Finding Phish and finding out why I do the things I do
August, 1995: I had graduated college. I got a job waiting tables at the Olive Garden. I quit to drive cross country with a buddy. I got home. I had loose plans to follow the Grateful Dead in the autumn. I was at the height of my neo-hippie stage.
Then Jerry Garcia died, the Dead canceled their tour, and all my neo-hippie friends jumped aboard the Phish bandwagon. I liked Phish well enough -I listened to their studio album “Picture of Nectar” a ton on that trip across America - but I didn’t join the crowd after the death of Garcia. Fact is, I thought everyone that did was a poseur and only it for the good times, and not necessarily the music, and certainly not the neo-hippie ethos. (Of course, looking back, me jumping on the Dead bandwagon in 1993 and becoming a neo-hippie was the height of poseurdum, but since it pretty much stuck for all these years, I’ll allow it.)
At any rate, I swore off Phish. I wasn’t going to follow a new band just because everyone else decided to. This was perhaps my most iconoclastic move ever.
Also, as it turns out, one of my stupidest. Fast forward to present day. My intellectually disabled 9-year-old daughter is having a fit about something or another, and she was very literally bouncing around the room. My synapses had that exact thought, which is the title of the one song by Phish most everyone has heard - kind of like their “Touch of Grey” - and so I said in the very next moment, “OK Google, play Bouncing Around the Room by Phish” and next thing you know … my daughter started bouncing around the room, but in a nice way. “Again!” she said after it was over. And by the fourth time, she was singing along.
At that point, I decided to put together a playlist of Phish songs for her. As any parent - of typical or disabled kids - can tell you, if you find something that works, you turn it up to 11.
I sorta randomized the playlist, just blindly picking songs Spotify spit out, and … well, heck, I kind of know that one … and this one I definitely heard from that “Picture of Nectar” album … and whoa, this one is awesome, let me hear that again … and …
And now I realize I could’ve been enjoying myself with Phish for the last 25 years but because I was a man of misplaced principle, I didn’t.
By the way, this is the second time this happened to me. First time was when my son was a year or so, and we were on vacation, and he had a fever on the day we were flying home, and at the airport in Jamaica he stopped crying during “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffett (we were eating at the restaurant of the same name) and I got home and immediately bought a $1.99 used copy of “Songs You Know By Heart” at the Princeton Record Exchange - it’s Buffett’s greatest hits album - and I discovered, much to my surprise, that I did know all the songs by heart, which set me off on a Buffett buffet that is still going strong a decade later. I now know his entire catalog by heart. Pretty talented guy, as it turns out, and someone I never would’ve dove
into because I ain’t no Parrothead.
Also stupid.
So what’s the point here? Well, that I’m a schmuck, but we already knew that. Also this: Don’t be your own worst enemy.
Listen: Between corona, my kids getting older, me getting older, all that stuff, I’ve kind of sleepwalked into a not-quite midlife not-quite crisis. I’m basically just thinking more, trying to see the finer details of my own personal painting. I’ve become very curious as to my “whys.” Why I do this and not that, and so on. I’m not exactly seeking answers to the Big Questions, but I am seeking answers to why I do the things I do. And I’ve found, almost without exception, the reasons I do the things I do are based on nothing much at all.
Most of us get a little more rigid as we get older, get stuck in our ways. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but it’s something I’ve been finding myself fighting against
recently.
There was no good reason why I didn’t allow Phish into my life, and there’s no good reason why I do just about anything else, either.
I’m not trying to get smarter. I’m just trying to understand why I’m a schmuck. And now I get to do it to “Backwards Down the Number Line” and “Farmhouse” and yes, all you diehard Phish fans, I know I’m just scratching the surface, gimme a break. (Also: Yes, I realize Trey was born and raised in Princeton and went to Mercer County College for a spell. I could’ve been writing about him forever. But again, remember: Schmuck.)