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

  What lonely teenager doesn’t want to hear that? Forget “family coming together”: When you’re a hormone-crazed teenager, getting laid is what all of life really seems to be about.

  The copious free-flowing nudity on display throughout the Gathering made those poignant little signs exquisitely redundant. Immediately upon entering the Gathering we stumbled upon Ron Jeremy leading an aggregation of mostly naked Juggalettes being hosed with Faygo in a wet T-shirt contest. An audience of mostly male, video-camera-sporting rubberneckers looked on in open-mouthed appreciation as the women flaunted their tattooed flesh and raging lack of inhibitions.

  Jeremy presided over the festivities with randy, cornball bonhomie. When two of the women began dancing next to each other, he leered, “By the way. Do you two know each other? Are you guys into women? Let’s just see one little kiss, but you need to get your hands out of the way like in those porno movies. A little more tongue, one last kiss.”

  The porn legend was enough of a showman to realize that a contest like this needed more than just naked women being doused with Faygo; it needed elevation. So for the next round, the contestants were asked for their names and favorite sexual positions.

  “Ashley. Doggy style,” enthused the first contestant.

  “Lindsey. Fucking from behind!” squeaked the second.

  “The ass or the vagina?” Jeremy countered with an incongruous nonchalance that undercut the sleaziness of the question ever so slightly.

  The rest of the girls expressed a pronounced preference for doggy style, but one contestant boldly established her individuality by bragging, “My name is Rook from Detroit, Michigan—Whoop! Whoop!—and I like any position except for boring because I am one erratic [erotic?] son of a bitch!”

  In the next round, the women were asked to fake an orgasm in order to make it to the finals. “You’ve got to use your imagination because no one is tickling your vagina at the moment,” Jeremy added with improbable matter-of-factness. He wasn’t about to leave anything to chance: There would be no fatally confused competitors on his watch thinking, “Wait? I have to make an orgasm noise yet I’m not having an orgasm right now? How do I reconcile those contradictory facts? Oh the cognitive dissonance!”

  One naked, heavily tattooed contender wasn’t willing to rely solely on the powers of her imagination, so she began masturbating vigorously in front of the impressed crowd. Clearly, Jeremy’s words were wasted on this fierce young future wet T-shirt champion. “This is called acting! Wait. I take that back. She’s now diddling herself,” Jeremy reflected as the woman enthusiastically fondled her pierced clitoris. An avalanche of faked orgasmic bliss ensued. I turned to Cadence and stage-whispered, “I’ll have what she’s having.” I should probably mention at this point that this all occurred at about 3:30 in the afternoon.

  The next contender went even further. After duly feigning an orgasm she quipped, “Oh, yeah, put your finger in my butt. Harder, harder. Wait, what’s your name again?” Jeremy did not appreciate this encroachment on his territory. “That’s right. I crack the jokes. You do the dancing. That’s how it works. That’s pretty fucking funny, though. ‘Is that your finger in my butthole and what’s your name?’ You’re a little wiseass, ain’t ya? Someone take her home. She’s ready.”

  Angry cries of “Take it off!” filled the air during the last dance, though at that point the Faygo-drenched young lovelies didn’t really have anything left to take off. The gals were ultimately competing for the wet T-shirt contest’s grand prize of seventy-five dollars in Insane Clown Posse merchandise, but the real reward lay in the performance itself. There’s an unmistakable element of exhibitionism in being a Juggalo, in making a ridiculous spectacle of yourself no matter the consequences. The wet T-shirt contest represented this tendency in its purest form.

  Jeremy was a quintessential Gathering of the Juggalos celebrity. He may be one of the world’s most famous porn stars, but he was at the Gathering to serve as both a ribald, wisecracking host of the wet T-shirt and Miss Juggalette competitions and as a stand-up comedian at the Fresh Ass Comedy Tent. But he was mostly there as a personality, a showman, an entertainer, a quasi-vaudevillian whose banter and shtick were pure Catskills, albeit for a decidedly non-Catskills audience.

  After the wet T-shirt contest, we ran into Jeremy and introduced ourselves and he more or less instinctively took a silver marker and signed Cadence’s cleavage. She didn’t ask him to do so but he did it anyway, because, well, when you’re Ron Jeremy, that’s what you do.

  “Are you here primarily for hosting duties?” I asked.

  “Well, that and I’m performing stand-up comedy though, did you guys see Hannibal Buress last night?” Jeremy asked of a genius black stand-up comedian Chris Rock has described as a cross between Dave Chappelle and Mitch Hedberg. Buress was already a critic’s darling and a staff writer for Saturday Night Live when he made an unlikely exodus to Cave-in-Rock, yet he had performed at the Gathering as Ron Jeremy’s opening act. He was still paying dues at that point, and some dues are stranger than others.

  “I felt like a fool performing after him. If anything, I should be opening for him. I mean, I do what I do, but he’s absolutely brilliant,” Jeremy conceded. Offstage, Jeremy’s razzle-dazzle professionalism gave way to something exhausted and dispirited. He had extraordinarily sad eyes. The following year we saw him lying nearly comatose in a chair in the stand-up comedy tent at four in the morning. Some teenaged Juggalos offered to get him high. “No thanks, guys,” he told them as he stared off into the distance at nothing much in particular. “I’m just tired. I’m just tired,” he continued. That tiredness seemed existential as much as anything.

  Cadence and I then walked over to the Seminar Tent, where Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope were scheduled to deliver their yearly address to the faithful. (All of the daily talks between Psychopathic artists and their fans were given the strangely formal title of “seminar.”)

  I have come to see Violent J as the benevolent but absent-minded stepfather to his Juggalo brood, and Shaggy 2 Dope as the fun uncle. In that respect, the annual Insane Clown Posse State of the Juggalo address represented the ICP equivalent of a long list of promises from Stepdad he’ll never quite be able to keep.

  In deference to the wishes of older fans, ICP announced it would be touring behind nothing but the old stuff and only be playing clubs without barricades so that there would be as few barriers as possible between the group and its fans, literally and figuratively. Even more excitingly, Violent J announced that at Hallowicked, the next card in the second Joker’s pack would be revealed. This was a matter of utmost significance, as only one new Joker’s Card had been revealed since Insane Clown Posse closed out the original set of six Joker’s Cards with the revelation of the twin Joker’s Cards Shangri-La and Hell’s Pit: 2009’s Bang! Pow! Boom!, the first Joker’s Card in the second deck and a continual explosion that clears the souls of the damned from the Dark Carnival.

  In a trembling voice, Violent J enthused, “I want to let everybody know, this Halloween night in Detroit, we will unveil the next Joker’s Card. The name and image will be shown at Hallowicked this year at the same building, the Fillmore in downtown Detroit. We’re not showing it everywhere on tour. For those live in person, this will come falling out of the sky. From the bottom of my nuts, the Joker’s Card is extremely fucking exciting. The image has already been blasted into our fucking skulls. We know what it looks like. We know its name. It’s so fucking energetic. I can’t wait to show you the next album and the next Joker’s Card. This is the second deck. Another six is what we’re doing. We never thought after the first Joker’s Cards that another hand would be dealt. But here we are. It’s like we’re living in the fucking future. This is 2010 and we’re bringing the thunder. We wish we could make it drop now.”

  I found myself swept up in J’s guileless enthusiasm and the equally guileless enthusiasm of the crowd. I got lost in J’s wrestling cadences, the way he seemed to transform every sentence
into a breast-beating boast, a self-deprecating dig, or some strange combination of the two. Wrestling was in J’s blood. It was in his cadence, his swagger, his strut. It shaped the contours of his personality and public image just as indelibly as hip-hop did.

  A furious tumult swept over the crowd as the assembled tried to bring this fabled new Joker’s Card into existence through will alone. At that point people inexplicably started chanting for Violent J to take his shirt off. This was perplexing on multiple levels. Violent J writes in Behind the Paint that he has a terrible fear of appearing in public without his shirt on. At his seminar he elaborated with the following anecdote: “Quick story. One time we were doing a concert in Toledo and I was trying to do a backflip off the step. Let me set this up. This is way back in the day. I forget the name of the place. The Asylum. Something like that. Just packed. They couldn’t move. You could walk over the crowd. The fire marshal showed up. So I do my ninja backflip over the top of the speaker set, and the next thing I remember I woke up in an ambulance halfway through a show. Cracked my head open and broke my collarbone in four places. But the real pain is they cut my shirt off. They carried me out in front of everybody with no fucking shirt. I’m glad I was unconscious. That was a horrifying and traumatic experience knowing my shirt was peeled in front of everybody. I was probably snoring. Ever see somebody get knocked unconscious and they’re snoring? I had a nightmare about this very seminar last week. I dreamed I came out with no shirt and didn’t even realize it.”

  Violent J insisted that nobody wanted to see him with his shirt off. No, Shaggy 2 Dope was the real sex symbol of the group, he proclaimed loudly. Violent J joked more than once that he was “two-thirds gay” for his group mate. To their credit, nobody seemed to make much of the statement.

  Violent J announced that Insane Clown Posse was buying an old industrial building in Novi, Michigan, and transforming it into Juggalo Arena. Every other weekend, grapplers from Insane Clown Posse’s Juggalo Championship Wrestling League would wrestle for free.

  There would be after-parties and a television show and even a new album from the Golden Goldies, an Insane Clown Posse side project whose lyrics exclusively involve gold and gold-related items.

  There was something incredibly humanizing about the lecture. Violent J echoed the sentiments of many of the assembled when he conceded, “I know we have a reputation of breaking promises and announcing things that don’t ever happen. But if you check your fucking records, we’re doing better. We’ve been coming through with our shit.”

  And that’s all you can really ask for, isn’t it? We aren’t perfect, but we’re trying.

  If Insane Clown Posse institutionally had a reputation for breaking promises, it was in part because they promised so much. In 2012 Insane Clown Posse made its biggest and boldest statement to date when it promised to sue the FBI on behalf of its fans for designating Juggalos a “loosely organized hybrid gang.”

  To that end, Insane Clown Posse set up the website juggalos fightback.com, where fans who had suffered negative consequences because of their status as Juggalos could seek legal recourse through Insane Clown Posse’s legal team. They also filed a lawsuit against the FBI over the classification.

  The ICP vs. FBI scuffle underlines just how thoroughly fandom defines Juggalos: No one would ever imagine designating the fans of, say, Duncan Sheik as either a gang or a discriminated-against minority, because by all rights liking Duncan Sheik represents but a tiny component of someone’s terminally beige personality, but to many people, hardcore Insane Clown Posse fandom is as central to a person’s identity and sense of self as race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion and is just as likely, if not more likely, to lead to discrimination. The war of words between the FBI and ICP that kicked off at the 2012 Gathering brought the duo’s eternal battle with the forces of cultural repression to the legal realm, but when I first set foot on the grounds in 2010 it struck me as an exhilaratingly lawless world, a new frontier where anything could and would happen.

  The sense that all the rules and tradition that govern the non-Juggalo world had instantly disappeared was only strengthened by the revelation that many of the festival’s top acts would be performing at four o’clock. In the morning. For example, Lil’ Kim was scheduled to perform at Friday’s “Ladies Night” at 3:20 A.M.

  We quickly became acclimated to our surroundings. To get to the main stage where the marquee acts of the festival would be performing, you passed a series of tents and clubs housing seminars from Psychopathic artists, wrestling, carnival games, and, most important as far as many of the festival attendees were concerned, the infamous Drug Bridge.

  Drug Bridge is exactly what its name suggests, a bridge where you could procure just about any illicit substance known to man. This was no furtive hideaway. There was nothing covert about it. There are window fronts in Amsterdam where women press their naked vaginas against the glass that are more subtle in their commercial appeal than the Drug Bridge. The idea is to advertise as blatantly as possible. Sometimes that meant literally yelling through a bullhorn or carrying a cardboard sign listing drugs for sale next to their respective prices. Sometimes you would see entire families selling bottles of prescription medication and feel bad for humanity as a whole. The Drug Bridge was to the Gathering of the Juggalos what the Lot was to Phish fans and Shakedown Street was to Deadheads: an open-air drug market, a dangerous and exciting place to be.

  Cries of “Molly! Weed! Rolls! X!” could be heard everywhere. A girl held up a sign reading, FINEST BOSTON YAYO 70 BUCKS A GRAM WOOP! WOOP!

  Spying the sign, a black security guard looked at it indignantly and asked her, “Seventy dollars a gram for some yayo? Damn, girl! Why you be trying to rob a Juggalo?” For days afterward, Cadence and I would ask each other, “Why you be trying to rob a Juggalo?” at random intervals.

  For stoners and fans of sensory derangement, there’s something extraordinarily exciting about the openness of the Drug Bridge. It takes the guesswork, scheming, and shame out of purchasing drugs. You don’t need to know a guy who knows a guy who might be carrying: You just need to engage one of the many drug dealers loudly hawking their illegal wares.

  During Insane Clown Posse’s seminar the day that the shit went down, literally and figuratively, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope sent out exquisitely mixed signals about how its rabid fan base should treat Tila Tequila, the notorious MySpace celebrity, singer, and reality-show personality who was the most unexpected addition to the 2010 Gathering of the Juggalos lineup. On the one hand, Violent J acknowledged that it was funny as shit to watch somebody get hit with a dead fish or pelted with piss, and that Juggalos should feel free to behave however they see fit. At the same time, however, every performer at the Gathering was a guest of the Psychopathic family and should enjoy the same privileges afforded the Boondoxes, Anybody Killas, and Blaze Ya Dead Homeys of the world.

  Shaggy 2 Dope offered a slightly less high-minded appeal. “I’m tryna fuck that bitch, yo! So don’t be fucking it up for me,” he insisted. If an appeal to family and graciousness and basic human decency didn’t work, hopefully the crowd would be moved by the massive cultural force that is Shaggy 2 Dope’s libido.

  But before Tila Tequila performed a set that will live in infamy, Tom Green was scheduled to play an early-morning gig in the Fresh Ass Comedy Tent. He wasn’t scheduled to go on until the early hours of the morning, but his starting time came and went with no sign of Green. This was not particularly unusual for the Gathering, where guests often came on dramatically late when they came on at all.

  The crowd grew restless. Green was ten minutes, then twenty minutes, then a half hour late. The unrest grew more and more pronounced. A clown named Upchuck who served as an unofficial Juggalo mascot blessed and cursed with the job of introducing Green bore the brunt of the hostility.

  “Fuck you, Upchuck, you fucking home wrecker!” yelled someone from the increasingly apoplectic crowd. “Because you fucked my wife I’ve got to pay two hundred
dollars in child support a month, you wife-fucking motherfucker!”

  “Hey, do you think Upchuck really fucked that guy’s wife?” I asked Cadence.

  “I don’t know. I just know that it is heartbreaking to find the marital bed suddenly full of yellow synthetic hair and the sheets stained with clown makeup,” Cadence replied.

  Upchuck finally took the stage forty minutes after Green’s set was supposed to begin and was immediately pelted with projectiles as he tried and failed to perform observational stand-up about dating. Nobody, it seemed, was interested in hearing about the romantic travails of Upchuck the Clown.

  Upon taking the stage, Green immediately announced, “I’m taking the temperature of the room.” He took a long, hard look at the crowd and adjusted his set accordingly.

  We were in the land of white rappers, so Green rapped intermittently. Everyone in the audience was high, so Green got high onstage.

  In between bong hits and hip-hop verses, Green cannily delivered a narrative the crowd could relate to. His tragicomic stand-up implicitly said, “I’m just like you. A Scrub. A Juggalo. Through some miraculous twist of fate, I was once one of the beautiful people. Through some cosmic fluke, I breathed the rarefied air of the Franklins. I had a show on MTV. I wrote, directed, and starred in a major motion picture, was referenced in hit songs, and married an unconscionably hot woman who also happened to be a huge movie star and a scion of one of the most prestigious acting dynasties in American history. Then everything went to shit. I got cancer. My movie was a flop. My show ended. Now I get drunk and host an online talk show in my living room and perform at three thirty in the morning in the middle of the woods.” Like seemingly everyone at the Gathering of the Juggalos, Green was a survivor. The tumult of his personal and professional life had shaken him, but it had not destroyed him.

  Like Violent J, Green had lived every scrub’s dream, which lent an additional element of pathos to his set. He’d been to the top. Now he good-naturedly resided somewhere very different. It was a melancholy arc Green shared with many of the other acts on the bill. Vanilla Ice, Coolio, Slick Rick, Lil’ Kim: They all used to be huge. Now they were just trying to get by.