screw hole began making this jet-like sound and shooting flame about a foot high. The Rhombus became a blast furnace. It really was the night the Rhombus came to life. It was either saying ‘thank you’ or ‘get the hell out.’ We’d like to think it was saying thank you for all the years of fun.”
Every so often during Phish concerts, Anastasio would provide what the fans called “Rhombus narration” from the stage. Seeking out the Rhombus became a kind of holy grail for serious Phishheads. It’s hard to understand why the Phish following had such difficulty finding the Rhombus, since this unmistakable metal icon sits in plain view in a park behind a well-known building in Anastasio’s hometown of Princeton.
No doubt part of the reason is that Anastasio offered clues from the stage that actually threw
“So this is the magical Rhombus,” said Marshall. “A lot of the energy of the Rhombus came out when you hit it, and we’d ruin our hands by slamming into the late hours. But when you’re laying back on it, it feels like it’s echoing up into the solar system. It’s an incredible feeling. It’s definitely a power source. There’s enough room to get four or five people up here, and you all chant and sing, and there has to be a guitar and a six-pack to do it right.”
In my notes from that day, I wrote, “Birds twittering, Rhombus rumbling, geese honking, wind howling.”
There was something alive about the Rhombus. The steel skeleton seemed to vibrate with an elemental energy. The Rhombus is where
the chant for “The Divided Sky” originated, inspired by a phenomenon Marshall and Anastasio witnessed one night.
“We’d always lay on our backs and start with a drum pulse,” Marshall recounted. “This one night, we noticed that half the sky was dark and half was light. It was an effect that came from the clouds being really low and the institute tower being lit in such a way that one-half of the lighting appeared to be off. It cast this incredible beam of light right over our heads. Half of the sky was fully lit and the other half was completely black. And we began chanting, ‘Divided sky, the wind blows high.’”
Marshall got married in 1992, and he held his bachelor party at the Rhombus. Phish were almost nine years into their career at that point, and it was a pivotal time. That year saw the release of their first album on a major label ( A Picture of Nectar , Elektra Records); the re-release of their prior indie-label albums ( Junta and Lawn Boy ), and the recording of the concept album Rift —which, in part, addressed Marshall’s marital jitters. (Just listen to “Fast Enough for You.”) Phish also gigged 112 times in 1992. Amid this bustle, Anastasio returned to Princeton for Marshall’s marriage. At the wedding ceremony, Anastasio and Dave Abrahams performed a Bach processional on acoustic guitars. The bachelor party was somewhat less sacrosanct, ending with a fiery, heavy-metal exclamation by the Rhombus.
“There were six or seven of us,” Marshall recalled. “Trey had his guitar, and we played and drummed and smoked and drank. At the end of the night, we had quite a lot of garbage—six-packs and bags and shit. My resourceful friend John Sprow opened the hatch of the Rhombus. It has since been welded shut, but back then it was just held down by gravity and we knew how to open it. He threw all the bags and stuff into it, which was blasphemy for us since we’d always treated the Rhombus nicely. Here’s a guy who didn’t know our ceremony and just figured, ‘Oh, wow, what a nice garbage can.’ Then he threw a lighted match on top of it, and before long our butts were getting hot.
“This is a quarter-inch or more of solid steel, and the heat was becoming an issue, so we threw the door back down on top of it. All of
a sudden we heard a howling, and it really was howling . Each screw hole began making this jet-like sound and shooting flame about a foot high. The Rhombus became a blast furnace. It really was the night the Rhombus came to life. It was either saying ‘thank you’ or ‘get the hell out.’ We’d like to think it was saying thank you for all the years of fun.”
Every so often during Phish concerts, Anastasio would provide what the fans called “Rhombus narration” from the stage. Seeking out the Rhombus became a kind of holy grail for serious Phishheads. It’s hard to understand why the Phish following had such difficulty finding the Rhombus, since this unmistakable metal icon sits in plain view in a park behind a well-known building in Anastasio’s hometown of Princeton.
No doubt part of the reason is that Anastasio offered clues from the stage that actually threw
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