You Don't Know Me but You Don't Like Me: Phish, Insane Clown Posse, and My Misadventures with Two of Music's Most Maligned Tribes

by Rabin, Nathan

  Cadence and I arrived in Miami around five o’clock on the 29th following a twelve-hour car ride from Marietta, exhausted and unbelievably excited in equal measures. In front of our dumpy yet charming hotel a pair of scruffy young men wandered about in cargo shorts and flip-flops. It felt redundant when Cadence asked them if they were in town for the show. It was not difficult to differentiate between the out-of-towners and the townies reluctantly tolerating their presence. At the front desk you could cut the class tension with a knife, as a Cuban clerk did little to mask his contempt for the stoned tourists stumbling around his hotel.

  The members of Phish weren’t exactly descended from hobos or sharecroppers. Frontman Trey Anastasio’s father was an executive at the testing company behind the SAT and GRE and his mother an editor at Sesame Street Magazine. Keyboardist Page McConnell’s father was one of the inventors of Tylenol. Drummer Jon Fishman and bassist Mike Gordon come from similarly solid suburban backgrounds. After hooking up in Vermont in the mid-eighties, Phish flourished in the womblike warmth and comfort of a supportive local college-music scene.

  The band’s genre-bending, whimsical, and psychedelic songs transformed fans into musical evangelists who spread the gospel through bootlegs delivered with passionate testimonials to the group’s greatness along with caveats that said greatness could only truly be understood watching them perform live, preferably while stoned on one or more mind-altering substances. Every generation must assert its independence and autonomy by rejecting the music of the generations that came before them. For a lot of early Phish fans, the Grateful Dead represented the music and mind-set of their fathers and uncles and older brothers. The Grateful Dead was something they inherited; Phish was something they could claim as their own. It belonged to them.

  Critics tended to analyze Phish’s fan base more than its music. The typical review was a Mad Libs–like construction littered with Grateful Dead references, snarky comments about fans perpetually encircled in a cloud of pot smoke like Pigpen from Peanuts, and complaints about noodly jams and endless guitar solos.

  Phish fulfilled few of the requirements of musical stardom: They made exactly one music video (for “Down with Disease”), they weren’t particularly good-looking, and they actively avoided having a hit single.

  Phish fans have a tendency to fetishize and romanticize the early years, when the scene was small and hermetic enough to feel like one big extended family. People became fans because they’d had a quasi-religious, semiorgasmic revelation after going to a show or being given a bootleg by a friend, not because they’d read about them in a magazine or kept hearing that one song on their drive home from work. The band created a secret language for fans, a homegrown vernacular of in-jokes, running gags, slang, and interactive bits. Phish varied its set list every night and made legal downloads of shows available almost immediately on its website. They were a jam band for an online era whose big Internet presence served to blur the line separating hippies from geeks.

  For a lot of fans, 1996 marked the end of an era. It was the year the world found out about a band that had previously been their little secret. The group recorded Billy Breathes with super-producer Steve Lillywhite (U2, Morrissey) and watched the album debut in the top ten. The spare, unrelentingly melodic Billy Breathes is an album of powerful quiet: It doesn’t shout its greatness from the mountaintops so much as it whispers its modest, insinuating charms. It’s also very transparently an effort to make a real album of tight, concise pop songs rather than compiling ramshackle vehicles for onstage jamming. The year 1996 similarly marked the first of a series of festivals that consolidated Phish’s reputation as a major countercultural force. On August 16 and 17, Phish played to seventy thousand fans—making it the biggest rock concert in the country that year—at a former air force base in Plattsburgh, New York, for an event called The Clifford Ball.

  The festivals grew in ambition until, as 1999 turned to 2000, at a festival called Big Cypress, Phish played a seven-and-a-half-hour New Year’s Eve set that lasted from just after midnight on New Year’s Eve to sunrise New Year’s Day. It was widely considered the greatest Phish show of all time and the apex of the band’s career. Phish had become so huge the media was forced to acknowledge it. Its members made the cover of Entertainment Weekly in 2000 and the Big Cypress show was covered by Peter Jennings on ABC’s World News Tonight.

  Phish had hit the pinnacle. There was nowhere to go but down. That’s just where it headed, with a vengeance. In Boogie Nights, a New Year’s Eve party on the dawn of 1980 marks the moment when everything good turns bad and the formerly charmed characters’ momentum begins spinning violently, madly, uncontrollably in the wrong direction. The drugs stop being fun and desperation takes hold.

  That was Big Cypress for Phish. The death of Jerry Garcia in 1995 had brought an influx of opportunistic Deadheads into the scene along with cocaine, heroin, and meth. Hard drugs pervaded the private world of Phish as well. Anastasio threw himself into partying with the same pummeling intensity he brought to leading Phish and becoming one of the greatest guitar players in the world.

  Phish became a prisoner of its success, no longer a band but a huge commercial enterprise with a massive infrastructure to support, from the road crew to an ever-increasing home office that handled a wide variety of services in-house. In 2000 Phish took a two-year hiatus. In 2004, following a disastrous Las Vegas stint, Anastasio shocked fans by announcing that the band would be breaking up.

  As for the band itself, Page McConnell supported the measure, but Mike Gordon made no secret of his opposition to the breakup. Anastasio had destroyed the world he’d created. Diehards had made the band their life. Now that life was over. Fans felt stranded and betrayed. Had they been worshipping at the altar of a false god?

  Yet, remarkably, the worst was yet to come. In 2004 Anastasio was bottoming out both personally and professionally. When the nucleus of an entire lifestyle is blasted out of his mind on heroin, booze, coke, and pills, it’s bound to have a ripple effect.

  The band’s final festival in Coventry, Vermont, in 2004 proved a logistical nightmare. Due to a combination of poor planning, torrential rain, and miscommunication, a traffic jam ensued that was so brutal fans parked their cars in the middle of the muddy road and walked to the venue on foot. The New York Times quoted Fishman calling the band’s final shows at Coventry “one of the great train wrecks in live concert history.”

  In 2006 Anastasio was arrested for possession of Xanax, Percocet, hydrocodone, and heroin and driving while intoxicated. He spent fourteen months in a drug-treatment program. As part of his community service, he was required to clean fairgrounds and scour toilets.

  As Anastasio told Congress while advocating for treatment of drug offenders rather than jail, “My life had become a catastrophe. I had no idea how to turn it around. My band had broken up. I had almost lost my family. My whole life had devolved into a disaster. I believe that the police officer who stopped me at three A.M. that morning saved my life.”

  Following Phish meant escape and freedom from responsibility to its acolytes. Being the frontman for Phish meant something much different to Anastasio. Being the epicenter of an entire subculture proved an almost unbearable burden, just as it had hastened Garcia’s smack-addled lurch to an early grave. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. The entire Phish phenomenon rested unsteadily on Anastasio’s slumped shoulders. Everyone was depending on him. Eventually he wilted under the pressure. He was at the core of a scene where drugs were less a recreational activity or a way to unwind than a lifestyle, an end unto themselves.

  Then in 2009 a clean and sober Anastasio reunited with the rest of Phish and the great beast rose from its five-year slumber to the delight of the subculture that had mourned its demise like the death of a loved one. By that time a lot of their fan base had grown up and moved on, like my Cadence. By then Phish was a fading memory that connected her to a world she used to know and the beautiful child she used to be.

  Befo
re the concert in Miami that first night, I experienced my first taste of what Phish fans call the Lot, one of many traditions the band’s fans imported wholesale from Grateful Dead fans, though Deadheads called their version Shakedown Street, after a Dead song. It’s a stadium parking lot where stereotypes come to life in vivid Technicolor; rotting vans, shaggy men and women with dilated pupils and vacant expressions, sad little makeshift stands selling questionable-looking burritos and other foodstuffs. But more than anything, the Lot is an open-air drug market, a traveling swap meet for mood-altering substances.

  It was in the Lot that I took nitrous oxide for the first time. Cadence had told me that taking a hit of nitrous was like getting punched in the face repeatedly, but in a good way; a huge, almost overpowering rush that dissipated almost instantly. It was not the world’s greatest sales pitch, but I’ll take anything that won’t destroy me, so I purchased three balloons pumped full of nitrous from what I’m sure was a reputable vendor, untied the balloons, inhaled deeply, and waited for a wave of euphoria to wash over me. But all I felt was a mild light-headedness. It was pleasant and goofy, but it wasn’t anywhere near as intense as promised.

  Maybe that was for the best, for throughout the week I came across hippies sprawled on the ground, their eyes glassy and empty, an idiot grin of stupefied satisfaction on their ecstatic faces and used balloons scattered at their feet. They looked like revelers at a birthday party for the world’s most debauched eight-year-old. I found this juxtaposition of childhood innocence and adult excess deeply disturbing. The people on nitrous oxide looked so sloppy and fucked up, so out of control, so unencumbered by dignity or self-consciousness.

  I pitied these sad, jubilant creatures, these sentient puddles of naked hedonism. I felt bad for them. I judged them harshly. And I envied them. Part of me wanted to call up their parents and part of me wished that I, too, could lie on the ground in a fucked-up haze without worrying what people thought of me.

  We tend to process subcultures that way. We’re horrified by a funky subsection of society’s loose morals, chemical dependencies, lack of self-discipline, garish garb, and unconscionable hairstyles. But more than anything, we’re terrified that these people who have nothing in common with us, who sneer insouciantly at our values and way of life, are having more fun than we are. We can’t join them, so we beat them up with our words and attitudes.

  During a book tour for my 2009 memoir, The Big Rewind, a jarhead chauffeur drove me from Milwaukee to Madison. He was a fifth-generation military man whose life revolved around God, country, and cars, the kind of true believer who has an official-looking portrait of George W. Bush as the screen saver for his cell phone, and not in an ironic way. He was so militantly polite and formal that he would apologize for using words like darn and crap. Though I suspect he would have found the book I was promoting, and every other aspect of my existence, deeply objectionable, I liked him a lot. He talked about driving a group of well-heeled Phish fans to a concert in a limousine and how they asked if they could toke up in the backseat. He told them it would be against regulations for them to smoke while he was in the vehicle but if they wanted to smoke while he went for a walk, that would be acceptable.

  At the end of his anecdote he got a faraway look in his eyes and said, “I obviously don’t approve of their lifestyle, but sometimes”—he paused, choosing his words carefully—“I wish that I could be like them.”

  Now I was living the chauffeur’s secret fantasy. Watching Phish perform that first night, I realized that following them would entail changing the way I processed music. I’ve always been a lyrics guy. I gravitated to hip-hop, and, later, country because they tell good stories. But to my untrained ears, the lyrics in Phish’s songs seemed irrelevant. They were doggerel, random silliness, free-floating whimsy, a means to an end, a framework for the solos and extended improvisation that was the real crux of their music. It wasn’t about playing a hit song; it was about embarking on an open-ended sonic journey and taking a stadiumful of fellow travelers along for the ride.

  There were compelling stories everywhere I looked, but they weren’t necessarily found in Phish songs. It was the story of four men from Vermont who started a band that became a lifestyle and an institution. It was the story of Phish’s relationship with their fans. It was the story of Phish’s breakup and reunion. It was the story of a teenage Cadence finding a way out of Marietta. It was the story of lost kids flocking to a scene promising a sense of community and solidarity, and trust fund babies enjoying a few laughs before taking over Daddy’s company. It was the story of a boy who so loved a girl that he would follow her through the gates of hell. It was the story of what Phish meant to Cadence as a dreadlocked teenage rebel and what they meant to her as a twenty-six-year-old.

  It was a story of rebirth, renewal, and redemption. Cadence says that the vibe around Phish shows before the band broke up in 2004 had turned dark and sinister. An air of decadence permeated the scene, untethered to any political or social consciousness. It wasn’t unusual to see a mother pushing a stroller while shouting, “Got coke, got meth, got E,” or fans with big black bags under their eyes and a zombielike pallor stumbling out of a Porta-Potty clutching their wrists. I wanted to hear all of these stories, soak it all in, get outside myself and my hang-ups and neuroses. I wanted to tune in, turn on, and drop out.

  I’d grown up thinking of rock and rap stars as gods who deigned to favor us with their genius. I went to concerts to worship pop, to prostrate myself before my larger-than-life heroes. Live performance was about sex, charisma, youth, hero worship, escape, and the unbridgeable gulf between rock god and worshipful fan.

  I saw little of that during that first night in Miami. The band looked like adjunct professors at a small liberal arts college.

  It’s hard to get a sense of Phish as a band from its studio albums, since the songs serve primarily as rough outlines that can be fleshed out and expanded into dazzling new shapes in concert. Songs that last three and a half minutes in album form are massaged into ten-minute epics onstage, while ten-minute epics have been known to last weeks.

  If I was going to make it through my Phish excursion, I’d have to repress my preference for short, punchy songs. I’d have to stop favoring energy and enthusiasm over technical virtuosity. I’d need to embrace the soloing, improvisation, free-floating whimsy, structural complexity, and goofball humor endemic to Phish’s oeuvre. I would have to recalibrate the way I processed music and learn to listen in a new way. I would need to stop worrying and love the dreaded extended guitar solo.

  That first night, I was introduced to songs that would come to mean a great deal to me, that in the years ahead would become filled with vivid Proustian associations of peoples and places and substances, like the popular set opener “Kill Devil Falls,” which would become synonymous with travel, adventure, and the exhilarating rush of excitement that characterize the beginning of a Phish show in a new town, or the heartbreakingly pretty “Prince Caspian,” whose lovely chorus—“Oh, to be Prince Caspian, afloat upon the waves”—captures the yearning for transcendence and escape coursing through so many Phish songs. Those and other songs would someday wind their way deep into my consciousness, but that first night they were just catchy songs that stood out from the pleasant haze of guitar solos and endless jams.

  The next night I was, to quote The Blues Brothers, on a mission from God. I was going to buy and then take MDMA (the base component of Ecstasy), or “Molly,” for the first time. The Lot was dirty, it was sordid, it was filled with illegal wares, and it was more than a little bit awesome. The Lot embodied all that was good and bad about the counterculture in microcosm. It was where Woodstock collided into Altamont, the wild party and the crushing hangover the next morning.

  But we were not there as sociological observers. We were there to buy drugs. Cadence and I have vastly different ways of pursuing our objectives. Cadence does this bizarre thing where if she wants something, she goes after it. I prefer a more indirect appro
ach. If I want something I’ll think long and hard about how badly I want it, then try to wish it into existence with my mind.

  Cadence and I pursued our antithetical strategies in the Lot. I silently wished someone would detect a “Hey, I would like to buy MDMA” look on our faces and offer us some, while Cadence purposefully strode around the Lot asking everyone within earshot, “Molly? Molly? We’re looking for Molly! Does anyone have any Molly?”

  Cadence’s approach worked better than mine.

  “Hey man, I’ve got some Molly,” a wasted-looking young man in an outsize sweatshirt and baseball cap offered. “Sixty bucks.”

  Acting as my consigliere, Cadence offered him fifty.

  “Nah man, it’s gotta be—” the hapless drug dealer began, until his identically outfitted girlfriend entered the picture and brusquely demanded, “Take whatever you can get. Don’t haggle.”

  I took the Molly, headed into the stadium, and waited for the magic to happen. Cadence makes a special point of never sitting in her assigned seat, so we moved up to a row farther down and sat next to a nice pair of bearded, overalls-wearing gentlemen who shared their stories with us. One of them enthused, “I’d never even been to a Phish show before a couple of days ago. I work at a gas station in Alabama and it’s not hard to get time off. So when my buddy told me what a good time it was, I started going to shows. Now I’m practically addicted to it.”

  Taking the Molly had a subtle but tangible effect: It completely destroyed my ability to function in the world. Also, my brain stopped working. In my paranoid state, I became convinced that the nice young men sitting next to us would kidnap Cadence the second I was out of sight. When I got up to use the bathroom I remember thinking, “I really need to take a piss but if I leave I might never see Cadence again.” Then again, I really did need to take a piss.