Phish 11/27/98 -11/29/98 vs. 11/27/09-11/29/09
Most phans can pinpoint the moment when they transitioned from simple curiosity to hopelessly hooked. The 3-night Worcester run 11/27/98-11/29/98 was that moment for me. As an 18-year-old Phish fan in Massachusetts in 1998, these shows marked the most distinct launching point of my life with Phish, and, as I would later come to realize, played a huge role in what my key interests in life would be the rest of the way. The same can be said for many other people in the same situation who would become my best Phish friends and peers when I went to college a year later.
I had been to a couple of Phish shows before, and I liked the albums for a long time thanks to some cool camp counselors, but the raison d’etre of being a Phish fan (going to shows) just hadn’t clicked with me before this run. My fragile, innocent teenage mind was too overwhelmed at my first couple of shows, and I didn’t go with the right people. But Worcester ‘98 would be different. This was the first time I saw more than one show in a row. This was the first time I had submitted a request to Phish Tickets-By-Mail, and of course a fistful of choice tickets had shown up at my door a few weeks later because PTBM never lets you down. I walked into the show on 11/27/98 as a fan of the music but still perplexed as to why all the camp counselors would disappear for 3-5 nights in a row every summer. Then Phish played what I believe to this day to be the most complete and flawlessly executed show they have ever played, Wipeout teases or not. I walked out ready for Phish battle like never before.
The torrent of helplessness swept me away from there. Within a week, I figured out how to trade tapes over the internet and spent every dollar to my name on 50 Maxell XL-II tapes and enough postage to send them all to total strangers throughout the country as blanks-and-postage trades. Actually, this was my first foray into using the internet at all! Sure enough, within another couple of weeks, every one of those tapes magically came back to me with different Phish shows on them. As this was happening, I surreptitiously filled out another PTBM request for the New Year’s run in New York City without letting my mother know. This easily qualified as the most lofty and audacious maneuver of my life to that point. I was pretty much on lockdown in high school. I didn’t go to parties, came home on time out of fear of getting in trouble . . . you know, one of those kids. So here I am, senior year, finally armed with something I wanted to do badly enough that I didn’t care how much trouble it got me in.
“Mom, I got tickets to see Phish over New Year’s in New York and there’s no stopping me.”
(long pause) “OK, just be careful.”
FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (cue music)
You know the rest of the story from there.
So here we are, 11 years later. 11/27/09-11/29/09. Where did we end up and how did we get here?
SAME: The fanbase. Same demographics, same collective mentality . . . heck it’s probably 80% the same exact people. But what about the other 20%? There are many who aren’t on board anymore, and it’s the dichotomy between them and the people who stayed that interests me. The people who jumped off seem to come from three groups: those who were never that heavily invested in Phish in the first place, those whose interests simply moved on, and those who have grown to consider the pursuit of fandom of a band to be a puerile endeavor. Nothing wrong with people in the first two groups, but it’s the growing ranks of the third group that are disturbing. I'd wager, though, that most of the people in the third group spend multiple nights per week watching reality TV.
DIFFERENT: The ticket market. PTBM was perfect because the complexity of filling the damn thing out and getting it in on time created a situation where only about one in four phans could ever get their act together enough to pull it off. Each one of these phans would get four tickets to each show they requested, and then take care of the three people they knew who were too stoned to do it. The whole operation was genius. Ticketmaster on-sales were a cinch, too. As long as you got to that outlet at the local mall by 6am, you were all set. You walked out of there by 10:05AM with 4 great seats and a bunch of new Phish friends every time. Obviously, all of that is toast now. But here’s the kicker that I still can’t believe even though I know it’s true: the professional ticket agencies never touched Phish before 2001. The agencies certainly existed before they were online. But even as Phish sold out the biggest arenas in the country, the agencies just were not paying attention to Phish. Maybe they though it was a risky fad. Maybe they saw the cheap prices and figured there was no money in it. There were a lot more companies selling tickets than just Ticketmaster then, so maybe the agencies didn’t have all the inside tracks that they do now. The fact that there was no secondary ticket market for Phish tickets is unbelievable to me now in a world where agencies are billion-dollar operations with first dibs to tickets in every genre of entertainment at every venue.
DIFFERENT: Communications and technology. This is a pretty hackneyed topic at this point, so suffice it to say that I’m glad I gave away my 300-some Phish tapes in 2002, because today I would have to throw them away, which would have been much harder.
SAME: The quality of the live Phish product. Phish’s level of play the past three nights is the best I have heard since pre-hiatus. It’s been a long journey to get back here, hasn’t it? Phish certainly didn’t stay at this level for the past 11 years, but the fact that they have come this far back is astonishing, a truly rare feat in the entire documented history of musical or athletic comebacks. While it’s not fair to compare 11/27/98 up against anything that happened this weekend just because that is such a singularly spectacular show, I’ll take 11/28/09 and 11/29/09 and put them right up against 11/28/98 and 11/29/98 any time.
SAME: The amount of fun and friends at each run. Still the best times you can ask for. The whole show-going day is equal parts planned actions and actions left to chance, just like the way Phish plays. Surrendering to the flow still seems to leave me in a good place, time and time again. That’s all that ever mattered.