Requiem
My first experience with the Internet occurred in 1989; a friend got me
onto the distribution list for the Phish Digest, a compendium of
Phish-related e-mail which was sent out about daily. The Phish Digest
would later morph into rec.music.phish, the newsgroup that we know, love
and/or revile today, but in those days, the number of people who were both
into Phish and had access to computers was very small - maybe a couple of
hundred people. Those were extraordinary, exciting days, and
participation in the Digest was almost as good as listening to tapes. The
people who made up Phish.net were articulate and enthusiastic, and the
small group made for intimate and impassioned discussions. We argued over
whether Phish ought to be kept as a local secret (as if we had any power
over the juggernaut that is Phish Inc.!). The Helping Phriendly Book
didn't exist, and the tapes that were circulating were a mess of sets and
philler, but we watched as people came forward and volunteered to be the
keepers of the setlists. The Lyrics file came together as people posted
their interpretations of You Enjoy Myself and Mike's Song and Weekapaug
Groove and Destiny Unbound; I served as the Lyrics File administrator for
a while, and I can still remember the excitement of receiving a rare live
Buffalo Bill, and transcribing the lyrics with repeated stops and starts
on my tape deck ("'Looking for owls?' the young man
asked..."). Newbie offers abounded, yet weren't overwhelming; my
first show was the Carleton College show from April'91, famous not for its
music but rather Fish's dreadful "Prison Joke." The Phish Digest
community participated in Phish's transition to Elektra Records; we were
asked to come up with phrases or descriptions that could be used in
promotional materials by the record company. We successfully petitioned
the Lords of the Internet to have a rec.music.phish group; prior to that
there were only three rec.music.bands (the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, and
Bob Dylan), and all other musical acts were forced into the
alt.fan.pantheon.
With the transition to Usenet, the volume of posts to the newsgroup
increased dramatically. The Phish Digest, which provided the Usenet
postings in 16-20kB e-mail messages, now came more than once a
day. Sometimes the Digest would consist of a two-line reply to the entire
previous Digest, which spawned "helpful" vitriole about how to use
e-mail. Membership swelled with each successive school year. Patterns
started to emerge; some of them were so common we actually coined enduring
names for them - most notably, the WATSIYEM? posts ("What Are They Saying
In You Enjoy Myself?"). The signal-to-noise ratio was degraded
considerably as the newcomers, these ill-mannered invaders, filled the
Digests with "Me too!" posts and day-after-the-show grovels and moronic,
crude, amoral and just-plain-worthless drivel. I was appalled at what our
cozy corner of cyberspace had become - a raging frat-house, where our
sensitive and philosophical conversations about the nuances of Silent in
the Morning were drowned out by the pot-clouded, beer-soaked,
barely-literate inanities of people whose successful admission to
post-high-school institutions of learning so flabbergasted me that I
lashed out in the best way I knew: with public scorn of their dreadful use
of the English language.
And so was born GrammarMan, who took it upon himself to stamp out bad
grammar and syntax by publicly deriding those newbies who dared post to
the sanctum that was Phish Digest. I soon realized, though, that
GrammarMan would quickly become overwhelmed, because (a) his victims
weren't getting any smarter any faster, and (ii) his pool of candidate
newbies was growing rapidly, faster than GrammarMan could keep up. So
GrammarMan changed focus, and out of the ashes arose DownerMan (the name
came from one of my stung victims, who querulously accused me of being a
complete downer - guilty as charged!). You could count on
DownerMan to put down entire segments of the Phish scene - the drunken
college kids with their baseball hats on backwards, the dirt-surfer
touring pholk, obsessive and greedy tapers, you name it, I insulted them
or otherwise questioned their right to exist. DownerMan assaulted the
band, condemning Fish for killing jams by slowing the beat down to
nothing, and Trey for screwing up Divided Sky solos. My alter-ego
assaulted people who posted rumors about the band's sexual and chemical
proclivities. DM came down hard on people who posted their tips on
cheating the Post Office out of postage for tapes. Every once in a while
there was a post which did not come as a result of provocation, but these
seemed few and far between; mostly DownerMan came across as some sort of
uber-grouch, the resident curmudgeon, whose well-composed but ultimately
futile efforts amused some, perplexed others, and were largely ignored by
the great unwashed masses. On more than one occasion I had to explain
that I was not, as one might surmise, an online source for
barbiturates; rather, I would sheepishly explain that I saw it my duty to
keep the rabble in line.
DownerMan's presence on Phish.net waned with my own interest in the
twists and turns that Phish's music had taken; I dropped off the radar
with the school year that started in the fall of 1996, around the time
that Trey gave up playing guitar and started playing effects pedals
(something he's mercifully scaled back in the past two years). I turned
my musical attention to other bands, both jam- and not-jam-, as well as my
own bass-playing, and life was good without Phish. Then, two years ago,
Dean Budnick tracked me down and asked whether I would consider writing a
column, entitled DownerMan Revival, for a new online music magazine
he was starting with Andy Gadiel. I said that the DownerMan of old was
retired, and that I wasn't sure I could summon the hostility and stamina
that it took to be a full-time crank - and I sure as hell didn't want to
have to troll rec.music.phish for "inspiration." But Dean reassured me
that I could write about whatever I wanted to, and he's allowed my columns
to grace this space alongside real writers like Bertolet, without any
editorial interference.
But there has been something nagging about the idea of publishing under
the DownerMan moniker, and it came to me with great clarity as I discussed
the concept of miracles with someone who's recently helped me with
some deep thoughts. In her words, a miracle is something that happens
that you never would have predicted would happen. I was talking about how
I rarely ever gave myself credit for anything, how my own internal
standards were set so high that achieving them was impossible - and if
they were ever achieved, then either the standards were too low or I
didn't attain them legitimately. I couldn't see miracles occurring in my
life (like Dean Budnick calling me up out of the blue and asking me to
write a column for a music magazine), because the standards were
always out of reach. That's how I set the rules of the
game. "Wow," she said, "That sounds like a real downer." click ... Oh
shit...
People know you as who you've been. (Please re-read that sentence
until you get it.) They come to expect you to behave like you've been in
the past; that's predictable, and people like predictable. People who
know DownerMan know him from a time when I set standards for the world,
and the world failed to meet them, and I tried to let the world know of
its failures. Sure, we had a few laughs along the way; cynicism is a rich
vein to mine, and Lord knows there's enough fodder posted to Usenet to
keep the mockery going until the cows come home. That's the perspective
that a character called DownerMan once held, but that's not me any
more. Cynicism is bankrupt. After the last giggle, the question
remains: What's next? I'm interested in writing about answers to that
question, not mocking those who try to ask it.
And so, with no heaviness of heart, no sadness, and no regret, I hang
up the name of DownerMan. This will be the last column written under that
byline. I have been toying with other noms de plume, but nothing comes to
me as meaningfully as simply being Alek.
Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next month.
Alek
There's a house in Oregon where I will continue to be
known as DownerMan, which suits me fine; there, it's a nickname, not a
persona.
