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

  Everyone around me exuded a complementary sense of joy. This was it. It was the moment we’d all been waiting for. The ceremony was officially about to begin all over again. I found myself filled with an incredible sense of anticipation. It wasn’t just that I had come to enjoy Phish’s music as a by-product of my overwhelming love for Cadence: I fucking needed to hear these songs. I needed to hear this music. It was fucking essential.

  The world took on a radiant glow. The LSD was speaking to me. I experienced a full-on epiphany. The woods and the concert and the road and the LSD were all letting me know that while the road contained darkness and peril, it also contained joy and wonder and light. The woods and the concert and the road and the LSD were letting me know that while I contained darkness and peril, I also contained joy and light. There was a small but distinct chance that my world would not end in October, as I had so desperately needed to believe. There was even an outside chance that I might make it through my little adventure alive.

  I had left Chicago in a state of existential darkness, but everywhere I looked I encountered light. That’s the great thing about Phish shows for the painfully shy and self-conscious: People will talk to you. You don’t even necessarily need to strike up a conversation: People just need to talk. I just needed to talk. I still do.

  There was a sense that in the primal, nurturing wilderness we could cast off all the bullshit and compromises of the corrupt outside world and be our best, truest selves. We could return to a place of innocence, of purity. This was no mere rock ’n’ roll show. This was paradise. This was Eden.

  By the time we entered Bethel, Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger was well on his way to losing his friend. He couldn’t help it. His friend belonged to the show now. Like beers and pipes and stashes, he had become communal property as he ricocheted madly around the show in a state of ecstatic joy. He lived to be part of the crowd. Later in the bus he recounted how he would find himself in the front row and wonder how in the hell he got there. On the bus ride over, he giddily recounted how he’d run onto the field twice during a Milwaukee Brewers game. There was no real rhyme or reason behind the action, just the eternal adolescent’s “Looky me, looky me!” Alas, he had the kind of daft sweetness that made “Looky me, looky me!” not only bearable but strangely charming.

  By that point the Golden Child was lost to me as well, but I did not feel alone. For Golden Child and Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger are what I have come to see as Phish friends. Phish friendship is a strange and often beautiful thing rooted, as you might imagine, in a shared appreciation for the music of Phish and the mind-expanding properties of marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, and Molly.

  In that respect, the Phish friend is a lot like the proverbial drug friend. The overlap can be tremendous and dispiriting. I know that over the course of my trip I always felt a little sad when Phish friendships morphed slowly but surely into drug friendships. Phish friendships, for all their drugged-up decadence, are at least rooted in the sense of community and life that comes with following Phish. Drug friendships all too often consist of two people tricking themselves into thinking they’re less alone by sharing their vices.

  Phish friendships are often defined by their ephemeral nature; it’s not at all unusual to meet someone at a Phish show, take drugs with them, experience a fierce emotional connection, vow to remain in touch, then never see them again or catch a fleeting glimpse of them a few shows down the road. Actually, that’s something of an ideal Phish friendship. Linger too long and the magic has a way of dissipating.

  Time is relative in Phish World. Just as a song can seemingly last a day and a concert a lifetime, it’s possible to have a wholly satisfying friendship with a fellow Phish fan that begins and ends over the course of a single hour.

  An example: As I stood there in the comforting blackness, listening to Trey and the band perform music I was convinced the universe had commanded them to play, a handsome young man in his midtwenties tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Dude, I don’t know why, but there’s this big empty space right behind you. I’m gonna dance in it.”

  I confess that in my narcissistic, grandiose delirium I looked back at the empty circle behind me and thought that I had fallen into such a dark place mentally that my negative energy had manifested itself physically as a meteor of blackness in this most sacred of hippie cathedrals.

  I began to think of the blank space behind me as My Darkness. It’s ridiculous, of course, but I felt oddly proud.

  If this was really my darkness, if it truly was a physical manifestation of the ugliness and tension and pressure in my soul, then there was something beautiful, even sublime about the idea of an exuberant stranger dancing madly in it. He was even polite enough to ask permission before doing so.

  A sheen of sweat coated his handsome face as he whirled about madly next to a girlfriend who wasn’t just beautiful but radiant. He was drunk and a little out of control and crazy with joy and she very maternally made sure he was properly hydrated and looked after and cared for. Eventually, we started talking.

  “You want a story for your book? Here’s a story. A guy finds Phish in high school, he parties, goes to college, goes to work for the man, but still comes to shows for release.”

  He was spinning a familiar narrative: You find Phish. It changes your life and rewires your circuitry, you grow up and do the college, job, marriage thing but you still go to shows now and then because it’s part of your history, it’s part of your past, it’s part of who you are.

  The man worked for a defense contractor, but he wanted to do more. He wanted to do good. We all did. We wanted to prove ourselves worthy of the unimaginable bounty we had been given.

  He was looking for something to believe in, someone to serve, a cause to devote his life to. He could be forgiven for imagining that the answers to the questions throttling his soul could be found in a field in Bethel Woods. That night we all could.

  In that field we were reborn. We weren’t just concert attendees. We were spiritual seekers in the midst of a transcendent experience. We were beckoning spirits. We were asking deep questions. We were seeking wisdom.

  The more alienated from the world I became that summer, the more I employed the royal we in my writing. I apparently felt that if I professed to speak for all of humanity at once, then maybe I could secure a backdoor entrance into the brotherhood of man. In the fields of Bethel Woods, however, I finally felt qualified to use the royal we for the first time in forever. I felt like I could speak for everyone around me and everyone around me could speak for me.

  Us. There’s something powerful in the word and in the idea. I had fallen into a pit of isolation in Chicago. I had disappeared so deeply and painfully inside myself that nobody even seemed to notice my soul had gone missing, including myself.

  The universe was saying: This is not about you. My narcissism said, “Everything is about you.”

  The man’s girlfriend offered me kettle corn. I took a handful and said, without irony or self-consciousness, “You’re like an angel!”

  She enthused, “I feel like an angel!”

  “You remind me of my girlfriend’s sister Romy,” I told her. “She also has a really great energy about her.”

  “I know! My sister is from Romania. This is her first Phish show. Isn’t that great?”

  In its own way, it was the perfect response. When I looked at them, I saw Cadence and myself. I felt connected to everyone.

  When I told her about the book, she told me she’d worked as a publicist but was going back to school to be a social worker. “I teach ballet to children with disabilities. They don’t understand any of that bullshit about money and power and all that other shit. They just understand beauty.”

  She handed me her card, but it seemed like not just an empty but a counterproductive gesture. Tonight was all about shaking off the strictures of the outside world, of abandoning a world of business cards and promotions and anxiety and chasing that Big Joy.

  We ma
de plans to hang out the following day, though neither of us expected those plans to come to fruition, and with that our curious friendship came to an end. I doubt they remember meeting me. I’m not entirely sure reading this would even jog their memory. It was that kind of a night.

  I should probably reiterate now that I was on some incredibly powerful acid at that point and probably could have had an intense, engaging, and, in my mind at least, important conversation with a sea urchin or owl or spore of some sort. Instead I ended up talking with a pair of nice Vermont academics in their midfifties who were sitting on a blanket behind me staring into the glorious void, their pupils dilated, their minds expanding rapidly.

  When Phish played the Talking Heads’ “Crosseyed and Painless,” as they did throughout the first leg of the tour, it triggered a flood of sense memories. I was instantly brought back to the Hanukkah at the group home where I grew up. Alumni of the system had given me three tapes that would go on to have a huge impact on my life and career: De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend, and the Talking Heads’ Sand in the Vaseline. I was instantly catapulted to the first concert of my adult life, David Byrne at the Vic in Chicago, as a seventeen-year-old. My body remembered countless nights spent half watching the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense and Storytelling Giant during my years as a video-store clerk. A flood of memories, all of them positive, was unleashed by Phish covering a song I’d heard countless times.

  I no longer felt as though I was watching a mere concert. I felt as though I was experiencing a profound spiritual epiphany about the fundamental benevolence of the universe. I couldn’t have been the only one. I felt a tidal wave of LSD-inspired spiritual epiphanies that night. The epiphanies weren’t limited to that particular show.

  Time stretched forward and backwards. I felt connected not just to Phish but to the Grateful Dead scene that birthed it. Throughout the woods, people were experiencing epiphanies. A twenty-two-year-old was realizing he didn’t have to go to law school just because his family wanted him to. Or maybe he was realizing that being a lawyer wouldn’t be so bad as long as he was able to write and play guitar on the weekends. It felt as if the show that I was attending was no different from Woodstock or a Grateful Dead show in Boston in 1979. It was all part of the same continuum, the same trip. I had hopped on board late, having zealously hidden my inner hippie for decades, but now I was most assuredly part of that world.

  That night changed me. I was no longer someone who enjoyed going to Phish shows because his girlfriend was a fan. Phish now had a much deeper meaning for me.

  If Phish’s music is rooted in Trey’s magical guitar, its mythology is grounded in stories. Those stories don’t necessarily revolve around the band. Nine times out of ten they revolve around the fan. Every Phish fan has that ultimate Phish story, that time they risked losing their job or skipped their best friend’s wedding or gave up an opportunity to make a lot of money because it was more important for them to drive fifteen hours with their buddy to hit some show that would live forever in their memories, growing more legendary and epic with every successive year.

  These are stories of devotion and commitment, tales where the dictates of Phish World outstripped those of the outside world.

  It would not be enough for me to simply hear some of these stories or document them for posterity: No, I would need to live some of these Phish stories myself. I will forever be grateful to Phish—and, more specifically, to their fans and the world their fans created—for saving my fucking life that night, for lifting me out of a bottomless depression and showing me that the world contained more than rejection, failure, desperation, and sadness.

  Something clicked in me. It was as if this concert, this fucking rock ’n’ roll show, had somehow intuited that something deep within me was broken and healed it instantaneously.

  That sounds ridiculous, I know. A few years back I would have sneered at the very notion that a concert could have that impact. I don’t have those kinds of defenses anymore. The road broke me down. That night in Bethel Woods I began to feel as if the road was starting to build me up all over again. It was reminding me that while there was darkness in the road, there was also light. There was joy.

  The Golden Child unsurprisingly nearly missed the bus. He was passed out on the ground somewhere when someone recognized him and brought him back. He was lucky. Suspiciously lucky. He was the kind of guy who could be dropped from the top of the Empire State Building and land in the arms of a bikini-clad supermodel covering her head with a bag of acid-soaked hundred-dollar bills.

  The Golden Child was also spinning. Hard. I had taken one roll of LSD, seen God, experienced a spiritual epiphany, and had my DNA rewired. He had taken seven hits of the same acid, so I can only assume he had seven times as intense an experience. His pupils were the size of quarters. His unsteady gaze was fixed nowhere in particular.

  He was so lost that Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger tried to lure him back with the soothing reassurance of the familiar.

  “I’m not the dude. You’re the Dude!” he smilingly told the Golden Child for what must have been the thousandth time. It was like a private language between them, their own Dude-speak. The Golden Child smiled but needed additional reassurance.

  “Would you like to listen to some music?” I asked before handing over my iPod. It was a way of paying it forward.

  So I gave him my headphones and experienced that giddy surge of satisfaction that comes with doing something good for another human being. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt connected: to someone, to something, to the whole gestalt of Phish in that moment. It felt good. It felt right. I wanted that feeling to linger as long as humanly possible, despite knowing that its power lay in the ephemeral.

  THE TOUR CONTINUES AS OUR HAPLESS PROTAGONIST TRIES TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO OPERATE WITH A BLOWN MIND AND LEAKING SKULL

  I could barely sleep that first night back after the bus dropped us all off back in Manhattan. I just stared at the shadows of my dingy little hotel room with Phish songs bouncing through my mind. I wanted to call Cadence and tell her about the night but worried that I lacked the eloquence to put my experience into words. I was still rolling pretty hard.

  I managed a few hours’ sleep before I was back on the bus to Bethel. The Golden Boy and Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger had opted out for the evening, so I planted myself in front of the most charismatic dude on the bus and hoped I’d be able to find a way to shoehorn myself into his conversation.

  It turned out to be a wise move. Behind me sat a man who bore a distinct resemblance to Jesus (in a good way) and an attractive woman I learned was a flight attendant for JetBlue with a degree in anthropology. They were not a couple. She had been turned on to the scene by a boyfriend she was no longer with (she volunteered just a little too aggressively), but by this point she was a zealot. Her Phish fandom had nearly cost her jobs and relationships, but she wouldn’t trade a minute of it. Like a lot of Phish fans, myself included, she had the zeal of the convert.

  The Jesus look-alike had a longer relationship with Phish. He’d gotten into them in high school and throughout his teen and college years Phish was the epicenter of his social scene. He’d graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and was in the process of working on something that combined the uncanny powers of GPS with the unholy acumen of the iPod, in addition to funding and running a satirical website. He was, in other words, the living refutation of the notion that pot, or at least the accouterments of the hippie lifestyle, kills ambition.

  Yet he’d never lost his affection for Phish. In a hectic and stressful life, it was a release valve, something he could do a couple times every summer to reconnect with his younger, wilder, more carefree self. I was impressed, in no small part because he was so oblivious to his attractive seat partner’s advances.

  Once we hit the ground, I set about the very undignified task of tagging along with the Jesus look-alike as he wandered about the Lot.

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nbsp; “You can follow me if you’d like,” he told me, which was good, since I was going to do it anyway.

  Nitrous was a controversial fixture of Phish shows. While the police in each city tended to turn a blind eye to pot and designer drugs, they seemed to take special pride in busting nitrous dealers. Their zeal was understandable: Nitrous was dirty, it was extraordinarily public (there’s simply no way to make a giant tank of gas inconspicuous), and, worst of all, it was not something that I personally enjoyed, the ultimate mark of any drug’s ultimate worth.

  “An interesting arc for your book might be coming into the whole scene as an outsider and then falling in love with it,” the Jesus look-alike said offhandedly.

  “Yeah. That already kind of happened. Last night. I had kind of a religious experience.”

  I then wandered over to the nitrous tank area with the Jesus look-alike and I semi-inhaled some balloons before we wandered over to the man’s friends and I discovered that this was no mere Phish fan I had been hanging with. No, I had spent the previous two hours with a gentleman whose existential identity will forever be Slow-Talking Hippie Guy from Survivor.

  That, friends, is pretty fucking impressive. I’m so goddamn insecure that I cannot meet someone without thrusting all of my books and press clippings into their arms, yet this infinitely more secure, rugged, and successful soul could just casually let slip that he was an iconic figure on one of the most successful reality shows of all time. The experience had scarred him; after the show ended, he had to wrestle with very nearly winning a million dollars only to come home empty-handed.

  After the show the man said, “Phish has been unusually tight. It’s like they’ve been doing yoga together or something,” which, for better or worse, is the kind of thing you’d imagine the slow-talking hippie guy from Survivor might say, Ivy League education or not. He also said the editor of Survivor was flummoxed because he said a lot of insightful, incisive things during his time on the show but he said them at a prohibitively slow pace.