by Benjy Eisen

I want to talk about The Grateful Dead, Phish, an erection, and God. I want to talk about gravity's rainbow as it shoots across a wide-open sky. I want to talk about red-eye nights at The Wetlands, The Stone Church, The Crystal Ballroom and beyond. I want to sing you a song about making love. And I want you to sing it back to me. But first:

I'm writing this from the passenger seat of my car, parked under a halogen lamppost in Wyoming, Pennsylvania. I know - it sounds like I'm in two states, and perhaps I am, but Wyoming is a small town on the outskirts of Wilkes-Barre, PA. The kind of town where there's a pancake house that serves great pumpkin pie and where you can sit for hours drinking coffee and they won't mind.

What I'm doing in the passenger seat of my own car, I do not know. No one else is driving it. Luckily, the car is parked. About ten minutes ago I was in Utopia. I know - it sounds like I was in paradise, and perhaps I was, but Utopia is a head shop in downtown Wilkes-Barre, a small city that has a surprising sleepy headiness to it. Well, actually that's not true. There's nothing heady about the town whatsoever. But there's a surprising number of would-be heads crawled into little corners and back alleys here. Inside Utopia I was drawing Yuba Gold out of a hookah while I watched a teenage Phish girl contemplate Tarot cards. Earlier today I was in Barnes & Noble and thought about all the many books I have yet to read. And write. I've been searching for a book that could tell me about the clouds. Nothing too technical, just a tiny little introduction - you know, perhaps a chapter on Cumulus and one on Strata. I want to know about them. Barnes & Noble has no such book. If you know of one, please tell me. I want to buy it as a gift to myself for spring. I want to be able to look up at the sky and not only know the names of the clouds but why they form the way they do and if they come bringing rain and what they do for fun on a Saturday night.

What I do for fun on a Saturday night varies. But it has nothing to do with clouds, per-se.

It's been too long since I've seen live music. The last jam band I saw was maybe four weeks ago when I caught The Brothers Past at the Blue Terrapin. I'm getting restless for another show. I did manage to see a cute little husband and wife duo sing Simon and Garfunkel and Jimmy Buffet tunes at a pub in the Poconos the day after Valentine's Day. The wife sat down and had a drink while her husband played "Embryonic Journey" to a room of five drunks, two couples and a retired boxer. It was warm and fuzzy. Almost romantic. But it wasn't rock and roll.

My girlfriend has told me that one of the appealing qualities she sees in me is the ability to make love to life. Good!! I have every intention to!! I WANT to make love to life. How could I not? I mean, is there really any other way to go about it?

When I wake up in the morning, I want to be like Pooh Bear, excited and enthralled about my choices for breakfast. And I want to take off all my clothes and do a foxtrot on my way into the shower and surrender myself to the flow of holy water and Ivory Coast. I want to sing "Roses Are Free" or "Limb By Limb" or "Scarlet Begonias" or "Hot Air Balloon" or whatever it is that pops into my head as I wash my ears and rub soap on my belly and I want to sing loudly, perhaps even a bit off key, and who cares - I'm having fun! All this and the day hasn't even started!!

By nightfall I want to be in the arms of elegance, exalted with the endless possibility of the electric neon night and Allen Ginsberg's America. I want to walk into bars and find my friends moving their heads and shaking their asses to a wonderful band of amateurs working their way through "In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed" and I want them to call me up and woo me into driving to Albany, if not to see Deep Banana then at least to join them for a Rage Fest where we could pop in a "MOMA Dance" and do it all night long, and I want them to honk their horns in my driveway so I'll drop whatever it is I'm doing and run with them to the 8x10 in Baltimore. I want Carla to get in touch with me and tell me to pack my bags and not to forget a pillow so we can high tail it up to Worcester to catch The Disco Biscuits at the Tammany or trick me into hopping into her car as we run riot down to Atlanta for another week of Phish Tour '98. I want to find out that the Slip is playing at Gullifty's Downstairs again so I can kick it at the house on Harvard with nuggets and glass and have Bone drive 110 m.p.h. for the three miles to the venue and I want to walk in and find Melham talking to some barfly about how the 57 minute Runaway Jim snapped his skull in half.

I want to make love to life.

I want to move with the night until it becomes the dawn, like we did those times at Matt W.'s house in Northport, Long Island in which we'd come back from the Wetlands at six in the morning, last spring when everybody still rolled, and Deanne and I would talk soul and the funny life of fireflies as we sat around the brim of a hot tub with only our feet dangling in and we'd cut butts and hours later Will and I would look up at the camera and sing "Life, he said, is all about style." It would go on nine, ten, eleven A.M. and the welcome warmth of springtime would reveal itself to be a soft and gentle thing and by noon Sagried had already explained to me twice about the jewelry on her arms and Maureen and I would talk about Kerouac and she'd show me a picture of herself half-naked somewhere doing something, I forget what, and we'd all fall asleep in the early afternoon watching six hour video tapes of The Simpsons without the commercials. I wouldn't make it past the first hour. No one would.

I would wake up soon after and call shotgun for the drive to Poughkeepsie - Ghetto Town, New York - and celebrate the arrival of spring with Peep Dawg Shoenacker by picking up a six pack of Budweiser and grilling hot dogs while watching hockey and maybe that's not all that heady but God damn it if it wasn't a celebration! A couple months later the two of us would jump into a Winnebago with eight others and hit 20 out of 20 Phish shows for the last summer of the millennium and by that time we no longer cared about what was heady and what was not, we merely moved rhythmically like neon angels pulsating with the light of jiboo. What could you do with a bunch of East Coast hipsters like us, but put us in patchworks and call us kids?

In September, 9/9/99, we reconvened in a coffeehouse in Vancouver called "Blunt Brothers" and sitting around backgammon tables we laid out our plans for taking over the world. By then we started to act as a team, continually growing and morphing and always trying to make life just a little bit more enjoyable, always taken by every second, each day a wonderbread of ideas and movements and Symphonies and a whirlwind of action as we sacked a good one to life at large, 'cause we knew we may only get one chance.

And all this time different friends of mine were falling in love with different friends of mine and before we knew it we'd start to pair off one-by-one and two-by-two and none of it was that strange since after all that is how it starts to happen and by November I'd be with Mary Jo and happy as a clam, even happier, knowing that everything that had been starting to happen was now actually happening.

Check back for Part Two, which deals with The Dead, Phish, an apple, an erection and God. (I promise).