A Trip to Feel the Feeling I Forgot

By Michael Pearlman, 3-15-09

	Phish fans were welcomed with open arms in Virginia.

Readjusting to the quiet life of Sheridan, Wyoming has consumed the better part of a week after an East Coast music vacation. Hampton, Virginia is not the kind of place I’d ever choose to vacation were it not for special circumstances. The return of Phish, a one-of-a-kind musical adventure that defies easy definition or explanation, qualifies as a special circumstance.

As a musical and cultural phenomenon, Phish is overlooked by much of America, looked down upon and dismissed by another segment and embraced and understood only by a small minority. Over the years I’ve struggled to explain the attraction and personal connection I feel to this quirky, emotionally-powerful band and its fanbase to friends and family who will can’t understand the attraction. Musically, Phish offers long songs with extended instrumental passages that often don’t translate well outside the live arena. But in concert, Phish is another beast entirely, a powerful experience that rewards the astute listener and well-schooled fan. As a vehicle I can use to analyze my life and connect with some of my closest friends, a Phish concert is unparalleled.

I was introduced to Phish back in 1992 by a friend who I traded Grateful Dead tapes with. I first experienced the band’s live power at a tiny bar in Southern California that held no more than 300 people. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of watching them graduate to theaters and half-full amphitheaters, introduce new songs and explore different sounds and sonic textures. Three years after hearing guitarist Trey Anastasio dedicate a song to my friend Tom, who had given him a surfing lesson earlier in the day in Ventura, California, I was sitting in a sold-out Madison Square Garden, watching a foursome of rock gods mesmerize 20,000 people.

“We’re done.” Anastasio told the Phish faithful in 2004, his decision and playing clouded by an opiate addiction which eventually led to an arrest, rehab and sobriety. In October, the reunion was announced and tickets found their way into my hands through a friend who had become a father and couldn’t make the trip. On my flight into Virginia, I met a rumpled thirty-something fan who had traveled from Romania for the shows. After a four and a half year absence, demand for tickets for these three shows at the funky, general-admission Hampton Coliseum had inflated ticket prices to unheard of levels.

For myself and so many others, the weekend of Phish concerts was a family reunion. Not the family that you see every few years at a wedding and have little in common with, but the kind of family that shares your passion and understands the joy and bond created and shared through music. The friends who joined me for these concerts came from Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.  Some of the enthusiastic fans standing next to me on the floor of the arena were still in diapers when I saw my first Phish show. Talking to a few younger fans on my way in, I was struck by the realization that I’d now become part of the older generation of fans who were respected merely for having seen the band in their prime. I don’t look at the crowd or the band with the eyes of a 22-year-old any more.  But the feeling is still there and if my weekend of Phish reminded me of anything, it’s that I will go to my grave believing in the transformative power of the live music experience.

For three nights, my friends and I traveled back in time, reconnecting with a period when life was a little more carefree, before mortgages and children and high-pressure job deadlines. We caught up on each others’ lives, danced like no one was watching and smiled ear-to-ear, drinking in the sheer joy of it all. We were joined by thousands of other thirty-somethings, for whom a quirky, talented band plays an important role in their lives. There was the familiar cigarette and pot smoke, and the big round eyes and 10-mile stares of those who revel in powerful psychoactive substances. There was also the ever-present seedy element, low-level criminals selling nitrous oxide outside the venue. Police made around 200 drug arrests over the weekend, a small number considering official estimates of 75,000 people descended on the area for the shows.

Phish has announced a summer tour and a rumored return to the legendary Red Rocks amphitheater outside Denver is expected to be announced shortly. For many of us who eschew traditional religious devotion, a rock and roll concert can fulfill the role of church or temple– encouraging a communal explosion of joy and representing the spiritual, out-of-body experience so many Americans seek out. I didn’t come home with a poster or T-shirt from the shows, but I have the recordings and more importantly the memories and friendships, to be replayed and savored forever.

“Nothing I see can be taken from me.”

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