Magnaball was my first Phish festival. And when I casually mentioned this to a few people this past weekend, no one believed me. The truth is that much of my relationship to and with Phish is about making up for lost time. Because even though I was aware of Phish, listened to their music on tapes and purchased albums such as Hoist, Billy Breathes and Story of the Ghost, I did not attend many live rock concerts as a teenager. The idea of “touring” the way many of my current friends and acquaintances did was simply not around. My first show was the first Radio City Music Hall concert in 2000, when I was nearly 20 years old.
This has been on my mind since @TheVic and I visited Princeton University a few weeks ago on the way home from Merriweather, to pay our respects to “The Rhombus,” the sculpture on the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Studies where Tom, Trey, Aaron Wolf and their clique used to hang out as kids. It was the closest I’ve ever been, physically, to Gamehendge.
Driving through the colonial hamlet of Princeton, perhaps one of the most beautiful towns in all of New Jersey, I imagined an alternate past for myself. Because things could have been a lot different for me.
In 10th grade, I visited Lawrenceville, a boarding school in Princeton Junction, to scope the place out. My parents desperately wanted to get me out of the city, where I was starting to struggle both academically and emotionally. As it turns out, Manhattan was not the easiest place to grow up. For someone as sensitve and attuned as I am to the world around me, Manhattan in the 90's was overwhelming. In fact, it still is.
My father had attended Lawrenceville in the mid 60's, and it was a major influence on his education and early teenage experience. He had fond memories. He eventually ended up at Yale and he credited his experience at Lawrenceville as integral to his academic and professional success in life. It wasn’t until I visited Princeton this Summer that I made the connection: had I attended Lawrenceville, I most likely would have been far more exposed to Phish and the culture of touring, taping and sharing earlier. I would have been in Trey and Tom’s backyard from the ages of 15–18 after all, prime time for most Phish heads in terms of early indoctrination.
I’m not sure why my parents left the decision up to me, but I decided to stay in Manhattan, not wanting to abandon my friends or my school and make such a drastic change halfway through High School. It wasn’t until Freshman year at Tulane, in 1998, that I began to dig deeper into the Phish mythos and music, thanks to Andy Greenberg, my first college friend and eventual cosmic brother. Andy was my earliest and most important guide to Phish. I am and will be forever grateful to him for asking me to “smoke a bowl and listen to YEM” on the very first day of college orientation. We lived two doors down from one another and have been close ever since. And yet even then, the idea of traveling to attend shows was too far afield. There were other issues at hand. I was not a well person, with both physical and emotional/ psychological issues weighing me down.
But Phish was my way out. Connection, meaning, art, music, adventure, myth, collecting, understanding. Phish’s catalog was there for the taking, something all new fans have to reckon with in their own way. Phish affords one the ability to go back and listen to history, to their history, and track it alongside our own life. It was an obsession, but a healthy one, a tether to a more grounded life.
I was 14 in 1994 when Phish played the Providence Bowie. I was 8 when they played venues like The Front and Nectar’s dozens of times a year. Hadn’t I missed the boat? Could I catch up? What began in those years has stayed with me almost 20 years later. And luckily, when Phish got back together in 2009, I had a second chance to…understand for myself what I thought I never ever would.
In 2012, when Andy and I started writing about Phish, we made a conscious effort to write for ourselves first, to extend and enlarge our own understanding. But we obviously wanted readers and to be a place where other fans who had also missed many years, or who were trying to extend their own understanding as part of an interactive and living writing project, could come to. And though Andy had seen a bunch of Phish in the 90's, we both skipped the 2.0 years and Phish’s initial comeback in 2009 and 2010. That being said, I don’t think there was a single day between 2001 and 2010 that I did not listen to Phish. I became incredibly familiar with their catalog, their eras, their sounds and jams and songs. Enough to fool myself into thinking I truly knew the band.
Looking back now on our earliest essays and blog posts, I detect a strong sense of narcissism, at least on my part. Because I was educating myself most of all, but also competing with people who had far more deep histories with the band, I often hammered home points, or made logical leaps in order to mask my own ignorance while projecting authority. I was needlessly provocative and unnerving. I can see now how this could have fooled people around me into believing I had a better understanding of the band than I actually did. I was playing catch up in a very unforgiving space, we all know how unforgiving the Phish community is for spotting and discarding inauthentic voices. One thing I was careful not to engage in was credentializing, the “how many shows, when was your first” sort of dialogue that is common to Phish conversation. Part of this avoidance was because we wanted people to engage with the writing and the ideas and not necessarily the people behind them. For over a year, Andy kept himself hidden behind a nom de guerre. And I refused to answer questions. I liked the idea of “coming out of nowhere.” It shielded me.
But as I now approach the 100 show mark, and have been fully ensconced in the community for several years, I almost wish I could go back and re-write, and re-experience that moment. As dutiful and careful listeners, Andy and I had the ability to write about Phish in a way that connected even with people who had seen the band for decades. We clearly had something new and fresh to offer. And as we started to see more shows and tour with the band, we slipped right into the slipstream of the community, further masking ourselves, in a sense.
Earlier this month, Andy published a long essay on his current mindset with regards to the band, focusing on the idea of how he no longer chases songs or jams, but rather shows; complete show experiences. Andy solidified my own feelings in a way that redounded back on our dualistic ability to share each others ideas and feelings for one another, and build upon them like a house of cards. Except far more sturdy.
This past weekend, as I soaked up the vybez at Magnaball, I realized how much of the Phish experience involves and revolves around festivals. The chance to camp on site with friends for days, to not be hustling to a new city or aiport, and to relax alongside Phish and their community cannot be overstated. Phish festivals are, in some ways, the purest way to experience the band. Because it isn’t about the jams or the songs they choose to play, but about the emotional temperature of the whole weekend. How would Phish play, and how would the audience show up when there is no where else to go?
And though I feel lucky that Magnaball was my first Phish festival, and that I never had to put up with the inconveniences, heat, large masses of people that have more regularly accompanied Phish’s past festivals, I still wish I could go back to my pretend dorm room at Lawrenceville, where, no doubt, my friends and roommates would have been far more likely to listen, tape, share and travel for Phish, and start packing for the Clifford Ball. How different things might be. How different I might be.
But if there is one thing that I took away from Magnaball, it is the feeling that I no longer feel as though I have to catch up to anything. I am here, the band is alive and well and there’s nothing left to do but smile smile smile.
