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Phish production manager plays a perfect chord with a transplanted organ
Saturday, July 08, 2000 By Gene Collier, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
It is four hours before the show and the Post-Gazette Pavilion has assumed its accustomed backstage rhythm, which is oddly languid and urgent at the same time. But for this event, the reliable summer appearance of Phish, there is a very warm, very human subtext not always evident in the hectic superbusiness of the modern concert game.
It has little or nothing to do with the Phish's noted audience, which is part nomadic splinter group inherited after the demise of the Grateful Dead -- the so-called Phish heads -- and part enviro-groove inhabitants who appreciate the Vermont-rooted group's eclectic swing from bluegrass to rock and back across all manner of happy disciplines.
Instead, tonight's karma has everything to do with the band's 40-year-old production manager, one Hadden Hippsley, who is, among many things, an example of what a person can get done with a donated liver.
"It's not so much having a transplant," he is saying in the catering tent as sound check looms and the band's chefs prepare potato leek soup, "it's wondering sometimes how long it will last, when will it fail? I heard a cancer survivor describe it this way once: It's like a piece of furniture that's always going to be in your home, your home representing your brain obviously. Some days it's a little piece of furniture you don't even think about, and sometimes it's a big piece of furniture you have trouble making your way around.
"Ninety-nine percent of the time you don't even think about it, but then something happens, you read something, and it triggers this endless circle of worry that leads nowhere."
Hippsley can perhaps break the circle more readily than most, and he's broken it up and down highways in both hemispheres. He is here only 15 hours from the end of a show in Toronto, barely 24 until the next one in Wisconsin. He's had the medication that suppresses his immune system stolen three times in Amsterdam. He barely escaped death-risk surgery in Japan when a member of his transplant team, Dr. Saturo Todo, persuaded Japanese surgeons it was not necessary to remove his appendix. Todo told them to wait for an infection to pass.
Hippsley's been doing this for 17 years, since he graduated from Miami of Ohio as a dynamo with his own production company, since he first started touring with Rick Springfield and later with Van Halen, David Sanborn, and a string of artists leading to Phish. When he got liver cancer and needed a transplant 10 years ago in Pittsburgh, he was idle only four weeks.
He is here, in the most literal sense, because of two Pittsburgh icons: world-famous Dr. Thomas Starzl, and a completely anonymous and yet, to Hippsley, equally inestimable donor.
"I was called in to be an alternate," he says. "The recipient was receiving multiple organs. For some reason, the liver wasn't right for that person. So I got it. I was sitting in the waiting room waiting to be told I could go. They came in and said, 'OK, you're on.' Physically, it was like having your tonsils out. Emotionally, it was much more difficult."
Marsha Zak, the RN coordinator at the Thomas Starzl Transplant Institute who was assigned to monitor Hippsley's case, said that though his situation required logistical gymnastics, his feelings about it are fairly common.
"I remember trying to Fed-Ex him his prescription in Vienna and having to time it so it would get there before he moved on to the next place," she said before the show. "Vienna, Munich, Japan, it wasn't easy. But he's been great. Hadden is really a sweet person. Once you have a transplant, certain feelings are always with you. Where did this liver come from? Somebody had to have something bad happen for me to get this, had to have something terrible happen in their lives.
"The whole thing is still a huge problem. There are not enough organs. The waiting list grows. It only increases by tiny amounts. I think there's a great potential for donation. I hope the Phish fans can relate to this."
That's why the concourse behind the pavilion's permanent seating was flanked with some unusual tables last night. The folks from the Center for Organ Recovery and Education were signing up potential donors and offering literature. Most of us don't understand the tedious and dangerous process that CORE monitors until it is tragically late.
"It never occurred to me that my Jonathan would not get a transplant," Rosemary Woods was saying as the tables were getting set up. "He needed a heart and a liver. One night he was studying for a test, the next he was on a respirator."
Jonathan died in March of '98, a day short of his 10th birthday.
"This helps me a little bit," she says. "If Jonathan would have had me stuck somewhere, it would have been at a Phish concert."
Hippsley puts out fires via walkie-talkie while he's interviewed. He is clearly pleased to have his work venue be a forum for something so significant, even as a subtext.
"He outworks everybody," said Brian Brown, the guitar technician who goes back with Hippsley to that Rick Springfield tour in '83. "But he's absolutely changed since the transplant. He's more aggressive. More energetic. Just a couple of weeks out from it, we were working 17-hour shifts in Japan in 100-degree heat. He's gained a lot of depth. We talk a lot about things, and he knows this transplant is a best-case scenario. I've known a number of transplant recipients, and Hadden is like them in that they seem to get in touch with a certain power within themselves."
On these, the front lines of an industry in which folks are wearing out their livers almost as fast as their amplifiers, it's a quiet and yet hugely significant success story.
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