Welcome to Phish

Squeezed between a barefoot, tie dyed, and dreaded 20 something and a girl with a painted face hidden under a feathered headdress, I handed over my ticket to a security guard. As my ticket was torn in half and handed back, the steady sound of a heartbeat and Trey’s voice bellowing “In the cool shade of a banana tree” pranced about in the air around me. I broke my way through the barricade of people, and made my way onto the field. A sea full of tie-dye, glow sticks, and ecstatic, swaying bodies greeted me. “Oooh, Fee, you’re trying to live a life that’s completely free!”  Thousands of people swayed and grooved together in one mass of pure joy. As soon as I had stepped into the crowd, I was absorbed into the collective rhythm of swaying, dancing, feeling, being. By the time I had found my place in the crowd, the riffs and chords of Fee had melted effortlessly into the playful beginning of Rift. I had been to a concert before; the mass of sweaty dancing bodies was nothing new to me. But never before, in all my years of music obsession and concert attending, have I seen or felt such a connection to every single person in a crowd. Each note reverberating off of Trey’s guitar, every pluck of Mike’s bass, every key hit by Page, and every cymbal crashed by Fishman, each and every one, resonated in my very being. Before I knew what was happening, I wasn’t just feeling the music, I was moving with it. Without a single thought my body submitted to the rhythm, to the groove, and I was dancing. This wasn’t the simple bob of the head, the casual sway of the hips, or even the widely forbidden ‘grind;’ this was a genre all its own.  My arms wove in and out of each other; my knees gave to the rhythm, my feet kicked, and my head swayed in rhythmic ecstasy. I made my way through the sea of ‘phans,’ constantly grooving and weaving in and out of dancing strangers.  As I migrated closer and closer to the stage, the source of my ecstasy, my hand was grabbed. I was spun around to face a man wearing a kilt and a tie dyed Grateful Dead shirt that was down on one knee in front of me. He held my hand in his, looked into my eyes, and sang along, “Reba dip a ladle for a taste of her creation, and she knew that what she made would be the finest in the nation.” He simply kissed the back of my hand, and grooved on out of my life, just as quickly as he had entered it. Pleasantly flustered, I continued my pilgrimage towards the stage. All around me were smiling, dancing people, many of whom greeted me with nods, hugs, pats on the shoulder, and simple exchanges of joyous energy. As I turn to my right, I see my friend Rachel, grooving to the music that filled the atmosphere. My focus is drawn to a girl with a flower in her hair, latched to her partner by the hand, skipping towards us. She stops directly in front of Rachel, places her lips on hers, and whispers, “hey there, beautiful!” into her ear. Rachel stands motionless, stunned. My body continues to sway and dance, and I laugh in rhythm to the music. Each ridiculous moment, the serenading kilted stranger, the flowered kisser, the headdress-adorned boy who was aptly referred to as “chief,” each moment and interaction wove in and out of each other in a beautifully chaotic dance of life. “Pantomime mixtures of heaven and earth, jumbled events that have less than no worth.” Words, notes, chords, lyrics, harmonies, melodies, smiles, energies, ecstasies; a beautifully chaotic dance of life.  Hours had passed, the first set had come and gone, and the second set was coming to a close, but my body and soul still grooved to the music that was overflowing my very being.  And with the final line, ‘got blank space where my mind should be, space where my mind should be” the lights dimmed and my body slowed down to a standstill. For a brief moment, the crowd was eerily silent, mourning the end of a musical journey. Before I even had time to reflect upon what had just happened, an azure light lit up the crowd, and the melodic beginning riff of Sleeping Monkey restarted the inner groove of every ‘phan.’  The slow cadence of music forced my body back into the ecstatic dance that had become brilliantly familiar to me over the course of the night. Soon my voice went up in song along with every other ‘phan’ in the crowd, along with the man in the kilt, along with the girl with the flower in her hair, and along with the boy in the headdress. “Home on the train, why’d you send my monkey home on the train? The day that you arrived, my sleeping monkey is revived, but you sent him home on the train.”   As Trey’s voice trailed off into the cool summer’s night air, he struck the unmistakable first chord of Tweezer Reprise. A shot of adrenaline pumped through my veins, and my exhausted body grooved more fiercely than it ever had. Every single cell in my body was dancing, singing, feeling, and becoming the music. To this day, I can see Trey jumping about the stage and playing that infamous riff. The lights flashed in a chaotic finale, and the song was over. Trey’s voice filled my ears, “you know what, we’re all having such a great time, and we’ve only got a couple minutes before they kick us off the stage, and we played, uh, Tweezer in Hershey Park, but we never did Tweezer Reprise, so we’re going to play it again! This is for Hershey Park!” And with that single monologue began the most beautiful, ecstatic, and euphoric 4 minutes and 12 seconds of my life.  Tweezer Reprise began all over again, but this time it was even funkier, even more energetic, even more perfect. I no longer danced with the music, I became the music. My energy flowed into that with the person dancing next to me, and his into the person next to him, and everyone was connected and dancing as one, sharing this historic moment in jam history. Tweezer Reprise Reprise. And just like that, it was over. The lights went down for the final time that evening. The man I had been dancing near reached towards me and shook my hand, introducing himself as Matt. As we began the mass exodus out of the concert venue, Rachel, Matt, and I exchanged stories. Matt told us of a marriage proposal, and Rachel relived being kissed by a mysterious woman. Before we parted ways, Matt blew a strand of bubbles in our direction, and yelled, “welcome to Phish!” as he skipped away. Just like that, the evening that taught me to feel music, to be music, to really love and become one with music, was over. I had entered a whole new way of life, and with a smile on my face; I repeated those sacred words to myself, Welcome to Phish.