In July 2012, guitarist Andy Greenberg scored prime tickets to see Phish at Saratoga Springs, N.Y.’s Saratoga Performing Arts Center. The seats were so good, in fact, that two of Trey Anastasio’s closest songwriting partners, Tom Marshall and Steve “The Dude of Life” Pollak, were sitting right behind him— that is, of course, until they surprised everyone, the band members included, by slipping onstage to sing on a classic they co-authored, “Run Like an Antelope.”
“For some odd reason, after that night, I ran into Steve an uncanny number of times,” says Greenberg, a Charleston, S.C.- based dentist who leads the Phish tribute act Runaway Gin. “One night a few years later, I was alone and lost in a dreamlike misty forest in Saratoga. I came upon a road trying to find my way back to civilization and, after walking a few minutes, I saw someone emerging behind me from the misty darkness. As the figure drew closer, I realized it was Steve. Somehow it seemed to make perfect sense since I kept running into him everywhere. We walked together for what seemed like hours and talked about history, music, family and life—I got a glimpse at how much we had in common, yet how our experiences had been so vastly different. It felt like a really interesting bridge formed at the hand of improbability.”
Over a decade after their initial meeting, Greenberg and Pollak are in the midst of recording their new project Space Armadillo’s full-length album at Charleston’s Coast Records with producer Matt Zutell. Pollak, who lives in the Westchester County section of New York and leads his own Dude of Life Band, has been flying down for the periodic sessions, linking up with Greenberg and the rest of the band, which includes area players like Doom Flamingo/ Lureto keyboardist Ross Bogan, Little Bird bassist Ben Mossman and Motown Throwdown drummer Stuart White. The group’s name is direct a nod to Space Antelope, Pollak and Anastasio’s combo at Connecticut’s The Taft School in the early 1980s. It’s also winks at some of Anastasio’s earliest musical detractors.
“One evening, Space Antelope played a vespers assembly in front of the entire school,” says Pollak, who mentions that their boarding-school band’s early setlists boasted a mix of Allman Brothers, Jimi Hendrix and Grateful Dead covers, as well as a few originals. “That fateful evening earned Space Antelope a boatload of attention and accolades. However, it turns out there was a small group of our classmates who were not exactly impressed. They formed a satirical band called Space Armadillo and performed at vespers the very next week. In discordant fashion, Space Armadillo blew tubas, screeched on horns and slammed their drums. In a mocking fashion, they comically, yet viciously, took musical pot shots at our Space Antelope performance from the previous week. So Andy and I decided to name our new band Space Armadillo, thinking it would be poetic if Space Armadillo—which started its journey as a sardonic small crew of high school kids dedicated to creating non-melodic noise mocking Trey and me—40 years later undergoes a drastic metamorphosis, transforming into a killer nitrous disco-rock band.”
In 2021, after a mutual friend mentioned that they both were looking to start a new band, Pollak and Greenberg booked a show at the latter musician’s Charleston haunt The Pour House and started sharing original material—synergistically connecting their music and lyrics. “Some of the earliest songs involved me taking Steve’s newest songs and, with Stuart and Ross, updating their feel and texture to fit the concept we were cooking up,” Greenberg says. “Quickly, this led to Steve and I on video chats writing entirely new music with some of Steve’s unused lyrics that resonated with me and felt like a good match stylistically for Space Armadillo. We also started writing brand new songs that had no foundation in anything either of us had previously ideated, which is when things really started to click. We are most productive when we collaborate in person. However, we have learned over time to successfully get a lot of work done from afar through FaceTime sessions.”
For their latest batch of tunes, Greenberg and Pollak say that they’ve mostly been taking a very basic kernel of an idea and developing it in real time together—either in-person, via video chat or over the phone. Once a song starts to take shape, Greenberg will bring it to White to help build the tune’s feel at the guitarist’s home recording space, Prehistoric Studios, and introduce the material to Bogan. After digesting the rough draft himself, Pollak will then travel back down to Charleston to rehearse, record the rhythm section and build the final tracks at Coast.
“I’ll go over to Andy’s house, he’ll cook me steak and I’ll pretty much just find the wildest sounds I can on his Yamaha Anx-1 keyboard and track them,” Bogan says. “It’s been great getting to know the Dude as well. He has some incredible stories. I’m pretty sure I understand why he was dubbed The Dude of Life, though I could be way off.”
“One of my favorite tunes that we’ve penned together is called ‘Visitors Center,’” Pollak says. “It started out as a poem I had written a couple years back. I was flipping through the pages of my most recent black, hard[1]cover song journal with Andy. ‘Visitors Center’ caught our attention. I started playing some chords and singing the verses. Then Andy took those chords and began adding his secret sauce, tweaking them beautifully. Before long, we had the verse section down. The chorus section easily and organically followed. Together, Andy and I chiseled away in our proverbial musical coal mine until the verse and chorus sections were properly formulated. The bridge section was developed many hours later in the day. ‘Welcome to the visitors center bridge’ is a literal reference to the bridge of the song while simultaneously taking the listener on a mystical sonic journey.”
Greenberg brought Zutell—whose credits include work with Big Something, Doom Flamingo, Little Wing, Andy Frasco, Little Stranger and many others—into the fold, believing he had “the right temperament, aesthetic style and capability to bring our vision to life.”
He adds, “He’s a great musician—very easy to work with, very efficient and a fantastic communicator. By the time we make it into Coast, we are ready to record the forms with the final bass and drum tracks. We usually do this with scratch guitar, keys and vocal tracks being laid down simultaneously. Then, the bass and drums go back through and do any overdubs they might want. After this, we typically move to the final vocal tracks. Once those are complete, we get to work on the final guitar and keyboard tracks. And, once those are complete, Matt mixes everything together. Then, when we are all happy with the product, we send the track to be mastered.”
While Space Armadillo will primarily focus on their original material, Bogan notes that they have included a few tunes that hug the Phish and Dude of Life catalogs in their setlists, including “Crimes of the Mind,” “Show of Life,” “Can’t Always Listen” and “Fluffhead,” which Pollak wrote about his brother who passed away after battling cancer.
After covering Phish’s music for so many years, Greenberg says that playing with Pollak in Space Armadillo has, oddly enough, allowed him to stray away from The Vermont Quartet’s patented sound. “In the beginning of this collaboration, I made a conscious artistic decision to strive to be as original and authentic with Space Armadillo as possible, perhaps in an effort to balance the fact that we are derivative of Space Antelope, and the fact that Steve’s personality, musical and otherwise, is so intimately intertwined with the ethos, music and spirit of Phish,” Greenberg says, making sure to also note his continued admiration for Pollak’s longtime collaborators. “I want this to be a different animal, despite sharing so much DNA with Phish—almost like an alternate dimension that splits off like a tree branch to a different side to create greater balance and spectrum in our collective musical perception. To be more specific, the feel, chord changes, melodies and even general conceptual matter of the songs are, from my vantage point, more influenced by The Beatles, The Doors, The Who, The Flaming Lips, Led Zeppelin, Smashing Pumpkins, ‘80s pop and ‘90s alternative[1]rock music.”
“Thus far, we have been having a blast,” Pollak says of their work on the forthcoming LP. “We wait with bated breath as the Space Armadillo album is rapidly making its way to the launch pad.”
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