College radio stations don’t blog about Phish because everyone has some opinions that, good or bad, are either completely engulfed in fervor or tinged with some sort of abashment. We don’t seem to advertise dogmas about music that other people know well enough to have formed their own. But these posts are somewhat anonymous, so here we go.
Dan the Parking Lot Man normally brings charcuterie he curated from Whole Foods but had to forgo the cheese because it would have sweated out the organic tax. I wander to Shakedown Street to eat. For the uninitiated, it’s what the Carrboro Farmers Market would look like if the average Carrborite had a spot to sell whatever they wanted. The pop-up market originated from touring Deadheads selling goods to follow the band across the country. It’s been gentrified since the 60s, but there are still enough people who look like they were raised without running water. I got a pita from one of them.
Most jam band shows are split into two sets and an encore. During the summer, the sun often sets during the intermission, allowing each set to adopt its own character. In the daytime, the lingering smoke over Walnut Creek gives the amphitheater the same blue haze from those majestic sports photos from the eighties when smoking was still allowed inside. During the night, the lights make the twenty-dollar CashorTrade ticket worth it. Chris Kuroda has been running light design for the band since 1989 and is colloquially referred to as “CK5,” or their fifth member.
The sea of people reminds me of Swifties except they each care about you and everyone else a whole lot more. They spew knowledge of setlists, eras, and members like it’s an oral exam, but I’m sure if I fact-checked it, they’d all fail. They’re just a bunch of happy little crackers that all cheer at the same time when they play “The Mango Song” for the first time this year and know just when to stick their hands up during “Meatstick.”
I dance with a woman who continues to wear her sunglasses through the second set and encore. She sounds like an amateur Tucker Carlson impersonator, repeating his classic turns of phrase, “What’s going on? What are we doing?” It’s not worrying because nothing is worrying; there’s something in the air, and it’s not metaphorical. Besides, she has 20 more years and 80 shows on you, so she’s seen worse.
We see these concerts as a circus of people who have smoked a little too much evil weed in their time to conceptualize music besides Phish. But we know music is subjective, and sometimes the experience of seeing it live is the perfect catalyst to turn that subjectivity into something worth fighting for. You’ve danced for hours inebriated off your mind in some random house with a DJ who’s redlining the equipment, so is that any worse? George Burns said, “You can’t help getting older, but you don’t have to get old.” We can all either die haters or live long enough to see ourselves become a Phan.
