The Joy of Phish, Pt. 1?
One evening this past July I was at a Phish concert, standing on the amphitheater lawn right before the music started, and I felt something drop onto my shoulder. I worried about a bug, a bird dropping, ashes from some phan’s joint. No. It was a hair. A white hair from my own head. Have I ever felt so aged, as I looked around at the 40- and 50-somethings gearing up for a night of dancing? Specifically dancing to 4 white guys from Vermont playing songs they’ve played for nearly 40 years? What had I gotten myself into? How did I get here? What have I done? (For more on Phish/Talking Heads connections, read up on Halloween 1996 and "Crosseyed and Painless." Or do that after you read this. Or ask me to write a newsletter about my relationship with Talking Heads!)
Phish is a band that has played a significant role in my life, though sometimes the effects are more tertiary than obvious. I had time to reflect over the summer tour and consequently ended up in more conversations with non-fans than usual about the band, and here we are, having a little newsletter about it, as promised last time. I might even experiment with a two-parter! Wow!
I’m not going to try to convince you to listen to the band. Believe me, I know that their music is polarizing. There are better primers on how to start that process if you’re curious. This little experiment here is more about analyzing my life journey through the band’s career, or something like that.
I’m also not trying to rehash the shows I went to or explain too in-depth my recordings collection which lives on as a stash of audio and video cassettes, burned CDs, SHN files, FLAC files, MP3 files probably, and maybe 1-2 other odd formats. (Look, it’s been a LONG few decades.) All this to say, today, I’m going to assume you’re not familiar with the band beyond their name and reputation. Cool? Cool.
What I’ll add here, before we make our way through the maze of time, for the uninitiated as context are threeish facts:
1) It’s basically been the same 4 guys playing together for the past 40 years.
2a) No two shows are the same in terms of setlist.
2b) You won’t hear the same song in back-to-back-shows.
2c) The same song may pop up in one concert multiple times, jammed in and out of, like "Tweezer" on 5/7/94 or "Down With Disease" on 2/17/97. Imagine Beyonce playing “Formation” 5 times! How would you feel!?
3) They sound less like the Grateful Dead than you think. More like Frank Zappa.
When I was in middle school, I felt like I knew three guys who listened to the band. Kirk’s parents drove him to shows in the region; now Kirk is a UU minister somewhere. Emmett was a preternatural drummer who had wide-ranging musical tastes. I can remember him outside the school cafeteria joking about how long Phish songs were. I didn’t understand at the time. I definitely do now. The third person I am sure was listening to them back then was Evan, the son of dear family friends, and someone who’s very cousin-like to me (me, a person who really doesn’t have much of a relationship with actual cousins, owing to a few intercontinental moves before I was born, a divorce that predates my existence, and, well, honestly it’s mostly distance (I think about this a lot)).
The band hadn’t really made it big yet, by most accounts, in that phase, but had definitely gained traction at colleges in the northeast and similar.
Around 1995, “the Internet” was taking off in various ways. A local consortium of entities decided to create PennyNet which was a BBS and email service and web host and catchall local Information Superhighway interchange. I regularly dialed in or telnetted in and connected with real-life contacts like my minister and my friend Amelia. The forums included trivia, poetry, and, somewhere in there, a bunch of snippets from Phish CDs as WAVs, uploaded by a fellow named Adam, who went by the username Fee on the site, after the song. I was also active at this time in my middle school’s ski club, which sounds fancier than it was. Eighth-grade math teacher Mr. Snyder, a ski patroller, organized group rentals and schoolbuses to take dozens of goofy youth to a nearby slope for three months of Saturdays. Part of the deal, which now sounds cuckoo to me, is that once we arrived at the ski area parking lot, we were all left to our own devices. Some kids knew who they’d pal around with, and others were less sure. Some of us took lessons faithfully, and that’s how I learned to ski. My classmate Pressly was a regular on these trips; we soon started hanging out. On the lift rides, we’d chat, and I distinctly remember him telling me about the absurd lyrics by this band, Phish. “The wheels are the things on the car that make contact with the road.” “When you’re there, I sleep lengthwise, and when you’re gone, I sleep diagonal in my bed.” Are you serious? “It’s time time time for the last rewind.” WHAT? He & I had a long chat this summer about how his cultural taste developed--I forgot to ask about how he knew back then about Phish, as it didn’t fit in with his explanation of other art. Between the WAVs and the ski lift, I knew about a half dozen Phish songs, but only a line of each.
I started collecting Grateful Dead concert tapes four weeks before I started high school after enjoying the band's studio output for a year or so (this was right after Jerry Garcia died; not great timing on my part). My new friend Katie told me that her brother Danny was into the Dead, Phish, and all sorts of other cool bands, and through her I finagled a copy of Danny's favorite Phish show, on one cassette, to satisfy my curiosity and expand my list of tradeworthy tapes I could copy. That copy of 3/9/90 took me to wild places. It was introducing me to swing music before the movie Swingers was released. Every version of "Caravan" I've heard since has paled in comparison. I heard vocal jamming in "You Enjoy Myself" that sounded frankly awful yet hypnotic. I wondered why they sometimes sang in Hebrew. I got even more confused by their lyrics meaning nothing and yet everything, with wordplay and Dylanesque imagery. I was hooked on these weirdos. I needed to learn more.
Around that time, a long-distance summer camp friend and I were dabbling in the mid-90s Internet and found ourselves hanging out on an Internet Relay Chat ("an WHAT?" you say) server. Bouncing around the rooms available there got me in with a bunch of Phish-loving strangers, leveling up from telnet talkers with no real cohesive identity. That channel launched dozens of possibilities for me over the next few years. One regular pal there, Allen, offered to show me around his college if I visited. I didn't take him up on it, partly because explaining it to my parents was too weird. We all played with leet-speak and other goofy language things, especially when it came to each other's names. My first name was particularly fruitful, yielding "gn33l" and "Neilshire" and eventually, "Knile." That was a creation by a teenager named Chuck M. in Arizona who later introduced me to what MP3s were, and through that, the music of Mr. Bungle, Ani DiFranco, KMFDM, and David Holmes. He and another high schooler, Ned, were pure kindness. We probably would not have been friends if we'd attended the same school. But there we were on the Phish channel shooting the breeze every evening. I don't know where to find these guys now, and I've tried. I hope they're well. Another guy, whose nickname and name escape me, got me listening to Aphex Twin, another artist I could write way too much about my history with.
Two connections of longer-standing note emerged as well from the IRC Phish crew. One was a friendship with a guy named Chris Morris in Kingston, Ontario. He's the one who dubbed me "Neilshire," in which the "shire" is silent. I became a fan of his band with his buddy up there, Keteela, and introduced dozens of Americans to their tipsy skits and silly songs like "Where Are My Pants?" Chris & I eventually, joyfully met up for a few minutes at a Phish show near the border, and, trust me when I say you don't see where this is going next: We now touch base multiple times a day, including but not limited to, trading Wordle scores and political analysis. The other connection has had a mindboggling ripple effect on my life. Allen connected me to a sometimes-IRC-user who went by the nickname Shorty, when Allen found out I'd be going to college at Hopkins. He noted, "Shorty's very nice. She does theater, like you, and listens to Phish." Because of Shorty, I met the Barnstormers, the university's longest-running theater group. I had considered being active in theater in college, as I had in high school, but my first Barnstormers experience was underwhelming. Shorty convinced me to give the group another go, that I should audition for the Freshman One-Acts. Because of that, I met a bunch of people who became my best friends. Because of that, one of those friends met a non-Phish Internet friend of mine, and now they have two cool kids together. On another branch of that causality tree, I doubled down on technical theater as a hobby, which turned into an interest in the technology of sound, which overlapped with my interest in linguistics, and eventually I did a Ph.D. in how people understand speech. And, to glide over a twist here and there, I spent my college years trying to weigh my options between a professional life in the arts and one in academia or research somehow. I zigged into academia for a while, then zagged right out into becoming the arts non-profit administrator I am today.
You know what? Let's hit pause here and think about August and September 2023. You'll read more from me about Phish soon, though that will be the last of my newsletters coming from this TinyLetter service, as the platform will cease to exist by the end of February. TBD whether I'll migrate to Mailchimp or Buttondown or something else. If you have strong opinions about such services, share them with me! If I play my cards right, you don't have to do anything to subscribe to the next iteration of this.
Reading:
Through these months, I have had at least three books checked out from the library that remain uncracked. I’ll keep renewing them until I can’t. This is like the dead tree version of the old Netflix DVD conundrum. I'm going to save my articles for next go'round.
Eating:
I had brunches at Miles Table in August and September. It remains one of the few brunch-seeming spots close to our house. Kelsey & I visited Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao in Cherry Hill. The service was a mix of human error and robots, and we'd go back and order differently next time. September brought our annual extended family pilgrimage to Kauffman's Bar-B-Que restaurant. We really enjoyed Ember and Ash. And I had a breakfast taco meeting at Taco Heart which led to more LinkedIn engagement than most people get out of breakfast tacos. My friend Noah threw a party where the idea was to bring a food with a surprising flavor or ingredient, and we'd go around and guess what we were blindly consuming. Items included jalapeno cotton candy, Korean barbecue doritos, peanut butter whiskey, and dozens more. It was the wildest eating experience I'd had in ages, and I'd encourage everybody to have such an event with their friends.
Beating:
This feels like ages ago now, but remember the popularity of "Planet of the Bass" which, if I recall, our friends ended up playing at their WEDDING? That song reminded me of Bronze 56K radio and had me looking up old Open House Party with John Garabedian bits. I almost never buy CDs these days, but I'd picked up some CDs at a friend's moving sale, which are great fodder for housecleaning. So in the span of a week I heard some new-to-me music from familiar artists: Ben Kweller's On My Way, Thievery Corporation's Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi, and DJ Shadow's The Outsider.
September got eclectic. One of the artists I subscribe to on Bandcamp, Wally Clark, released a new album that I found musically enjoyable but lyrically very questionable at times. I saw the Death Cab for Cutie/Postal Service show at The Mann Center, which led to other dives into the '01-04 collection, including The Strokes and Stars of the Lid. Derek Trucks playing live with Phish sent me down a daylong rabbit hole about his output and that guy can PLAY. In August, Rob & I were supposed to see Bruce Springsteen and instead saw a quirky group from Canada, known on the night we saw them as "36?" Rob & I were approximately 40% of the audience. I bought a cassette of their other project and need to fix up my tape player to hear it. August's dive into Open House Party brought me around to some incredible Spotify playlists of songs from that show's heyday. Locally, I discovered South Philly bands like Tinmouth and Porter Street.
Deleting: I did a big office cleaning in August but it’ll never reach a state I’m happy with, I fear. Or maybe it will and then I'll use it and entropy will ensue. After months of telling myself I was overdue, I went through my closet and dresser. I put some clothes in a bag to donate, and I set some shirts aside to have a blanket made. Kelsey & I sat for a Philadelphia Water Department/Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Rain Check Workshop to learn about how we can reduce rainwater's impact on our sewers.
Retreating:
Notable end-of-summer restorative activities included camping at Camp Swatara with family, a video about every Margaritaville in North America that I had to explain to my therapist, and a jaunt to PDX for Kelsey's job and some delicious Cascadian hiking. Kris (one of the Barnstormers mentioned above) and I followed a guide to breaking up with our phones, bit by bit. He wrote about it better than I could ever, including the days that we each put our phone away for the whole day and the day that we spent with some of our dearest friends.
Meeting
I gave a talk about breakfast sandwiches at Creative Mornings and recorded a Mission Story Slam podcast that's not yet released. Any day now, a Rotten Treasure episode about my favorite movie, Real Genius, is coming out and you can bet I'm all over that.
This was over 2500 words and I appreciate the opportunity to put them together for you. It's Monday morning and I have to go do my job for a while.
Miss you,
Neil
Phish is a band that has played a significant role in my life, though sometimes the effects are more tertiary than obvious. I had time to reflect over the summer tour and consequently ended up in more conversations with non-fans than usual about the band, and here we are, having a little newsletter about it, as promised last time. I might even experiment with a two-parter! Wow!
I’m not going to try to convince you to listen to the band. Believe me, I know that their music is polarizing. There are better primers on how to start that process if you’re curious. This little experiment here is more about analyzing my life journey through the band’s career, or something like that.
I’m also not trying to rehash the shows I went to or explain too in-depth my recordings collection which lives on as a stash of audio and video cassettes, burned CDs, SHN files, FLAC files, MP3 files probably, and maybe 1-2 other odd formats. (Look, it’s been a LONG few decades.) All this to say, today, I’m going to assume you’re not familiar with the band beyond their name and reputation. Cool? Cool.
What I’ll add here, before we make our way through the maze of time, for the uninitiated as context are threeish facts:
1) It’s basically been the same 4 guys playing together for the past 40 years.
2a) No two shows are the same in terms of setlist.
2b) You won’t hear the same song in back-to-back-shows.
2c) The same song may pop up in one concert multiple times, jammed in and out of, like "Tweezer" on 5/7/94 or "Down With Disease" on 2/17/97. Imagine Beyonce playing “Formation” 5 times! How would you feel!?
3) They sound less like the Grateful Dead than you think. More like Frank Zappa.
When I was in middle school, I felt like I knew three guys who listened to the band. Kirk’s parents drove him to shows in the region; now Kirk is a UU minister somewhere. Emmett was a preternatural drummer who had wide-ranging musical tastes. I can remember him outside the school cafeteria joking about how long Phish songs were. I didn’t understand at the time. I definitely do now. The third person I am sure was listening to them back then was Evan, the son of dear family friends, and someone who’s very cousin-like to me (me, a person who really doesn’t have much of a relationship with actual cousins, owing to a few intercontinental moves before I was born, a divorce that predates my existence, and, well, honestly it’s mostly distance (I think about this a lot)).
The band hadn’t really made it big yet, by most accounts, in that phase, but had definitely gained traction at colleges in the northeast and similar.
Around 1995, “the Internet” was taking off in various ways. A local consortium of entities decided to create PennyNet which was a BBS and email service and web host and catchall local Information Superhighway interchange. I regularly dialed in or telnetted in and connected with real-life contacts like my minister and my friend Amelia. The forums included trivia, poetry, and, somewhere in there, a bunch of snippets from Phish CDs as WAVs, uploaded by a fellow named Adam, who went by the username Fee on the site, after the song. I was also active at this time in my middle school’s ski club, which sounds fancier than it was. Eighth-grade math teacher Mr. Snyder, a ski patroller, organized group rentals and schoolbuses to take dozens of goofy youth to a nearby slope for three months of Saturdays. Part of the deal, which now sounds cuckoo to me, is that once we arrived at the ski area parking lot, we were all left to our own devices. Some kids knew who they’d pal around with, and others were less sure. Some of us took lessons faithfully, and that’s how I learned to ski. My classmate Pressly was a regular on these trips; we soon started hanging out. On the lift rides, we’d chat, and I distinctly remember him telling me about the absurd lyrics by this band, Phish. “The wheels are the things on the car that make contact with the road.” “When you’re there, I sleep lengthwise, and when you’re gone, I sleep diagonal in my bed.” Are you serious? “It’s time time time for the last rewind.” WHAT? He & I had a long chat this summer about how his cultural taste developed--I forgot to ask about how he knew back then about Phish, as it didn’t fit in with his explanation of other art. Between the WAVs and the ski lift, I knew about a half dozen Phish songs, but only a line of each.
I started collecting Grateful Dead concert tapes four weeks before I started high school after enjoying the band's studio output for a year or so (this was right after Jerry Garcia died; not great timing on my part). My new friend Katie told me that her brother Danny was into the Dead, Phish, and all sorts of other cool bands, and through her I finagled a copy of Danny's favorite Phish show, on one cassette, to satisfy my curiosity and expand my list of tradeworthy tapes I could copy. That copy of 3/9/90 took me to wild places. It was introducing me to swing music before the movie Swingers was released. Every version of "Caravan" I've heard since has paled in comparison. I heard vocal jamming in "You Enjoy Myself" that sounded frankly awful yet hypnotic. I wondered why they sometimes sang in Hebrew. I got even more confused by their lyrics meaning nothing and yet everything, with wordplay and Dylanesque imagery. I was hooked on these weirdos. I needed to learn more.
Around that time, a long-distance summer camp friend and I were dabbling in the mid-90s Internet and found ourselves hanging out on an Internet Relay Chat ("an WHAT?" you say) server. Bouncing around the rooms available there got me in with a bunch of Phish-loving strangers, leveling up from telnet talkers with no real cohesive identity. That channel launched dozens of possibilities for me over the next few years. One regular pal there, Allen, offered to show me around his college if I visited. I didn't take him up on it, partly because explaining it to my parents was too weird. We all played with leet-speak and other goofy language things, especially when it came to each other's names. My first name was particularly fruitful, yielding "gn33l" and "Neilshire" and eventually, "Knile." That was a creation by a teenager named Chuck M. in Arizona who later introduced me to what MP3s were, and through that, the music of Mr. Bungle, Ani DiFranco, KMFDM, and David Holmes. He and another high schooler, Ned, were pure kindness. We probably would not have been friends if we'd attended the same school. But there we were on the Phish channel shooting the breeze every evening. I don't know where to find these guys now, and I've tried. I hope they're well. Another guy, whose nickname and name escape me, got me listening to Aphex Twin, another artist I could write way too much about my history with.
Two connections of longer-standing note emerged as well from the IRC Phish crew. One was a friendship with a guy named Chris Morris in Kingston, Ontario. He's the one who dubbed me "Neilshire," in which the "shire" is silent. I became a fan of his band with his buddy up there, Keteela, and introduced dozens of Americans to their tipsy skits and silly songs like "Where Are My Pants?" Chris & I eventually, joyfully met up for a few minutes at a Phish show near the border, and, trust me when I say you don't see where this is going next: We now touch base multiple times a day, including but not limited to, trading Wordle scores and political analysis. The other connection has had a mindboggling ripple effect on my life. Allen connected me to a sometimes-IRC-user who went by the nickname Shorty, when Allen found out I'd be going to college at Hopkins. He noted, "Shorty's very nice. She does theater, like you, and listens to Phish." Because of Shorty, I met the Barnstormers, the university's longest-running theater group. I had considered being active in theater in college, as I had in high school, but my first Barnstormers experience was underwhelming. Shorty convinced me to give the group another go, that I should audition for the Freshman One-Acts. Because of that, I met a bunch of people who became my best friends. Because of that, one of those friends met a non-Phish Internet friend of mine, and now they have two cool kids together. On another branch of that causality tree, I doubled down on technical theater as a hobby, which turned into an interest in the technology of sound, which overlapped with my interest in linguistics, and eventually I did a Ph.D. in how people understand speech. And, to glide over a twist here and there, I spent my college years trying to weigh my options between a professional life in the arts and one in academia or research somehow. I zigged into academia for a while, then zagged right out into becoming the arts non-profit administrator I am today.
You know what? Let's hit pause here and think about August and September 2023. You'll read more from me about Phish soon, though that will be the last of my newsletters coming from this TinyLetter service, as the platform will cease to exist by the end of February. TBD whether I'll migrate to Mailchimp or Buttondown or something else. If you have strong opinions about such services, share them with me! If I play my cards right, you don't have to do anything to subscribe to the next iteration of this.
Reading:
Through these months, I have had at least three books checked out from the library that remain uncracked. I’ll keep renewing them until I can’t. This is like the dead tree version of the old Netflix DVD conundrum. I'm going to save my articles for next go'round.
Eating:
I had brunches at Miles Table in August and September. It remains one of the few brunch-seeming spots close to our house. Kelsey & I visited Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao in Cherry Hill. The service was a mix of human error and robots, and we'd go back and order differently next time. September brought our annual extended family pilgrimage to Kauffman's Bar-B-Que restaurant. We really enjoyed Ember and Ash. And I had a breakfast taco meeting at Taco Heart which led to more LinkedIn engagement than most people get out of breakfast tacos. My friend Noah threw a party where the idea was to bring a food with a surprising flavor or ingredient, and we'd go around and guess what we were blindly consuming. Items included jalapeno cotton candy, Korean barbecue doritos, peanut butter whiskey, and dozens more. It was the wildest eating experience I'd had in ages, and I'd encourage everybody to have such an event with their friends.
Beating:
This feels like ages ago now, but remember the popularity of "Planet of the Bass" which, if I recall, our friends ended up playing at their WEDDING? That song reminded me of Bronze 56K radio and had me looking up old Open House Party with John Garabedian bits. I almost never buy CDs these days, but I'd picked up some CDs at a friend's moving sale, which are great fodder for housecleaning. So in the span of a week I heard some new-to-me music from familiar artists: Ben Kweller's On My Way, Thievery Corporation's Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi, and DJ Shadow's The Outsider.
September got eclectic. One of the artists I subscribe to on Bandcamp, Wally Clark, released a new album that I found musically enjoyable but lyrically very questionable at times. I saw the Death Cab for Cutie/Postal Service show at The Mann Center, which led to other dives into the '01-04 collection, including The Strokes and Stars of the Lid. Derek Trucks playing live with Phish sent me down a daylong rabbit hole about his output and that guy can PLAY. In August, Rob & I were supposed to see Bruce Springsteen and instead saw a quirky group from Canada, known on the night we saw them as "36?" Rob & I were approximately 40% of the audience. I bought a cassette of their other project and need to fix up my tape player to hear it. August's dive into Open House Party brought me around to some incredible Spotify playlists of songs from that show's heyday. Locally, I discovered South Philly bands like Tinmouth and Porter Street.
Deleting: I did a big office cleaning in August but it’ll never reach a state I’m happy with, I fear. Or maybe it will and then I'll use it and entropy will ensue. After months of telling myself I was overdue, I went through my closet and dresser. I put some clothes in a bag to donate, and I set some shirts aside to have a blanket made. Kelsey & I sat for a Philadelphia Water Department/Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Rain Check Workshop to learn about how we can reduce rainwater's impact on our sewers.
Retreating:
Notable end-of-summer restorative activities included camping at Camp Swatara with family, a video about every Margaritaville in North America that I had to explain to my therapist, and a jaunt to PDX for Kelsey's job and some delicious Cascadian hiking. Kris (one of the Barnstormers mentioned above) and I followed a guide to breaking up with our phones, bit by bit. He wrote about it better than I could ever, including the days that we each put our phone away for the whole day and the day that we spent with some of our dearest friends.
Meeting
I gave a talk about breakfast sandwiches at Creative Mornings and recorded a Mission Story Slam podcast that's not yet released. Any day now, a Rotten Treasure episode about my favorite movie, Real Genius, is coming out and you can bet I'm all over that.
This was over 2500 words and I appreciate the opportunity to put them together for you. It's Monday morning and I have to go do my job for a while.
Miss you,
Neil
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