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
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It meant meeting strange people and forming bonds that felt important and real. It meant travel and the Holiday Inn and the Comfort Inn and Motel 6 and feeling as if my body no longer belonged to me. It meant weeping openly and publicly for no discernible reason and feeling untethered from anything but a band and its fans.
Perhaps more than anything, Phish in the summer of 2011 meant feeling as if I simultaneously had nothing and everything to lose.
That is what Phish meant to me in the summer of 2011. The incarnation of Phish I saw at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago couldn’t help but feel ersatz by comparison. I was also far more emotionally invested in each show during my weeks on the road. During that quiveringly uncertain period, I needed Phish to be great. Otherwise my life didn’t make any sense. Oh, sure, I had a book to write, but my brain didn’t process that as a legitimate excuse. It demanded more; I couldn’t just follow Phish for professional reasons. No, it had to be personal as well. I had to mean it.
I had press tickets for the first time on August 16 in Chicago. That likewise felt a little wrong. For when I saw Phish I took my critic’s cap off and put my fanboy hat on. I was not there to render devastating critical judgment on Phish: I was there as a fan.
The tickets Phish’s management provided were, alas, too good. The seats were so close that Cadence and I were more or less forced to watch the band perform, and that’s one of the least interesting vantage points for a Phish show. What I loved and love about Phish is the grand gestalt: the anticipation and the Lot and the drugs and the spectacle and the road. To reduce it all to a band playing music felt awfully limiting.
I had come to associate Phish so strongly with light that it felt strange and wrong to watch them performing in an all-consuming darkness. So while I enjoyed the dark, jammy show on August 16 in my hometown, there was something that kept me from embracing it with the unselfconscious conviction and overriding passion I had experienced that first night in Bethel Woods.
Phish and their fans had given a neurotic cynic the most precious gift of all: the ability to live in the moment instead of lamenting a past I couldn’t change or fixating on a future that filled me with unshakable dread. But on August 16, my mind understandably focused on the night of August 17, which would be eventful for reasons that went beyond being the final night of Phish’s Chicago run. If all went according to plan, the night of August 17 would change my life forever.
It ends, as these things generally do, with a girl. On August 17 I took Cadence to a now-closed bar next to the Onion office in Chicago named the Martini Ranch, sat her down, and asked her the question that had been rattling my soul since the night of the June 1 Phish show in Holmdel, New Jersey.
In a Molly-induced fit of joyful determination, I had decided that night in New Jersey that I was going to ask Cadence to marry me. I had known she was the one for a long time. Growing up, I’d never imagined I’d get married. My father’s three divorces stood as harrowing cautionary warnings of the dangers of commitment. Growing up, marriage was always seen as something you got pressured into against your will. I had no frame of reference for a happy marriage. But the prospect of spending the rest of my life with Cadence incited fevered anticipation instead of dread.
I’d decided to ask Cadence to marry me at a Phish show. That seems poetically apt. I was shocked and overjoyed by my lack of ambivalence: I had to marry Cadence and I had to do it as soon as humanly possible. I couldn’t bear the idea of being apart from her anymore after I returned from the road, and there was still some part of me that imagined I would be decapitated in Pittsburgh or lose a limb in Cuyahoga Falls and I wanted everything to be as solid as possible back home when that inevitability occurred.
Rationally, I was in no position to propose. I had just been diagnosed as bipolar. I was drowning in debt. Within a year sheriffs would show up at my front door to serve me with a summons informing me I was being sued by American Express for non-payment of my account. I was still struggling to write two books I had no idea if I’d be able to finish. I’d lately become deeply enamored of the music and culture of Insane Clown Posse. I was stunted. I was proposing to Cadence with a glorified piece of costume jewelry, a purple octopus ring with rhinestone eyes I’d ordered online after she mentioned she liked it after seeing it in O magazine. I was not in any position to make a sober adult decision, but I could not contain myself any longer.
“Cadence, I have something very serious to ask you,” I began uncertainly that fateful night in Chicago. She shot me a puzzled look. “I guess I might as well just up and say it. Cadence. Will you marry me?”
Cadence was overwhelmed. “Are you serious?” she asked.
“I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life. Cadence, will you marry me?” I asked with more force and conviction than I ever imagined possible.
“Yes! Yes!” Cadence replied, then called her mother.
We then celebrated in the customary fashion: by going to the Phish Lot.
I spent the entirety of the show with a goofy, ecstatic grin on my face only partially attributable to an unusually great Phish performance. There is a poetry to the set list of a great Phish show, a secret symmetry to the songs they play and the way they play them. That perfect synchronicity was in full effect that historic evening. Everything happened as it must: An unusually assured “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent” segued effortlessly into “Fly Famous Mockingbird,” “Possum” was distinguished by a particularly ferocious solo from Trey, while “Divided Sky” and “Bathtub Gin” were both Technicolor, Sensurround epics.
The August 17 show marked the end of one epic chapter in my life and the beginning of another.
I have found my true home in Cadence. She is my present and my future. I want our children to grow up in a world free from judgment and shame. I want them to dance exuberantly at Phish shows without feeling self-conscious or silly even though I realize there is everything in their neurotic Jewish DNA to keep that from happening.
The years ahead of us will not be easy. Life with mental illness never is. Hell, life without mental illness is seldom easy. In the decades to come there will be plenty of bad notes and dire performances, mainly because Cadence and I are forming the Obvious Metaphor jug band and neither of us can play the jug for shit. But there will be off nights metaphorically as well. As Prince has written, loving someone is truly believing that there is joy in repetition: Like a transcendent jam, a healthy, successful marriage is ultimately about discovering the unexpected in the familiar, in finding exhilarating new notes in songs you know by heart that speak to the deepest parts of your soul.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Above all else, I would like to thank my kind and empathetic editor Brant Rumble for having faith in me and my ability to finish this book when I had no faith in myself. Thanks for sticking with me through all the madness and doubt and uncertainty. I’d also like to thank my agent Daniel Greenberg, who helped shape and mold my proposal and get this weird one past the finish line. Thanks also to Danya, the love of my life, for inspiring this book then dealing with all the blowback and consequences that decision wreaked. You are my soul mate and my salvation.
I’d also like to thank Keith Phipps and Stephen Thompson for giving me a job that afforded me an opportunity to do insane things like this as well as my compatriots at The A.V. Club, chief among them Scott Tobias, Noel Murray, Tasha Robinson, and Sarah Collins. Thanks also to Michelle Welch for the transcribing.
Thank you to the Maloons. Your kindness and generosity are infinite and all-encompassing. You’ve really made me feel like a part of the family. For that I will always be grateful. Thanks also to the Rabins, Sacks family, and Gerbers.
On the ICP front I’d like to thank Andi Pelligrino for the excellent publicizing, Violent J for talking to me twice and creating the Dark Carnival, Colt Cabana, and all Juggalos everywhere. Thank you for being so endlessly fascinating and fun to write about. It was an honor and a privilege exploring your world.
I’d also lik
e to thank Phish, all Phish fans, and Jason Colton for hooking me up at Super Ball. I sincerely hope this book makes me a welcome presence at Phish shows and I sincerely hope I did you guys justice. I’d also like to thank Cody and everyone else I met along the long, strange road.
Thank you also, Weird Al, for having the questionable judgment to commission me to write a book about you at the apogee of my craziness. I’m not entirely sure how we got through it all, but we did.
To readers of The A.V. Club and A.V. Club commenters: thanks for your loyalty and dedication. I’ve been able to live my dream for the past sixteen years, and you guys are a big part of the reason why.
Lastly, thank you, Scribner. You published The Great Gatsby and Don DeLillo, and you got into the Juggalo business because of me. If that isn’t proof of both the universe’s fundamental benevolence and the universe’s fundamental insanity, I don’t know what is.
© CHARLIE SIMOKAITIS
NATHAN RABIN is the head writer for The A.V. Club, the entertainment guide of The Onion. He is also the author of a memoir, The Big Rewind, and an essay collection based on one of his columns, My Year of Flops. He most recently collaborated with pop parodist Weird Al Yankovic on a coffee-table book called Weird Al: The Book. Rabin’s writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Spin, The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Nerve, and Modern Humorist. He lives in Chicago with his wife and has learned to love both Faygo and extended guitar solos.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013011702
ISBN 978-1-4516-2688-9
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