on saturday, i had a special experience. i congregated with the hippies, the old-timers, and the transplanted vermonters to watch one of the final performances of phish. they were playing in coventry, vermont, a town nestled in the hills of the northeast kingdom, that area of vermont where farms still rule and you never ask what somebody does for a living. the band chose the site in its home state to play its final shows last weekend. after twenty years together, they called it quits.
a movie theatre is a strange place to watch a live concert. especially strange when that concert is all the way across the country, and you are watching a satellite feed in high-definition video streaming in to your darkened room. the bay area contingent was fired up from the start. people got up in the aisles and danced when the band hit the stage. i went because of the nostalgia. i have invested ten years of my life listening to and studying this band, so i felt that it would only be fitting to wish them farewell properly. the last few shows i saw were less than stellar, one of them was downright disappointing. so, i wanted to give them a chance to really send me home thinking that they still had it going on.
the first set of the day started out a little slowly, but the band settled into a groove after a couple of songs. the video and the sound were spectacular. close-ups and split screens, a few shots of the crowd, always total emersion. all of the distractions inherent to seeing the band live slipped away and i was left with only the images and the music.
the band started really cranking, and they brought me up to a dizzying high. they were playing "antelope", the second to last song of the set. maybe the third or fourth time i saw that song, i came the closest that i've ever come to an out-of-body experience. i was nineteen, at a phish concert, and as the song built up to the tense finish, i felt my feet leaving the ground just a little bit (i was sober, by the way). since then, i've seen that song over a dozen times live, so seeing it one last time gave me a familiar tightness in my chest. the song builds and builds until the tension is lifted to the boiling point, then the band literally explodes into light and the tension is released in one big screaming gush. it's difficult to describe. i felt tears in my eyes, not from sadness but from joy. it had been a long time since phish had given me that shot in the chest that set my spine straight and caused my hair to stand up. it took me a couple of minutes to remind myself that i was sitting in a movie theatre and not standing on the side of a hill on the concert grounds at the age of nineteen.
so it's safe to say that the nostalgia quotient was high. as i wandered out into the lobby, i was surprised to see young kids playing video games and couples standing in line for popcorn. alien versus preadator was on the next screen. i really felt lost, as though i had been brought into a world of sound and light far away from emeryville california, and then dropped back into the movie theatre lobby a hundred years later.
outside, during the set break, we were talking to one of the security guards hired to work the show, a black man in his mid-forties from oakland. we asked him if he liked the show so far. "i've never seen them before, never even heard of them. but those guys get down!"
yes they do, but not anymore. it's all over for the phishes, may they have wonderful lives...
Posted by snackfight at August 17, 2004 01:20 PM