The Jew in the Phish

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.

“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.

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!

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.

It is the summer of ’69, and I am homeless in Jerusalem. For 19 shekels, less than 5 dollars, I can take a bus to Tel Aviv. I can hitchhike south to the communes in the desert for free, or I can get in a car with scarved mystics and travel north to the mountains of Tzfat.

Instead of doing these things, I sit in the Y Coffee Bar on Nisim Bachar in Nachlaot. It is cramped and overpriced, but the people here speak Hebrew. For four and a half months, I lived in a basement apartment on HaYarkon, which is one block from this place. Sager, my roommate, left at the end of May to go back to the states and work at Camp Ramah. Back in January when we signed the lease, leaving the month of June open had seemed a great way to force myself to get out and travel. But here I am, sitting a block away from my former apartment. To one side of this coffee shop, a couple doors down, is a hole in the wall where I can do laundry. On the other side of the shop, a few doors up, is a thrift store called Trumpledore. I bought some bellbottoms there once. There’s a typewriter in the window that has Hebrew-lettered keys. It costs 35 sheks, less than 10 dollars. I don’t know how I’ll carry the thing around, so I just stare every time I walk by, which is often because I have nothing to do, being homeless and all.

I sit in the Y Coffee Bar and drink a café hafooch, which can be translated to mean “upside-down coffee.” A man with a big, curly mass of hair on his head walks in the door and sits down. I sit and drink my upside-down coffee, which is really just a latte, and periodically look up at this guy. He orders a hafooch and periodically looks up at me. I look at him and assume he’s Israeli. He sees me look at him. He stares back and says, “You listen to Phish, don’t you?” I freeze. I look down at my shirt. Nope, I’m not wearing any Phish regalia. How did he know that? “Yea. How did you know that?” I ask. “I can just tell,” he says.

A lot of Jews are familiar with the term “Jewish Geography.” You are at a party and a friend introduces you to someone named Rachel Wasser who is visiting from Maryland. “Oh! Maryland! Do you know Jonathan Zeigler?” you ask excitedly. Rachel stares back into the recesses of her mind for a moment. “Oh, yea! Jon Zeigler! He was in my Chemistry lab. He’s in AEPi, right?” “No, I don’t think so.” “Oh, right. That was Jon Seagel. No, no, I don’t know any Jon Zeiglers.” “Oh. OK. Let’s try again. What about Michelle Waldman?” you ask, a bit less expectantly. “Ah! Michelle! I love Michelle.” A dozen OMGs later, and though you only barely know this Michelle Waldman, you’re now practically BFFLs with Rachel Wasser.

Jewish geography is a game that developed out of the smallness and insularity of the American Jewish community. But in the epicenter of the Jewish state, 6,000 miles from the nearest Phish show, I’m not playing Jewish geography. This is something similar. This is Phish geography. A guy walks into a coffee shop, sees me, and something—an aura, maybe—tips him off. He knows I listen to Phish and that I’m heavily invested. There is no hesitation. He asks, but the asking is more of a formality than anything else. We talk for a little while, trade favorite songs and shows. I tell my new phriend about a street party happening that night, finish my hafooch and say goodbye. It’s a quick exchange, but it makes an impression on me.

Walking around town that day, I wonder what tipped him off. It is the summer of ’69. I’m homeless in Jerusalem. Is it because I carry a big backpack? Is it because I have a beard and shaggy hair? Is it because I wear Naots? No. These are all superficial signs. Every third Israeli on the street looks like this. It must be a feeling. Rachel Wasser might never have been formally introduced to me, but I still would have felt that she was Jewish. This guy in the coffee shop might never have called me out, but he knew we had something in common. Jews sometimes call themselves members of the tribe. Well, phans are a tribe within that tribe.

The night before this encounter, I go out to a bar with some other members of the tribe. I plan on sleeping at a friend’s tiny apartment off a tiny back alley, Hatsor Street, in Nachlaot. My friend works a few different jobs. Sometimes she tends bar, sometimes she waits tables at a fancy pasta restaurant. The night gets away from me. I walk back to her apartment at 3 a.m. I knock on the door. No answer. I look around for a key. Not there. I don’t want to call because it’s 3 in the morning and my friend will need to wake up soon and she is Israeli and Israeli women can be terrifying.

I walk back up the tiny alley of Hatsor and out onto a more main road, Bezalel. What are my options? Few. There is a limited number of people I wouldn’t mind bothering at this hour. Most them have left Israel already. I get a brilliant idea. Why not sleep in the park? I mean, I’ve been telling everyone that I’m spending this month homeless, why not live up to my word?

Ever tried to sleep on a metal park bench? Or on a patch of grass with the sprinklers spraying and a murder of crows creeping all around? Or on the side of a prickly-bush hill? It didn’t matter where I lay. It was damn cold and awkward and painful and they don’t turn the lights off in parks at night.

Delirious, I walked through the park, back into Nachalot and, in a quiet square across the street from Shuk Machne Yehuda, an open-air market, I waited and waited and waited.

It takes a long time for the sun to rise. I assume the market will open early. I’d had some early classes that semester at Hebrew University, but no matter how early I got up to run to through the market to the bus stop, Machane Yehuda was always ready and raging. Now, it takes a long time for the sun to rise. And once the sun rises, it takes a really long time for the market to yawn awake. So I wait some more. Finally, a newsstand opens. I grab the Haaretz English edition, and I wait some more. Shops begin to open. Falafel begins to fry. People begin to yell. The place is transforming. I’m 6,000 miles from the nearest Phish show, but Shakedown Street is coming alive before my eyes.

In the Shuk in Jerusalem you can get anything. And if someone tells you they can’t find this appliance or that fruit or some such person, tell them they haven’t looked hard enough. There are nuts, vegetables, fruits, coffees, teas, tonics, pastries, cheeses, eggs, fish, meats, beers, wines and sweets. You can buy plates and bowls and pots and pans. You can find rugs and shower curtains and linen pants. You can give money to a dozen beggars in 10 square feet. You can hear people speaking in Hebrew, Arabic, English, Yiddish, Russian, Amharic, French, German, Yeshivish.

The Shuk is the chaos before creation. Or maybe it’s the chaos of creation. You have to push people aside if you want to get anywhere. You have to hold your head up, or you’ll get ripped off. Yet, everything and everyone flows, and you can find anything your heart desires.

Six months later, I’m extracting myself from a car in the parking garage of the American Airlines Arena. The first thing my new friends and old friends and I want to do is get to Phish’s Shuk, to Shakedown Street, to the Lot.

There’s a parking lot scene at every Phish show. For this run of shows, the parking lot is opposite the arena on the other side of Biscayne Boulevard, a major road in downtown Miami. The lot is where the party begins and ends. Phisheads and gawkers alike congregate before the doors open and the lights go down. You can get anything in the lot: Tickets, bootleg Phish shirts, show posters, stickers, hand-made skirts and hats, pieces and papers, vegan burritos and heady quesadillas, garlic grilled cheese and French-bread pizza, chai tea, beers and smoothies, ganja goo balls, brownies, cookies, rice crispy treats, NO2, L, E and the rest of the alphabet pharmacy.

The place to go is Shakedown Street. This is the main drag where the vendors set up. Vendors are seasoned veterans. Their vans and RVs are often plastered with stickers from tours of lore. It always seemed to me that these people started following the Grateful Dead, and in 1995, when Jerry Garcia died and the Dead disbanded, they just up and moved their business to Phish tour because it was the easiest possible transition. They seem to have 20 or 30 years on the average Phish concertgoer. Hence, every parking lot outside of every arena-sized jamband show is named after a Grateful Dead song.

Vendors arrive at the lot early. They set up their various tables and grills behind their cars and across from another row of vans and vendors. These people sell the shirts and the skirts and the garlic grilled cheese. They’ve got signs and lights and everything is boiled down to a science. Then there are the people selling beer and burritos out of coolers. They sort of fill in the gaps between vans and yell things like, “Heady brews! Three dollars! Heady brews! Two for five!” Stand near one of these dudes for long enough and, with the show approaching, he’ll start to rhyme: “What the fuck? It’s only a buck!”

There’s a writhing mass of people in between all these vendors. It’s a mixture of young beaming fans enamored with the scene, casual concert goers called custies, curious onlookers, people who just got swept up in the tide and drug dealers. You don’t even have to ask for the drugs. It’s impossible to walk more than three steps without hearing someone whisper in your ear, “Molly,” “doses,” “chocolates” or any number of drug nicknames. Keep walking and the whispering stops for another few steps. But if he’s piqued your interest, all you have to do is stop, look the guy in the eye and your wish is his command. The river of people just flows on around you.

People spill out of every orifice of Shakedown Street. The outskirts are where you can buy more beer or posters or buy and sell tickets. All of this happens, while a horde of police look on. It’s quite flagrant, but the police can’t realistically arrest every offender in the lot. Outside of a handful of undercover cops, they just do their best to contain the masses.

This is the scene that we’re all eager to experience before the show starts.  Ryan and Eric, the guy we picked up in Boynton, head to the lot as soon as we get out of the car. Harper and Cahlin take a bit longer to get their acts together. Another friend parks his car near us. His name is Matt Doenges, but most people call him some variation of Doogan. He’s from Wellington, too. Harper introduced me to him freshman year, but I really met Doogans before I met Harper. Actually, he was the first person I ever met in college. We were in the same freshman orientation. One of us was wearing a Phish shirt. We started talking Phish geography and then got to Jewish geography. He’d missed the boat and never had a chance to see Phish during the post-hiatus years. So this is Doogans’ first Phish show, and he’s stoked, to say the least.

Eventually, everyone’s articles are in order, and we exit the parking garage. As we walk alongside the venue, a verse from “Roses Are Free,” a song by Ween that Phish covers, rings out. We look up toward the source of the music. There’s a big screen on the front of the arena with a clip from the Phish DVD called “IT” that chronicles the band’s 2003 summer festival of the same name. The clip is being played on a loop like the “Roses Are Free” verse, but the two don’t match. In fact, nothing matches. Here we are in downtown Miami outside of an arena that normally hosts NBA games, and Phish is blaring over the speakers and flashing on the screen. But the mismatch fits. This whole endeavor is about expecting the unexpected, after all.

I ask Doogans what song he most wants to hear Phish play. “Weekapaug,” he replies. I assure him that we’ll get to share in that groove. We walk on, past the venue, and cross Biscayne Boulevard toward the parking lot. Group cohesion is more of an ideal than a possibility at this point. People stream by in every direction and everything catches my eyes. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is happy.

We get to the edge of the lot and I can actually feel the energy of the place all around me. I want to dive in, but we don’t have a lot of time. Showtime approaches. I’m hungry. I want a burrito. Harper, Doogan and I work our way onto Shakedown Street. Doesn’t take long to get distracted. There’s some carrot cake that looks extra special. And then some girls walk by. They look familiar. Before I can place their faces, Harper and Doogan are screaming salutations and introducing me. Shira and Sarah, friends from Camp Coleman.

But I’ve already figured it out. I’ve met these girls before. Three months ago, the Mike Gordon Band came to Jacksonville Beach. It was September 18^th, a Friday.

When Mike made the announcement, the show’s date made me do a double take. September 18th. September 18th. What else was happening on September 18th? The answer soon came to me: Rosh Hashanah. The Jewish New Year.

Rosh Hashanah is one of those holidays that even the most secular, disconnected American Jews celebrate. Or acknowledge. My background is more traditional than that, so I couldn’t just ignore this reality. In a way, it seemed perfect. I would be coming home to Jacksonville anyway for some quality family time. It seemed I could have my cake and eat it, too (Thank God Mike wasn’t playing Jax on Yom Kippur. There would be no cake and no eating then.) So I found out the family dinner plans for Friday night, I found another Jewish friend from Jacksonville who wanted to hit the show and we bought our tickets.

The night of the show, after dinner, I decided I had to make a sign to bring to the show. It was the New Year and, though his touring schedule implied otherwise, I knew Mike had an innate connection to the holiday. I used some Sharpies and some cardboard to make a sign that read “Shanah Tovah” in Hebrew and included an apple and a shofar. Only the semi-learned Jews in the crowd, Mike included, would be able to read and understand that the sign said, “Happy New Year.”

Sign in hand, I drove to my friend’s house to pick him up. His family had just finished their own Rosh Hashanah dinner. They were interested in the sign I’d made. Before we left, my friend’s mother had an idea. Apples and honey. The traditional pairing for a sweet new year. She wanted us to bring some to Mike. She filled a Ziploc with apples, and then poured in the honey and that was that.

We drove 30 minutes to the Freebird Live at the beach, picked up our tickets at will call and made it through the security, sweets and sign in tow. We found some space close to the stage, and as soon as Mike appeared, I held up my sign to him. He peered out, read the Hebrew words and grabbed the sign from my hands. Mike then held the sign up and out for all to see and the place went nuts. There was a large Jewish contingent at the Freebird, it seemed.

Then Mike and his band played a song or two. I still had this offering of apples and honey, so during the next song break, I held up the Ziploc and made it clear that I wanted Mike to take it. He leaned in, strained his eyes and eventually grabbed the bag. Looking closely, he saw exactly what was inside. He understood.

“Apples and honey, for sweet new year!” Mike said into the microphone while holding up the bag. Now, the place really went crazy.

A glowing faerie of a girl, about my age, danced up to me and said, “Did you tell your parents that you were coming to Jacksonville for Rosh Hashanah services, too?!”

That girl was this girl in the lot, Sarah. She had been with someone at the Mike Gordon show. It was the other girl, Shira. I reintroduce myself, and the circles just keep intertwining.

The girls get pulled away in the tide. They’re selling some baked goods of their own. We float around the lot, get caught up, broken apart and thrown back together a few times over. We find some goo balls bobbing around in there somewhere. The clock is ticking. We start drifting toward the edges of the lot. As it gets closer to show time, the masses become more and more alive. Every so often, some primordial war cry will ring out and the lot will erupt in collective excitement. There is only one official crosswalk between the lot and the venue, so even though Biscayne Boulevard is busy, people keep tempting fate and making a run for it.

Harper remembers this vividly: “We’re tryin’ to walk from across from the lot to the American Airlines Arena and there’s like this six-lane highway and nobody knew when to go, when not to go. And you can see 150 people trying to decide what to do, and this is within the span of three seconds. And all of the sudden some little kid just runs and goes, ‘Power in numbers!’ and everyone starts yelling ‘Power in numbers!’ and running across the street.”

The river is raging, spilling over its banks. Power in numbers. Waves are crashing everywhere. This is it. Power in numbers. We surrender to the flow and careen toward the source.

Even in the depths of December, 60 miles of sunshine lie between the village of Wellington and the metropolis of Miami. It can take any time from one hour to 12 to cover that distance, depending on the route, traffic, lines at tollbooths, carpool-lane eligibility, construction, lane closures, detours, missed exits and the position of the constellations.

I’m back in the Buick, behind the wheel, trying to keep track of a silver Civic that’s a few cars away. There are six lanes on this highway, the Florida Turnpike, and the Civic darts from this lane to that. Every few minutes it speeds ahead until it’s caught in the web of cars, and then the process repeats.

Harper is driving the Civic. His sister, Sarah, is in the car, and so is his friend, Ryan. He knows I’m trying to follow, that I have no idea where we’re going.

The Civic disappears from my sight again, just as a sign for the tollbooth blurs green overhead. This is the Florida Turnpike. This is the edge.

Six lanes somehow expand to twenty. Each lane has a booth. Each booth has a sign over it: Ticket. Change Provided. Exact Change. SunPass.

The Civic must have followed this last sign. With the SunPass—a sticker or plastic box stuck in the windshield—drivers can just roll through the tollbooths. No lines. No loose change. No wait. The pass turns the car into a credit card on wheels. Money’s deducted without a beep or a thought, and the road rolls on.

I don’t have a SunPass. The Turnpike connects Miami to Orlando. It runs parallel to I-95, which extends beyond Orlando, through Jacksonville, my hometown, and all the way up to Maine. Florida’s Turnpike doesn’t make it to Jacksonville, which means I don’t have a SunPass, which means I am like a foreigner in my own state.

I’m stuck in line. I call Harper. No answer. At the booth, I pay $1.25 for my two axels. I merge back onto the highway, call Harper. His sister answers. I tell her that I don’t have a SunPass and that I’ll try to catch up even though I’m far behind. She tells me to get off at a certain exit. They need gas and they need to pick up someone else and we might as well cut over to I-95 for the rest of the trip so that no one has to deal with tolls. Reasonable enough.

Sarah is quite the opposite of her brother. Not difficult to reach, not loud, not erratic, not off-the-fucking-walls crazy. Driving down to see Phish, for her, is as much an opportunity to let loose as it is to do something productive. She’s working on a story for JVibe about the Miami Phish concerts.

Her brother, on the other hand, came exclusively to party down. And I’m not surprised that communication and group cohesion has already begun to break down. Harper is notorious for these sorts of thing, has been since we met in the earliest days of freshman year at the University of Florida.

That year, late one night just a couple of weeks into the fall semester, I walk into my dorm room. Ben, an old friend and my roommate, is standing there drunk and laughing. Some guy is sitting on Ben’s bed, and the

instant that I enter the room this guy starts yelling, screaming at me. There’s excitement in his voice, not anger. I don’t know him but he seems to know me. He’s yelling about Phish and about being Jewish and he’s giving me a huge hug of excitement.

“I remember being super shit faced,” Harper said about that night.

Turns out Harper had been in the communal bathroom of our hallway in the dorm. Ben was in there, too. They were both drunk and started talking. Mutual love of Phish was discovered and then a shared heritage and Ben knew he had to introduce this guy to me. Harper’s been my most abrasive music-loving friend ever since.

It was a new thing to meet other Jewish kids that really liked Phish, Harper said. “Because in high school, man, I looked all over for anyone who liked Phish and nobody liked Phish and I was so sad about it.”

My experience had been similar. I’d discovered Phish, along with the Grateful Dead, at Jewish summer camp just before my last year of middle school. It seemed that a unique, creative culture surrounded these Phish, and I wanted to dive into the ocean to swim around. But this newfound enthusiasm was greeted with blank stares back in the non-camp world. Like Harper, I found that nobody liked Phish and I was so sad about it, too.

The band was on hiatus in 2001. None of my camp friends were hopeful that they would return. Our most legitimate source for Phishformation was a guy who claimed to be a cousin of Mike Gordon, the bass player. He said Mike had been at his Bar Mitzvah. He said that Mike said that Phish would never play again. None of us believed him. All of us believed him. We just assumed that the train had passed, that maybe we should find our own band from our own time.

I imagined that high school would be a garden of musical enlightenment. That didn’t happen. Kids at my school were either stuck deep in the mud of popular country music or listening at the whim of the Top 40.

Thank God for the Internet. I was able to form a virtual community. I could talk with my camp friends about the group online. I found nugs.net and began downloading audience recordings of Phish shows. I discovered the thriving world of American bands that jam.I downloaded more shows from Furthur.net. It took a lot of time and patience. We had a 27-kbps modem at home. I waited. I lamented the fact that no one around me seemed interested.

During the year, I was able to see many of those friends from summer camp at Jewish youth group conventions. Every American Jewish movement has a youth group. Young Reform Jews have NFTY. Conservative Jews have USY. The Modern Orthodox have NCSY. The pluralists have BBYO. I was in USY, and my youth group region covered the Southeast. There always seemed to be a disproportionate number of heads at those weekend gatherings. Some of them I recognized as older kids from camp. They were from exotic locales like Atlanta and Raleigh and Memphis. Some just fit a 15 year old’s notion of the 21^st century hippie: Long and tangly hair, fat hemp necklaces, Chaco sandals and an ever-present Nalgene water bottle plastered with stickers of unknown acronyms and nicknames: SCI, WSP, moe., STS9, pgroove. The oldest, coolest kids wore shirts and hoodies emblazoned with Phish’s iconic logo. The letters inside the fish were in Hebrew. These kids had found Phishy T-shirts on the touristy streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv while traveling on Jewish summer programs. It was common to see other permutations of the Phish logo on shirts created by individual youth group chapters to reflect the initials of their hometown synagogues.

While I spent my summers at Camp Ramah Darom, Harper spent his at Kutz Camp, the national leadership camp for NFTY. There he learned to be a song leader, he met some Phishheads and he was increasingly inspired by Phish. One summer, guitar in hand, Harper had the bright idea to take the melody from a ballad-ish Phish tune and applied it to a traditional Jewish prayer. He then taught the arrangement to other Kutz Campers.

Some summers later, Sarah, Harper’s sister, went on an Israel program. There were kids on the trip from Los Angeles who organized a Shabbat service. When they got to the Mi Chamocha prayer in the service, the leaders began to play and sing it to the tune of “Wading in the Velvet Sea.” Hearing this Phish tune in a Jewish service, Sarah was shocked. She approached one of her left-coast peers to ask the origin of the tune and was told that someone from LA had come home from Kutz Camp one summer with this song on his mind. A NFTY song leader, he taught it to the region. And like that, Harper’s bit of Jewish Phish lore was out there in the world.

The Phish world is like the Jewish world in that way. Word travels fast, and trends become traditions. Benjy Eisen wrote a story for Jambands.com in 2003 about how he changed a certain Phish song forever. Stopped in traffic one day in 1996, the song, “Harry Hood,” came on his stereo. As the band got to the segment in which they shout “Harry!,” Eisen found himself responding, “HUH!”

“Not the scratch-your-head, shrug-your shoulders ‘huh,’” Eisen wrote. “But the James Brown HUH, the Funk Amen, the sound of a man getting on the good foot.”

This “HUH!” soon morphed into “Hood!” A few weeks later, someone named Darius posted a message on the nascent Phish Internet community, rec.music.phish, looking for audience participation ideas. Eisen threw out the Hood chant idea. Darius must have liked it because he printed thousands of fliers for Phish’s August ’96 shows at Red Rocks with, among other audience participation ideas, chanting instructions for “Harry Hood.” Darius and his friends passed the fliers out to as many phans as they could. Many of the fliers’ suggestions to the audience were unsuccessful. But then, “during an electrifying thunderstorm on the third night of the run,” according to the Phish.net, Phish played “Harry Hood.” When the band arrived at the “Harry!” section, the amphitheatre responded, “Hood!” Phish was caught “completely off-guard by the successful crowd chant,” but “was noticeably pleased, especially Trey, who responded to the situation with a mile-wide grin.” Phish audiences have shouted “Hood!” ever since.

Eisen continued on Jambands.com:

I go back and listen to pre-1996 Harry Hoods, before the crowd picked up my chant, before anyone knew to sing it. I can still hear it! It’s still there! It is in there years before I discovered it. It’s just silent, that’s all, waiting to be sung. It’s as if I didn’t come up with it after all I was just the first person to stumble across it. I pulled a note out of the air and this one time it happened to be THE RIGHT NOTE.

As Harper made the rounds in NFTY, playing his Phishy reworkings of Hebrew prayers, pulling the right notes out of the air, and as I began to believe I had found my garden of musical enlightenment in USY, Phish announced that they would play shows again. And it seemed that maybe the train hadn’t passed after all, that it was just a bit late getting to the station.

Harper and I got on the same train at about the same time. We saw the same sites, formed similar social networks in our identical train cars and, at some point along the way, discovered we’d been traveling concentric circles.

And now I’m traveling down the highway looking for his nondescript silver sedan so that I can make it safely to a Phish show tonight. The phone buzzes. Harper tells me which exit to take—Boynton Beach—and where to meet—the 7-Eleven. I pull off when I see the exit, and I’m back on a street that looks just like the streets in Wellington. Same strip malls, same traffic, same luxury cars and SUVs. Nothing stands out. Everything repeats. The 7-Eleven doesn’t stand out. I miss it. Five minutes pass, and I find a place to make a U-turn. Another five go by trying to make it back to the convenience store. I pull in, park. Harper backs out of the parking lot and into the traffic of downtown Boynton. I back out, try to follow, get caught in another net of cars.

Harper pulls away fast. Somehow, the Buick and I lunge free, catch up and survey the scene. We’re in the least affluent area of South Florida that I’ve seen so far on this trip. Small houses, packed side by side, extend into the distance on every side street. These people aren’t poor, or doing poorly, but they seem to be living within their means.

Harper turns in somewhere, and we stop at a gate. The gated community—a hallowed South Florida tradition. But, like an unfunny bastardization of the securitized American Dream, this is a gated community of cramped apartment complexes. We follow the curves and corners and eventually stop to pick someone up.  He’s got a brown-bagged bottle in one hand and a duffle in the other. He hops in Harper’s car, and we’re off, back around the curves, through the gate and into Boynton.

Harper finds a main road, which we follow until it reaches an I-95 on-ramp. No tolls here but still an inordinate number of cars. An hour passes before we approach greater Miami. Time is ticking. It’s nearing 5 p.m. Doors open at 6:30. The show starts at 7. We still need to drop our stuff at a friend’s house. We keep driving. Cars converge and concentrate into a metropolitan mass. Every exit is backed up. We keep driving. We find a suitable exit and begin our descent from the highway heavens into Miami. Thirty minutes of stop lights and rush hour and one ways pass before we make it to the house, in all its upper-middle class glory.

Our friend, Cahlin, lives here with his parents when he’s on break from school. Now is such a break. I never took Cahlin for a Phish fan. But the potential exists in everyone, and, though he’s only tangentially familiar with the band’s music, Cahlin’s decided to come to the show tonight. We drop our bags in his room. Even in an upscale, Art-Deco’ed house such as this, things are cramped. Cahlin’s got a bed and some slivers of space on the floor in his room. The couches in the living room are more for show than sleep. I’ll take my sliver any day. How can I complain? I left Jacksonville days earlier without the slightest plan for accommodations. A bit of carpet in a posh house in Miami is better than sleeping on the streets, you know? Tomorrow night’s a different story, but I’ll worry about that then, I think. HUH!, I think, let’s get on to the show.

Everyone hits the bathroom, changes clothes, grabs vitals—all I need is my notebook—and we bust out of there. To save on parking, we decide to take one car to the show. Four of us pile into the back seat and I begin to realize what’s about to happen.

The lot. The lights. The love. Huh! We find the freest expression in the most crowded of cramped spaces. All squeezed together, we get back onto the roads of Miami. In the parlance of our times, shit’s about to get mad intimate.

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.