Another favorite thing we would do was when we were coming down the mountain we would spend the whole time fighting coming down the mountain. Instead of walking and just fighting gravity you would just throw yourself down. Actually, [laughs] I remember hearing Tom [Pirozzi] behind me just going, "Whooooa!" and he came just like a flow of hair, skinny body, running and he was like, "Look out!" and he just kept running past us. The rest of us looked at each other and did the same thing and we just all took off, and it was one of the most fun things we did. It was a little tough on the knees. It was almost like skiing down a mountain, you spend your time moving your body left to right, left to right running down a mountain, and it was like an improvisational run because you had all these rocks, roots coming up, and different gradations of steepness. You couldn't think two steps ahead to make sure you weren't going to run into anything or slip over something. That had a big influence on my improvisational style because instead of thinking, it became more of a flow and not worrying too much about where I either came from or too far in the future where I was going, but just where I was right at that point. They sort of did both for each other. I would think about playing while I was running down the mountain and also while I was playing guitar I would think about that same thing of just letting it flow, not fighting the gravity, not fighting anything and just kind of moving with it all the way. So yeah, those usually creep into my head the most I would have to say. Even still when we were living in Albany, we would get out there as much as we could. Yeah, that was really the biggest one and a lot of time, like you said about being in a different place while I was onstage playing, that would be it. I don't think there was any other thing I would think about.

Yeah cool [laughs] I was almost lost as I was explaining it there too. I miss it; I want to go back to that point. Mountain running is what I used to refer to it as.

Yeah, very much so. Where are you living these days?

Oh cool, very cool. Yeah we spent a summer there, Dana and I did. We lived in a house up the hill from town like almost at the crescent hill; I can't remember the name of the street it was on. Yeah, I remember that summer really well. That was the summer where Phish was just starting to get big at the time and we went to this small bar and it might have been the soundman's birthday so they put him up on the stage with all his sound equipment and they played off the stage. There was like 20 of us at the bar [laughs].

That was a great city. We only spent that one summer there.

Oh that's cool.

Yeah, it was like summer of '88 or '89 that we were there. Yeah, that was crazy. I remember Trey's [Anastasio, Phish] girlfriend, he probably ended up marrying her eventually, living there and she was just becoming aware of just how popular the band was becoming. She was real freaked out, but she was psyched at the same time for them. Yeah, it was funny… it was this whole group of people hanging out doing tons drugs and everything else. I remember he [Trey] had just written something, they hadn't even put out that many albums at the time, "Bathtub Gin" or something like that, but they had two horn players from the Sneakers Jazz Band. We used to go see Sneakers Jazz Band like every Monday. I remember Trey had just sort of showed them the songs and I was so impressed with something that he did. I was standing like probably 5 feet away from the horn players and Trey was right next to me. Like I said there were probably about 20 of us at this tiny club. It wasn't a big place; it kind of had a big back area. He was playing along and he had written out sheet music for the horn players and they got lost. He sort of looked over and saw they were getting lost and they would hit a couple of notes. He would always kind of bob his head while he was playing and he barely looked at the sheet music and pointed right to where they needed to be. I was like, "Holy Shit!" Not only did this guy write a whole score of horn parts for these guys to play, but he was so aware of the tune and where in the sheet music they were supposed to be. He pointed right to it and the guy kind of nodded and acknowledged, "Got it," and from then on they got their parts right. They were just sort of learning that tune and a couple of others. I remember thinking that we were such a fresh band at the time; we weren't even touring nor doing anything. I was still a very big Grateful Dead fan, but Phish were just so fantastic and they're energy was great. I remember thinking that was pretty impressive that he had it that together enough that he was able to pull the horn parts together and was very aware of what everyone was doing in order to get the guys back on track.

Yeah, that was an interesting summer. It had an influence on us, but not quite the influence you thought it would have had. We really liked the New York side of the lake, it was a cool city, but there was like a different edge and a different kind of sarcasm that came from Plattsburgh. It was such a great summer; we were psyched to get back to our side though. I remember a couple of months later we went to relatively large clubs that Phish would play at and people would spill out into the streets and at that point they were huge.