Archive for June, 2010
The Prayer of Jam
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
“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:
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.
Kids in a Crowd
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—28th, 29th, 30th, 31st—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!
