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

  I detected a brief flash of panic dancing over Cadence’s eyes as I left, perhaps for the very last time. “Hurry back soon!” she implored with a hint of desperation in her voice.

  I made it to the bathroom all right, but I lost my shit immediately afterward. As I staggered back to the general vicinity of our seats, nothing made sense. Row 103 was followed by 104 and then 105. Fuck, what was that supposed to mean? Was there even a pattern to that random set of numbers?

  My mind traveled to very dark places. I became convinced that the men sitting next to us dragged Cadence away from the arena by her long, luxurious hair, stuck her in the back of a van with the windows blacked out and a majestic wizard astride a unicorn painted on the side, and planned to take her back to Alabama so that she could become their shared wife. No! I couldn’t let that happen. I had only myself to blame; if I didn’t want Cadence to be kidnapped by deranged hillbillies, I never should have smoked that guy’s pot. Or taken MDMA. Or gone to a crazy rock ’n’ roll show. Or stopped going to synagogue after my parents got divorced.

  Astonishingly, I made it back to my seat, next to Cadence, and recovered to an extent. The Molly I’d ingested gave the entire concert a tactile, sensual quality. I felt like I was somehow inside the music. The magic was happening. I never stopped smiling a big, goofy grin at Cadence once we were joyously reunited.

  That night Phish played a ramshackle but ingratiating cover of “Dixie Cannonball,” ambled its way through Taj Mahal’s “Corrina,” Argent’s “Hold Your Head Up,” the Edgar Winter Band’s “Frankenstein,” and “Boogie On Reggae Woman,” a Stevie Wonder cover Phish should stay far away from on the basis of its title alone. Or so I thought. In time I’d come to love Phish’s version of “Boogie On Reggae Woman” as pure, uninhibited, joyous liberation. I’d eagerly anticipate it. But that first weekend I held on to cynicism like a life preserver. I thought I needed it. I thought I needed my defenses. Time would prove me wrong. I wouldn’t get anything of value out of my travels until I let myself go, until I abandoned a detached critical perspective and made a conscious decision to lose myself in the moment.

  As a stranger to both the jam-band world and Phish, I appreciated how many covers the band plays: Their takes on “A Day in the Life” and songs from the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street instantly transported me to other realms of the pop-culture and musical world I knew and loved. They were comforting, soothing reminders that Phish’s influences, frame of reference, and worldview extend far beyond the jam-band universe.

  The jams were just as long and the lyrics as inscrutable that second night, but the MDMA did wonders for my attention span and concentration.

  Cadence and I exited the show on the kind of natural high accessible only to people on illegal drugs. I had the woman I loved by my side and a mind full of strange and wonderful chemicals.

  We floated in the general direction of our hotel, surfing a massive wave of good vibes. Tie-dyed and sandal-wearing space cadets surrounded us. We were all on the same wavelength, united in our righteous crusade for jam-band nirvana.

  Then somewhere we made a wrong turn and found ourselves inexplicably alone on a desolate-looking street. One minute fellow travelers cocooned us. The next we appeared to have wandered into one of those ominous empty streets found in zombie movies.

  The only vehicles we encountered were cop cars. Every time we’d see a car we’d lurch in its general direction, our pupils as big as dimes, our arms waving wildly and perhaps threateningly, as we begged the law enforcement officers for directions. They were, perhaps not surprisingly, a little freaked out. I couldn’t tell if they were giving bad directions or if we were just too fucked up to follow them correctly.

  Finally Cadence pleaded with one of the cops, “We’re really, really lost and have no idea where our hotel is. If you could just give us a ride to our hotel we would be sooooo appreciative. It should just be five or six blocks from here.”

  The cop glared at us with a faintly disgusted look that conveyed that he understood the implications of what we were asking for better than we did. Here we were, two lost, borderline incoherent Phish concert attendees who might not have been entirely sober, begging to be let into the backseat of a cop car. So he could drive us to our hotel. We apparently lingered under the misconception that Miami police cars magically turned into free taxis at the stroke of midnight.

  Neither of us saw anything unusual or counterproductive about trying desperately to get into a cop car. Part of that was attributable to the MDMA; we were not quite in our right minds. But there was also some strange lizard part of my brain that assumed that since I was a middle-class white man who paid his taxes on time and maintained an excellent credit rating (or did at the time), the police worked for me. As a rage-choked teenager growing up in a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents, the police were the enemy. I hated cops and rich people. As an adult, I now apparently felt the police force were my employees. I had become the enemy. After thirty-three years I finally began to experience the transgressive surge of power that comes with white male privilege.

  In Miami there seemed to be an implicit pact between the city and Phish fans. As long as no one got hurt, the city would turn a blind eye to a wide array of misdemeanors and misbehavior: public drunkenness, pot smoking, scalping, acid, mushrooms, giggling men-children lying dazed on the ground next to deflated balloons, the whole doped-up shebang. They might not have liked the invasion of overgrown adolescents that descended upon their city, but they tolerated us because we pumped cash into the local economy. Besides, the whole city was built on coke money from the eighties, so who were they to look down on us for smoking some weed, huffing nitrous, or rolling on E?

  After trying and failing to score a ride home with a cop, we finally managed to flag down a black cabdriver who seemed terrified of the erratic strangers racing into the middle of the street to stop his cab. “What the hell are you doing out here! You could get killed in this neighborhood at this time of night!” he yelled at us en route to our hotel. We paid him no never mind, for we’d been saved! We’d lived to rock another day. We fell asleep that night secure in the knowledge that we’d cheated death and that the grand finale of our great adventure lay just around the corner. Phish! Miami! New Year’s Eve! Woo! Hoo! USA! USA!

  EXPLODING INTO THE TURBULENT TEENS: PHISH, NEW YEAR’S EVE, MIAMI

  On New Year’s Eve, Cadence and I still hadn’t secured tickets to that night’s show. At our hotel that afternoon we rode in an elevator with a red-haired kid wearing sunglasses and the official jam-band uniform of shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. At the risk of seeming unhippified, my first impression was, “Jesus, look at that fucking burnout. What a waste.”

  Sure enough, when we got off the elevator he began to babble about his hunt for tabs of acid.

  “You can probably get that at the Lot,” Cadence offered cheerfully.

  “Nah, man. I know a guy. It’s all set up.”

  Of course you do, I thought cynically. “We’re probably headed over to the Lot ourselves later to see if we can get tickets for tonight’s show,” Cadence continued.

  “You guys need tickets? ’Cause I totally have some I could sell you at face value,” the crimson-haired burnout offered. We accepted.

  After we bought the tickets, Cadence asked the kid if he was a native of Miami. “Nah,” he explained, “I’m just treating myself ’cause I just finished medical school.”

  “Where?” Cadence asked.

  “Uh, Brown?”

  It was a beautiful moment. Here were two proud products of Ivy League graduate schools who would one day look after your children and perform your open-heart surgery. But on December 31, 2009, they were primarily concerned with getting fucked up for that night’s Phish show.

  “This is just how I get my rocks off,” he offered by way of explanation, half apologetically, half proudly.

  At the show that night everyone around us was immersed in their own private spiritual reverie.
To our right, a swarthy young man with the brooding intensity of a beat poet inhaled from a joint, then thrust his arms high in the air as if lost in a trance. Next to him, a shirtless young gent with homemade glitter-coated angel wings danced. It felt ridiculous and foreign and strangely right.

  Phish’s rise, fall, and rebirth lent an added poignancy to their performance of “Joy,” the title track from their comeback album. On the tenth anniversary of Big Cypress, Anastasio sang the song with a disarming vulnerability that did much to wash away the lingering odor of Coventry and the drug bust. He poured himself into the lyrics with a sincerity that bordered on the heroic. When Anastasio sang, “We want you to be happy because this is your song too,” he was commenting powerfully on the intense relationship between the band and its fans; every Phish song belongs to the audience as much as the band.

  McConnell’s organ and piano took center stage on a pair of Rolling Stones covers from Exile on Main Street that luxuriated in ramshackle grace: “Shine a Light” and the set-closing “Loving Cup.”

  “There’s such a different vibe than the last time they toured,” reflected Cadence. But for me it was like catching the last ten minutes of a movie. I was intrigued by all that came before—the backstories, the breakups and addictions and incarcerations—but was more than a little lost. The chorus to “Simple,” which they played during their second set, goes, “We’ve got it simple ’cause we’re in a band.” But there’s nothing simple about being in a band. Throw in money and fame and adulation and the situation becomes deeply complicated.

  Yet Anastasio and bassist Mike Gordon seemed to experience uncomplicated pleasure as they performed an entire song moving in unison while jumping on trampolines.

  As the band’s New Year’s Eve gag, it was announced that Jon Fishman would be blasted out of a cannon high into the stadium’s rafters. After much fanfare and a deafening boom, Fishman disappeared. Anastasio then asked if there was a drummer in the house who could fill in for their fallen comrade, at which point a “woman” who looked suspiciously like Fishman in a wig and dress volunteered and manned the drums for the rest of the show.

  Anastasio sang the names of everyone who made the tour possible while the band played “Blue Moon” behind him, giving props to everyone from the lowliest roadie to the loftiest guitar tech. He impishly introduced the band’s head of security, for example, as the man who would be confiscating the crowd’s nitrous tanks immediately after the show. It was all very geeky, very silly, and very sweet.

  There was a celebratory quality to the show, and not just because it was New Year’s Eve. The crowd was celebrating Anastasio’s return from the abyss. They were celebrating Phish’s resurrection from the dead. They were celebrating themselves and their bond with the band and the ghosts of a thousand past shows. They were celebrating four men who created something much bigger than themselves when they got together to perform music. They were celebrating being alive. I was celebrating being alive. I was celebrating being in love.

  The crowd seemed to be moving as one, to have evolved into an orgiastic hive mind, grooving and grinding deliriously to a borderline transcendent performance. Phish and their fans had to wade through an awful lot of darkness to get to the light. The exuberance was hard-won.

  At midnight balloons rained down from the rafters and I kissed Cadence. There was nowhere in the world I would rather be at that moment than in Miami, with Cadence, on New Year’s Eve, watching Phish. I was living in the sacred present tense.

  I was exhilarated by the journey that lay ahead of me, a voyage through strange corners of the pop music world where saner souls feared to tread. I wanted to lose and find myself in these alien worlds. I would become the world’s least likely chameleon.

  My time in Miami had come to an end but my adventure, or rather our adventure, had only just begun. Had I known what lay ahead of that delirious moment in Miami, I would have been filled with equal parts dread and anticipation, but in that moment all I felt was pure, rapturous joy.

  AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: VIOLENT J’S BEHIND THE PAINT USHERS US INTO THE WORLD OF THE DARK CARNIVAL

  Given the centrality of circus iconography in Insane Clown Posse’s mythology, it might make sense to think of me as a ringmaster presiding over a three-ring circus perpetually threatening to spin out of control. In one ring lies the festival of light that is a Phish tour. In the next, intrepid adventurers will discover the Dark Carnival of Insane Clown Posse, while in the final ring, unbeknownst to me at the beginning of my bizarre ride, lie my rapidly degenerating psyche and crumbling sense of self.

  So as your unreliable tour guide, I would like to warn you of a rather jarring shift in focus just ahead as we turn our attention from my introduction to Phish to my descent into the heart of the Dark Carnival at the 2010 Gathering of the Juggalos. But before we travel to Juggalo country, let’s go straight to the source and learn about the secret history of Insane Clown Posse and the strange world it created from face paint, imagination, and stubborn persistence from Violent J’s massive 2003 memoir Behind the Paint.

  Violent J embodies a bifurcated identity as both an ostracized ninth-grade dropout and as a spiritual leader whose prophetic visions show the way to the eternal paradise of Shangri-La. Violent J is a man completely devoid of pretensions beyond his stubborn contention that he is a portal to a vast and unknowable spiritual realm beyond our comprehension. He’s a regular dude, but he’s also, you know, a makeshift prophet.

  J writes of his discovery of the Dark Carnival and the Joker’s Cards, the key components of the Insane Clown Posse mythology, “Now let me ask you, do you think I’m smart enough to come up with something like that on my own? I am a fucking dumb-ass; I never got past eighth grade, remember? Now, however, I’ve shown hundreds of thousands of people the same magic. And they feel it too. Juggalos are everywhere! Can’t you see that it’s magic? Look at how lame I am. Look how untalented we are, yet we have hundreds of thousands who follow the magic? Why? Cause it’s real. Cause it IS magic.”

  Behind the Paint is a book equally defined by sputtering rage at a world that won’t accept him no matter how successful he becomes and seemingly incongruous but pervasive sentimentality.

  For example, when Violent J was four years old his older brother, Rob, caught a giant, magnificent butterfly. They were overjoyed. They were poor kids with nothing but each other and vivid imaginations, so something as seemingly inconsequential as catching a butterfly carried tremendous symbolic significance, but not nearly as much as there’d be after what happened next.

  J and Rob made a home for the butterfly, but when they woke up the next morning to release their guest for the night they discovered the butterfly had died. For J, it was the childhood equivalent of Adam noshing on a McIntosh; the end of the innocence, the fall from grace.

  Rob and his brother made a makeshift casket for the butterfly out of a potato chip can and buried their fallen comrade while reciting the following vow: “One day, we will make it to heaven, so that we can make sure the Butterfly made it, and so that we can apologize to that Butterfly face-to-face (If insects are not allowed in heaven, then we would ask to change that policy on the Butterfly’s behalf.)”

  Violent J got a giant tattoo on the inside of his left arm in honor of the Butterfly and dedicates every major accomplishment in his life to the Butterfly, including Behind the Paint. When contemplating ICP’s complicated legacy, it’s important to bear in mind the image of a four-year-old latchkey kid weeping uncontrollably alongside his six-year-old brother while burying a butterfly that symbolized all that was good and beautiful and pure in the world.

  Behind the Paint offers an origin story for Insane Clown Posse, Violent J, and the Dark Carnival that marries the mundane with the fantastic. In a section helpfully titled MAJOR CHILDHOOD MEMORY 2, J writes of his mother traveling to Boston with a wealthy family to look after their children. This was a big deal for a five-year-old and a seven-year-old whose mother never left Michigan, b
ut it was nothing compared to the windfall J’s mom left behind for food: fifty dollars. Of course it’s not advisable to leave prepubescent children alone, but J’s broken home was desperately poor, and though J loves his mother dearly and thinks of her and his older brother as the heroes of his childhood, circumstances and finances forced her to make difficult concessions, like leaving her children at home while she struggled to make ends meet.

  This fortune attracted the attentions of a ten-year-old bully who decided to crash over at J’s home in a bid to get his hands on all the chips and dip, pizza, and sparkler J purchased with his mother’s money.

  J and his brother were appropriately terrified until they were visited in the middle of the night by what J describes as a black oil figure as dark as midnight that climbed up the stairs leading to J’s room, raised and then lowered its hand, then floated downstairs and disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived. The sight of this mysterious creature inspired rapturous joy and much frantic screaming from J and Rob, but the neighborhood bully didn’t see a thing.

  This cryptic creature was, in J’s own words, “GOD! No question, no doubt in my mind. It was God. Fuck you if you don’t believe me. We know what we saw that night. G-O-D diggity himself. The Holy Roller Thunder Bowler, funky fresh in the flesh. GOD baby.”

  To J, God appeared to him and his brother one magical evening to let them know that everything was going to be all right and they had nothing to fear, not even malevolent prepubescent monsters intent on relieving them of their tasty snacks. What poor kid doesn’t need that reassurance, supernatural or otherwise?

  More than most poor children, J needed something to believe in. Behind the Paint is ingratiatingly devoid of subtext; J acknowledges the role daydreaming played in his survival when he writes of his brother and himself, “Fantasy kept us happy and busy. Rob and I were out on our own; from the time I was nine I was mentally gone. I stayed in a fantasyland and I’M STILL THERE.”