The Jew in the Phish

Two windows in a basement on HaYarkon don’t let in much light. But I don’t open either of them for the light. I do it for the Internet. And I do it for Carl.

In coat and scarf, I open the window and climb atop furniture inside the apartment, one leg planted so firmly into the blue arm of a couch we found in the street that it’s hurting and feeling like what I imagine fig preserves must feel like during electroshock therapy if fig preserves could be crazy and get such a treatment, the other resting lightly on a wobbly table given to us by some neighbors, my laptop at eye level, snuggly nestled deep in the recess of the open window.

There’s a pinch of guilt and a heaping of absurdity in this act. Why am I standing like this? Why am I wearing these clothes? What do you call this? What have I become?

Guilt because of the wobbly table and the blue couch and the open window. Guilt because of Carl. Guilt because of sorrow. Guilt because of absurdity. Guilt because of guilt. And DNA. Absurdity because of absurdity. Absurdity because of guilt. Absurdity because of sorrow. Absurdity because of Carl. Absurdity because of the wobbly table and the blue couch and the open window.

In early January, Sager and I arrived separately in the Holy Land with little to call a plan. He had a place to crash when his plane landed one day before mine; I had a plane ticket and some ideas, but not much else. We were to meet in Nachlaot to look for an apartment because one of the ideas I had was that we had to live in Nachlaot. We met up, but something was missing. Carl was supposed to be here looking for an apartment with us. That had been the real plan, but Carl called in December to say that he wouldn’t be able to make the move. Sager and I, upset but not entirely dejected, walked up and down a few of Nachlaot’s characteristically narrow alleyways looking for signs. Not from God or anything. From people renting out their apartments. We walked up and down and it felt like we were making circles, walking up and down the same alleyways, though I was sure this place was bigger than that. And then a sign. In Hebrew. Handwritten. God? I could make out the word for “apartment” (dirah) and saw some derivative of the verb “to rent” (l’haskir) and there was a phone number on there, too. A sign. We called. I had a feeling this would work and that if it didn’t then we would have to rethink our brilliant non-plan but that it definitely would work, somehow, definitely.

The details are wary: There was a language barrier (broken English vs. broken-er Hebrew), a religious/cultural difference (Israeli Haredi vs. American Conservatish Jews), a trust issue (the previous tenant had up and left one day without paying his bills or rent), there was a lot of useless, dusty shit in the apartment (a broken miniature refrigerator, a J.R.R. Tolkein magnet–“All who wander are not lost”–for the broken miniature fridge, a few disemboweled CPU towers and a lone monitor, buckets of dried spackle, empty cheap-plastic mezuzah cases, a small dresser, one drawer of which was filled with framed metallic pictures of frozen lakes and mountains and a sailboat), all of which added up to only one thing, Sager believed (and I couldn’t rightly deny): We were inheriting a basement hideout from an undercover Mossad agent and our landlord, Amram, whose beard was wispy enough that it either corroborated his claim that he was a ba’al teshuvah helping out an ailing mother or gave him away as a fake, was probably that undercover agent and we were in the midst of a sting operation, charges to be determined at a much later time.

But it worked out. If Amram was in fact Mossad and conducting an investigation, he must’ve hit a wall, because we paid our rent and met his family and somehow blended into the community without major issue. Still, there was the problem of furniture. The only useful inherited thing in our apartment was a highly functional, if musty, futon.

Here’s the thing about dwellings in Israel. If the ad says, “furnished,” it means that a refrigerator and a stove might be included. If the ad says, “two-bedroom,” it means there are two rooms total, one of which may or may not be the kitchen. Of course, if any of this was listed on the sign to which Sager and I responded, it wouldn’t have mattered. The futon was fine – as long as you didn’t slam your fist upon it or drop down to sit too quickly. The kitchen was great – though it consisted mostly (solely) of a sink and some counters. In time, in time, we populated the space. Some dusty donated cushions for beds.  Some pots and pans. An electric stove. A table for the living room/dining room/guest house/entertainment parlor. A blue couch from the street. Eventually, we even got a working refrigerator. What luxury. Slowly, slowly, we enjoyed every amenity American Jewish college students in Modern Israel can afford.

Except the Internet.

Of all the things that sustain, the Internet is paramount. For us, it’s not an appendage; it’s an artery. And we didn’t have it. It was enough already to fill the rooms on a lazy budget, but to have to buy the necessary routers and cords and then establish an account with an Israeli bureaucracy in Hebrew over the phone, who needed the hassle? We certainly didn’t. Early on, we discovered it was possible to hop onto some wireless action while sitting outside the apartment on the steps leading up to the street. It didn’t take long to realize that the same trick would work in the window, which had a lovely stair-side view. And soon enough the most coveted spot in our dirah was atop a couch of unknown origin, arms resting across the sill, digitally grasping at silent bands of WiFi floating by.

I’m on the sill, and the computer starts to ring. Carl’s calling on Skype. I hesitate before answering because I think I know what he’s going to say. Or ask, rather. Sager and I’ve been getting the same calls and chat windows from our Alabaman brother ever since we arrived and got settled here: He wants to know if we’ll go see the Bostoner Rebbe to get a bracha, a blessing, for him. “Sure, sure. Yes, yes. We’ll go, we’ll go,” I tell him now, as before. But there’s that hesitation, which engenders the guilt, which reminds of the absurdity of it all.

Excuses: Why the Bostoner Rebbe? How will we find him? Where will we find him? Musn’t he find us? Once we find him or he finds us, will we be able to speak with him? When we speak with him, will we know the proper question? When we ask, will we ask sincerely? What will he ask us? How will we respond? How will we enter, and how will we leave?

It’s these last few questions that really cause my apprehension. I have no problem getting a bracha for Carl. If he wants a blessing from the Bostoner Rebbe, then we’ll find the Bostoner Rebbe and get a blessing for him. But can it really be that simple? I have so many qualms and internal knots of my own. I need some sort of healing. Won’t the Rebbe see that? I’m not ready to enter into this Hasidic tale. Something told me – even as I told Carl, for the hundredth time, yes – that I would not. Not now.

In the periphery, a question: From what are you running? In the forefront, a memory: Summer of ’02. I walk onto the porch of the bunk next door. Carl is there in a fold-out camping chair. Over his mop top he’s got these big headphones on, the kind that swallow your ears and drown out the world. They’re hooked up to a CD player, and there’s a red Strat in his hands that’s hooked up to an amp. He’s playing riff upon riff, grooving and building upon whatever’s playing in his ears. He’s got on this oversized, maroon Phish tour shirt from ’99, but the riffs don’t sound like Phish, even to my novice ears. And then he plays the main lick. The spark of recognition. “China Cat Sunflower.” I can hear him invoking, somehow embodying, the Troubadour of Trips. The spark of ignition. In the memory, I watch Carl transcend Carl, and feel myself begin to ascend.

And then the memory ends, pushed out by other bits of that and later summers. The mountain rises steeply above us. Mosquitoes abound. Trees surround in endless all direction. The heat settles in like an old man on a porch in the evening in the South. In this memory, Carl, Kabatznik and I climb up and up. That’s our destination: up. Once we get there, we’ll decide what next. For now, expanses, expanses, expanses divine we crave. So it is good just to climb. Without a trail. Without a guide. Without limits. Without.

In this memory, Carl lumbers to a hault. Kabatz and I catch our breath, awaiting explanation. No words. Carl drops his pants and then his underwear. While Ben and I exchange unsure glances, Carl returns his pants to their rightful place. His underwear, in the other hand, succumbs to a another fate: Carl forms the drawers into a ball and launches this out into the trees, breathing a sigh of relief, like this has been plaguing him for hours, if not days or weeks. Expanses, expanses, confined not in cages. The mountain rises above us. We climb up and on, and the memory fades. Time goes on. There are other mountains. There are other cages. There are other layers, of cloth and of consciousness, to shed and to break.

On one mountain, up one path, we walk and come to a stream. It is shallow and clear and barely moving. This stream, like all streams, has secrets. Follow it one way, encounter one set of secrets. Follow it the other way, another set of secrets. Don’t follow it and still there are secrets. We leave the path. We go upstream because we go upstream. The water becomes our trail. Our trail widens, picks up stream. For hours, we follow in search of the secrets. But on this day the stream is not telling, so we turn around, go downstream, find the path, go down the mountain, go home, forget for a while about the secrets, about the stream – forget for a while everything. We find a tree, lay down, fall asleep, and not even the wind perks our ears or flutters our eyes. For a while, we forget everything.

But the stream streams on. Follow it. Get to where the water rests. You will see that it does not move. And you will lean in, closer, bending further still. Now you will see that it does move. See this and go at once to the source of the movement. Go. Walk. Stroll. Run. Lunge. No matter, just go. Follow the water for hours. Follow it until you come to the point where you know that going farther is fruitless. Yes, you have been here before. Yes, you will be here again. But this time now, continue. Go. Do not walk. Do not stroll. Do not run or lunge or loll. Just go. And keep going. See that the stream is now strong. Notice the trees, which once were endless, have begun to thin. And in the distance, something golden. In the distance, you know, a secret is revealed.

Go! the river roars. Go! the wind contorts. Come! the gold glints. Now! the moment storms. Run until you blur until you fly until you dream. Forget everything. Open your eyes. Still you stand in the courtyard of a once-magnificent palace, the one of which all the ancient stories speak.

Yes, yes, the melody from afar – but that comes later. For now, sit and listen to the tale of this place. The tale? A tale. A recollection. A few words. A fading impression. A hint. A guess. A question.

What is the source of the sound of the river? A child, huddled in a dark nook in a dark cave, whispers this to himself, over and over. Certainly, he doesn’t know the answer because he doesn’t know even what all the words in the question mean. But he repeats and repeats, asks and asks nonetheless.

That this child came to be in a cave without light, without stream, is a story that begins in the sparkle of a fountain of dreams. Water flows out of the top of a miniature castle, over a translucent bed of stones, which radiate, wrap around and around and eventually overlap with another set of frozen rotating stones. There are seven fountains arrayed in a circle so the whole of the courtyard is a galaxy of stars from afar. On each stone, each star, is a letter engraved by time and within each letter are more letters left over from forgotten, failed alphabets, so the whole of the galaxy is just an indecipherable riddle, a rhyme. In the center of the universe is another castle that could fit a hundred thousand miniature castle fountains in its entryway alone. And this castle with its courtyard of clones is arranged in such a way that there is no part of any day that does not have light captured and projected and enflamed through one window or another because the whole of the castle is glass and were it not for the sun and moon overlapping, enlooped, the castle, now in rainbows, would be just an invisible, empty doom.

And from somewhere deep within, from somewhere far beyond, a river loudly groaned.

Once, a long, long time ago, a people called this courtyard the heart of their eternal home, for at the heart of the heart was a circular glass throne. And no one sat there, no one looked there, no one left there—at least, no one known—because nothing can rule over nothing at all.

And from somewhere deep within, from somewhere far beyond, a river loudly groaned.

That is, until one day, one time, one of these people decided to sit. And shattered the glass. And collapsed the rift. And the glass castle became visible as the glass turned to stone and the courtyard stopped spinning as the stone spread and spread and froze and froze.

Now, the people had never known what they’d never seen. To the point, of course, that they knew nothing of everything. Then, of course, there was nothing to know. Now, they weren’t so sure. All was revealed and it was just a pile of, well, stones. How could they gone on? How could they come home? Knowing now that nothing was known? They needed someone to tell them which way and where and how. They needed someone to sit in that broken heart of a throne. So they gathered round the castle, amid the seven fountains, looked left and right and front and back and up and down and so on until all heads were turned toward the same stationary soul who stood there with his eyes closed, unaware of the stares, thoroughly, really, at home. And he became king. And he sat in the throne. And the people had direction. Questioned, they were home.

Everyone in the kingdom settled in and got used to the new sight as the center of town and the king hired his court and was just and all were proud. It went on like this for generations. King begat king. A court succeeded each crown. And the people got used to this and love did truly abound.

Then the king fell ill and appointed a stranger who hardly anyone in town knew. Very soon the king passed and the stranger ascended the steps and, out on the balcony, raised his arms and his voice and grew. Breaths were held. Hearts were still. And the new and strange king decreed something strange and new: It was for their inaction and their unknowing that the king had fallen ill and for this they would all pay.

“Descend!” the king roared.

“De-what?” they asked, for until then they’d only known heights, they’d only known nothing, they’d only ascended. De-what?!? they all screamed.

“Descend. Go down. Grovel. Into the ground. There are caves in the mountain just over those hills. Take your things. Gather your selves. It’s dark where you’re going, but I’ll send for you. One day. For now, pack up your gear. Go! Right now!”

Their feet, it seemed, understood, even as their hearts rebelled, and in the morning, on the narrow path the king had revealed, one by one, over the hills, into the mountain, falling, falling, falling, all of them falling, as in a deep well. And truly it seemed the light was growing darker, the path more narrow and steeper still. When one stumbled and another stooped to help, the rocks seemed instantly to shift and the helping hand, now flung, withdrew. Down, down, down, down, down, they stumbled. And at the mouth of the cave, they breathed deep. And in blindness, they plunged below the earth.

Later, that blindness became sight, and the people made due. There was birth and friendship and love. There was death and quarrel and hatred.

They marked the passing of seconds with silence: No one spoke of those crashing rapids. What could be said?

They marked the passing of hours with song: At first, it was not formal. There was no song leader and no cue. But every now and some then, a lifting thought emerged as a unconscious whisper, rattled into a hum, croaked into a solitary chorus and creaked to life with some black crevice’s drum, until all the walls of the cave whispered, hummed, croaked, creaked and shook with the sound of the exiled community’s uncalled song. Out of the disconnected darkness came the sound of the rapids of which no one could speak. But just as soon as the music began to resonate, to wash away the inner fear and ignite something ancient and forgotten, the crescendo crumbled and the darkness poured back in, blacker than ever, and the people in the cave were lost anew.

They did not, together, mark the passing of days: Though the song rose up and receded without effort, to catalogue its iterations and thereby keep some semblance of time was too much for any one person to bear. In another time, maybe, the people might have formed a calendar committee. But strewn across the black stone, disconnected and despondent, the people let the days and weeks—and then the months, the years, the generations—pile up and bury them. For a time, one man on one end of the cave slashed the walls at the end of every collective song, and, linked by intention but without knowledge of this man’s tally, a woman across the cavern added to a pile of stones every time she woke. The man, feeling along the walls, eventually had to re-slash segments of the cave and, realizing the darkness had no end and no beginning, stopped breathing 10 years to the day after he and his countrymen plunged into the earth. The stone-collecting woman, on the 6,570^th day could not find another. Her daily spelunking, which had taken her to reaches and rooms and depths of the cave that no one else among the exiled had thought to fathom, ceased to have practical meaning or purpose. The pile of stones would’ve taken days to count, and she had nothing to add.

Still, there was the matter of food. Amid the wonder and despair of their first hours and days in the cave, the people forgot hunger. Later, the question of what to eat resulted in blind, thundering chaos: It seemed everyone had an opinion, but, voiced at the same moment, collective effort eluded them and now hunger filled every mind and every movement of the hourly spontaneous choir.

As things happen, one day, just as the pits in their stomachs threatened to burst, someone found in an unknown corner near where some suspected they’d first entered this dungeon a basket of breads and roots and fruits that, though the basket was small and light enough for a child to lift, contained just enough for everyone to eat and be filled for the day. And the next day, having placed the empty basket back in that corner, the people found the treasure returned.

In this way, they lived in the cave for years. And as it does, life went on. People got together. Friendships formed. Enemies aggravated. Children were born. Wise ones passed. Children grew. The cycle repeated. The cave became so much like home that one day, when the last of the original exiled group closed her eyes and let out a final breath, no one saw this as a rope shorn. Life went on. There was no such thing as darkness or “up above.” The only connection with land-dwelling past, which no one consciously called or knew, was the time marked by an hourly song that seemed to rise from the throats of all present without reason and that, more often than not, came back to a bubbling, rushing chorus resembling and amplifying the sound of the tiny stream someone had discovered, though this later generation did not know it, on the same unbelievable day as that first basket of food. It was not uncommon, in years past, for this song to followed by a story. And even those who knew only the cave repeated the tales their parents told of far-off lands and something called the sun. But as time went on, the stories stopped: The words themselves had lost all meaning. The people of the cave were at first confused and then angry and then desperate to end the stories and went so far as to forbid their telling on threat of death. This was hardly necessary as they all felt driven equally mad by these tales and nothing of “land” or “sun” was heard again in the cave.

Still, though, the song. At every hour was it sung. For years. Until one day, as the final notes drifted into silence, the people of cave, who were the 10th generation since exile, were awakened from the silence of meditation by an unrecognizable cough. All heads turned toward the source and perceived an unsure mass.

“Psshhh,” came the breath of a man. “That was beautiful. Like, like an ancient river. We sing a song like this in the fields of my home,” the man’s words dropped like a veil, “which is your…”

“What are you saying? What tricks are these? Whose voice is that?” A tangle of questions exploded the cave into sound, and it was a long time before the panicking voices died down and silence returned.

“What I am saying is truth not trick,” said the man. “Who I am is not important. I have come by order of the king. You must follow me. Your exile is ended. Come. This way. The hour grows late. Night approaches.”

“Exile? A king? Hours? Night? Who are YOU!?” The cavern was a cackling, squawking mess of confusion. The people were as angry as they were scared.

“Yes, yes. All of this is true. There will be time for explanation. For now, you must believe me. You must move.”

A voice rose from the rabble: “We know not what you are saying. But we know also that we do not know you. But if you did not come from this cave, then where…”

“Yes. You will soon see.” The man would offer no more. He let logic work its nascent magic.

Another voice from the group spoke out: “If we are to understand that you are from our past, from some place we once knew, then prove it.”

“From where do you think your food comes every day?” the man asked, knowing that a past king had cast a spell on this cave so it would provide unfailingly for its inhabitants.

“It appears in the basket the way it always has,” someone said. “Your question means nothing to us.”

“So you think this cave is all there is?”

“We have only ever been here. Our parents were only ever here. And their parents, too. Every inch of this cavern has been mapped and set to memory. There is only this cave, yes.”

“From where, then, is your song?”

To this the people had no immediate response. Every hour, it was true, for as long as they could remember, a song would form and always it came back to the gurgling chorus that everyone knew. And just as every thought in the cave turned back to that musical river, as before and now once more, a whisper became a rattle became a rumble became a memory as the stranger in their midst sang the cave’s song as it had never been sung. Without understanding, as they joined in with the man’s song in perfect uncontrollable pitch, in the minds of everyone present were images of flowing water, green grass, steep mountain passes and, above, white tufts hanging in the firmament. Their feet, like their hearts, must’ve understood because all present rose and moved toward the man, who was climbing now around a boulder and up some stone, through a hidden doorway, up toward home.

It can’t be said what the people felt as they emerged into the fresh air of unknown evening or what they saw dancing in the trees or heard rustle everywhere around them. They climbed over and out of the mountains in a daze, pulled more than propelled. The hills unrolled into fields soon enough and in the distance some spires spelled—glistening, breathing, singing, they would later say. The man, their strange leader, approached the castle gates and stopped.

“What now?” he asks.

“What now?!” they gasp.

And as if in answer, but really resolving nothing, the gates whispered, rattled, creaked, croaked, thundered open.

And I’m opening the door to the hotel room to greet Carl, who comes bearing two roast chickens, chocolate bobka and a liter of milk—glatt, pareve and halav yisroel, respectively—along with his suitcase and black fedora, and he can barely keep it all from spilling off the cart, gone from oversized Phish tee to oversized beard, but not having changed that much at all, far as I can tell. As they say, the castle of song and the castle of penitence are close to each other. And as they say further, the castle of song is the castle of penitence.

But how I’ve gotten away from myself.

The kings are all lined up. A bubbling river awaits.

Six miles in this city could take days to traverse. Highways meant for speed and grids for ease? In Miami, the highway serves only to get you lost more quickly. And the grid here? Well, the grid here offers only a tease of ease.

Navigating the Buick along byways and one-ways and no-ways in search of a hotel while coordinating – via text, e-mail, phone call, smoke signal and good vibe – the simultaneous arrivals of friends from across the state and within the environs of Greater Miami, while very hungry, while equal parts exhausted and electrified, while preoccupied with the four sets of Phish done and the five sets of Phish yet to come, is difficult.

Six miles in this city does not take 11 mere minutes. Of course, Google Maps said otherwise, and, at the time, I was eager to believe Google Maps. There are things that are too good to be true, for sure. But I think there are also many things that are good and true. Like, at the hotel after the show last night, when I decided it was high time to figure out the next night’s sleeping arrangements. Soon, many more friends would arrive in Miami, and I’d promised a number of them a hotel room. Or would that have to be rooms plural? Rooms, I determined.

Thanks be to my father – employed as he is by a certain hotel chain – I knew from past attempts that I could do simple search online with a promotional code and reserve a room in any area hotel for a reasonable price and on short notice. I hoped.

The cheapest room on the menu – $20 per room per night – was near the Miami International Airport off the Dolphin Expressway, not 10 miles from the American Airlines Arena. I selected two rooms, confirmed the reservation and slept soundly upon the assumption that such a last-minute deal was just the right amount of good, just the right amount of true.

Now, the next day, not having completely “died,” as Ben said, but definitely having slept through the complimentary breakfast and having our check-out time extended, Ben checks out of the bayside suite while Nat and I pack our things into the Buick and make the vehicular trek across town. Ben will be staying at a fraternity brother’s place even closer to the venue, and we would see him at the show later that night.

While I make every possible wrong turn on the basis of every possible wrong hunch, Nat gives navigational advice and helps coordinate with our friends. Though Atlanta this is not, Nat’s relatively highly tuned internal compass made all the difference. We find the right road, turn the correct direction and then marvel at the sight of, perhaps, the world’s last remaining Miami Subs.

Nat and I aren’t partial to fast food. He’s a vegetarian and my attempts at keeping kosher make me a virtual vegetarian. But this Miami Subs just as we’re turning into our hotel here seems both anomaly and destiny. We both order breakfast burritos without the bacon. We chat it up with the Indian guys behind the counter, who are the only other people here. With grease our wraps runneth over. It is approaching 4 p.m.

Back in the Buick, we turn toward the parking lot. “Take a ticket,” a machine demands. We comply. The machine’s arm lifts itself to the sky. We enter the parking lot. I wonder how much this will really cost us. I try to figure out how many cars will be coming here just from our crew. I multiply the extrapolation-compounded imagined numbers in my head. The price is high and getting higher. The good and true begin to fade.

Jason Attermann is there in the parking lot waiting for us. He was up early. He is always up early. He spent the day exploring downtown Miami while waiting for the rest of us to get our acts together—that is, to wake up. The Mad Atter, someone once called him. Now, the Seemingly Subdued Atter: His hair is short, the V of his solid-color shirt deep. Once, he let his hair go for a while. Once, he wore tie-dye shirts in public. His hair began to poof and curl and frizz like the young, bass-wielding Bob Dylan on his wall. Once, he was sitting on the futon in the living room of his apartment with his hair implying madness and with his moe. shirt implying other things, when one of his roommates – this was more than two years ago already – said that he looked like a bomb-defuser. What’s that supposed to mean? Like, you look like a guy sitting in dark room with sweat pouring down his face with wire-cutters in his hand and veins popping in his eyes and there are many-colored wires in his crazed gaze and the clock is ticking and his hair is, like, electrified or something. A bomb-defuser. The Mad Atter. Jason cut off all that hair. He stopped wearing tie-dyes in public. Back in Gainesville, he is one of my roommates. But I don’t see him often. He comes home to sleep long after the rest of us dream, and he wakes up long before the sun obliterates those dreams. We’ve been roommates before. Bunkmates rather. Nat was there, too. We were 14 years old. Jason slept in the top bunk, above me. His pillow inexplicably smelled like maple syrup. While I was just then learning all about IT, Jason had been entrenched in that IT since day one. His mom was a deadhead. Still is. His dad, too, is down, as they say. A couple years later, when I got my first car and was visiting Jason in Orlando for some reason or another and when I mentioned that all I had in the car was a cassette deck and that the only tape I had was a copy of Phish’s Junta that I’d found in a used music store in Philadelphia while on a last-year-of-camp summer bus trip, Jason’s mom told me to follow her, which I did, and proceeded to a wide closet in the hallway where all the kids’ rooms were, which she opened and there, amid the towels and blankets, were a dozen or so neat, dusty stacks of tapes: The Attermann Grateful Dead Archive. The tapes had dates and venues written on their spines. Take some, Momma Attermann told me. She knew all about IT. I was learning. I got on the road then with a bunch of newly useful Maxells, and now I get out of a different car that has the same, but larger, cassette collection and Jason is waiting for us because Jason is on time, while Nat and I are late. But what else is new?

The three of us enter the hotel lobby and join the line at the front desk but we barely notice having to wait because we’re already discussing what will be tonight at the show. Well, they’ve played this, this and this already, so they’re definitely gonna play that and that and maybe that tonight. There are other Phishy-looking folks in line, on couches, coming out of elevators. Everything but hanging from the rafters. We’re lost in the conversation as we get to the front of the line. The guy behind the counter – let’s call him “Brian” – as we approach, gives us a knowing smile.

“What do you think they’ll play tonight?” he asks.

“Oh! Are you gonna be there!?” we ask. He says no, he was at the last two shows, but he has to work and doesn’t have tickets for tonight so he’ll just download the soundboards when they’re up later and anyway he got to see those couple shows and he’s happy and it’s almost a new year and Phish is touring! And he’s happy. I tell him my name and hand him a form that should ensure the so-called “Friends & Family” rate. He pulls up my reservation and I mention the price that I found on the website last night.

“Well, you’re not really supposed to get that much of a discount, man,” he says. “But, whatever, don’t tell anyone. Anything to help another fan, you know?” He asks us how many cars we have. I tell him three. Or maybe four. I’m not sure. He swipes four cards. He swipes four more cards. “Take these,” he says. “Swipe them when you leave and your parking will be comped.”

We weren’t expecting this. We thank him profusely. He tells us it’s not a problem and that he’s happy to help. Matter of fact, “You guys want a copy of the last night’s show?” he asks us. “Well, yeah, sure, but what do you mean?” we ask. “I already have the recording downloaded. I’ll burn a copy and slip it under your door in the morning,” he tells us. “Dude, you are too kind. Thank you. Thank you.”

In his book, Chris Hedges relates how some former Phish fans got out while they still had the chance and mended their lives. But the life they left behind? He describes that life as a mirror to the general corruption of the lives of many other Phish-unaffiliated Americans:

“The childishness of the Phish followers reflected our own childishness, our belief that if we are happy, if we are entertained and feel good, then the rest of the world will take care of itself. Others should find a way to feel good with us,” Hedges writes. “We go along with the flow, deadened to the pain of others, seeking our own emotional transcendence. The world will take care of itself.”

No matter that when Phish comes to town, their WaterWheel Foundation selects a local non-profit to support through fan donations and merchandise sales, raising, by their own estimations, $550,000 for 325 different groups. No matter that in 1996 Phish fans founded the Mockingbird Foundation to support music education for children. No matter that the net proceeds of LivePhish.com, the source of official soundboard recordings of Phish’s performed music, are donated to Mockingbird. No matter, Jon Fishman’s mom, Mimi, whose foundation raises money to support, among other things, Glaucoma research. No matter that the Mockingbird and Mimi Fishman Foundations have together raised more than $1 million in their short histories.

No matter people like Brian here, who, instead of lamenting an inconvenient work schedule by taking it out on the relatively jobless and carefree kids who walk into his hotel oblivious to rules about room rates and parking fees, decides to honor those rates and comp parking and include some smoking Phish CD-Rs on top of it all because he understands IT.

No matter. For Hedges, who doesn’t understand, it is enough that Earth swallows some of the idol worshipers. That way, he can say “We” in his dispatches from the sin zone, but remain a safe distance away from the ensuing heavenly bloody onslaught.

But even Moses had to come down from the mountain, even he was reprimanded for not caring enough about the outside world, as Roger Kamenentz relates in The Jew in the Lotus:

“Moses was not allowed to enter the land of Israel. He made some mistake on the way that could not be corrected. There are many attempts to understand what was his sin. The answer given by my greatest teacher, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, is that Moses had reached the level where he could exist twenty-four hours a day knowing God, in communion meditation with God. But he had to serve the people. The people down there needed his help over boundaries, over laws, over many things. And Moses went down, but Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav says that his sin is that for a moment—he resented having to go down. Because he resented having to break off his communion with God, he could not enter the land of Israel.”

You hike up the mountain, sure. You breathe the air up there, of course. You breathe it deep. You thank God – or your luck or whatever – for the beauty and for the blessing. And then you hike down. You return. You bring the blessing with you. You share the joy.

Brian gets IT. Nat, Jason and I thank him for this, and Bing! we get on the elevator to breeze up to our good-and-true-and-cheap rooms plural.

All we have to do now is wait. Jon and Dena Mizrahi and Zach Morris are on the way from Jacksonville. It’s looking like they won’t have enough time to come to the hotel before the show, so we decide to meet them in the Lot. They ask about food and drink. I recommend that they get a couple cases of beer and try to sell bottles for a buck when they get there. They can easily make back the money, I tell them. Jon is asking me about the Lot, if it’s okay to drink out in the open there. I tell him he can’t even begin to imagine, and as I tell him this I am get another call and I look at the screen and it says “Count Carlos” and there, as I open the door, is a man who looks as though he has just now, after a very long and very mirror-less time, come down from top the mountain.

But if you aren’t here, you will say that the answer is incorrect.

You will say there is no “here.” You will say there is no “answer.” You will say there is no knowable king. You will say that to say otherwise is to blaspheme. You will say that joy is self-indulgence. You will say that community is orgy. You will say that worship is sin. You will say that dark is light and without is within.

You will say a lot of things, and you will make a lot of noise and your anger at such a self-indulgent orgy of devil-worshiping sin will be full of holy fiery righteous indignation.

You will interview the disenchanted dissidents, the broken angels and the recovering addicts. You will write a book based on these interviews. The book will claim to defend all that is good and decent and moral. The book will say that all that is good and decent and moral has been lost and forgotten. The book will be an impassioned plea. It will speak to all who are happy and free and make them realize that their happiness and their freedom are faint wisps: feelings, delusions, illusions, moments—nothing more and nothing less than sin. Heresy. Idol worship. Eternal damnation. The End.

Or maybe you won’t write this book because such a book already exists. In Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandment in America, journalist-cum-theologian Chris Hedges sets up a neat little argument for why Americans have descended into the pits of hell: Ten chapters, 10 commandments, 10 true stories of sin.

For the sin of idol worship, Hedges pokes his golden finger square in the chest of Phish—the band, the fans and the culture. He quotes a couple former Phunky Bitches, women who gave up everything for a “road toward spiritual obliteration, a road that led them away from life, a road that led them toward nothingness, the final essence of death.”

Says one of them, “For us it is like going to synagogue or church.”

Says another, “The band takes over a crowd. They throw everyone into a fury. You cannot move or shake quickly enough.”

And yet another, “There are parts of their music that can be a spiritual experience, but at the same time it can be very easy to make that experience idolatrous. It can remove you from the real world. It can become a cult.”

In this conception, the cult is phandom and the manipulative cult leaders are none other than Page, Jon, Mike and Trey. To Hedges, Mike Gordon does not euphemistically “drop bass bombs” and Fishman is not the quintessential comedic troll. To Hedges, Phish are literally the Four Horseman. OK. Maybe he wouldn’t go that far. The Four Horseman work for the white-bearded man upstairs, while Phish, in this conception, work for no one but themselves. They are, Hedges writes, “False prophets, who say they can harness the power of God for us, lead us away from the worship of God into the corrosive idolatry of self-worship.”

Idols? False prophets? God harnessers? Really?

I’m not up on Christian theology, by any means, at all. But those 10 Commandments are my commandants, Phish plays music that speaks to my heart and, in this conception, I am, like other Jews who have also fallen into the perceived trap, a part of the Phish cult, too.

Aish.com writer Jenny Hazan interviewed American-Phishhead-turned-Israeli-soldier David Sussman about his time skipping through the lily fields with the band. Sussman stares fondly back on that part of his life, but sees only a period of youthful abandon:

“Sometimes when I look back at my Phish days, I feel like I wasted time. There was a lot of great energy there that never really went anywhere, never accomplished anything. There would be this explosion of energy at concerts, but they always ended flat. With Judaism, I feel like I’ve tapped into something real, long-lasting, even infinite. Living in Israel as a religious Jew provides a framework with boundaries to contain that energy, and now I feel I am investing my energy much more wisely, toward a real greater good, toward ‘tikkun olam’, trying to truly repair the world.”

That explosion of energy is something that Chris Hedges pointed out in his declamation. About Phish’s fans, he said, “They sought, over and over, what the band, what all idols cannot give: permanent rather than transitory meaning. A life dedicated to transitory happiness is poisonous and impossible to maintain.”

Wait. What? Fans who repeatedly sought peak experiences, tried to glean wisdom from such highs and even wished for those experiences to become long-lasting reality, those fans were merely “dedicated to transitory happiness”? That sounds like a contradiction in terms, or, at worst, a cop out. Explosion of energy, mind expansion, dveikut, psychedelia, loss of ego, peak experience: These are all the same thing: goals of the spiritual endeavor.

Jay Michaelson, founding editor of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture and a scholar at Hebrew University, doesn’t mind a little transitory happiness. In an article for Zeek about Jewish meditation he writes, “These peak experiences are really nourishing. They show us that there is far, far more to this miracle of life than what we ordinarily experience. They give us a glimpse of possibility, of Light.”

Such experiences show the seeker that his search is not in vain, pushing him or her or them further along the path, in obvious and subtle ways. But there is always a but.

“Unfortunately, peak experiences tend not to last,” Michaelson went on. “You can’t chase kicks forever.”

Which is why such a high, or “showing up,” as he puts it, is a “beginning, not an ending.” Reach the same high repeatedly and the seeker is pushed, sooner or later, to the constant realization of divine immanence. Which is where meditation, contemplation and raw effort come in. Such focus aims to normalize the peak experience. Like launching a rocket into the sky, but instead of briefly leaving the atmosphere and falling just as fast back to earth, the rocket pushes through the atmosphere, reaches zero gravity and then everything seemingly stops and just is. There is time then to watch the wonder, to watch with wonder.

Let’s be clear: Phish is a band of musicians who play improvisational psychedelic rock music. The members met in college, where they studied music and film and philosophy and other things. They did drugs. A couple of them are Jews. The other two are, I don’t know, staam dudes. Phish played their music in small bars. They practiced a lot. They worked real hard. They played in small theaters. They practiced a lot. They worked real hard. They sold out this country’s most prominent arenas. They toured Europe and Japan. They did drugs. They partied. They played music. They faced demons. They started families. They broke up. They got back together.

They play music and they play it well. This is why they have fans. Those fans sometimes take drugs. Sometimes those fans are irresponsible. Some of them don’t lead healthy lives. Some of them are bad people. But people are people. People are responsible for themselves.

Can’t get a glimpse of ecstasy brought to you by four guys who are really good at what they do—which is play music—without losing your shit, leaving your family, getting addicted to drugs and aimlessness and your self? Well, I would say you have some growing up to do.

Don’t blame Phish. Don’t blame the music. Don’t blame the culture. You are a part of that culture. Take responsibility for it. Take responsibility for yourself. Phish is a band that plays psychedelic rock music. They tour the United States of America, a country of freedom and opportunity that is often addicted to excess. The members of Phish are not prophets any more than Chris Hedges is a prophet or Jesus Christ was a prophet or you are a prophet or I am a prophet. That is to say, they are people with the same infinite potential of all other people.  Though Phish, maybe, has realized more of that potential. They work real hard. They practice a lot. They play music.

As Trey said:

“Music can’t lie — it really is the universal language. People can hear your intent. If you intent is to sell records and make money, people will hear that, and it blackens the music. That’s why the live thing has been so exciting, and so spiritual for us. Once the fans are in the room, there’s nothing we can do on-stage that will bring us any more monetary gain. So we’re then free to explore and celebrate the spiritual aspect of the music.”

OK. Fine. Only a cult member would defend the cult with the cult leader’s words. Only an idol worshiper would let the idol speak for itself. I hear that. But these people who say that once they ran from life and now they live life, these people imagine that life can be segmented into the times of mistake making and the times of answer knowing and that the former segments of life were not life in the way that the latter segments are life. They imagine that their definitions of happiness and spirituality and community and God and evil and good are now definitions of truth while their old definitions of such things were misguided, dishonest, blasphemous heresies—a result of stupid, reckless, Godless youth. Oh! but they were so much younger then; they’re older than that now.

An oft-mentioned story from the Talmud (Hagiga 14b), with additional details from the Zohar (I, 26b): Four people entered paradise, an orchard. They were Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Ben Avuyah and Rabbi Akiva. Before entering, Rabbi Akiva spoke to them, saying, “When you come to the place of the shining marble plates, do not say: ‘Water, water!’ For it is written: ‘He who tells lies shall not tarry in my sight.’”

Well, so, the rabbis entered the orchard, and they came to the place of the shining marble plates that probably looked a lot like water and Ben Azzai gazed and died, Ben Zoma gazed and was burned and Ben Abuyah became Aher, The Other One, a heretic. Only Rabbi Akiva entered and left in peace.

Shining marble plates are shining marble plates. Water is water. Words are words. Feelings are feelings. Divisions are divisions. Definitions are definitions. God is God. But “God” is by no means God.

As Professor Matt writes in The Essential Kabbalah, “Every definition of God leads to heresy; definition is spiritual idolatry. Even attributing mind and will to God, even attributing divinity itself, and the name ‘God’—these, too, are definitions.”

Rabbi Akiva knew that the shining marble plates were unique shining marble plates and he knew that they were not unique shining marble plates. He did not seek to define. He came and went in peace.

But Akiva was a disciplined mystic, a seasoned practitioner of meditation. The story about entering the orchard is, in part, a metaphor for mystical study and for serious meditation. He came and went in peace because he was worthy to do so. But the others were unworthy?

Gershom Scholem translated an account of Ma’aseh Merkavah, or descending the Divine Chariot — also variously known as the Hekhalot texts or descriptions of the palace of the eternal king or entrance into the orchard — in his book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:

“But if one was unworthy to see the King in his beauty, the angels at the gates disturbed his sense and confused him. And when they said to him: ‘Come in,’ he entered, and instantly they pressed him and threw him into the fiery lava stream. And as the gate of the sixth palace it seemed as thought hundreds of thousands and millions of waves of water stormed against him, and yet there was not a drop of water, only the ethereal glitter of the marble plates with which the palace was tessellated. But he was standing in front of the angels and when he asked: ‘What is the meaning of these waters,’ they began to stone him and said: ‘Wretch, do you not see it with your own eyes? Are you perhaps a descendant of those who kissed the Golden Calf, and are you unworthy to see the King in his beauty?’…And he does not go until they strike his head with iron bars and wound him. And this shall be a sign for all times that no one shall err at the gate of the sixth palace and see the ethereal glitter of the plates and ask about them and take them for water, that he may not endanger himself.”

Many people get lost at the top of the mountain. The path up is obvious. Descent is another thing. Ascending and descending and ascending and descending—acting like an angel can be disorienting. But even Moses eventually had to come down. For the seeker can easily become addicted to the seeking and forget to find anything at all. The definer can easily forget that each definition is an interpretation of the thing and not the thing itself.

Or, as the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism, once told his disciples, as recounted in Elie Weisel’s Souls on Fire, “Imagine a palace with an infinite number of doors. In front of every door the visitor finds a treasure. Satisfied, he feels no urge to continue. Yet, at the end of the hallways, the king is waiting to receive those among his subjects who think of him rather than of the treasure.”

Thus, The Golden Phish are idols only insomuch as we call them idols. And if we call them so, then every unsavory act – every modicum of morality lost in the context of a Phish concert or a Phish tour or a blinded-by-Phish world – can be attributed to the seeming source of that world (i.e. Phish) rather than to the fact that life is full of both mistake making and question asking, climbing and falling and climbing again, and that that is OK. Meanwhile, the source of the source of that world, of all worlds, sits silently by, indefinable, infinite and unfathomable, waiting.

And, like, I get it. Saying the “source of sources” instead of saying “God” does not a mystic truth-bearer make. And it does not get me out of defining. “Source of sources” is a definition. But, Professor Matt goes on, “Were it not for the subtle awareness that all these are just sparkling flashes of that which transcends definition—these, too, would engender heresy.”

Definition is the plight of language, and heresy is the plight of question asking. So why define Phish as that which is worshiped—an idol? From fear of being heretical? Rav Kook teaches, according to Matt, that “Even heresy plays a spiritual role, challenging us to continually expand our concept of God.” So, instead of limiting faith with fear — or worse, confusing faith with fear — and eternally pointing an accusatory finger, why not define Phish as that which serves, ultimately, only to facilitate worship—a vessel?

Why not? If all that this band engenders—which undeniably includes joy and grandeur and goodness as much as it includes self-absorption and addiction and darkness—can be defined as profane, wouldn’t it instead be better to look at Phish in terms of that which is sacred? Phish is world unto itself, and to look at such a world in terms of blinding light rather than empty darkness, that’s a tikkun if I’ve ever seen one.

Uplift your eyes, your language and your definitions. Uplift for the sake of uplifting. There are idols, sure. But do not say “idol, idol.” The stream flows—through idols and through everything else that exists. Denying that it flows or acknowledging that it flows does not change the fact that it flows. Let it flow or do not let it flow. Either way, it flows. And that is good.

“So, Ezekiel was standing on the River Kevar. As he was gazing at the water, the seven heavens were opened for him and he saw the Glory of Holiness, along with celestial creatures, ministering angels, bands of angels, seraphs, and angels with sparkling wings, all joined to the heavenly chariot. As they were passing through heaven, Ezekiel saw them reflected in the water. As it is written, ‘on the River Kevar,’ the River of Already.”

So, I stood at the edge of the Stream of Already. As I gazed at the water, Ben Whitman began walking—down from the waterfall, down upon the rocks, cautiously, wrapped in woven thread.

As I gazed at the water, Ben Whitman began falling—down from the waterfall, down from upon the rocks, crashing, scraping, sliding, breaking, wrapped in woven thread.

Gaze broken, laughing, I turn toward thud’s source, gaze broken, laughing—and down from the waterfall, down from upon the rocks I fall, helpless, flailing, without sparkling wings, crashing, wrapped in woven thread.

So much for a peaceful meditation session by the waterfall. What does a 13-year-old know from meditation anyway? Ben stood up. I stood up. We laughed, brushed ourselves off, checked for damage to our tallitot and helped each other walk safely back to path, down from the waterfall, down from the rocks, down from top the mountain where we’d come to pray, down into the valley of summer camp, down into the hidden, frozen caves of memory.

When Phish opens the second set of the second night in Miami with a song about a waterfall, my mind turns to Ben and to that still-life, still-vivid moment of laughing and slippery rocks and lift off and fear. Also, Ben’s told me he really likes this song.

“Kill Devil Falls” has been called many things, among them, “a pointed metaphor for the seductive oblivion of addiction” and a tune “bound by simplicity.” Whether those descriptions are true, the song’s musical family tree reads something like this: Chalkdust Torture (1991) + 46 Days (2003) = Kill Devil Falls (2009). “KDF” is 3.0’s road-to-relapse blues-rock anthem.

“Just got back from Kill Devil Falls/ draped my water-logged clothes in the hall / Reach for a beer, glad that I’m here / when I realize that you’re not around.”

Trey singes through the song’s main lick and sings his story with the lucid fury of a retired partier. He went out. He saw the light. He came back. A different light was gone.

“How can leave me, you heard what I said / I’d be at the waterfall clearin’ my head / soakin’ up nature and thinkin’ of you / but leaving’s the last thing I thought you would do.”

Or maybe he never actually retired from the scene. Or maybe he was never a part of a scene at all. Or maybe he was never apart. Maybe.

“I didn’t plan to stop at the bar / but Kill Devil Falls is really so far / who knew a day would turn into a week / but I learned my lesson / and I can still remember the last one / but this time will be different / until I do it again.”

Patterns. Ripples. “You think you have grasped the light, when suddenly it escapes, radiating elsewhere,” writes Danciel C. Matt, a scholar of Kabbalah. “You pursue it, hoping to catch it—but you cannot. Yet you cannot bring yourself to leave. You keep pursuing it.” Ripples. Meditations.

“Standing at the face of a mountain (Don’t follow me) / Step back up to the cliff side (Better learn how to lead) / Stare straight into the future (Tell me, what do you see?) / This time’s gonna be different.”

Maybe. The boys launch into the jam with gusto. Searing leads from everyone. Nothing quite so crazy or new emerges, but they are tuned in, certainly. It’s like they have the password to the mainframe, the key to the lock of locks.

Climb the ladder. Climb the mountain.  Climb the spheres.

This “Kill Devil Falls” is short but determined. And then Huh!, with one simple riff—a different key, password, secret name—Trey drops “Tweezer” and launches the energy of the arena to far-off realms.

This journey into the freezer has got to be big. In many respects, the ascension of this four-night run into the annals of Phishtory or the relegation of it to dusty external hard drives everywhere hinges on this “Tweezer.” If they go big here, the rest is history. But if they fail to turn the heat up in this collective cooler, well, we might just freeze to death.

Three minutes in, before the lyrics have even been finished, it’s clear that this is going to be big. Five minutes in, as the last of Uncle Ebenezer’s exploits are recounted, the band begins kneading the molasses. Mike starts up a rhythmic line, and, in a barely perceptible iota of a second, Trey locks onto the simple riff—the secret name, the key to the door. Page and Fish are right behind. Soon the repetitive “dunh dunh” evolves into subtle vocal play care of Trey. Mike is the first to break free from the simplicity, laying down the sort of lines that make for aural ice cream topped with fiery fudge. But his riffs grow from—not against—the roots already laid. And soon, as Trey colors the jam with his own simple psychedelic sprinkles, it’s as though Mike is as much in charge of the direction of this music as Ol’ Leadership Qualities Anastasio. Fishman and Page lay some rumbling groundwork, as Mike and Trey spiral around each other, and, ladies and gentleman, once again, we have lift off.

Climb the ladder. Climb the mountain. Climb the spheres.

Mike, at the controls, slows the ship substantially and before anyone can argue—and why would they?—we’re out in space, floating above the Earth to the tune of a contemplative cosmos. Patient and emotive, the soundscape descends and ascends softly, simultaneously.

But to where?

With Trey leading the way—he knows the secret name, he has the key—the floating Phish soon crashes right into “Prince Caspian.”

“Ohhhhh! to be Prince Caspaian / and float upon the waves / with nothing to return to / but the demons in their caves.”

The days when it was impolite to sing along at a Phish concert are long over. The American Airlines Arena is one big sing-a-long reunion. We’re all out to sea, out to space, whatever, and Oh! to float here without a care, the world below us, its problems and its promises have no consequence. Trey wastes no time sending us soaring even higher. Whatever doubt may have existed last night or earlier or ever that 2009 would end with a bang is banished to those caves as the four highly-trained cosmonauts craft a succinct segment of charging electric ecstasy.

Prince Caspian floats upon the Sea of Already with stumps instead of feet. If he could look down on the waters and see a reflection, even he would see reflected the heavens opened, himself with wings instead of feet.

As “Caspian” comes to a close, without stopping to admire the sights on high, Phish glides gently into the warm glow of “Gotta Jibbo.” This Farmhouse-era tune is one highly danceable, delightful groove. About three minutes in, as if weren’t steeped in the improv already, Trey’s spacey loop signals the real beginning of the jam. Mike and Fish hold down the bottom end while Page and Trey begin to slowly climb a mountain once again—the jam proceeding in traditional “Jibboo” fashion. The Chairmen of Board and Fret, respectively, offer clean leads that chug and jog and begin to pick up speed. Nine minutes in, things start to veer off a bit. It’s like out over there, Trey spots a pocket of unexplored rhythmic space. He hits a “dunh, dunh” that mirrors the simple theme from tonight’s “Tweezer” jam and hovers over it for a little while before launching back into a solo. But he can’t fly out alone for long, as Page picks up the “dunh, dunh” and begins playing it himself—the secret name, the glinting key. And like that, in unison, Phish has left “Jibboo” for the revolutionary pastures of Gamehendge. “Dunh nuh. Dunh nuh,” Trey eggs us on. “Wiiilllssoooon!” we respond. “Dunh, Nuh. Dunh, Nuh.” “Wiiilllssoooon!”

I’ve definitely lost my voice at this point. But there’s an old teaching that you receive a second voice at every Phish concert, this one straight from heaven. (And by “old teaching,” I mean “extremely new teaching.”) So when the final pairs of Es ring out, I let my voice soar in as rough a roar as I can produce: “Wiiilllssoooon!”

But why? How does everyone in this place know to scream that awful name in unison when Trey strikes those dark and devilish Es? And why do I say that name is “awful”? And why do I say those Es are “dark”?

In answer, the story to this soundtrack, which is this: There once was a land of peaceful forest, frothing river, golden pasture and mystical mountain. A certain happy bunch of people lived there. Lizards, they were called. Lizards, they called themselves. And these people lived in the peaceful forest near the golden pasture by the frothing river that flowed cold and free from the magic mountain. The river kept on flowing and bubbling like that back and forward through time forever. And these people knew peace, they knew it well, they knew it for as long as they knew to know.

You see, the trick was to…

Well, so, peaceful forest and mother mountain were no more, it seemed. The Lizards had forgotten how to know. In all their eternal solitude, they forgot that there was nothing to remember and remembered only to forget.

The trick was to…

Well, so, that’s when they awoke. Every time.

The trick was to…

Shock. Harsh light. Eyes open. The world again—still without peace, still without magic. Still. They awoke with an image blurred. They became convinced that the memory of perfection was just the dream of perfection. They became convinced that when they slept, they slept. They became convinced that when they woke, they woke. And that was it.

The trick was to…

Well, back in that dream, in that blurry vision, there had been a man. He had appeared as a harmless dot in the distance, walked along the frothing river, hiked though the thigh-high golden grass and finally entered the tranquil forest. He had smiled. He had waved. He had been greeted with peace. He had come in peace.

The trick was to…

And that was it. The memory turned right then to hazy dream. What happened after? Where went the peace? Where went he? And who, more importantly, are we?

Well, certain Lizards among men began asking these questions. And since their self reflection echoed neither infinite nor peaceful heaves but instead blurred tradition and self rejection, certain Lizards among men began to ask, softly, then loudly, then hoarsely, and then finally violently, “Who the hell is He?!?”—“He” being that once-harmless dot. “He” being end of memory and beginning of dream. “He” being past, present, future and everything in between. “He,” of course, being Wilson: the wicked, evil, dirty, rotten, awful, murderous king.

Well, these Lizards among men began asking such questions and then, met with silence, they began answering the questions themselves. Their voices grew louder still. They took up weapons, invented madness and kept feeding the dream. But even the Lizards among men had forgotten that they were Lizards. They asked questions but forgot how to listen for the answers.

The trick was to…

Well, that’s for another time. Back, now, to that awful name, to those devilish chords. Errand Wolfe, one of those Lizards among men—in fact, the Lizard among angry Lizards—stands above the Sea of Already. Only, he sees an ocean of raging fists and upturned heads. His revolutionary tirade is reaching its peak. The upturned heads are all screaming the same awful name in the same murderous tone: “Wiiilllssoooon!” Only their voices are disjointed—unity, after all, being only a memory and memory being just a dream.

“And dreams don’t kill dictators!” the revolutionary Lizard seems to scream above the din. We can tell Mr. Wolfe has nearly finished his diatribe because back in the American Airlines Arena in Miami, Fla., at the end of 2009 Trey has begun the “Blat Boom” section of “Wilson,” which is really just a final reprise of a searing solo. And this time around, Trey uses this section as an opportunity to revisit the groove session we never quite left. A door unlocked to yet another infinite hall in yet another palace. With two simple swipes, he signals that time is of the essence, that, if we’re gonna reach the peak of peaks, then “Jibboo” ain’t over yet. All four musical magicians dive back into the dance session instantaneously. And You Keep On Dancin’ Two. I know nothing else.

Until two infinite minutes later, another instantaneous transition: “Heavy Things” emerges from this “Jibboo Sambo,” as Ben would call it, and the Farmhouse siblings couldn’t be a more perfect pairing of feel-good-ness. There’s no hesitation from Trey in his decision to end this song or begin another, and his bandmates are so tuned-in that it seems as though these transitions were preplanned, which, of course, they aren’t and which, of course, they are.

Like Mike said, on a song-by-song basis, complex composed sections act—much like prayers—as potent vehicles to get to from Point A to Point ?. That is, an unknown point beyond.

Mike Gordon may not know it, but his co-founding of The Phish is merely a latest chapter in the continually anthologized history of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah. The most influential modern academic scholar of such mysticism, Gershom Scholem, definitely didn’t know it, but he was talking also about this current second set of holiday Phish when he wrote: “The Kabbalah regarded prayer as the ascent of man to the upper worlds, a spiritual peregrination among the supernal realms that sought to integrate itself into their hierarchical structure and to contribute its share toward restoring what had been flawed there.”

Or more specifically:

“Merkavah mysticism, or ma’aseh merkavah, was the name given in Mishna Hagigah, 2:1, to the first chapter of Ezekiel. The term was used by the rabbis to designate the complex of speculations, homilies, and visions connected with the Throne of Glory and the chariot (merkavah) which bears it and all that is embodied in the divine world.”

Ezekiel, Mike, Fish, Page, Trey and 20,000 some-odd people stand on the River of Already. And as we gaze upon the water there is reflected only the Joy of Already. It doesn’t matter what song turns into which kind of jam or which jam morphs into what song, only that the music continues and that we all climb together higher, together. Climbing, we remember that the dream is a memory is a reality is now.

Thus, a late second-set “Heavy Things” is not a travesty. It is just one more iteration toward the sublime divine. Late second set doesn’t always have to be other-worldly. And anyway, this-worldly is other-worldly.

As if to prove this, “Heavy Things” peaks and then plateaus into the veritable theme song of other-worldliness, the iteration of iterations, “2001.” Thus Spake Zarathustra, we have reached the seventh sphere, figuratively, literally, heretically, ecstatically. This is the seventh different song of the set, the final hallway, the last palace before the Throne of the Glory of Holiness.

And why is the Throne found beyond the seventh heaven? Because eight is the unknown point beyond. That is, everything in this world of ours, everything that can be felt and seen can be likened to any simple three-dimensional object, like, for instance, the rhombus. A rhombus has six sides. Those six sides amount to the visible world. The seventh point, the seventh heaven, is the point within the rhombus, or within the person, or the soul. It is Keter, crown—the spark of the monarch, which is the spark of the divine. It is the root.

That’s within you. Without you, beyond the rhombus, beyond the soul, beyond good and evil and beyond the root is the root of roots, is the ineffable is-ness. Beyond seven is eight. That is, 8. That is, infinity.

In “2001” we come to terms with our unlimited funky selves. In what “2001” turns into—on this night, “Slave to the Traffic Light”—we let our funky soul-selves free. Evil King Wilson is just a traffic light. Man is enslaved by him, yet man invented him. So, stepping beyond that “king,” that shackling traffic signal, we see that man has enslaved himself. Step beyond that beyond, into beyond’s beyond. Then where are we?

Don’t ask me. Don’t ask Mike or Fish or Page or Trey. Don’t ask Ezekiel. Don’t ask the angels. Don’t ask the King sitting there. Don’t ask the Queen, either. It is too late for questions.

If you are here, you already know the answer.

A breeze off the bay gathers the setbreak clutter—ringed cocktail napkins, cloudy plastic bags smaller than matchbooks, a thousand hoarse hellos, a thunderhead of cigarette smoke—and flings it to the other side of the porch. The paper, the plastic, the exhaust, the everything settles for a few moments, maybe a few minutes, before the wind picks up again and the debris is sent soaring across the concrete enclave.

I’m sitting with back to wall and to bay, looking through the glass at a steady stream of disembodied chests, necks and faces. To my left is a line of legs. To my right sits Alex Harper. He is smiling, but his is the smile of a mind without alternative facial expression options. He’s not saying much, but his head, which slowly rotates 180 degrees from one end of the porch to the other, on repeat, indicates he’s got a lot to say. His eyes are like little suns eclipsed by giant UFOs. I look into them, and for the briefest of moments what I see is what he sees and what we see is the future, a dream or maybe both:

It is night on Interstate 10. Harper is behind the wheel, fidgeting with the iPod. The whole of Florida sits silently to his left. I sit to his right, and beyond me, ahead of us and in every endless direction, the United States of America. Also ahead of us, our destination: the hills of Tallahassee, the promise of some sort of dubstep music and couches on which to sleep.

“If one does what God does enough times, he becomes as God is.”

In a beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

“If one does what God does enough times, he becomes as God is.”

In a beginning, man created the rhythm and the verse.

“I’m the one who brought the truth to the light / If you listening to me you couldn’t lose in a…”

I cringe. Harper skips through the stanzas, listening for a particular line.

“…nition of Toxic / Anyone who ever got close to me got sick.”

“Here it comes man, here it comes.”

“We like heavy metal, listening to Sepultura / Remain calm, study Islam and read Torahs.”

“Unhnhnhnh.” The song is stopped suddenly. I cringe. “…Sefer Torah. Remain calm, study Islam, read Torahs,” repeats Harper, to the best of his well-meaning abilities. He taps next a few more times. Shuffle lands on something permissible. But this song doesn’t last long either. We listen to disjointed fragments of verse, synth and beat until there, ahead of us, is the exit for Tallahassee.

Up a hill, down a street, around a bend, down a hill and Railroad Square is up ahead. We park in a dirt lot across from the Engine Room, where the dubsteppin’ is supposed to have already started. We produce IDs, pay cover and emerge onto the front porch, where somebody enthusiastically welcomes us. “Yo Ryan, meet my boy, Josh!” But I’m already giving Ryan a hug. “This is ‘your boy in Tally,’ Harper?” I ask. “Your boy Josh?” Ryan adds. “D’you forget about Miami?” “Aw man. “You’re rigggghhhhttt. Damn. Hahahahahahahaha. Sorry about that guys. Sick. Well. Let’s dance!”

Inside. Wah waahh waaahhh, wah waahh waaahhh. Bar. Wa waah waah, wa waah waah. Porch. Wah waahh waaahhh, wah waahh waaahhh. Bathroom. Wah waahh waaahhh, wah waahh waaahhh. Porch.

Up the steps floats a faerie I’ve definitely seen before. She walks over, bids hello to Ryan, hugs Harper, smiles at me. “Sarah. Mike Gordon. Jax Beach. You told me that you told your mother that you were going to Jacksonville to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. I’m Josh,” I say. Her eyes light. “Awww, yeah! And Miami!” she says. “Phish!”

Inside. Wah waahh waaahhh, wah waahh waaahhh. Bar. Wa waah waah, wa waah waah. Porch. Wah waahh waaahhh, wah waahh waaahhh. Bathroom. Wah waahh waaahhh, wah waahh waaahhh. Porch.

The night carries on. Friends disperse. Sarah needs a ride home. Harper obliges. Up a hill, around a bend, down a street. We arrive. Sarah invites us inside, offers us tea, washes our feet, whatever we need. Water boiling, she sits down at her laptop, scrolls. As. Bs. Ds. Gs. Ls. Ns. Os. Ps. Phs. Phish. Sarah picks a jam. “Mama sing sing.” And the music never stops.

The topic of tour comes up. How’s it done. How’s it not done. Sarah did Summer ’09. Sold homemade T-shirts, beer, water on lot. “Oh! I have leftover shirts,” she says while running upstairs to grab them. A muffled: “You gaughta check these out!” And returning: “I only have one medium left. But the larges are small larges. Is that cool?” she asks while throwing a T at me. “Cool for what?” “For you. You can each have one.” “No, no. We can’t take your shirts.” “No, seriously, it’s cool. We made all the money back. These are the extras. You should have them.”

I hold the stark dark enchanted-forest green cotton out in front of me. “SUMMER TOUR 2009” the back declares. I turn the shirt around. Below a deep-V neck, the shirt is covered in hand-drawn golden-green lines: A maze of swirling branches cascade into a thick trunk and then dripping roots.  Next to this tree, a thicket of words: “AND A TREE OF KNOWLEDGE IN YOUR SOUL WILL GROW.” I turn to Harper with a shocked smile of disbelief.

Harper blinks. It is night on the porch of the American Airlines Arena in Miami. I turn forward and look through the glass at a steady stream of disembodied chests, necks and faces. A breeze off the bay gathers the setbreak clutter and flings it to the other side of the porch. The paper, the plastic, the exhaust, the everything settles for a few moments, maybe a few minutes, before the wind picks up again and the debris is sent soaring across the concrete enclave.

Take a sip of water. Take a breath of air. Take a gulp of courage. Set IV is about to begin.

Seats. Lights. Roar. This is what we wait for. Seats. Lights. Roar. This is what some of us live for. Seats. Lights. Roar.

We walk up the steps, empty pockets, raise arms to the heavens and are oh so happy to let strangers feel us up. Inside, people pour from every door, up every staircase and into every hall and byway of the venue. We’ve left Miami. We’ve left time and space. This is not hyperbole. This is not fluffed-up fandom. This is simple. To get to our seats, to watch the lights drop from bright to black, to add our chords to the roar, this is what we wait for.

Nat goes one way. Kabatznik another. Ben’s gone to his seats, the Harpers to theirs. All our various friends have fanned out across the aisles and floor. Now, I am alone and I am home. Tonight is Night 2 is December 29. My seat is in the 100s, Page-side. I find it and survey the surroundings. The lights are up. I’m ready. The lights go down, and with the darkness comes that holy eruption of collectively conscious sound.

In a matter of moments, the four friends of Phish are onstage and, after having consulted each other, Pow!, have opened the gates with one of, if not the oldest, still-played Phish song: “Golgi Apparatus.” If the title and lyrics of this song sound ripped (and then warped) from the pages of a middle-school biology textbook, well, that’s because they were. Trey and a posse of preteen cohorts wrote this tune when they were in eighth grade, and it debuted as a Phish song way back in ’86.

I’m reminded of Nat, who’s groovin’ somewhere out there in the crowd. I’m reminded of driving to Atlanta with my mom sometime in high school. She was headed there to hear a panel of neo-cons speak about war and Bush and the vast left-wing conspiracy. I went to hear what they had to say, and maybe to shake the place up a bit with some youthful descent during the Q&A. Also, Nat lived in Atlanta. Mom and I got to the hotel after dinner that night. A dozen missed calls later and “nat” was finally buzzing on my cell phone. I answer it. He’s driving home from a co-billed Allman Brothers Band/moe. show, he says. I tell him that I’m in Atlanta and that I want to chill. I ask what is plans are, ask can he pick me up? “Doo do do dun dun nuh nuh nuh nuh, dan neh nuh do nuh nuh nuh nuh,” he responds. “Nat, Nat. What’s goin’ on, man? I want to see you.” “Nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh, dan neh nuh do nuh nuh nuh nuh,” he repeats. I can hear music in the background. I can hear that his singing aligns with the guitar of that music. I can hear that “Golgi Apparatus” is playing. “Haha. Dude, what’s up? What’s your deal?” I ask. “Nah nuh nuhn nuh, nah nuh nuhn nuh nuh, da nah nuh nuh nuhn nuh nuh nuh nuh nun nun nun nun nuh nah nuh nah,” he continues. I don’t respond. I wait. This is, in effect, an answer to the question that so many Phish haters ask: But where are all the whine whine whine words? I can’t sing along. This music suuuuucks. Nat keeps singing along with the guitar. I am not hanging up. I can sing right along with him, but I don’t. He sings along with the song ‘til the end. It ends. He stops singing. “Hey man. Sorry. What’s going on?” he asks. “I’m in Atlanta. Let’s chill, man.” “Alright. Cool. Where are you?”

Thus began another sleepless Atlanta adventure, and thus begins another rocking Miami Phishventure. “Under the light / Middle of the night / Couldn’t get it wrong.” “Golgi” is a short tight, raucous way to start a night of Phish, and the boys execute it perfectly. Seconds later, the quick, repetitive tonk tisk tonk tisk of Fishman’s high hat and the sparse bumping metronome of Mike’s bass signal the beginning of an even rawkier outing.

“The overhead view is of me in a maze / And you see what I’m hunting a few steps away / And I take a wrong turn and I’m on the wrong path / And the people all watching enjoy a good laugh.”

It’s early in the show, but we’ve already entered the “Maze.” And I don’t mind getting lost, in the least. Anywhere else, be it a club or party or whatever, dancing means moving just that much less than I want to. From fear of all the people watching and laughing on my behalf, real or imagined, I don’t ever really fully let loose. But not here. I flail and jump and twirl and rage just as hard as I please and thank you. Nothing is an embarrassing failure to this freaky horde—less maybe a flubbed lyric or solo from Trey. But this final ’09 take on “Maze” features nothing of the sort. Trey’s guitar work sears through every vestige of insecurity and apprehension and, if it wasn’t before, the party is now truly on.

Next up is “Driver,” a much-needed-by-my-muscles breather. Successful Phish shows are as much based around high-energy rock songs and exploratory jamming as they are around sets that flow well. If “Maze” had catapulted into another searing jam, that would’ve been one thing. But it didn’t. The song ended. There was a short break. And then the audience’s sweating energy found its cooldown in “Driver,” a formerly acoustic number — about that dude who lives inside your brain and tells you what to do and where to go — that is played with relative infrequency but has been reworked in recent years to feature Trey on electric guitar. “Driver” is a short, insightful song that acts as a direct challenge to anybody who thinks Phish only plays long, directionless jams with no-to-meaningless lyrics.

Glad to catch my breath after “Maze,” I am slightly let down but mostly amused that, after a long lull, the band chooses to play what it plays next.

“The Connection” is, according to Phish biographer Parke Puterbaugh, the “undisputed pinnacle” of Undermind, Phish’s last album before calling it quits in 2004. Puterbaugh qualifies that distinction: “A burnished gem, it is a song so simple, tuneful, and eloquent that you could swear it’s always been there.”

Out there in the mass of people, I know that Nat is laughing hysterically at this song choice. To Puterbaugh’s claim that this connection has been waiting in the wings of sonic perfection all along, Nat would later say, “Yes. In the form of every pop song that sucks.” And that is a sentiment I can’t echo with more effect because, in fact, Undermind features many higher high-points than this song—the title track, “Scents and Subtle Sounds,” “A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing,” to name a few. So I stand there and just laugh hysterically, too. Hey!, at least it’ll be over soon, I rationalize.

And it is. Seconds later, Page strikes a minor chord and then strikes a chord one step up and the American Airlines Arena is greeted by that lovable funky furry friend, “Wolfman’s Brother.” Let the dancing recommence. Trey and Mike lock in soon enough and while this isn’t exactly liquid funk a la 1997, it’s easy enough to get down and groove with this friendly monster. For a little while. The jam doesn’t break the 10-minute mark before the Wolfman’s Distant Cousin, “Ocelot,” makes an appearance and I know there’s ample time and that the night is young and that the run isn’t even half done. “Ocelot” is a feel-good romp in the middle of a feel-good first set. This jam, which also doesn’t break the 10-minute mark, is firmly rooted in the structure of the song. Phish clearly isn’t in a hurry. “Settle in, friends,” they seem to be playing/saying. But what comes next — sweet, blissful “Reba” — seems more a note-to-self about settling in than a message to the audience.

The Phish.net is one of the earliest Internet resources by and for Phish fans. It has an extensive FAQ section that virtually answers any question you could ever have about the band. But because fans create the content on this site, there’s a healthy dose of creative exegesis involved. A prime example of wild speculation is the page that asks (and answers), “They, Uh… Sing In Hebrew??” Yes, in fact, they do. And Hebrew is probably the most widely used foreign tongue in Phish music given the presence of “Aveinu Malkeinu” and “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” in set lists. But what’s this got to do with “Reba”? Well, there’s speculation that the name is Russian and there’s also speculation that it is Hebrew. The truth, most likely, is that “Reba” is just the name of the character in this song about concocting the finest amalgamation in the nation. It’s just a name, people! Stop attaching importance to every little letter. It’s just a name. They’re just letters. It’s just a song. Now, get down, motherfunkers.

But, of course, Phish fans can’t allow for anything to be so simple. So, in 1994, on the infamous RMP message board, someone made a loose (but tiiiiight) connection between “Reba” and Hebrew and the nature of Phish’s beloved musical exploration. In Hebrew, “Reba” (ריבה) means “jam.” As in, “I’d like some strawberry jam for this here toast.” “Jam,” in English, also means, “to freely improvise a passage of music as a group.” And that is just the sort of jamming that Phish does. But, of course, it doesn’t even stop there. “Reba” is a song about an epic concoction that is itself an epic concoction of zany lyrics, tight composition and loose improvisation that, as consistently as any other Phish tune, leads the band and its fans toward a connection to something beyond, something other, something higher. In other words, “Reba” is the perfect case study for our purposes. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s hear what SSDS-alum Mike, in a passage taken from Puterbaugh’s Phish: The Biography, has to say:

“To get so tight in a preplanned way makes the looseness juxtapose even more. I look at it that the written-out stuff is a sort of ritual, almost like a prayer session that gets my mind in gear for what’s to come. Sort of like a Hassidic Jew doing a bunch of prayers and moving until he starts to reach God. There’s like this leg work that has to be done, something where the prayers are already written.”

Phish’s composed-then-jammed songs — “Reba,” “You Enjoy Myself,” “Harry Hood” — are mere meditations that set the band and its fans on the path to temporary enlightenment. You can only climb the mountain if you follow the right signs and, once you’re up there, you only get to see God’s back, but even that back is composed of the purest loving light. This type of jamming is deveikut. It is cleaving to the divine. It is mind expansion. It is clinging to Jah Most High. It is psychedelic. It’s climbing toward Icculus. It is seeking a connection to whatever you want to call that ineffable source of all sources. It is IT. It is the first time I have seen Phish play this song, and I couldn’t be happier to be alive.

The “Reba” jam (Is that redundant?) starts softly enough, but Trey wastes no time and is soon pulling at my soul with his blissful lead. Then Red and Page lock onto each other, and the all systems are GO as Mike and Fish lay down the rumbling ground. Without a wasted note or cymbal splash on any band member’s part, the tightness and looseness juxtaposed perfectly, “Reba” culminates succinctly and with beautiful grace.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. A collective exhale of clap and cheer. But the set is not over yet. The band quickly drops into the rarely played, Mike-penned tune called “Access Me” off of Undermind. “And you don’t have to open up the secrets of your soul / But if that’s the place you want me I’d be glad to pay the toll.” Mike doesn’t talk very much, but he’s very profound. His song wraps up with a sentiment that is as much about personal relationships as it is about how I’d like to treat this community of friends and family and fans around me.

And then it all comes full circle. With the strumming of one beautiful chord, Mr. Trey Anastasio brings me back exactly six years, brings me back to the Rhombus, brings me back to an ancient, unknown time and place.

“Divided Sky” is the primordial chant of the Lizards of Gamehendge. It is, according to Trey’s telling, chanted ritually atop the Rhombus in the middle of a field: “Ahhhhhhhhhh! Divided Sky and the wind blows high! Divided sky and the wind blows high!” Off of Phish’s freshman effort Junta (its best, most inspired effort, in my opinion), “Divided Sky” is a composition of elation that moves from a silence to a whisper to a cheer to a soaring mountain of sound. There’s no jam here. This is pure composed bliss. Virtually wordless, it is a niggun.

Out in the crowd is Andrew Shaw, another beaming, passionate yid who, confronted with the task of extracting niggunim from Phish music, ended up creating an entire prayer service of epic Phishy proportions. He found endless inspiration. But it started with “Divided Sky.”  There’s a section of the Hallel service — a collection of six psalms that are recited on joyous occasions — that fits musically and intentionally with the various melodies of “Divided Sky.” Literally, it just fell into place. Take a listen:

Divided Psky

The challenge is to do a little searching and digging, but this pairing says, in part, this: “Min hametzar karati Yah, anani vamerchavyah,” which means, according to one translation, “From the narrow places I called out to God, who answers me with Divine expanded perspective, the expansiveness of the open field.”

But seriously? Seriously? This is a joke, a coincidence, a little bit of both and neither. Seriously.

Phish executes their beautiful composition with precision, and after a joyous set-closing “Cavern,” we’re one third of the way toward the culmination. One third of the way is close enough, so I’ll say it early and, God willing, often. Shannah tovah, chevre. Happy New Year, friends.

Bing. The gaudy gold splits open and I step back out into the lobby into the indoor-plant promenade and couch clusters and sparklingly lonely piano.

Bing. I realize this is the hotel where we stayed in 2003 after seeing Phish. I exit the hotel to go back to my car to grab the things I forgot.

Bing. I realize that my ticket to tonight’s show is still in the room, 27 floors up, and that this is the same hotel where we stayed six years ago on this same night. I call Ben and ask him to grab the ticket from the envelope in the inside pocket of my bag. “Make sure you grab the right one,” I tell him, but I know he won’t mess this up. Soon after I arrived and put my bags down, Ben laid the four-ticket set out on the bed, “just to look at them.”

Lined-up—28^th, 29^th, 30^th, 31^st—the tickets compose an AAArena-centric collage of the Miami skyline, complete with palm trees dipped and seagulls swerved. Ben’s the type of person who will have these tickets framed when he gets home. The gotta-catch-‘em-all philosophy. It’s why, after Live Phish 01 grew on us, Ben didn’t just move on to Live Phish 02. Instead, after we acquired the taste, he acquired the deluxe binder of  16 originally released shows (whose covers also line up, forming a black-and-white Pollock painting).

I grab notebook and pen from the Buick and return from the parking garage. Nat and Ben aren’t here. I sit near the elevators and wonder if I should ride one up. Nat and Ben. Ben and Nat. Nat and Ben? It’s unlikely duo. Ben doesn’t leave the house if there isn’t a little gator guarding his heart; for some reason Nat’s been wearing Fourth-of-July flag shirts since Old Navy started making them. Ben has known that he will go to law school and become a lawyer for as long as I have known him; Nat usually knows very little about anything beyond a few moments from now. Somehow, tonight will be the third time Nat and Ben have seen Phish together. Somehow, though he’s from Atlanta and pursues this band as fervently as the next guy, Nat and I have never been to a show together. When I went to Bonnaroo in ’03 with my Dad, all my friends were gathered yet again at camp. And while I lived in Israel in ’09, many of my friends, Nat and Ben included, were gathered at Bonnaroo to witness the first summer Phish in five years.

Collective memory has a way of making every milestone event seem better attended. I wasn’t at camp that summer, but stories about it are told with me, not to me. And though the only negative part about moving to Israel for five and a half months was the fact that I couldn’t be a first-hand witness to the unveiling of Phish 3.0, on some level, I don’t believe that I wasn’t there. It doesn’t make sense. How could I have missed that train? I went to Bonnaroo ’08 almost as an afterthought. Press passes got me there for free. All I had to do was make the drive, write the story. But Phish reunites and headlines ‘Roo with two nights of music and I’m stuck 4,000 miles away?

It won’t be long before my friends’ experiences mesh with my own and the memory of 2009 becomes a jumble of Joy and Israel and music festivals and religious festivals and also the beginning of seeing that everything becomes a lot less certain soon. There’s no camp for us anymore. Not even close. We’re spread out across the country, and we’ll be spread to the four corners soon enough. Maybe Nat and Ben weren’t the closest friends way back when and maybe today they still function on different brain plains, but here they are, together, emerging from an elevator in a fancy hotel in the warm winter of Miami and the world may soon turn downside in or upside out, but right now we have just one thing to do: get our asses to the show.

Out of the hotel compound, Nat, Ben and I head south on toward Biscayne Boulevard. On foot, 15 minutes pass between hotel and psychedelic hoedown pre-party. From laid-back amble to strung-tight hype, I move compulsively. The road turns right. Nervous—we hit Biscayne, walk under the Dolphin Expressway, see the arena ahead of us, hovering, and I resist the urge to plunge into a run—energy.

And with good reason, too: King Koopa is in the lot, and he is waiting. The man capable of both fireball anger and mile-wide smiles is waiting for us. Any longer and the fate of the Mushroom Kingdom may be in jeopardy. Or was that the fate of Gamehendge? Oh, Mario, maybe this metaphor doesn’t work here, but Ben “I Will Destroy You” Kabatznik definitely shouldn’t be left to his own devices.

Once a week, 10 years ago, my mom would drive me to our modern American synagogue so that I could sit in a room and chant ancient Hebrew texts in a medieval Jewish tune to our cantor, a man from South Africa. Previous proper planning didn’t prevent my piss-poor performance. I would sing one verse and then the second and then the third and then the—STOP! Before I could get to the fourth, I’d have to start over. Sing that word again. Not like that. Like this. Like this? No, like this. The hour would end. The nervous trembling would begin to ease. I would exit the room. Ben Whitman would be sitting outside with his mom. Ben and I were born three days apart and would become bar mitzvahs in nearly the same interval. It was his turn now to chant and chant and shake until he got it right. One of the last times I exited the cantor’s office, 10 years ago, almost exactly, I saw Ben and blurted that I’d be going to camp with him that summer. The excitement of that prospect out-trembled the torture of trope.

We became sons of the commandment. We were showered with gifts. We were still children. Months later, I went to camp. Ben was there, in the bunk across the hall. Thirteen-year-old Nat was there, too, in my bunk. And on the other side of the hill, in the double-decker, best-American-Jewry-can-buy bunk of all bunks was Kabatznik, an American-born Israeli-South African, a freakishly muscled hybrid, the brunt of many insecure jokes, but more often, just another kid in crowd.

It’s hard to say if he was present for the great Phish-Panic debate. I don’t think we talked much that summer. But the same forces that were then working on my psyche were working on his, though maybe not as quickly. This is a kid of smiles so big that he can’t keep in the drool. This is a kid who will threaten your life with words but never with action (unless you fuck with my shit one more fucking time, Fleet, you fucking asshole). This is a kid who broke the same tooth multiple summers trying to impress girls. And this is a kid who returned from the dentist down the hill in Clayton, Ga, with a new tooth saying, “Yo guys, I just came back from Dr. Funk. It was the shit.” Indeed. The phorce was getting stronger with this one.

The summer ended. The school year passed. More years expired. Road trip to South Florida. The Internet. The tensions of teenhood. High school ended. Where once I was a camper, now I was a counselor. Still, I was too young. A kid can’t control kids, especially not in the place where the kid became that kid, especially not when his other kid friends are there too, “working” and remaining kids. Nat was there, and then Nat was not there. And the bush was not consumed by the flames.

Kabatznik staffed camp with me that summer, too. He was no longer just a joke. He was a dear friend. Late one night at the top of a hill in the summer of 2006, after high school was over and before college had begun, we sat in his car and turned the volume up, forgot about responsibilities and remembered that we were still kids. It was “Simple” and still and serene and so so funky. We were just kids in the crowd. Though Phish was broken up, we were just beginning to take the stage.

The American Airlines Arena appears in the distance and hovers closer and closer until the three of us are still and staring up. We’re here. Oh giddy giddy God, we’re here.

The doors may be opening soon, but show time isn’t for another hour, at least. There’s a cop in a neon yellow jacket. There’s a crosswalk. There are more cops in yellow jackets and there are thousands of happy people in all manners of regalia swarming in a lot across the street. Kabatznik is in the swarm. He is waiting.

“Yea, I remember being really excited because I had seen the first show of the fall tour and then had been listening to subsequent shows and seeing how the sound was changing and improving over the course of the tour and so I was really excited to see what they can do,” he said. “Some people in the lot were talking about how the 28th was nothing to write home about, but that didn’t even phase me because I was just really excited to see them again.”

We nod to the cop, cross the street and join the swarm. Flashing blue lights. Flowing beautiful women. Cackling, hysterical men. Neon yellow jackets. The be-ticketed hands of scalpers. Twelve Tribes table. Coolers on wheels. Bubbles. Heads held high. High-held heads. Bumping, muffled bass. A street. The swarm. And there, amid it all in a Big Bird T-shirt too small to contain his Israeli bulk, beams Kabatznik, not just another kid in a crowd.

“Seeing you and Nat in the lot was also awesome because that was when I first realized that we were all actually finally at Phish together,” he said. “And even though we didn’t sit together for that show I felt amazing just knowing that you were in there somewhere and we were finally seeing the band that we had talked about and listened to for so long.”

We join the swarm. We hug tight. How good and how pleasant is it when brothers dwell in unity? It is so good and so pleasant. There is Anchor Porter. There is cheap beer. There is laughter and singing, hollering and some hissing. We get separated. Harper’s around. Harpers abound. We gallivant. We meet back up. Nu? We check our cell phones—Show Time—and set out to cross the street. Yalla. Let’s go. Let’s get on with it. Let’s GO!

“Wake up.” Huh. “It’s 11:30.” Consciousness hits. Eyes open. “I gotta kick you guys out.” Roll over. Out-of-focus dark-brown millimeters from my nose. “Got an appointment really soon. Come on guys.” Roll over. Rough carpet on my back. “Get up. It’s 11:40.” Keep rolling. Out-of-focus metal millimeters from my face. “Let’s go! Get up.” Shit. Sit up, shake, focus.

In front of me: one built-in desk with oversized computer monitor. To my immediate right: one posh leather chair, one table, many odds and many ends, strewn. To my immediate left: one pullout couch, pulled out. Beyond that: one new friend, sitting up, yawning. All around: the sounds of premature waking.

Starting with this long strip of carpeted floor, details from the previous night take their time returning to my memory. I slept here because it was the only space in the room in which I could not only fit but also unfurl myself entirely. Before the floor became my bed, Harper made his out of the front passenger seat in the Buick, where he sat waiting for our host to return from the club.

In the driver’s seat, I shuffle through the iPod, which is loaded with several Phish shows and a smattering of psychedelic folk, jazz and hip-hop. I avoid the Phish because I’m superstitious and because I need some balance. Harper wakes up every few songs to proclaim his love/disbelief/curiosity. I pick up the iPod, which is tethered to the main console by a chord that hangs from the mouth of the cassette deck like black, unslurped spaghetti, and tell him the name of the song, but he’s snoring before I can get the words out. I put the iPod down. I flip a switch on the console that reads “Map Light.” The song changes. Harper wakes up. I tell him the song name. Harper sleeps. I flip off the switch on the console that reads “Map Light.” A glint above me. In the rearview mirror, headlights growing big and blinding. Cahlin is back with Sarah and Ryan. Harper wakes up and falls asleep one last time before waking up again to get out of the car.

On the way in to the house, we pass through a living room that has a couch and some chairs on top of a shaggy rug. The couch is so bold, so red, so shiny that I’m afraid sitting might cause it to shatter. The couch is a tease, like a bowl of candy on the counter that, when you get close enough to grab, reveals itself to be a bowl of colorful glass blown to resemble plastic-wrapped confections. We pass by the faux candy comfort, go through the kitchen and enter Cahlin’s room. I locate a blanket, a bit of floor. Next thing I know, it’s nearly noon and we have to get the F up and out.

But such a plan-less person as I can’t complain. So I stand, grab fresh clothes from my pack, change, pack everything up and am following the others out the door not too long after. We decide to leave Harper’s Civic parked at Cahlin’s and pile into the Buick to go find some breakfast. It’s a quick trip ending in bagels and cream cheese, eggs, coffee. The meal is perfect, but all is still not right. With two set’s worth of sweat all over and a floor’s worth of sleep underneath, we really need a shower to set ourselves straight. Back to the Buick, back to the Miami streets. I start driving south on a main-seeming vein while the native South Floridians phone (ten) friends in search of an open home.

In the meantime, Ben calls me. He knows I probably have no place to sleep tonight and invites me to stay with him at a Marriot near the venue. “How much?” I ask him. “Don’t worry about it,” he tells me. “You sure?” I ask him. “Yea, bud. You want to stay or not?” he responds. “Ok, ok. Sure. Thanks, man.” “And if Carl or whoever needs a place to stay, that’s fine.” “Awesome. Thanks man.”

I look for a dollar store as we stop and go, stop and go. I want glow sticks and neon goggles and alien antennae. Anything. I’m in the mood. Tonight is Night Two. December 29^th. Exactly six years from this day I saw my second-ever Phish show in this same city at the very same arena. Ben’s mom scored tickets for us while chatting with a stranger on a ski lift in Colorado a couple weeks before the show. It worked out that I was on a family vacation in the Florida Keys at the end of December and my parents were able to drop me off at a hotel in Miami to stay with Ben and his mother on the day of the show. It worked out in the other ways, too. Ben had contacted our old camp friend, Sherman, the one who claimed to be Mike Gordon’s cousin. I doubted the validity of that claim until the moment a teller at the American Airlines Arena will-call window handed Ben an envelope filled with complimentary tickets to that and the following night’s show. Shock and awe. Sherman had pulled through big time. We walked from will call to the lot, got rid of some extras, saw the sights and entered the arena all by ourselves.

We’d come a long way. I was 15 the preceding summer and had listened to and researched the music of live jam bands on the Internet for a couple years by that point. But Jacksonville didn’t have the liveliest music scene then, and the shows I desired to see invariably happened way out at Jacksonville Beach late at night. Starting with a Widespread Panic show in Tallahassee in April 2003, I entered a crash course in the world of live music. The Panic show was my first large-scale exposure to the Jam in its natural element. I couldn’t go to camp that summer for various reasons, but a parental compromise was reached soon after Neil Young & Crazy Horse were announced as headliners of the second-annual Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. My dad was convinced, we bought the tickets and soon enough it was a Thursday evening in early June and we were on the highway heading toward Tennessee. Bonnaroo or bust. We arrived in Manchester early the following morning. It took us six hours to drive the final mile into Mecca, but, traffic clusterfuck or not, the long wait was worth it. That Father’s Day weekend, Dad and I saw so many people make so much music. We were introduced to new sounds, to innovative songwriters, to the forefathers. Yonder Mountain String Band. Kaki King. The Slip. Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. The Allman Brothers Band. Nickle Creek. Medeski, Martin & Wood. Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals. moe. Galactic. Mike Gordon and Leo Kottke. The Dead. And on and ever on. In a matter of days, the world had transformed into an endlessly expansive playground of original music. I saw old legends perform and new legends made. It was eye opening. It was mind opening. It was life opening.

One month later—because of another clause in the great No Camp Compromise—I got to experience live Phish for the first time. Phish had returned from a two-year hiatus the previous New Year’s and seeing that summer show in Atlanta was the actualization of a dream. Still, Ben and I were only able to go with a babysitter, Ben’s older cousin. Phish wasn’t ours yet. “Yea, that ‘Wilson’ was special, man, I haven’t seen them open with that in all my 120 shows,” I overheard a guy comment during set break. The band, its phans and its history still seemed Other. This feeling was not uncommon. Even in the late 80s, folks who stumbled into Phish shows were confronted with precisely executed music involving ongoing storytelling and improvisation played on a tiny stage in front of wildly enthusiastic fans. John Paulska, who would go on to work as Phish’s manager for the better part of two decades, described his first impressions of the band in Phish: The Biography, written by journalist Parke Puterbaugh:

“There was nothing casual about what was going on there,” Paluska said. “People were really into it, and I felt like probably a lot of people felt over the years when they went to their first Phish show, which was that there was a lot of already established understanding that I didn’t know anything about.”

To us, that ‘03 Atlanta show was a revolutionary milestone. I jumped higher off that lawn than I had ever jumped before when Trey signaled the opening riff of “You Enjoy Myself.” We’d arrived, but to the majority of the other phans in attendance that night I’m willing to guess the show—and maybe even that “YEM”—felt like just another Phishy moment in time. No revolution about it.

Then, Miami NYE ’03 was announced. Ben and I failed to get tickets initially but ended with twice as many as necessary at the last moment. In the highest balcony of the arena, the first set of that show was joyous. But it still felt removed—too far away, too Other. At set break, we managed to sneak into a lower level on Page’s side of the stage. Seating was out of the question here. The aisles were overrun with every imaginable breed of Phishhead. I remember a lone security guard treading in this sea with a smile on her face. Or maybe I smiled for her. And then a “Divided Sky” late in the second set sent me leaping to the rafters, almost as high as that Atlantan “YEM.” A song that is short on words but long on love, “Divided Sky” has some of the deepest roots of any Phish song. Off of Phish’s first real album, Junta, this song is 10-plus minutes of praiseful, compositional bliss. “Divided sky and the wind blows high!/Divided sky and the wind blows high!” Trey and Mike call and respond early in the tune. The chant is a ritual from Gamehendge, Trey’s senior thesis/mythical wonderland. In better times, before an evil man named Wilson arrived, the Lizards—those hapless people who inhabit Gamehendge—sung this song to the heavens from atop a giant black rhombus in the middle of a field in the middle of a forest. Fairytale nonsense, to be sure. In any case, “Divided Sky” is a grand piece of music that showcases the compositional and technical mastery of its composer and its players. Its peaks mirrored my soul that night. The set finished up with a Zeppelin cover. Two encores later, all I could think about was how and when I would see this band—my band—again.

But all was not right in the world of Phish. Just months after the four-night run in Miami, a message was posted on the official Phish website. It was from Trey. Phish was through, he said. They wanted to go out on a high note and it was time for everyone else to get on with their lives. I wrote a little poem that day:

It’s all over folks
There’s nothing left to see
Pack up all your adventures
And go back to your family
It was great while it lasted
But now that time is passed
We were all in this together
Now it’s time take a bath

Simple, sad and on another level, down and bitter. Maybe most Phishheads had grown up. Maybe they’d formed families and maybe they had responsibilities that were more important than this. But for me, for Ben, for our other friends currently stepping through the door, the adventure had just begun. “If we’re all in this together,” I thought, “y’all are gonna have to speed through to the punch line of this shitty joke and start the grooves back up again because I’ve got some youthful energy to expend and years of missed magnificence to make up.”

Simple, sad, dark, bitter. And muddy. Coventry, the name and location of the group’s final performance and festival, was a disaster. People traveled thousands of miles to see the show. But biblical rains inundated Vermont in the days leading up to the finale. The festival site was more soup than solid. Cars couldn’t drive in anymore. Amid a traffic jam that backed up dozens of miles, Mike Gordon announced over the festival’s radio station that everyone should turn around. It’s over. There’s nothing we can do. Just pack up and get out of here. We’ll refund you. We’re really sorry. Go home where it’s dry, where it’s warm, where you won’t have to witness what’s about to happen.

But many people just pulled to the side of the rode and walked the five, 10, 20 miles into the grounds. Despite such dedication, every fan who made it was left to shudder in the puddles and the muck as Phish delivered one of the worst, sloppiest performances of a 20-year career. This is how it ends? The unimpeded bliss of a Phish festival has devolved into this muddy mess? Had Trey really become Wilson?

That was a sad, dark, bitter time to be a wide-eyed fan of this band. But here I am, in 2009, bleary-eyed, grateful. Sadness can sit in the waiting room, darkness can banish itself to a dungeon somewhere. This is the year of Light. This is six years later, and we’ve all stepped back through the door.

Miami blurs by. The light turns red. We stop. I look around for a dollar store. The light turns green. Miami blurs by. Sarah gets a call. A friend, whose house is down the road, has some good news. Her mom is home and wouldn’t mind it at all if we rolled through to shower.

Living in Florida—where everybody and their Jewish mother goes to retire, where communal cross-pollination is the rule, not the exception— can take the fun and excitement out of finding unexpected connections. Usually. Soon as we get to talking at Sarah’s friend’s house, one such connection is found. The friend’s mother has been a United Synagogue Youth director for years. I’m excited to meet this women, excited to be welcomed into her home so warmly, so unconditionally, so unquestioningly.  I’ve probably met her before—at a Southeast regional convention, perhaps, or possibly at International Convention, “IC,” the Bonnaroo of all Jewish youth-group gatherings. I went to that convention in the winter of 2005, in my senior year of high school. It was a weeklong event in Philadelphia, PA. We did more that week than I care (or can remember) to list. But one day I remember because they put us on a bus to the city of King of Prussia to do volunteer work at Somesuch Non-Profit. I can’t remember what we did or why or how because all I could think about that day was the Rhombus. If I had my own car and no schedule and no adult supervision, I would be out combing the streets and hills of this city looking for it. It would be down a road, past Wilson’s Leather Shop, up a hill, when you think you’ve made it, keep going. “You’ll know when you’re there,” Trey directed an audience in December 1995. No doubt, a handful of heads have heeded the call over the years and made the pilgrimage to King of Prussia. But could the origin of so many names and circumstances in The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday really be that simple? How seriously did the creator consider his creation? Maybe I felt a pit in my stomach that day because I subconsciously knew we’d been misled. The Rhombus wasn’t, isn’t, in King of Prussia. It couldn’t be that simple. The search could go on. The convention could go on. Whatever good deed we were doing could continue. The journey to that mysterious field in that hidden forest would have to wait for another day. I’m struck that there are people, places and things that will come into your life when you least expect and most need them and that often they will have been standing around nearby all along. The Rhombus isn’t in King of Prussia. According to Puterbaugh’s biographical account, it’s in Princeton, New Jersey, where Trey grew up. But when I was there, in Princeton, a year and a half after feeling a sinking-stomach feeling in Philly, I didn’t know this. Micah and Jason were there. We’d driven all through the previous night and day from Gainesville, Fla in Micah’s Prius. Freshman year’d just ended. I’d just finished reading Dharma Bums. I was primed and ready for the road. Our final destination was Providence, Rohde Island—we’d talked to Nat, a friend living and learning there, a few weeks prior but couldn’t get in touch with him from the highway and weren’t sure where, how or if he was—but we made a stop at Princeton’s campus to visit brilliant little Hallie and to watch the enchanted trees there turn wondrous colors. Princeton was beautiful, but the road beckoned and the Rhombus would have to wait another day.

This day, in Miami, Nat calls. He’s nearly here. I tell him he can stay with Ben and me and he asks which hotel and I tell him and that’s that. I’m struck that every turn off of every road, no matter if you’re out there a thousand miles from home, holds something or someone special. There’s always a lesson to learn, a heart-filled favor to receive or give. Or just more trees. You can ride down a road a thousand times before you notice that spectacular oak tree or this side street’s hilarious and irrelevant name. And you will pass and meet and re-meet the people you don’t know but need somewhere down the line. Try. Don’t try. Just be open to the possibility and the road will wind around for the thousandth time and out there, before you, below you and above you, will be the same old world bathed in a holy new light. Or maybe there will just be a hot shower and dry towels when you need them most. Also, a lot of laughter and conversation. And speaking of cars, a couple hours of have passed and we need to get back on the road. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

We pull out of the fenced and gated front, and turn back the way we came. We follow the lines going north. We find pizza. We eat pizza. We get beer. We locate Cahlin’s house. We grab stuff. We find that it’s high time to get to where we’re going. Nat’s already at the hotel. Ben’s on the phone and ready ready ready, so we go go go. Drive, drive, drive. Stop. Drive, stop, drive. Stop, drive, stop. Drive. Stop, stop, stop. We’re here. Stop. Let us out here. The light is green. Here. Stop. Screeeeuh. See you. Later. Bye. Thwak.

Go, turn, go. The Marriot’s ahead. One way, this way, that way. The Marriot’s behind. This way, this way, this way. I see the on ramp to the parking garage, spiral round and round and round, find a spot, swing in. Stop. Door opens screeeeeuh. Door shuts thwak. Cacheengpop goes the trunk. Stuff, so much stuff. Clunk goes the trunk. Where do I go? Turn. Third floor. No elevator, no entrance, just stairs, no up. Where do I go? Down down down. Around around around. See the sliding glass. See the lobby, the lounge, the mirrored halls. See the elevator. Go up up up up up—20s—up up. Out, turn, walk. Stop. Knock, knock, knock. Kachunk, woosh opens the door. And there, Sir White and Saint Nat, and behind them the bay and the lights and Miami from so high, and welcome, dear friend, welcome, to the new, raging night. Let us go.

Outside of my section, the halls are already filled with heads. I find the stairs and head down to the lowest level. On my way to find Harper and his ilk, I pass Brad, one of Ben’s Phish-virgin friends. He’s buying a $7 beer. I ask him what he thought of the first set, but he doesn’t say much outside of “Great!” and “Awesome!” I know that he’s unsure of what just happened in there and the familiarity of an over-priced domestic draft is the only thing that can clear his mind and provide some context. I leave Brad in line and find the doors that lead to a sort of porch. The place is packed with cigarette smokers, exhausted revelers and others like me looking for friends.

I squeeze through the packs of people and come to the other end of the porch without finding anyone I know. After one more trip around the crowd, I run into Doogans who leads me to Sarah and Ryan and eventually Harper. Harper’s friend Adam—a guy I first met freshman year when he came to visit and ran into again while living in Israel—is there, and then, in the span of 30 minutes, two or three pockets of Jewish kids, all people he met in Israel but didn’t know were coming to these shows, run into our group on the porch.

These types of meetings should seem coincidental or unlikely, but I’ve actually come to expect them. Today, I’m the friend of a friend meeting friends of friends of friends. Tomorrow, I’ll be introducing my old friends to friends of other friends. I bought solo tickets to this run of shows in Miami without a moment of hesitation because I knew hordes of familiar Heebs would be at the show, no matter the amount of pre-planning. But what made this a reality of the Phish experience for American Jews?

In the summer of 2003, I was heartbroken that I couldn’t attend camp with my friends. Just about the only thing that lifted my spirits that summer was the knowledge that I’d be seeing the Phab Four live in concert in Atlanta, Ga. I went to that show with Ben and Ben’s older cousin (we were 15 at the time and Ben’s 19-year-old relative, himself a moe.ron, was our parent-approved chaperone). At the show, I remember running into people from Camp Ramah left and right. Barry from Alabama was there, smoking a cigarette and telling us a story about breaking in to someone’s house and almost getting arrested. After not seeing this guy for more than a year, his tendency to tell the tallest of tales had only increased. Lizzy, also from ‘Bama, was twirling around the grounds, too. And then there was the group of familiar faces lounging behind us on the Lakewood lawn. I wasn’t friends with anyone in this group. They were older. I recognized most of them as counselors from Ramah. Bearers of the Phish torch, these guys had Phish shows written into their camp contracts—or so one of them told me in Jerusalem while I crashed on his couch during a month of homelessness six years later.

Part of the secret of Phish fandom being somewhat synonymous with American Jewry lies with that group of twentysomethings on a grassy hillside. Phish began in the American Northeast, and though they’ve played for audiences from sea to shining sea and as far away as the island of Japan, they will always remain a Northeastern band. There are a lot of Yids in the Northeast, and so too there are a lot of Jewish summer camps. Camp Ramah Darom was founded in 1997. Until that year, Conservative Jewish families in the Southeast shipped their kids off to Ramah camps in Massachusetts, the Poconos or elsewhere. It was not uncommon for a counselor at one of these camps to be a Phishhead. In fact, it was probable. And the people who inevitably ran Ramah Darom came from this background. There’s nothing special about my experience at this camp in this time. Analogous experiences have been repeated for decades. And the Northeast connection has been noted before. The torch is still passed on—L’dor v’dor—from generation to generation. But in America, where the majority of Jews lean toward the secular side of religious involvement, new Jewish traditions are passed on through new Jewish communities—like this one centered on Phish.

As set break inches to a close, I decide to join Doogans and sit in a different section of the venue for the second set. We pick the perfect pre-set moment, and I manage to make it through security without the proper ticket. Doogans leads me to his seat in the 118 section, which is Page-side but, given the size of this audience, not quite rage-side. Soon as we settle in, the lights go down and Phish returns to the stage for Part B of Night 1. The first set had clearly been a warm up. Would the second set continue in this vein, or were the boys ready to really throw down?

“Yes!” comes the answer, as the opening riff of “Mike’s Song” rings out from the speakers. I immediately turn to Doogans. “You’re definitely gonna get your ‘Weekapaug’ now,” I tell him. “How do you know?” he asks. “Trust me,” I say.

“Mike’s Song” is, according to the Phish Companion, a “groove of transcendentally elephantine proportions” that is about as old as the band itself. In fact, it was Mike Gordon’s first contribution to the repertoire. Though it has morphed over the years, “Mike’s Song” can still be relied upon for a couple of things: the snarling-est guitar work from Trey and an inevitable pairing with Doogan’s favorite, “Weekapaug Groove.” These two songs and a variable musical interlude collectively compose “Mike’s Groove,” a fan favorite that has become pretty formulaic in these latest years of Phish. This version of “Mike’s” lacks exploration but is still sharp and gnarly. Lasting fewer than 10 minutes—short compared to many “Mike’s” of lore—the song comes to a familiar ending before the band quickly transitions to the new-school jam vehicle “Light.”

Of all the songs on Phish’s 2009 release Joy, “Light” has been explored the most in this year. While fans have waited for “Stealing Time for the Faulty Plan” to finally bust open and for Trey to abandon his long-winded “Time Turns Elastic,” “Light” has become the Joyful anthem of Phish 3.0:

“It a takes a few moments of whirling around / Before your feet finally leave the ground / And fending off fears and hearing the call / And finally waiting for nothing at all / And the light is growing brighter now / And the light is growing brighter now.”

It’s a song about forgetting the past and the future and living in the moment, living in the light—a great philosophy for the new health-oriented Phish. Page plays some phaser synth effects that lift the jam off into space. Then, Trey subtly takes control with some dissonant leads, and 10 minutes into “Light,” the jamming has an otherworldly feel. The band members are clearly listening with open ears, as the jam is both tight and loose at the same time. Koruda is also plugged in. His lights at this point are multi-layered and, as always, synced to the sound. Mike weaves some well-placed and groovy lines into Trey’s rhythmic flashes but, tending toward compactness in perfect 2009 style, “Light” slows down a couple minutes later and lands in “I Am Hydrogen,” the traditional “Mike’s Groove” interlude that was written by Phish lyricist Tom Marshall and friend Marc Daubert in the early ‘80s. “Hydrogen” is short, sweet and just a wind up to Doogan’s delight. Led by Mike’s popping bass, the band kicks into “Weekapaug Groove” with lots of danceable energy. But this segment of the set runs just over six minutes—not long by historical standards. Maybe this compact “Mike’s Groove” should me wondering when we’ll really get to let loose and share in the groove, but can I really complain? I’ve just heard my first ever Mike’s Anything. Write it down. Cross it off the list. I’ll groove regardless of length.

Up next is “Alaska,” a fun rock song that’s reminiscent of “Tennessee Jed,” quintessential Grateful Dead Americana, but isn’t something to write home about. Trey’s solo is on point and the band builds the song to a head captivatingly. Still, like parts of the first set, I’m left thanking Kuroda’s lights that this song is out of the way.

And then the group digs into another Joy track, “Backwards Down the Number Line.” Like the rest of that album, “BDTNL” (as I wrote it in the Moleskine) is an anthem of renewed life, happiness and friendship. “All my friends come / Backwards down the number line.” The jam is bright and tight, but it’s also pure Type I. “The only rule is it begins / Happy happy oh my friend.” I wonder about my friends. I wonder why they are spending so much time and money to travel to see these shows. Traveling to see this band again. I wonder why I care, why we care, if this jam unfolds uniquely or formulaically.

Another part of the secret of Jewish-Phish synonymousness is love of, or even genetic propensity toward, analysis. Mike and Trey have both described how a no-analyzing rule was instituted in the latter half of the ‘90s to combat micromanagement. Mike has said that this over-analysis is a feature that speaks to Jews. He’s a product of the same middle- to upper-middle-class lifestyle that my friends and I grew up in. He went to Solomon Schechter Day School in Massachusetts. I went to Solomon Schechter in Jacksonville. So what?

Well, American popular culture is just a large bucket of white paint—public schools here value you standardization and percentiles, MTV is both a rite of passage and a vapid sham and fast food is our nutrition-less national pride. The American Dream is getting on a fast track to prosperity. It’s never looking back at what flies off of you and lands in the roadside ditches. Thoughtful religious practice doesn’t fit very well into this box. But Jews remain Jews. And though we’ve succeeded and assimilated more in America than ever before in our history, there are certain deep-seeded drives from which we can’t speed away. Community and connection are some of those things. Nuanced debate is another. Phish provides all of this. So when a jam is just a jam and not something more, I want to know why. I want to shake Trey and Mike and Page and Fish until they open their eyes and let go. I want to dance a new dance, not step backward.

“BDTNL” ends and two seconds of organ signal the beginning of a tune that is as old as “Mike’s Song” and brings the widest smile to my face. “Makisupa Policeman” is an original Phish reggae tune from the early ‘80s that was feature on Live Phish 01. It’s based around two chords and a few lyrics that are changed up at most shows. “Hey Makisupa Policeman, policeman came to my house,” the group sings several times. Then, “Woke up this morning,” Trey sings as always, but with the next line, Makisupa’s silly, ever-changing narrative continues anew: “did just what I like, spent a whole two minutes listening to nobody but Mike.” The spot light drops onto Cactus and he begins a low-end bass line. As he builds the line, Trey chimes in with a chant: “Mike! Mike! Mike!” The audience takes their cue and the whole arena eggs Mike on. And then the rest of the group lays into their parts. Mike turns on the Lovetone effect and his bass takes on a thick, warbling sound. “Policeman! Policeman! Policeman!” The story ends. Trey begins looping little lines. Page gets into the synth again. Mike is thick as ever and his lines are still front and center. The group is progressing toward something, I hope. Trey reaches out toward space. Mike builds and builds. And then back to the usual reggae rhythm. “Hey Makisupa Policeman,” everyone sings. “Policeman came to Mike’s house.” And without hesitation the group begins to play vocally play on this theme over a syncopated soundscape that soon segues into a beloved Phish classic.

“Harry Hood” begins with a reggae rhythm that is complimentary to “Makisupa” but soon—after the obligatory “Harry! (Hood!) Harry! (Hood!) Where do you go when the lights go out?” section—becomes all its own. Soon the band enters the composed section of “Hood” and though the only lyrics are an infrequent “Thank you, Mr. Miner,” I can sing along to the entire thing. Six minutes in, Phish has already reached the jam segment. The improvisation starts from a quiet, contemplative place. Mike is leading as much as Trey here. Fishman is holding it down on the high hat while Page drops tiny sonic pebbles that slowly ripple out through Kuroda’s blue light pool. The band doesn’t get louder, but they do begin to coalesce. Trey and Page trickle together while Mike returns to the bottom of his bass. Everything starts from the center. Trey returns to a familiar line, a it’s clear that this is where things will start to build. But there’s no rush. Each band member takes his time. It’s all pretties and possibilities and potentials and before I realize it, the lights have signaled to the Mothership once again and we’ve all been beamed out into the cosmos.

Collectively, we land on the surface of “Contact,” another classic Phish tune that was penned by Mike and whose lyrics are equally laughable and clever. The song begins with a solo run up the bass, a line that is then echoed by Trey and finally filled in by Fish and Page. “The tires are the things on your car that make contact with the road,” Mike sings to us several times. “The car is thing on the road that takes you back to your abode,” our lesson continues. “The tires are the things on your car that make contact with the road,” Mike sings. And he concludes: “Bummed is what your are when you go out to your car and it’s been towed.” And the band breaks it down into some funky, bass-led grooving. Page splashes in with laser beam lines, and then Drop!, the spotlight’s back on Mike, who serenades us (and his car) with more solo bass and singing:

“I woke up one morning and realized I love you. / It’s not your headlights in front, your tailpipe or the skylight above you. / It’s the way you cling to the road when the wind tries to shove you. / I’d never go driving away and come back home without you.”

Just like the recorded version of “Contact” on Junta, Mike treats everybody to some short and sweet bass flirtation. This AAA-worthy love song comes to an end as the entire AAA audience follows the band’s lead, creating an endless sea of arms waving back and forth, back and forth as the refrain is sung one final time.

The opening riff of “Character Zero” comes right out of the end of “Contact” and it signals the final song of this set. “Zero” has been a go-to show closer since it was debuted in 1996, and though it has been jammed out in the past, I don’t expect that to happen here. Sure enough, this “Zero” is a straightforward shred-fest for Trey.

The band leaves the stage, returns a minute later and quickly drops into “First Tube,” an explosive, Farmhouse-era jam vehicle that took the roof off of Madison Square Garden when it ended the first set of the last night of a three-night run there a few weeks ago. Maybe the energy is a bit off in the American Airlines Arena tonight. The crowd doesn’t erupt for it this time. But I love this tune. It’s the first Phish song I ever learned to play on guitar. I can play that eerie riff over and over and over in my sleep. And the jam section is, to me, a concentrated stream of pure bliss. Though I try, my limbs can’t twist, jerk or flail fast enough.

The lights go up. My voice is already nearly gone from all the screaming. Walking up the steps, into the halls and out of the arena surrounded by Phans, all I am is a big, breathless smile. In the Lot across the street—all smiles. Driving around downtown Miami looking for something to do, I’m smiling. The $20 cover for an aftershow—not so smiley. Harper, Doogans and I decided to go grab something to eat, while Sarah and Cahlin and others bite the bullet and pay the bills to get in. We find a McDonald’s. I don’t want to eat there. I don’t eat non-kosher meat, and a Filet-o-Fish is not a Philet-o-Phish, no matter how you wrap it. Not in the mood. Doogans and I walk across the street to grab some pizza and walk back to eat it under the golden arches with Harper. About this time, Harper gets a text message from his sister. Turns out the MVP of tonight’s show, Mike Gordon, is at the club we just left. So what? I’ve got pizza. I’ve got two sets of Phish behind me. I’ve got three more days to chill with Mike and his friends ahead. I’m all smiles.

The longest, most revolutionary month of my life was over. The world looked and sounded different. The mainstream didn’t rumble like it used to. It was time to approach the real rapids head on.

My co-conspirator in this pop-culture crime adventure: Ben Whitman, a pre-school-era friend among friends. Our mission: locate and procure illicit sonic material from the heart of the machine. Possible consequences: extreme confusion, uncontrollable guffaws, hemp buildup, beard.

OK. Maybe the situation wasn’t so dramatic or daring, but it certainly felt that way. Ben and I were 13 at the time. I don’t know about him, but my musical taste prior to that month of adolescent eye opening was downright sour. My CD collection didn’t amount to much: a few Blink 182 albums (two studio, one live), Green Day’s Nimrod, some New Found Glory probably, Will Smith’s Willennium, the “clean” version of The Slim Shady LP and that really was about it. All of these discs were scratched and getting skippy. I knew every word to every song—minus, of course, the bleeped-out profanities from Eminem but plus the narrated interludes from Blink 182’s live album, The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show (The Enema Strikes Back!). Dark middle-school times, to be sure. But, for far too long, as far as I knew, this was the cream of the crop.

Ben had been going to camp for a few years already before I decided to join the summer circus. I brought a guitar with me. I knew how to play G and C and D and had busted my fingers up learning a Green Day song whose name should not be mentioned. I thought I could learn a few things at camp.

When I got there, a bunch of other kids had guitars and basses around their necks. And our counselors could play pretty well, too. I remember sitting around in the bunk one day listening to this kid Carl from Birmingham pick on a Fender Strat and thinking, “Holy shit! Somebody introduce this guy to someone. Anyone. He’s the best guitar player I’ve ever heard!” I didn’t pick up my guitar much that summer, and I didn’t go to many of my scheduled Judaica or Hebrew classes that summer either. But I did sit around the bunk listening a lot. I remember a few other guys from Austin and Montgomery and Orlando having an argument about something:

“No, no, no, man,” the kid from Montgomery, Barry, interjects. “The Widespread fans are really happy that Phish is gone. It’s a good thing.”

One of the Austinites named Jacob isn’t too pleased with this analysis. “Fuck that. Phish is better. Fuck Widespread.”

To 13-year-old me, that seemed to be a bulletproof argument. But I had no idea what they were talking about. I didn’t grasp this—couldn’t—at the time, but I’d just experienced my first over-analytical, conjecture-based discussion of the music of Phish.

Later, I looked through Barry’s overflowing CD folder. He pointed out the Phish and the Panic and much more. There was a two-disc set that caught my eye. One of the discs was white and there was a drawing of a mouse with a fishing pole. The cover of another disc was bulging with the blurry, smiling face of someone. The kid from Orlando—everyone calls him Sherman—sees that I’ve taken an interest in that particular CD and says, “That’s my cousin.”

“Wait. What?” I ask. “Isn’t this a Phish CD? Your cousin is on the cover of a Phish CD?”

“Yea. My cousin plays bass in Phish,” Sherman responded.

This was all new to me. From what I could tell, there were two bands—Phish and Widespread Panic—that had big fan bases, and, though the music was similar, the fans didn’t get along. Oh, and one of my new friends was related to this fat face on the cover of an album called Billy Breathes. But how did all of these kids know about this music? I’d never even heard of these groups before. Why didn’t the one band still play? Would the conflict between the fans be resolved? Why was there a conflict at all? Was Sherman telling the truth? I knew there was more to the story.

Later that day or that week, Ben and I headed to the tower for some quality climbing time. Everybody at camp had a sort of elective activity that he or she would do once or more times a week. Ben and I chose climbing, and every time we began to approach the tower some happy, whistley, makes-you-wanna-jump-in-a-creek music would float over to us. It would get louder and louder as we got closer and closer, and pretty soon we’d be standing around waiting for this beard-and-bandana big dude to notice our presence and help us climb up onto the tower at whose base he was napping. The music, it turned out, was that of the Grateful Dead. Something about the name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t tell what or why. We went climbing a couple times every week, and every time this same music would lilt toward and dance around us.

And then the longest month of my life ended. Everyone went home. Back in Jacksonville, Ben and I were about to make a leap into an abyss. We arrived at the mall, located Sam Goody, the biggest music store there, and went straight to the Gs.

The Grateful Dead had a million colorful covers to choose from. Some were double-, triple- or even quadruple-disc sets of lives music. But one stood out. It was the cheapest and safest title: Skeletons From the Closet, a best-of collection that I figured would be a good introduction. I bought the disc and just burned a copy for Ben. It was too risky an investment for him, I guess. But we ended playing those songs over and over and over again that summer. Green Day and Blink began to fall by the wayside. These Grateful Dead were singing from a different America than the one Ben and I inhabited, but the sounds were still somehow familiar and I wanted to know why. The longest track on there was a six-minute live cut called “Turn On Your Lovelight.” I found out that it had been cut down to fit on the disc. That didn’t seem possible. The edited version was six minutes long? Woah. That was twice as long as the longest Blink 182 fart joke. I wanted more from these crazy cowboys. I wanted to hear the whole uncut thing.

But first Ben and I needed to re-visit Sam Goody. We’d fallen deeper into the abyss, this time straight down to the Ps. The selection of Phish here wasn’t as vast as the Grateful Dead’s but it was just as unfamiliar. There were a bunch of CDs on display above the regular racks. New releases, I guessed. One was unlike the rest. The case was shiny silver card paper with a black-and-white drawing on the cover of a cityscape that looked like it was being invaded. A giant hand had plucked a tree off the street with some tweezers and was holding it upside-down. Another hand was holding a fishing pole. A comet and airplane were flying through the sky in opposite directions above the buildings. “Live Phish 01” was printed above the comet. There was a date—12.14.95—and the venue and city were named next to that. I picked up the CD. It felt heavy. I turned it over. There were two discs hidden inside this silver sleeve. The song names were intriguing—“Suzy Greenberg,” “Split Open and Melt,” “Makisupa Policeman,” “Slave to the Traffic Light.” On the song list for the second disc, some songs repeated and had a mysterious carrot symbol—“>”—after the name. The weird song names and symbols, the unusual silver packaging, it might as well have been a piece of crash-landed space junk. After the Skeletons From the Closet experience, logic dictated that it was a wise decision to skip the studio stuff and go straight for the live release. And what better place to start than Live Phish 01?

It’s hard to say what that first listen was like. Mainly, it left me feeling confused and a little bit scared. I didn’t try to listen to the concert again for a while. Our logic had failed. We weren’t ready for these alien songscapes. One best-of Grateful Dead album wasn’t enough to prepare us for two and a half hours of unscripted Phish. We had no point of reference.

Needless to say, it was back to the listening boards for some training. Ben and I found Farmhouse, Phish’s most accessible album, and then we began listening to A Picture of Nectar. This was the hey-day of Kazaa. It was pretty easy to find and download the group’s most popular recordings. Someone—a friend with older, hipper sisters probably—recommended a song called “Bouncing Around the Room.” The song was infectious. And meanwhile, we started getting acquainted with the Dead’s vault of live stuff. For whatever reason, their brand of psychedelic Americana was a bit easier to digest than Phish’s. But I was trying to acquire the taste. I remember staying up late one night to watch a show on PBS. Our local affiliate was playing a Phish concert from Austin City Limits. With the volume way down low so that my parents and sister wouldn’t wake up, a part of me felt like I was finally a part of a secret club whose rites I was slowly beginning to understand. Honestly though, another part of me was disappointed when they didn’t play “Bouncin’” on that ACL broadcast. “Get to the good stuff,” I remember thinking.

The “good stuff” had taken on a completely different meaning for the self who walked through the doors of the American Airlines Arena nine years later on December 28, but my original partner in pop-culture crime is still right here with me. After making it through security with Harper and Doogans, after going up the escalator, after realizing IT is actually, finally about to go down, after leaning over the railing and screaming a joyous scream to the revelers all around, after parting ways with Harper and Doogans and finding my 300-level seat, after talking giddily with an older phan next to me, after accepting that the show won’t be starting for another 15 minutes, I know I have to go find Ben.

A few text messages and stairwells later and I am approaching a row of dudes in polos and khakis. Ben, two of his fraternity brothers and an older gentleman are right on the aisle in the middle of section 107. Handshakes and hugs all around. The older guy is father to one of Ben’s friends. These guys, Brad and Beer as they’re known, are all relatively clean-cut. Standing there, the five of us literally embody a large part of the spectrum of Phish concertgoer stereotypes. I’ve got the longhair and beard covered. Ben’s got the southern-fried phrat contingent on lock. His friend’s father is the Deadhead vicariously reliving his glory days through his college-aged son. And the rest of them are the gawking onlookers along for the ride. As divergent as our paths have been since those first glimpses of musical enlightenment, Ben and I still share a love of this band and a will to spread the Good Word to the uninitiated. Brad and Beer are Ben’s night-1 n00bs, but they weren’t supposed to be. Had things been different, Ben’s parents and brother would be sitting right there instead. He drove into Miami earlier that day after getting off of a plane in Ft. Lauderdale, which had left from Philadelphia early that morning. Though they had requested and received a handful of tickets to this show through Phish’s lottery, Ben’s family stayed behind in Philly. This show is the first movement from darkness into light for Ben, I think. His grandmother had just passed away and he was grieving by sharing in the groove. Phish’s music is a celebration of life, its darkest parts included.

The venue isn’t exactly filling up, but I have the feeling show time is approaching. I want to be set and ready when the lights went down, so I wish everyone a good show and hurry back to my seats. Sure enough, just as I get situated, the room turns black and the roar of thousands erupts. Game time. The boys walk onto the stage, which is bathed in blue light, and take their positions. Page McConnell is on the keys to the far left, Trey Anastasio is next to him on the guitar, followed by Mike Gordon on the bass and, finally, the band’s namesake, resident clown and drummer, Jon “Fish” Fishman, all the way to the right. Mike and Trey pick up their axes and confer with each other while Page and Jon take their seats.

What will they start with? Weeks of speculation in my head and among my friends come down to this roaring room on this day in downtown Miami. Phish would play what they would play. The only sure thing: Nine sets of music over a four night holiday run would result in not a single song being repeated and lots of expected but as-yet-mysterious trickery.

My notebook is ready and so is the band. The initial chords of “Sample In a Jar” ring from the stage, bringing Phish in Miami underway. “Sample,” like “Bouncing Around the Room,” is one of Phish’s most accessible, even mainstream, songs. Pick a random person off the street. Look through his or her iPod. If you find Phish under “Artists,” it’s likely that this will be one of the few songs, if not the only that he or she has by the group. It’s an obvious crowd-charger, a go-to show opener, but it’s definitely the least interesting song with which they could have started this run. “Better to get this shit out of the way,” I think to myself. And thankfully, it ends quickly.

Next up is “NICU,” a funky little number with the kind of silly, nonsensical lyrics that make many Phish-detractors cringe: “Appendages flailing, you’re running at me / Ferocious, tenaciously clawing at me / The devious gelatin holding me fast / Miraculous now you let me move past / Over the wall rushing rivers of sleaze / The tips of stalactites incising my knees / A slipper, a sand dollar day at the shore / Nice evening at home that I dread even more.” Though this song was never released on a studio album, lately it is played every 4 or 5 shows. It’s also featured on the second disc of Live Phish 01, so it holds a special place in my heart. I like to think that NYE 2009 was started with this song and not with “Sample.” Willful ignorance perhaps.  Though “NICU” was first played back in early 1992, its lyrics have contemporary pertinence. The verse after the first chorus goes like this: “Look back on those days when my life was a haze / The gelatin lay on a truncated sleigh / Copernicus drank from a vessel that stank / The free masons crank to the overflow tank.” As Trey gets through the first line, a triumphant cheer resounds around the venue and the guitar player’s face stretches into a quick smile.

Already, this year in Phish history, these initial tours of Phish 3.0, are proving to be the polar opposite of post-hiatus Phish 2.0. That time period, 2002-2004, referred to by some as the Oxy Years, was a time of long, often directionless jamming, of poorly played compositions, of flubbed lyrics and of a wild, drug-fueled backstage scene. That was then. This is the Phish of compact jamming, of perfectly executed composed sections and of a family-oriented and drug-free behind-the-scenes philosophy. So when Trey gets to that line about looking back on a time of haziness, the crowd congratulates him because many people here are in his shoes and many more just love to see Big Red happy and healthy. As for the free masons crank and the overflow tank, the mystery continues.

“NICU” comes to an end after just five minutes and, without missing a beat, the band drops into “My Soul,” a bluesy tune originally written by Clifton Chenier that hasn’t been played since 2000, in the days of Phish 1.0. It’s a simple song with repetitive lyrics, but after having been gone for so long, “My Soul” gets the crowd moving. During the crescendo, the lighting starts to sync up with the energy of the music, and I’m reminded of the man behind that bit of white magic, Chris Kuroda. Some rightly consider him a fifth member of the band. His light show is unlike anything. It mirrors the music being played on stage, sometimes to the point that it’s unclear who is leading the improvisation, the musicians or the lighting guy. “My Soul” doesn’t reach any improvisational territory, but, as the song comes to a head, Kuroda’s lights peak right there with band anyway.

A minute passes and then another elusive tune of latter-day Phish peaks out from the catalogue. The softly introduced “Roggae” hasn’t been played yet in this modern era, and I am happy to hear it, had actually listed it off to Ben as one of the seemingly unlikely songs that I wanted to hear busted out during the run.

“The circus is the place for me with bears and clowns and noise / I love the shiny music that descends from overhead / Gordon knew the moment when the stars all turned around / but from that vantage point I frowned.”

The song is lyrically self-reflective—each band member sings one of the lines underneath Kuroda’s spotlights—and even refers directly (maybe) to the moment in Mike Gordon’s college career when he decided he had to play music for the rest of his life. Mike recounted that experience in The Phish Book, an out-of-print history of Phish and collection of band interviews conducted, compiled and written by music journalist Richard Gehr:

“I had my peak musical experience of all time during a gig at Goddard College in November 1985. At the time I was an engineering student pondering a transfer to film. I’d just completed a series of tests, and the pressure was temporarily off me. The entire week was a peak experience of sorts. I’d played jazz bass solos for the first time in my life during an open-mike gig with [Jazz Mandolin Project leader] Jamie Masefield, the night before our Goddard cafeteria dance. The snow had just fallen for the first time that fall the night we played, but it was still fairly warm outside. Located out in the middle of the woods, Goddard was something of an anti-institution at the time. Only about fifty people were on campus the night we played, and of the ten people who came to the dance, eight left after the first set. This was an official college event, so not coming definitely made some sort of statement.”

Mike goes on to say that the five band members—original member and lead guitar man, Jeff Holdsworth, was still in the band at the time—set up in a circle in the school cafeteria. This was a time of childlike learning and growing for the band. Mike recounts how he felt the group could then only play two kinds of gigs, but could never combine the styles. There were loose gigs when the jamming was ON and there were tight gigs when the boys nailed complicated arrangements. The light show consisted of three floodlights-red, green and yellow. Mike says that before he picked up his bass, while he was helping set up, he knew that this gig “would be infinitely tight and loose at the same time.” Mike continues:

“The sun was setting, and it looked perfectly white and tranquil outside.

We went out into the hallway and passed a joint around with some strange people after the first set. I got really, really high, and as the rest of the band returned to the cafeteria, I realized I couldn’t stand up. When I finally did, I just sort of glided like a hovercraft back downstairs. Jeff was playing volume swells on his guitar, which I thought was the most incredible sound I’d ever heard. We turned off all the lights, and I started jumping up and down with the beat, not caring how I looked for perhaps the first time in my entire life. As we jammed, I felt more spiritually in tune than ever before. I felt at one with the buildings, wall outlets, chandeliers, and these people I loved. As we kept jamming, my ecstatic state didn’t diminish no matter how I played or what style we played in. at one point I had a vision of Trey standing beside me in white tails with a pocket watch, as thought we were performing during the 1920s.”

It was like viewing a well-lit room after a lifetime of blindness, Mike said.

“I was more like myself that show than ever before, but I was also part of Phish, five people in a circle who seemed to hover above the forest and move slowly through the trees. I wandered into the woods after the second set and decided never to return. Yes, filmmaking was better than engineering. But film had nothing on the musical experience I’d just had, and I was afraid I’d never be able to recapture it. So why bother? When I did return, the rest of the band decided to play another set. I was terrified another set would soil my peak experience, but it turned out to be just as great! We played for hours to the two or three people listening to us in the darkness. I decided my goals in life were to live in the woods, travel around from city to city, and try to replicate the experience I’d just had as often as possible. The whole gig’s on tape, but I’ll probably never listen to it.”

While reflective lyrics have become commonplace in contemporary Phish, “Roggae’s” introspection is still the exception not the rule. In this first set of a nine-set run, the song brings the first bit of improvisation. The band doesn’t break any new ground during 10-minutes of playing, but Mike’s bass lines are tight. And the whole group, echoing the song’s lyrical dreamland, moves as through a collective lullaby. “So now I wander over grounds of light and heat and sound and mist / provoking dreams that don’t exist / a circus of light where dreams can take flight / in the peacefulness dreaming dreams brings.”

The Story of a Ghost track comes to an end and pretty soon Trey strums a chord signaling the title track from 2004’s Undermind, an album that was released one month after Phish announced they were breaking up. The song itself was never performed by Phish 2.0, and this is only the sixth time it has ever been played live. “Undermind” is a fun, dance-y tune, but like the rest of the set so far this version doesn’t break into any new territory.

When I first started listening to Phish, I stayed up late one night to watch a concert of theirs on PBS and wondered why they wouldn’t play any of their good tunes like “Bouncing Around the Room.” I wouldn’t stay up late just to hear this song anymore, but that doesn’t mean the song isn’t classic Phish. Still, “Bouncing” unfolds predictably and leaves me wanting to hear a song with some teeth. “Poor Heart” comes next, and, though it barely breaks the two-minute mark, it’s stomping good time. Mike belts this tale of love and theft like he does on every bluegrass tune that Phish plays, and by the end of it the rest of the arena is ready to romp.

As the opening notes of “Stash” ring out, I know we’re about to experience the first song of the run that shows the snarling teeth of improvisational Phish. “Stash’s” lyrics are about as weird and nonsensical as they come—“Smegma, dogmatagram, fishmarket stew / Police in a corner, gunnin’ for you / Appletoast, bedheated, furblanket rat / Laugh when they shoot you, say / ‘Please don’t do that.’”—but their strangeness perfectly mirrors the musical mayhem of the song’s jam. That segment, which starts softly and slowly, is Miami’s first glimpse of the four-head monster that this group can at any moment become. “Maybe so, maybe not.” It’s probably the first time that I have that feeling that is the reason why so many people invest so much money and time in this band. The band plays and plays and I dance and dance, and then I look down at myself and see that we’ve lifted off the earth. “Maybe so, maybe not.” The lights climb and contort with the music, I dance and rage with the music, the band plays and pulses with music, and then Blam!, the band and the lights crash all at once, bringing me back to my body again, back to my screaming self.

As I catch my breath, I see Page and Fish stand up. This can only mean a few things, and as the low vocal bass of “I Didn’t Know” begins, it’s clear we’re about to be treated to some a cappella action. Trey, Mike and Page work through the piece while Fish dismounts his drum kit. Could it be? Are we already getting a vacuum solo? Soon enough, Fish comes to the front of the stage and Trey answers my question:

“Ladies and gentlemen, be prepared for the fine…this is the last vacuum solo you will ever hear in the Aughts. Are you ready for that? The final vacuum solo of this decade. Incredible. Incredible. Here it comes. Brace yourself. Stand up. Everyone stand up. Stand up. Brace yourself. The final vacuum solo of this entire decade. Are you ready? Are you ready, Henrietta? Give it to us.”

And with that, Jon “Henrietta” Fishman, the man in the doughnut dress, puts his face to the hose that blows and treats us to the last vacuum solo of the decade. Trey jumps on the drums at some point to help Page and Mike back the vac. Fish trudges on. Trey gets off the kit and goes back to his mike while Fish quietly ends the solo. “Pardon me, Doug (pardon me, Doug) / Is this a picture of Otis Redding? / Yes! Yes! Taken right before he died / Well you can give me his hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide,” Page, Mike and Trey sing, finishing “I Didn’t Know” with a flourish.

“Beauty of a Broken Heart,” a Page tune from Phish’s Joy album, comes next with some nice guitar work from Trey, but it’s clear that the peak of the set has passed. When the band quickly drops into “Possum,” I have the impression that the song will close out the set. Almost reaching the nine-minute mark, the Mike-sung “Possum” is concise but doesn’t disappoint. With it comes the end of an energetic but tame first set. “Eight more to go,” I think as I leave my seat for set break. “And they can only get better.”