The Jew in the Phish

Goodbyes are said. Plans are concocted. Numbers are exchanged. I follow Harper out of the parking lot in the Buick, and he leads me out into greater suburbia. We get to his neighborhood. Or maybe they call it a community here. It’s gated, and even though I’m following a resident, I have to show the guard my ID before he’ll let me through.

It’s the first of many security checkpoints. I know what’s in store. Emptied pockets, pat downs, hidden stashes, ticket scanners, bracelets. My tickets will work, but what of my friends—all those people on that vague, ever-changing list?

Only a few friends purchased tickets in the weeks leading up to New Year’s Eve. Harper is one of them. He got his tickets straight from the band, through their lottery system. He requested four tickets for each of the four nights that Phish would be playing, and somehow got all 16 of them. So he didn’t exactly win the lottery. He was more like the recipient of an obligation to pay Phish close to $1000 in one fell swoop. I got my tickets through the lottery, five of them, every one I requested. I’d be sitting solo for the first three nights, and then, on New Year’s, another one of those summer camp friends, Nat, would be joining me. And Ben, an old friend from Jacksonville who listened with me to that very first Phish CD, snagged a few tickets in the lottery. His parents, after deciding they wanted to see what all the years of fuss were about, requested and received opening-night tickets for the whole family.

Of course, as we all clicked checkout, we were thinking that, should the need arise, which it shouldn’t, which it couldn’t, which it wouldn’t, offloading tickets to this special run of Phish shows wouldn’t be difficult.

A chunkier but not necessarily crunchier portion of my friends bought tickets from secondary markets—StubHub and the like. These were friends who weren’t so lucky with the lottery or who didn’t want to directly support Ticketmaster or who decided at the last minute to attend. As the weeks grew to days and the shows loomed closer and closer, the prices actually went down on the secondary sites. There were tons of tickets available in all sorts of configurations, for all types of seats. People paired up and hoped to meet up with everyone else inside the show.

The rest of my mental list, the stragglers, would be buying their tickets outside of the American Airlines Arena. These friends were banking on there being a vibrant parking lot scene. A few of these friends were probably only coming because I’d hyped the experience so much. A vibrant parking lot scene was part of the experience, I’d hyped. Some of these friends were passively fond of Phish. Some were only coming to be part of a circus. Regardless of motive, circle upon overlapping social circle wanted to sit and dance and revel together inside the arena, despite assigned seats and yellow-shirt-guarded sections and half-baked plans that could unravel at any turn in the trip.

Sitting on the porch at Harper’s that night, I think of calling some of these friends to find out where in the world they are. I assume Florida. I assume they’re still coming to one or two or all of the shows. I assume—rather than know—these things because it makes the whole thing a bit more exciting. I like not knowing. I like letting events unfold, even if they unfold into disaster.

The desire to not know is why I called Harper from the road to ask if he was around and if I could stay at his place the next night, rather than go the peace-of-mind route and book a bed in a hotel weeks in advance. The desire to not know is probably why I dropped all that money to get the tickets at all. It’s why I want to hear the same band in the same city for four consecutive nights. It’s why I listen to Phish.

This not knowing is also why, I think, without radio play or music videos or any other commercial exposure, Phish, a nerdy quartet hidden in the collegiate confines of Vermont obscurity, went from New England merrymakers with a theater-sized cult following to selling out Madison Square Garden a day before New Year’s Eve to playing the largest concert in the world on the night a new millennium began.

Phish is a story, unfolding, in real time, into sweet oblivion or dark demise. Or, if you’re lucky, something like Dark Demise → Sweet Oblivion. Or, if you’re a little less lucky, it unfolds into a funky dance party. It’s sometimes mind expanding, sometimes earth shattering and sometimes just a real good time.

There’s a scholarly book of ideas called Storytelling and Spirituality in Judaism that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Phish. It’s all about the Hasidic masters and about how they told stories. Somewhere in there it says, “At the same time that storytelling promoted Hasidism, Hasidism promoted story telling.”

In Phish and Phandom there’s a parallel to the Rebbe and his Hasids. At some shows, Trey tells stories of Gamehendge, a mythical land that he created for a senior project at Goddard College back in the 80s. The project was a suite of songs that were recorded with narration and collectively called The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday. Many of the songs from that project became Phish classics.

The songs tell a story about a man and a mountain and a people who are lost and book they are looking for, and when Phish busts out one of these rarities in concert or when Trey decides to tell another chapter of the evolving saga, dedicated Phishheads listen with ears on fire. Then, they relate the stories to the uninitiated or, in the least, point the uninitiated to a Web site where they can download show with a particularly poignant storytelling section. Often, phans will travel from show to show waiting and wanting to hear a “Tela” or a “Lizards,” both beautiful tunes from The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday. Phish’s fan base grew so much in the early 90s, I think, because of the presence of this ongoing Gamehendge story.

And at the same time that storytelling promoted Phish, Phish promoted storytelling.

There’s the story of Phish’s early, obscure days. There’s the story of the band’s snarling psychedelic heights in the mid-90s. There’s the story of the cow funk, and of the ambient space. There are the stories of hiatus, the stories of Oxy exploration and Oxy flub. There’s even a sad story about some mud and tears in Vermont, about the “end.”

Each one of the nearly 1500 shows over the last three decades is tale, each set is a parable, and each song is a story, too. And strewn among those stories are the overt tales told during holiday pranks or between rare sonic treats pulled from the depths of the band’s arsenal.

There are the stories told to old friends during set breaks and the stories imagined in the afterglow: “Just listeners creating narrative constellations and creation myths outta the splattered blobs of pop stardust,” Jesse Jarnow wrote on New Year’s Eve 2004. That was exactly one year after Phish played a four-night run of shows in Miami. That was half of one year after they cried it quits at Coventry.

Well, here I am, I think. Here we are. And here Phish is about to tell us another story in the setting Florida sun. The only rule is it begins, after all.

When I finally do make it out of the darkness onto a street with lights and with signs for schools and Starbucks, it’s the first time in my life that South Florida’s sterile suburban predictability is a relief.

Jog. Military Trail. The names of the roads set off some murky memories. This here is Ye Old Wellington, a sort of upper-middle class Floridian village, a high-end 21^st century shtetl. Keep driving south and I’ll hit other villages: West Palms, Boca Ratons and Plantations.

The parking lot of the strip mall where I meet up with Harper feels familiar, too. In high school, there was this epic winter break road trip that my parents should have never let me go on. A dozen or so Jewish-summer-camp friends from all over Florida and the American South made appearances.  We spent a lot of time in parking lots. And this parking lot in Wellington, I just know I know it.

Harper walks me to a table outside of a Jo Jo’s Bar ‘n’ Grill or the Wellington Ale House or something along those beer-buckety lines. We sit with a couple guys there. I recognize one of them from Gainesville. The other one has a Spanish accent. Everyone talks a lot about nothing until the conversation turns to a topic that for years I have dreamed about and that now, I realize, might no longer be a dream: Miami. Four-Night Run. New Year’s Eve. Phish.

The conversation makes this inevitable turn, and I get an inevitable phone call. It’s Zach Hindin. Or just Hindin. Or the Cat formerly known as Fat. He’s the Wellington connection. I recognized the parking lot because Hindin’s house—and consequently that parking lot—was our home base during that mad winter break road rally. And now he’s calling because I’m in Wellington and he’s one of those friends who, with lots of passive patience and very little planning, I will see throughout my life. I tell him about Jo Jo’s and within minutes he’s there. He’s not Fat Cat anymore. He’s slim and relatively clean-cut, wearing some simple linen for a shirt. After some time at George Washington University, he’s more like Mr. Cat.  Or Zen Master Cat.

A few years before, you’d be able to pick this guy out of crowd—assuming it wasn’t the crowd at an Allman Brothers Band concert. Back then, Hindin was large, tye-dyed, unkempt and brutally, bitingly honest. But the thoughtful, simple, contemplative side of him won out at some point. Or maybe he grew up. In any case, when he shows up at the restaurant he seems so kind and collected that I stop and think about my own appearance and attitude. I wonder if I should care more about my hair (it’s getting long) or my telltale beard. His speech makes me want to slow down and plan my own. I tell him that I drove in for the upcoming Phish shows and ask him if he’s going. He says he can’t make it this time because he’s heading to the Virgin Islands the following day to play guitar in a reggae band for a handful of gigs.

I have this vague list in my head of friends from far and wide who are supposedly meeting me in Miami, and Hindin could easily have been on that list, could easily have answered yes. A few weeks before, I got a message from him on Facebook. He had been at a Phish show in Charlottesville, Va., the last show of the 2009 fall tour, and wanted to know if I was there. He thought he saw me on stage. He thought I was the Naked Guy.

During the second set of that show, just as the band began playing “Yamar,” a classic Phish cover of the island tune by The Mustangs, a fan ran on stage. He was naked. On YouTube, you can watch a video of this happening. He gets up there and runs straight for Trey Anastasio, Phish’s guitar player and primary songwriter, and gives the man a hug. Any other guitar player in any other band would have stopped playing, backed away nervously and motioned for security to come on stage to throw the perp out. But Trey just smiles and pats the guy on the back. Now, Naked Guy pauses for the tiniest of moments. It’s like he never planned out what to do after getting up there and hugging his hero and now he’s standing in front of thousands of people without clothes and he’s got to do something. Seeing that security is coming for him, Naked Guy releases the embrace and begins doing figure 8s around the band members and their equipment. Mike Gordon just keeps plucking away at his bass and Jon Fishman never stops the beat. Naked Guy ducks and dodges to the soundtrack of a disjointed “Yamar” and for a minute there it seems he’s gonna get away with it, but then several large men lunge on him at the same instant and Naked Guy’s time is up. As he’s being dragged away, Trey says, “Let’s hear if for the Naked Guy! That took a lot of balls,” and then the band instantly drops back into “Yamar.” Later on in the evening, during the final song of the second set, “Run Like an Antelope,” Anastasio adlibs some new lyrics: “You’ve got to run like a Naked Guy, out of control!”

The Internet the next day is, as they say, abuzz. A video of Naked Guy is on every Phish blog out there, and most commentators are echoing Trey’s praise. I get a message on Facebook that day: “Fleet, be honest. Were you the naked guy at Charlottesville last night? I could’ve sworn that was you.” It’s Hindin. I’m not sure how to answer him. I wasn’t the Naked Guy and I wasn’t physically at that show. But I wasn’t not there, either.

The Internet blurs the line between actual experiences and vicarious ones. Fewer than 20,000 people in the whole world were physically at that show in Charlottesville, yet tens of thousands more experienced the show in a dozen different ways, often in real time. I was one of them. Throughout the 2009 Fall Tour, I would spend my nights refreshing Phish’s site to keep codified track of the unfolding set, and I would keep my eyes on Twitter for the commentary. Mornings were for downloading the show and reading reviews of it. I would spend my afternoons listening to the show. I was on tour, only virtually.  It became a ritual, a routine. The Daily Phish.

Sean Gibbon followed Phish around in the late 90s and wrote a book about the experience. The account, Run Like an Antelope: On the Road with Phish, briefly addresses the idea of Phish as ritual:

“We don’t really have any ritualized celebrations in America. The holidays, yeah, but the holidays mean football games on Thanksgiving and the malls at Christmas. We don’t have any rituals. We don’t celebrate the coming of spring. We don’t celebrate the harvest moon. When was the last time you celebrated anything? I mean, when was the last time you let your hair down and howled at the moon on a clear autumn night. Humans have been doing this sort of thing for centuries, as a way to celebrate life, the joy of it…Phish shows are becoming an American ritual. People turn out year after year to hear the same band play the same songs at the same time of year. And it is precisely this continuity, the ritual of it, that in a way brings a magic to the show, makes the fan feel like he is part of the event. The shows provide a timeline, a kind of calendar to divide up the year.”

When Gibbon wrote this, Phish hadn’t yet played The Show at Big Cypress, I hadn’t even heard of Phish and the Internet hadn’t become quite the revolutionary social-networking tool that it is today. When Hindin wrote on my Facebook wall, asking if I was the Naked Guy, I didn’t know how to respond because I truly felt the Naked Guy was the epitome of a Phish fan, that I was him, that he was me and that we were all one big virtual, communal Naked Guy together. From my house in Gainesville, Fla., I sincerely felt that I was part of the tour-closing event in Charlottesville. And in a few weeks, I knew, the lights would go down and my roar would be buried in a thousand other roars streamed the world over.

I wrote Hindin back: “That, somehow, was not me. But I will be the naked guy at NYE in Miami. Rest assured, dear friend.”

It is night on Sugarland Highway in the middle of Florida. I can’t see it, but Lake Okeechobee is lapping at my left. There are no streetlights, and it is black all around my Buick Century. A few dark minutes pass and I see a pair of pinpoint lights ahead and then other pairs appear and I start to feel that maybe I have friends out here, but then a few more minutes are gone and those sparkling eyes have become bursting beams that blind past and bring everything back to that heavy black.

I smoke a cigarette even though I don’t smoke cigarettes. I check my iPod even though I know the song won’t be finished for another 15 minutes and I hate stopping songs before they finish. I look and wait and look and worry about it, but I certainly don’t stop at the next gas station even though I need gas. I just keep driving, and even though everything gets black again, somehow somewhere I know that down the road the air will be clear, the sky will be light and I won’t be alone.

Two hours earlier, I had dropped Sager off with his parents at a gas station near the Tampa International Airport. Fresh off a plane from Austin, they were now heading down to Sarasota for their annual Florida family gathering. This is the first time I’ve met Sager’s parents, and, though it only lasts minutes, it’s a meeting that adds a couple more pieces to the puzzle of who he is.

Almost a year earlier, in our basement apartment in Nachlaot, an old and mystical neighborhood in Jerusalem, Sager told me he gets his sense of humor from his mother, a woman whose presence seemed to tower over me with booming warmth at the gas station where she immediately hugged me tight and told me to pass the love along to Carl, one of the guys I would be meeting down the road.

From his father, a professor at the University of Texas and Great Clips franchise owner, Sager said he gets an ability to talk and talk and talk and talk. But I don’t experience this. When I meet him, the old prof is quietly chomping at a Snickers Ice Cream Bar that he bought inside. He shakes my hand, gets into the passenger side of his rental car and that’s that.

Back on Sugarland Highway, every few minutes I pass a bright yellow diamond with a big black tractor on it. It’s sort of jarring. I know this sign, but I don’t expect to see it on this road because everything I know about South Florida tells me that the sign should’ve rusted from irrelevance and been taken down long ago.

My Buick is cutting through the blackness and a sense of doubt is cutting through me again. It started soon after I dropped Sager off. Getting to Tampa had been easy enough. The day before we’d taken back roads to get from my parent’s home in Jacksonville to my house in Gainesville. It’s a trip I’ve made a thousand times, coming home for holidays, doctor’s appointments and the dire laundry run. And Gainesville to Tampa is more or less a straight shot along I-75. No problems there.

But now, Sager is gone and I stare at a map, searching for the best route. Staying on the highway will take me out of the way, almost all the way to Orlando just so that I can cut back down south. The back roads are more direct, so, even though it’s nearing night and I’ve never been on them before, I opt to stay off the highway and soon enough I’m passing these tractor signs and wondering in the dark if maybe I’ve headed north by mistake.

Florida is folded on the steering wheel so that I can only see her mid-section. Pass a town on the road. Check Florida for the facts. It always seems to match, but the doubt still manages to creep in to my consciousness. Pass another tractor. It’s dark again. I’m doubtful again. I barely know where I’m going. This is South Florida, right? I’d called Harper late the night before from Gainesville. Sure, I could stay with him, he had said. We’d caravan down together. But South Florida doesn’t have tractors and it doesn’t have an endless blanket of sparkling stars for a sky. Does it? Check the map again. It all lines up. I call Harper to confirm. “Tractors? Lake Okeechobee? Where the hell are you, man?” I tell him the name of the next town. “Yea, that’s somewhere I sort of recognize that but why oh why the hell are you there?” he laughs and asks. His laugh emboldens my doubt and it just seems to get darker all around me.

Put out that cigarette. Pull in for gas. Wait to shut the car off until the song finishes. Shut the car off. Get coffee. Get doubtful. Get darker. Get back on the road. Forget tractors. Remember another sign from dozens of miles back. “Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation –>” It’s like a beacon in my brain. South Florida must be somewhere near me, Miami somewhere beyond that. And the light must be growing somewhere out there, too.

Ten years before the sign for Big Cypress, before the Jerusalem apartment, before I knew Sager existed, before I could really worry about darkness and tractors and expectations, I was 12 and the world was freaking out about mass technological failure. The TV and other trusted sources of information were claiming that some numbers would soon roll over and thereby destroy everything we’d ever worked toward, and that to me sounded like nothing to hyperventilate over, but what did I know, anyway?

So on New Year’s Eve 1999, as the ball dropped and as my parents did things that I do now but didn’t do then like drink and worry about mass technological failure, I snuck up to a balcony with some other kids where we pulled strings on a dozen confetti poppers so that multicolored strings shot out over our parents’ heads and got caught in the fan spinning above them, and we thought that was the funniest thing ever. Of course, the fans kept spinning and the lights didn’t suddenly go out. It was just the end of one year and the beginning of another.

And while most Americans—hypochondriacs, all of them—were realizing they had imagined the whole Y2K fever, somewhere out in South Florida where there is still swamp and it doesn’t feel like South Florida feels in 21^st century, the largest millennium-eve gathering was going down. Out on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation, Phish, an improvisational rock quartet from Vermont, was playing the greatest concert of its career, a marathon midnight-to-sunrise performance that many Phishheads call simply “The Show.”

They say that every Jew was at Mount Sinai when God and Moses gave the Torah. Well, I have a corollary to that midrash: Every Phishhead was at Big Cypress when Phish gave that Show of all Shows.

What follows is the tale of mine and many other souls finding a way, consciously or otherwise, back to that South Florida swamp and back to that mystical mountain.