20 Years Later: Getting Hooked on Phish

I: THE OVERHEAD VIEW

I grew up with the oldies channel on the radio and Jimmy Buffett, John Prine, and John Denver cassettes in the tape player. There was always music in my life, and when I got my first Walkman I started taping songs off the radio and buying cassette (and later CD) singles at the mall.

My musical world expanded greatly when I got to high school, as it no doubt does for most people. At the beginning of my sophomore year a friend loaned me Green Day’s Dookie, Stone Temple Pilots’ Purple, and Weezer’s blue album, and I took my first steps into a larger world.

One night, riding the bus home from an away basketball game, a teammate turned around in his seat and handed me a tape. Matt had moved to my sleepy hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania from Corpus Christi, Texas before our freshman year. He was automatically more worldly than anyone I’d ever met.

I’d heard of the band before but never actually heard the band before. I’d seen the logo on t-shirts and sewn on backpacks, but figured it was something alien to me, something inaccessible.

The tape was the second set of Phish’s October 19th, 1991 show at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, California. Matt had taped it off a bootleg CD that he’d somehow acquired, which in doing research for this essay I learned was called Cruzin’. (Thanks to a DAT soundboard recording this show quickly circulated and became many fans’ first high quality sampling of Phish’s music.) Looking back, Cruzin' is an appropriately Phishy pun--think A Live One or the band's Live Bait series.

The first side of the tape opened with “Llama” and “Bathtub Gin,” but the moment I was hooked was “Sparkle.” Two decades later I look at “Sparkle” and revel in its beauty--Trey Anastasio took a really downcast poem by his friend Tom Marshall about the horrors of getting engaged and turned it into a major-key sing-along happyfest. Back then I didn’t know any of that, but I thought it was catchy as hell. “Laugh and laughing fall apart” indeed.

There’s a “Tweezer” and a “You Enjoy Myself” in that set, a Fishman tune (“Terrapin”) and a cover I didn’t realize was a cover--Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times Bad Times.” I loved it. I mean, I absolutely loved it. I took Matt’s tape home and copied it that night, not trusting him to dub it himself over the weekend and bring me a copy. I wore that tape out over the next year.

II: EVERYTHING IN ITS OWN DOMINION

I soon got Junta for my 16th birthday from one of Erie’s independent record stores, then the rest of the studio albums from BMG. (Anyone over 30 no doubt remembers the eight-discs-for-a-penny scam.) I made mix tapes of my favorite songs and subscribed to the Doniac Schvice, the band’s semi-quarterly newsletter/merch catalog. We got a new Macintosh for Christmas and I made spreadsheets sorting the band’s songs alphabetically and by length.

I bought A Live One when it came out, but I admit I didn’t quite “get it” yet. I loved “Chalkdust Torture” and “Gumbo,” but in my Phish infancy, I often skipped disc two’s monster “Tweezer.” It was too massive, too swirling, too out-there for someone who’d grown up on four-chord folk-rock songs. (Full disclosure: I still sometimes skip this "Tweezer" if I don't have a half-hour to spare for its outer-space tension-and-release weirdness.)

Because of the nascent Internet, one of the areas in which I didn’t get involved was the world of tape trading or tracking the band online. I didn’t buy any of the “bootlegs”/”imports” that circulated in some of the record stores around town, though, mostly because of the ridiculous price tags (sometimes up to $50 for a single disc and $100+ for a complete show). I had the tape of that Santa Cruz, show, though, and the following summer Matt graciously procured me the tape of set II of June 23rd, 1995 from Waterloo, New Jersey because he knew I liked Blues Traveler, and John Popper sat in that night for a jam out of “Harpua” that touched on Abba’s “Waterloo” and ended up as “Llama.”

And I listened and I listened and I listened.

III: SWEPT AWAY

Fast-forward to August of 1996. I was vacationing with my family at my grandma’s house outside Minneapolis. I was 17, and about to start my senior year of high school. My cousin Sarah, two years older and ready to head back for her sophomore year at Northwestern, pulled me aside after dinner one night and asked, in a tone that made us sound like conspirators, “Do you like Phish?”

Yes, I answered. A thousand times yes.

The next day, we drove from Twin Cities to Wisconsin for the band’s first show at Alpine Valley, a ski resort that the Grateful Dead played nearly two dozen times in the ‘80s. I had absolutely no idea what I was in for.

The night before the show we camped out with a handful of Sarah’s friends, a few of whom were really into the band (one guy’s requests: “Free,” “Fluffhead,” and “Harry Hood." He got 'em all!) and a few who were just along for the ride. I talked more to the ones who were really into the band, and once I passed some kind of figurative acid test about Phish knowledge (the drummer wears a dress onstage!), I was accepted into their merry band and dubbed “Cousin Kevin.”

The week before, I’d seen Hootie & the Blowfish at Starlake outside Pittsburgh, my first big-time amphitheater show without my parents. I was all set to rock my Hootie t-shirt at the Phish show as my way of announcing my newfound coolness. One of Sarah’s buddies saw me put it on before we left the campground and he subtly shook his head, indicating that no, Hootie was indeed not cool. I threw on an old UNC t-shirt and off we went.

I didn’t have a ticket, which at 17 really freaked me out. How would I get into the show? Would I have to wait in the car? Would I get arrested and spend the night in middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin jail? (Looking back, I realize how ridiculous all this sounds, but again: I was 17.)

Luckily, the guys we were traveling with found me a ticket at a gas station that was swarmed with young people in VW buses and Jeep Cherokees, all plastered with stickers that I didn't understand ("My Other Car is a Mulitbeast?"). The circus was indeed in town. At that early stage I fully believed that was as crazy as the experience was going to get.

Then, the lot: I’d never seen anything like it, and I’d seen Buffett a half-dozen times with my parents by that time. While the Parrotheads I’d seen were known for their partying, I was wide-eyed at the apparent lawlessness of the Phish lot. The most incredible example was the guy walking around with a huge branch of marijuana--you could hand him a $20 and snap off a giant nug. I watched it happen!

The vending of all sorts, legal and illegal, baked my noodle. One could simply ply his wares--patchwork clothing, blown-glass pipes, veggie burritos--and nobody seemed to care, least of all the police. (I've been back to Alpine a handful of times since--97, 99, 2000, 2009--and heard it described often as a police state. I never saw anything like this. As in any Phish lot, as long as you're not doing anything ridiculously illegal conspicuously, I think you're pretty much OK.)

Following that lead, we tried to sell grilled cheese the following summer, which was an utter failure. Later, I financed most of the dozen shows I saw in 1999 by selling “Thank You Trey” bumper stickers for a dollar each. My lesson in lot commerce had already unconsciously begun.

At that point, Alpine (capacity 37,000) was the biggest venue the band had ever played (a record that would hold until 70,000 fans showed up for the Clifford Ball, Phish’s first large-scale festival, a week later). We set up a blanket about halfway up the crazy-steep lawn and settled in. I reiterate: I had no idea how much my very limited worldview was about to change.

IV: ATTEMPTING TO RECORD THIS VIEW

“Cousin Kevin knows all the words!” one of Sarah’s friends shouted to our group halfway through the first set. At that point, he was mostly right, as the first handful of songs had all been on the studio albums I’d listened to ad infinitum for the past 16 months. I knew “My Friend, My Friend” and “Poor Heart,” “Fee” and “Reba.” I’d never heard “AC/DC Bag” (because it wasn’t on a studio album) and I labeled “I Didn’t Know” as “A Picture of Otis Redding” on my setlist. The set closed with another batch of songs I indeed knew well--"The Horse > Silent in the Morning,” “Rift,” “Bathtub Gin,” and “Cavern.”

I was still too wet-behind-the-ears to know much about the mythos of the band; I couldn’t have differentiated Gamehendge from Narnia, told you what a Type II jam sounded like, or picked a clavinet out of a lineup of keyboards. I didn’t know that “Reba” didn’t always feature the whistling, or that Trey didn’t always sing the verses of “Fee” through the megaphone, or that Fishman didn’t play the vacuum at every show. None of that mattered. Yet.

I remember sitting on the hill at setbreak, still wide-eyed at the scene taking place before me. (It’s important to note here that at 17 I had never once had a sip of alcohol and had only occasionally even smelled pot. I didn’t partake in anything that night, but suffice to say I saw a great deal more than I expected to see.) Setbreak could’ve been Trey’s proverbial 15 minutes, it could’ve been an hour. I don’t remember, and at the time I didn’t care. I was in love. With all of it. The music, the scene, the people… this was for me. When I got home and my parents asked about the show, I could only find myself talking about the people, how nice and welcoming everyone was. I’d found my tribe.

The second set opened with a bunch more tunes I knew--"Wilson,” “Down with Disease,” Scent of a Mule.” “Free” came next, and because I wasn’t in the virtual Phish world yet, I wouldn’t know it until I bought Billy Breathes on the day it came out that October. “Hold Your Head Up” announced a Fishman song (the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post" sung as a joke). This segment of the show I was familiar with thanks to the Catalyst tape. I laughed with everyone else when Fish took his vacuum solo, and was incredibly psyched when the set closed with a blissful “Harry Hood” and “A Day in the Life,” the latter I knew all too well from the tape of Sgt. Pepper’s that my middle-school buddy Dave had found in his mom’s car and we played until it unwound.

More stuff I knew in the encore: "Contact," one of my earliest Phish favorites, and Jimi Hendrix's "Fire," which I admit to being introduced to via Wayne's World. I looked at my watch, incredulous--for my $25, the band had played for nearly three hours.

After the show, as I walked back to the parking lot with a perma-grin, Sarah informed me that because I’d stayed sober I’d have to drive us, but there were two problems: 1. We had no destination, and 2. I couldn’t drive stick. Nobody thought to mention that to me before or during the show. So I got a very rough tutorial in driving a manual transmission, and our posse “camped” at a nearby rest area. (I put “camped” in quotation marks because all we did was unfurl a blue tarp on the ground next to the car and crash for a few hours until someone other than me was sober enough to drive.)

Cruising back to the Twin Cities the following day, with no air conditioning and Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” hissing from Sarah’s speakers, I sat in the back seat already wearing one of the three t-shirts I’d bought at the show--this one was of Dr. Seuss’ the Cat in the Hat juggling fish from bowl to bowl. I also bought an official tour shirt (which I still have but never wear because it’s an XL… I weigh a good 20 pounds more than I did when I was 17 and I currently wear a large… Why on earth did I buy an XL?) and one of those terrible bootleg t-shirts that get slung in every parking lot of every concert ever for $10. I didn’t care. I wore them in rotation once the school year began a few weeks later. I sewed the Phish logo patch onto the back of my favorite baseball cap. I was, as they say, hooked.

V: THIS EVERLASTING ITCH

Later that fall, I had a ticket to see what would’ve been my second show. It was on a Saturday, in Buffalo, on October 19th, 1996. Unfortunately my dad was out of of town and my mom didn’t like the looks of the crew I was riding with, so she put the kibosh on my would-be adventure. In hindsight, I can’t say I blame her, but if she’d seen my cousin Sarah’s friends, my first Phish show might’ve been out of the question as well.

My actual second show came the following summer, back at Alpine. Sarah and I took her brother Peter (two years younger than me), and we were joined by a friend of hers who wore denim overalls the whole time. We drove my uncle’s giant red Suburban and made the aforementioned ill-fated attempt at selling grilled cheese in the lot. (When Peter climbed atop the Suburban and announced that our product was “a party in your mouth” I closed up shop. We made no money.)

I took my three best high school friends to Starlake a few days later, and I soon had tour buddies for life. I caught two more shows during the fall of 1997 during my freshman year at Ithaca, one of which is my still-favorite-of-all-time, December 11th, 1997, immortalized in Todd Phillips’ documentary Bittersweet Motel.

From there, I've been seeing Phish as often as I can, wherever and whenever, coast to coast. Since that fateful day when Sarah asked me that innocuous-enough question, I’ve seen Phish 99 times, in 17 states (and once in Canada) in 37 different venues. I’ve seen five of the the band’s ten major festivals, three Halloween shows, and three New Year’s Eve extravaganzas.

I’ve been extremely fortunate to call Phish my favorite band, and while there are many, many people who have enriched my fandom over the past two decades, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my friend Matt for the Catalyst tape and my cousin Sarah for the Alpine trips.

This has indeed all been wonderful.