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It is possible to thrive even with a Phish addiction, and in some cases impossible to thrive without it\u00e2\u20ac\u201dWe should all hope for obsessions and enablers as healthy as my scalper\u2019s, although \u00e2\u20ac\u0153scalper\u00e2\u20ac\u009d cheapens the relationship somewhat. In the Phish world, I had just experienced what\u2019s known as a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153miracle.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Of course on any major holiday one man\u2019s miracle is another night at the office and I soon found myself schmoozing a few of the Garden\u2019s production men, who seemed amused at my long-burning curiosity about what the arena\u2019s attic is like (apparently it\u2019s a cluttered labyrinth of submarine-like industrial passageways and during the Phish run it gets incredibly loud because of its proximity to the amplifiers that the band hangs from the room\u2019s gently sloping ceiling and also becomes pretty stuffy because of the smoke rising from the crowd not far below). \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It used to be like it was raining,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d one of the productions guys said of the torrents of glow sticks that cascade from the upper decks during Phish shows. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Now, we barely have anything to pick up afterwards.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d You all are getting old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Is there any conceivable logic to seeing a single band 100 times? It\u2019s a question I\u2019ve often asked myself having seen Phish on a measly 17 occasions. How many \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Simples\u00e2\u20ac\u009d does one need before happiness and fulfillment are achieved? Will my existence really be incomplete until I\u2019ve seen \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Magrupp and the Watchful Horsemasters\u00e2\u20ac\u009d played live? (Obviously, yes). Does the band even give as much of a shit as we do? That last one was something of an open question among fans up until their Baker\u2019s Dozen stunt in the summer of 2017\u00e2\u20ac\u201da run of 13 shows at the Garden in which they were jammier and weirder and freer than they\u2019d been in a long time. For the next year\u2019s worth of decent to sometimes well-north-of-decent live performances, the more honest fans would bitterly reflect that it took a high-stakes gimmick for Phish to really become their best and truest selves, after which they reverted back to late-period predictability. And then, another coup: The surprise live debut of an album\u2019s worth<\/a> of some of the weirdest and funkiest and sneakily darkest (and absolute best) songwriting of their career, introduced via the magisterial Kasvot V\u00c3\u00a4xt Halloween prank<\/a> of 2018. The quartet that played four nights at the Garden last week was one that really did seem to grasp the existential significance of having the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Simple\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that\u2019s been rattling around in your head for years or decades dazzlingly manifested in sound and vision. For my money, they played just such a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Simple\u00e2\u20ac\u009d during the opening hour of 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Obsessions are indulged for\u00e2\u20ac\u201dor, more cynically, sustained by \u00e2\u20ac\u201dthat handful of moments in which they make absolute, perfect sense. So it was when Phish embarked on a hazy, grungy \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Steam\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in the first set on New Year\u2019s Eve, with the choruses punctuated with decidedly un-Phish like eruptions reminiscent of the end of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Day in the Life\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (come to think it, the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153No Quarter\u00e2\u20ac\u009d they played Saturday night sometimes reminded me more of like, Ride<\/a> than it did of Led Zeppelin or Phish). A Bob Dylan lyric occurred to me during the glorious windup for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Run Like an Antelope:\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And then almost immediately I remembered the doggerel that closes Gravity\u2019s Rainbow, which is written in a notably similar meter to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Auld Lang Syne:\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There is a hand to turn the time\/Though thy glass today be run.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Phish has only a small number of songs that really stand on their own and the band\u2019s power comes from the four musicians\u2019 ability to both embrace and transcend the inherent absurdity of their material. But on New Year\u2019s their songs took on an unexpectedly profound quality. On \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Down With Disease\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell were yelling \u00e2\u20ac\u0153stop!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d at the galloping hour hand. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The day is longer than your year,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d they insisted as the outset of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Mercury,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d just around 11:50 PM. The jam<\/a> that preceded midnight felt intense and sludgy and pleasantly unmelodic, liminal in a way that channeled the psychic and temporal moment. Then thousands of silver balloons<\/a> dropped from the ceiling, and the crowd batted them around like giant pachinko balls. Dressed in space suits and screened by a forest of glistening streamers, Trey and Mike Gordon hovered a hundred feet above the crowd, absolutely nailing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Say it to me S.A.N.T.OS\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/a>(one of funkiest, weirdest, and darkest of the Kasvot V\u00c3\u00a4xt numbers) while harnessed far, far away from their pedals and monitors. Dancers dressed as pepperoni pizza slices and flying saucers traipsed across the stage, and a few of the inflatable giant green aliens crowd-surfed down 7th avenue after the show finally let out around 1 AM. These were the hands to turn the time, though thy glass today be run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n During one of the set breaks, a Phish newbie in my section said he was once under the mistaken impression they were a Christian band, with their name being a possible reference to the multiplication of the loaves and fishes (Matthew, chapter 15<\/a>). Now we all know that Phish is a Jewish band as anyone who went to Jewish sleepaway camp in the past quarter-century or listened to the YEM > Yerushalayim Shel Zahav > YEM<\/a> they played on July 16th, 1993 can attest. But this is a beautiful connection nonetheless, this idea of a small thing becoming a cosmically big one, or at least of the existence of some higher alchemy that human witnesses can verify. Were Phish, in fact, a Christian band, the name might refer to the idea that live music and religion share some core experiential similarity (in fact it\u2019s derived from the last name of drummer John Fishman).<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n A Phish show is its own strange sort of spiritual community that exists for a few hours at a time and then dissolves with fearful instancy. They\u2019re not exactly a popular band or one with particularly broad appeal; their success has come from mining the same somewhat large group of enthusiasts over the course of several decades and effectively preventing that audience from wandering off. The people at a Phish show really do want to be there\u00e2\u20ac\u201devery square inch of the floor and seating bowl are filled at the Garden and only the truly inebriated manage to stand perfectly still. No one watches indifferently. Five hours pass in a moment, and the lacuna in real life jolts to an unwelcome end. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153This is so sad,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d someone in my section remarked, watching the balloons and ribbons being swept away. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The universe is no longer here.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n\n\n\n By Armin Rosen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The man from whom I bought my ticket had seen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,12,976,8,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-posts-comments","category-events","category-life","category-stuff","category-tv-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","featured_image_urls":{"full":"","thumbnail":"","medium":"","medium_large":"","large":"","1536x1536":"","2048x2048":"","chromenews-featured":"","chromenews-large":"","chromenews-medium":""},"author_info":{"display_name":"Being BOB","author_link":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/author\/admin\/"},"category_info":"All Posts & Comments<\/a> Events<\/a> Life<\/a> Stuff<\/a> TV & Music<\/a>","tag_info":"TV & Music","comment_count":"0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p822aG-vR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1975\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}