Joy was not for me. I couldn’t simply go to a show and have a good time. No, I had to frame it in the soul-crushing vernacular of the pitch. I couldn’t experience joy firsthand; I had to position it as a compelling sociological phenomenon.
So over the course of a very eventful day on June 25, 2010, I signed a mortgage, moved, signed the contract to write this book, and flew to the East Coast to catch a Phish show with Cadence the next evening.
Something was off from the very beginning as Cadence and I traveled about the country following Phish and chasing joy with fiercely divided spirits. There’s something inherently melancholy about graduating from college and saying good-bye to your friends en route to a terrifyingly vague future. And now I was not only piloting Cadence’s uncertain future, I was forcing her to contemplate parts of her past that she treasured but could never recapture.
Phish was a big part of who Cadence had been. It’s still a part of her, but when I became obsessed with Phish it had already become a part of her life she was willing to let live happily in the past. Cadence had enjoyed her adolescence. Then she got over it. I, however, was hell-bent on vicariously experiencing Cadence’s radiant adolescence even if it killed us both and destroyed my career.
Here’s the thing about doing things for the wrong reasons: It always goes awry. The universe sees the deception and subterfuge in your soul and acts accordingly.
“I miss my friends. My friends aren’t here,” Cadence said to me during one show over the botched summer of 2010. I never understood the full portent of what she meant until now, as I write this well over a year later. Following Phish is a supremely communal experience, yet we were going it alone.
Rather than kick off our life together on a rollicking note, our nine 2010 dates with Phish were unmistakably bittersweet. All around us people were dancing and smiling and having fun, but they were not her friends, and she felt that absence acutely. I couldn’t concentrate on the shows because all of my energy and attention were directed toward Cadence. That was entirely my fault. I had tunnel vision. I couldn’t get out of my own head long enough to really empathize with or understand the people around me.
I had hoped to follow Phish throughout their 2010 tour and finish a book about it by the end of the year. That was the first of many disappointments, each more crushing than the last. I entered this project with an unforgivable lack of preparation, planning, and foresight. I just hoped that if I got out on the road something worth writing about would occur. I had faith in myself so utterly delusional that it bordered on madness.
I did not understand the Phish experience because I went in under pretenses so false I damn near fooled myself. I wouldn’t be able to write this book with a clear conscience until I was writing it from a place of emotional honesty. It would take me a solid year, oceans of abandoned prose, lots of fruitless trips and excursions, and tens of thousands of wasted dollars before I could do so. Writing books can be a tricky business when you have no fucking idea what you’re doing.
I had to abandon plans to continue the Phish tour when it proved prohibitively expensive. I wasn’t able to get anything out of the shows that I’d attended. I was there but I was still on the outside, still looking for a way in. I enjoyed the experience of going to see Phish. I enjoyed spending time in the summer outdoors with my girlfriend.
During that time my sense of self was shaken. I was overcome with fear that I would not be able to write the book I was professionally, morally, financially, and legally obligated to write. How could I when I had developed such agonizing social anxiety that the prospect of talking to a human being other than Cadence terrified me?
My life got a whole lot stranger when I got a Twitter message from my childhood hero “Weird Al” Yankovic announcing that after considering all the writers in the history of the universe, he had decided that I was the man to tell his story. He wanted me to write a coffee-table book about his life and career with him for Abrams Image.
It was an opportunity I probably should not have accepted. But I couldn’t resist. How do you say no to “Weird Al”? How can you turn down an opportunity to work with your childhood hero? How can you disappoint a pop-culture icon? How can you tell a friend of children and misfits everywhere that you’re too damned busy to tell his story? Who was I to say no to “Weird Al”?
You can’t. You simply fucking can’t. But accepting the gig of writing “Weird Al”’s coffee-table book meant that I’d be writing two books in a single summer while continuing to serve as A.V. Club’s head writer during a time of intense expansion, and, for me at least, mental disintegration.
Assembling the coffee-table book took my mind to some pretty strange places. I spent my thirty-fifth birthday in the living room of Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz, Yankovic’s drummer, archivist, and webmaster, sorting through boxes upon boxes of seemingly identical photographs of Al from throughout the eighties and nineties. Schwartz saved and photographed everything: His garage has become a shrine to the man he has drummed behind for over three decades.
While poring through photo after photo in Schwartz’s garage, I sank into what I call a “work coma.” Time seemed to stop. The world around me disappeared. All that mattered, all that existed, was the work in front of me. I was able to block out the rest of the world even when I really shouldn’t have.
On my thirty-fifth birthday I glimpsed into the abyss when a few errant drops of Coca-Cola seeped into my computer’s hard drive and destroyed it. Rationally I understood that I was paying a terrible price for my carelessness, but my unconscious mind processed it as something much more sinister.
At the risk of being hyperbolic, I felt as if something cracked in me when my hard drive died. This anxiety manifested itself physically as a persistent twitchiness, a pervasive sense that unless I kept a constant inventory of my belongings at all times, they would all be lost or broken. If one thing can fall apart, then everything can fall apart. If everything can fall apart, then everything will fall apart.
I was retreating deeper and deeper into a prison of self. Yet even as I increasingly lost my grasp on reality, I came to develop an unexpected connection to Phish’s music. I didn’t notice it at the time, but the band’s songs began to get under my skin, to affect me on an almost subliminal level so that when I encountered them again they boasted a new, unexpected resonance. My new affection for Phish’s music and the subculture it inspired only contributed to the sense that I was failing not just myself, my editor, and my publisher, but my subjects as well: the groups and their pathologically dedicated fans.
In my paranoia, I was convinced that I had fucked up so badly and made so many terrible, unforgivable mistakes that the only people who could possibly accept me would be Juggalos, the most misunderstood and reviled people on earth. Juggaloism is on some level a celebration of failure, of fucking up, of being a scrub. I identified with Juggalos and Insane Clown Posse on a profoundly personal level. As this project flew off the rails and I entered an intense emotional downward spiral, that identification with the Juggalo aesthetic increased exponentially.
I felt like a failure. I felt like a weird, sad ghost of my former self. I felt broken. I felt fucked. I was feeling awfully Detroit, which was fortuitous, since that was where I was headed for Insane Clown Posse’s 2010 Hallowicked hometown Detroit show.
THE CORRUPTION CONTINUES: HALLOWICKED 2010
Detroit feels like the ruins of a great civilization. Once upon a time the city was the engine that drove our economy. It was the lifeblood of American commerce, a blue-collar utopia where a union man of modest means could buy a house and send his children to college on the wages he made working on an assembly line at GM or Ford or Chrysler. He could live the American dream, secure in the knowledge that because of his tireless toil, his good-for-nothing children could go to some hippie college and major in bong hits and Frisbee golf.
Then a series of cataclysms wracked Detroit. The Japanese came to dominate the automobile industry through sneaky, underhanded tac
tics like building better cars for lower prices. The American car industry entered a downward spiral from which it has yet to recover. Unions lost their clout. We moved from an industrial society driven by steel and oil and factories to a technology and information society.
Detroit failed to keep pace.
As society crumbled and the mighty institutions upon which Detroit was built lurched into irrelevancy, nothing took the automobile industry’s place. Camelot morphed into a citywide Grey Gardens. The automotive capital of the United States began to look like the victim of a zombie apocalypse. The streets are strangely empty. Beautiful old buildings that once housed thriving businesses and families are covered with mold and graffiti. The ugly and corrupt have infected the gorgeous and pure. The city feels like a ghost town.
This is the world that created Insane Clown Posse. And Eminem. And Esham. And Kid Rock. And Iggy Pop. And Madonna. It’s a world of poverty and shuttered buildings. The music Insane Clown Posse makes reflects that.
Is it any wonder Violent J developed such a vivid imagination? How could he not dream of something better? It’s easy to see how one might develop a gothic imagination growing up in a dead city, surrounded by the rotting debris of a once-vital industry. If your life is going to suck, you might as well make an outrageous joke out of it. If you’re going to be treated like a clown, then why not be the wickedest, freshest clown around?
It doesn’t take much of a leap to look at the mean streets of Detroit and see a sinister circus. Acid rap and horrorcore thrived in a city so beaten down and desensitized that gangsta rap wasn’t hardcore, violent, or strange enough for it anymore. N.W.A wasn’t cutting it; that’s where Esham and later ICP came in. What they lacked in polish or musicality they made up for in extremism and theatricality; they went too far, then kept on going. They transformed their lives into sick jokes, their everyday struggles into warped horror-comedy drive-in movies for the ears.
Yet there is something unbelievably pure about the devastation of Detroit today. It’s as if one of the great cities of the world is being afforded an opportunity to start again from scratch on the ruins of a great civilization. There’s a spirit in the air of rebirth and renewal, of hope and optimism. It’s as if the fates are granting Detroit a giant cosmic Do-Over, a chance to rebuild on the faded glory of the past. Cadence and I fell in love with Detroit that Hallowicked weekend, with its potential, with its history, with its irresistible underdog spirit and gothic beauty. Like Cave-in-Rock during the Gathering, it was like no place on earth and the only place that could have birthed a phenomenon as doggedly strange and preternaturally resilient as Insane Clown Posse.
The line outside the Fillmore for Hallowicked 2010 was nearly a block long. Even on Halloween, Juggalos stood out. Orange-and-black jack-o’-lantern face paint was nearly as ubiquitous as the signature greasepaint styles of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. For reasons known only to himself, a young man was dressed as what appeared to be a gangsta ICP banana; he had a big, goofy banana costume festooned with the Hatchetman logo, yet nevertheless carried himself with swagger. He was fucking owning being the dude in the ICP banana costume at Hallowicked.
Behind us a cute, chubby, middle-aged black woman dressed up like a sexy cat reconnected with a man she bonded with during the 2006 Gathering when he had carried a sign offering “free hugs” and she happily took him up on his offer. Immediately in front of us, a man with a huge, menacing scar on his head that made him look like a bit player from The Devil’s Rejects triumphantly told his friends, “For the first time in my life, I don’t feel like a spectacle.”
It was a statement of naked, poignant sincerity. He spoke for a lot of Juggalos. Three hundred and sixty days a year, they’re the outcasts. But for five magical days every year, weirdness becomes the norm and normalcy becomes weird. The fringe becomes the mainstream, and the mainstream is reduced to the fringes. For five days it was all about Juggalove and Family and being embraced for your eccentricities and peculiar passions, not despite them. Hallowicked is much more conventional than the Gathering of the Juggalos. It may be ICP’s biggest non-Gathering concert of the year but it is, in the end, a concert, whereas Gathering of the Juggalos is a world unto itself where the rules of man no longer apply, especially those involving drugs and nudity.
Juggalos are by nature a social genus. They travel in packs and luxuriate in the camaraderie and acceptance of their fellow Dark Carnival aficionados. Yet there was one man standing next to us who was very conspicuously alone.
The man turned around slowly and said to me, “Hey, you’re Nathan, aren’t you?”
I don’t expect to be recognized anywhere, let alone in the line for an Insane Clown Posse concert in a city I’d never been to before.
The gentleman explained that he was one of the only other journalists covering the Gathering in 2010 and had been sent a link to a speech I gave about Juggalos earlier that afternoon.
He didn’t quite look at me; instead he looked through me with spooky intensity. He had read my A.V. Club blog entry on the Tila Tequila attack online and clearly took issue with it for reasons he had difficulty articulating. “I mean, man, I read your piece online and uh”—he then paused and chose his words carefully—“it almost felt like you had a problem with what was going on with Tequila. Like that you found it disturbing or something.”
Before I could explain that, yeah, there was part of me that was a little unnerved by a ninety-eight-pound woman being inundated with bottles of shit, he launched into an elaborate explanation of why he was at the Gathering. He was an old hand at festivals, an old-school “Burner.”
“When I started going to Burning Man, it was all about freedom. You could do anything and I am, philosophically, all about what I call ‘extreme freedom,’ and that’s scary for a lot of people. They can’t handle it. They couldn’t handle it at Burning Man. I mean, after that first year they wouldn’t even allow you to have guns.”
The man had come to the Gathering as part of an ongoing multimedia project about how festivals become universes unto themselves with a karmic energy and governing structure all their own. They were, in this gentleman’s estimation, exemplars of extreme freedom where festival goers could enter an alternate universe for a few days where the outside rules didn’t apply and drugs were a problem only if they were too expensive or not of sufficiently high quality.
Festivals were the Wild West, the last frontier, strange little quasi-nations of structured anarchy and free-floating chaos. The gentleman’s philosophy was fundamentally libertarian; he didn’t need a mommy state to tell him where he could or couldn’t fire off guns or hurl projectiles at people in need of a spiritual awakening. The man had embraced the Dark Carnival with the zeal of the convert; he seemed to take the philosophy more literally and seriously than even Violent J himself.
“The message of the Dark Carnival and the Joker’s Cards is to really examine yourself on a spiritual level. So when that happened to Tila that night, she was forced to come to terms with who she was as a person. Those pictures you saw of Tila on tmz.com, where she’s got cuts and bruises on her face. That’s the real Tila; that’s what she looks like on the inside.”
“So you’re saying that Tila Tequila was moved to become a better person because of what happened to her at the Gathering?” Cadence asked incredulously.
“I dunno, man,” he responded noncommittally. “That’s on her, man.”
As a hippie festival rat turned Juggalo, the man was the living embodiment of the interconnectedness of strange musical subcultures and the simpatico solidarity that each provides, yet I couldn’t help but feel like in this man’s eyes I was failing to live by the Juggalo Code.
The man was a spiritual seeker. In the Dark Carnival he’d found something that made sense, that reflected his own beliefs in karma and spiritual energy. I had become pretty obsessed with Insane Clown Posse myself. I was genuinely excited about the revelation of the second Joker’s Card of the second pack and was way too geeked about the
free EP Insane Clown Posse gives out at each Hallowicked.
I didn’t suspect that another year on the road would transform me into a wild-eyed lunatic obsessed with energy and vibes and the interconnectedness of all things as well. I too would go upriver. The road would save me. It would also drive me mad.
Inside the Fillmore, we spied an Army armed forces recruiting table where a jarhead who looked like a deflated version of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson delivered his spiel beside a pull-up bar. The juxtaposition of the marines and the Dark Carnival might strike some as incongruous, even surreal, but it’s not the mismatch you might imagine. Violent J’s beloved older brother Rob was a GI, and one of Violent J’s earliest wrestling aliases was Corporal Robinson.
At Hallowicked, the army was looking for cannon fodder. What better place to find poor, undereducated young men with few resources or opportunities and an overwhelming air of desperation than at an Insane Clown Posse concert in Detroit?
While images of elite all-Juggalo units in clown makeup and camo filled my mind, Cadence asked the recruiter why the army chose this concert in particular to look for new recruits.
With an unmistakable air of defensiveness, the recruiter spat back, “What, soldiers aren’t allowed to listen to Insane Clown Posse? We’re looking for a diverse army, and there’s an awful lot of diversity in this crowd.”
I don’t know exactly what I was expecting from ICP’s Hallowicked performance, but I was initially underwhelmed by a set that looked as if it was borrowed wholesale from a cut-rate haunted house and a bunch of flunkies in cheap monster masks spraying Faygo into the crowd. I guess I expected an expensive, elaborate spectacle. This was Halloween, was it not? The most important, sacred day of the Juggalo year?
Then I realized that for Juggalos and ICP, a cheap haunted-house set and friends in monster masks spraying Faygo at an ecstatic audience constituted an expensive, elaborate spectacle. Hey, if it was good enough for the previous sixteen Hallowickeds, it was good for number seventeen as well. There was ultimately something strangely winning about the modesty of the duo’s stage show. As big as the group has become, it never lost the low-budget feel of its earliest shows. It never stopped feeling homemade, intimate, like something that belonged to the fans more than the group.
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 Page 9
