Phishing for Meaning
I understand that you may not like Phish. It is easy to be cynical and to discredit Phish fans and to deride their particular form of worship. But Phish concerts offer many people a taste of redemption in this world, and attending the first two nights of Phish’s New Year’s Eve run of four shows at Madison Square Garden reminded me why I keep coming back.
In the grand scheme of Phish fandom, I’m a “dilettante.” My devotion has not, historically, been as intense as others. I’ve probably been to 20+ shows in my life, which is a lot of times to see any musical act live. But others have clocked hundreds, with miles to go before they sleep. There are songs I don’t know and covers I can’t identify. Phish fans, dogged in their devotion, can be given to veiled-competitive bouts of displaying their knowledge. Hearing “My first show was [year very early in the 1990’s, or possibly the late 1980’s]” or “the best version of [Song X] is from [Such and such date at such and such venue]” uttered with great self-assuredness, intimidates the neophyte. I mean, damn! These folks are a data-driven bunch. Steve Hyden writes: “People who love Phish can never know enough about Phish; everybody else works hard to keep the number of Phish factoids rattling around inside their craniums at zero.” (h/t @alexremington) But once initiated, you’re intrigued to go again, and a trickle becomes a flood until you too are identifying trends, themes, and perhaps even recognizing a “bust-out” on your own. -
There are norms and rituals associated with a Phish show (no wonder they speak of ceremonies) and a call and response between band and audience that might be unparalleled in music history. Deepening your knowledge of the lines — you might call it the turns of a dance — enhances the pleasure, and memorizing the script signifies your commitment to the theatre. And glowsticks.
A Phish concert is utopian in the sense that it creates a space that is beautiful but unsustainable, ephemerally real, unbounded in feeling but tragically circumscribed. What does your ideal night out dancing look, sound and feel like? It can be yours, and you can come along with 20,000 of your old-new best friends and experience theirs too. I know you, rider. We’ve been here before and we share a secret language.
Everything is determined by chance and yet is anchored in the comfort of knowing what to expect next. Then the lights come up. We try to hold on that feeling as best we can, but we are sad knowing that nothing that beautiful can last, and you can’t catch lightning in a bottle. Are you coming tomorrow night? Me too! Then let’s take comfort in that. You don’t have tickets? Bummer. Well at least we’ll always have tonight.
In an era of divided attention, in the pit of the heart of the world’s most dispiriting Gesellschaft, Gemeinschaft emerges inside “The World’s Most Famous Arena.” Mere days and steps away from the neon assault of “Times Square Presents: Ryan Seacrest’s Vapid, Market-Research Fabricated Exploitation of Music and Good Taste,” a band sings songs about dropouts, goofball screw-ups and loveable losers who are invited to waste their time with one another, and a crowd of 20,000 “Fluffhead[s]” are eating out of the palm of its collective hand.
This is Phish’s genius: A fairly straight forward rock band set-up — guitar, bass, drums, piano/keyboards — unfurls itself and transforms into a sonic display at turns frenetic, velvetine, chunky, funky and absurd. To love Phish is to believe in the endless possibility of music’s power to transform, and that four friends from Vermont colleges (and a wizard of a lighting designer) who love music can become virtuosic musicians, and when they do, they won’t choose conventional commercial ubiquity. Instead they’ll give devoted followers the best possible night out and a taste of transcendence.
Part of Phish’s appeal is nostalgia. The band’s apex is inextricably bound to the 1990’s. Clinton was President, and the predominantly white, upper middle class male fanbase was building a bridge to the 21st century out of cheap gas and dot.com boom money. (Perhaps this helps explain why the show widely considered their greatest and most epic took place on the temporal bridge between the centuries: 12/31/99–1/1/00). I do not, and can not see Phish now in order to return to those days. You can’t, after all, go home again. I’ve read too much, been disappointed, hurt and lived long enough to see some friends from those years leave this world. In addition, I can no longer overlook the fact that, if 20,000 plumes of pot smoke were exhaled by young men of color in a semi-public venue, it would bring out the National Guard. In fact, our prisons might very well still host young men of color whose crimes in the 90’s were precisely the same as mine (#crimingwhilewhite). The privilege to escape and indulge in utopian thinking must be understood as precisely that: a privilege. As Ta-Nehisi Coates tells his son, the people with me in MSG, whether it was 2000 or 2016 are the “Dreamers”; the ones woefully and willfully ignorant of the black bodies being destroyed so that we might dream another day.
We Phans have aged, and there are more tired knees, aching backs and dad bods among our ranks. Feel free to call us pathetic. You are welcome to think we are aging hippies trying in vain to relive our glory days. But cynicism is not welcome here. Not when the boys are giving everything they have, creating a rigorously apolitical space in which it’s ok to shout “Can I live while I’m young?” I commit myself to coming back to the see Phish in order to remember that I was a young man full of belief in the hope that I might be an ever-so-slightly more hopeful father, husband and citizen.
