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Stuck In Normal
by Chris Bertolet - bertolet@earthlink.netThe phattest thing happened to me on Phish tour last month.
Check it: Trey pulled this little plastic object across a metal string, causing it to vibrate at a specific frequency. A device set into his wooden sounding board received the vibrations, and converted them to electromagnetic impulses. Then a wire carried these impulses to a tube, which amplified them into ambient waves of sound. My eardrum received the sound waves, re-coded them as electrochemical impulses, and sent them to my brain to be processed into perception. Then it all happened again and again and again, for, like, three hours. It was way phucking rad, bro! After that, we mowed the phatty dollar garlic grilled cheeses until the five-oh kicked us out of the lot.
Even when imagined as a one-way street, reducing live music to the technical is an exercise in futility. The experience of receiving music is as unique and complex as your own neural tangle, which explains why one fan's earth-shattering musical epiphany is another fan's bathroom break.
Nor do sounds travel through a sensory vacuum. They combine with sights, smells, breezes, and the resonance of earth underfoot -- and all of those stimuli bleed together to drench the ever-changing palette of mood. No matter how crisp, using a recording to describe a Phish show is like using a handful of ashes to describe a forest fire.
Though a tape can't convey visual or tactile stimuli, it can, under the right conditions, suggest an experience, triggering fleeting memories of sights and smells, and a lot of folks prefer audience tapes to soundboards for this very reason. Even today, when I listen to the "China->Rider" from my first Dead show, the sound of the crowd erupting in response to Garcia's declaratory "wish I was a headlight" verse stands the hair bolt up on my arms, just as it did in Hampton Coliseum twelve years ago March.
That moment was my first inkling that music was more than uni-directional, more than players feeding listeners. Something else happened that night, something symbiotic, something that transcended the conveyance of sound. Something was created, and I was a part of it.
Walking out of that show, basking in afterglow, we happened upon a girl in distress. She had lost her kite in the low-hanging fog (the kind of problem that can defy solution in certain states of mind). The girl was still clinging to the spool when a passerby offered a suggestion that seemed to please her.
"Climb the string!"
Creative thinkers are all around us, and most of them don't even know it. Most people are never encouraged to jump off the hamster wheel long enough to nurture their creativity, to find ways to express hopes and fears and dreams. If you would believe the Machine, the only kind of expression worth creating (or consuming, for that matter) is that which appeals to all and challenges none. Coddle, and snort coke from the cleavage of bikini models. Innovate, and suck exhaust from the tailpipe of obscurity.All of which makes it much easier to dismiss creative pursuit as a path for the lucky and talented few. Public school systems cut music and art programs from curricula because they're deemed "non-essential." Is this really what we've come to believe?
In his 1963 treatise Strength to Love, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted." This may be truer today than ever before. Our nation is constipated by Business As Usual, our capital markets swollen with greed and ripe for yet another "adjustment." Reality. We're numbed to Politics As Usual, sleepwalking through a democracy so bereft of real ideas that the words "President Cybill Shepherd" don't even sound like a bad punch line anymore. Reality. And we're so medicated by Art As Usual that we've swallowed the biggest lie of all -- that we're programmed only to receive.
Reality?
In my undergrad years at Duke, I witnessed first hand how much an audience can influence performance. The uncanny invention and spontaneity of the Cameron Indoor Stadium hoops fanatics was like jet fuel for those players; they couldn't help but excel in the electrified atmosphere we made. In basketball, this phenomenon is known as "The Sixth Man."When I first started seeing Dead shows, the expressions of joy and individuality were immediately familiar. Ditto my first years in the Phish scene. Much as you might hate the "HOOD!" chant by now, Benjy Eisen's Red Rocks gambit charged that performance. The band took the crowd's spirit and poured it right back into the show, and Mother Nature responded electrically, as if inspired Herself. The spontaneous glow stick war at 1997's Great Went capped a feast of creative expression on the part of band and fans that no one there will ever forget.
As the creativity of Phish fans began to blossom, the Secret Language -- a goofy little parlor trick which nonetheless seemed to make fans feel like they were in on the joke -- all but disappeared. It was as if the band had acknowledged that we were running with the ball, and no longer needed signals to prompt creative response.
Just a few short years later, it looks to me like maybe they were wrong.
Glow stick wars, Stash claps and Hood chants have grown into hackneyed cliches. These days, naked stage diving passes for novelty, and creepy, "Heil Hitler" fist pumping from the RML (Rail Mafia Lemmings) passes for audience participation. Instead of kindness and a spark of wit, one's place in the hierarchy of phandom is now determined by one's "crew," and said crew's willingness to use physical force to carve out the front-row real estate they need to mindlessly worship.
I vehemently believe that the violent incidents at the Tucson, Ames, and Normal Phish shows (do I really need to qualify them as "alleged?") are symptoms of this cancer. I'm not deluded enough to believe that any of the thugs involved are computer literate, so I won't bother preaching to the absent, but I'd like to know where the rest of us were while these Neanderthals pummeled someone to a bloody pulp in the name of "lot justice."
It's a well-known medical fact that cancer doesn't stop advancing until it kills the host organism, or until something stands in its way. Ironically, the overwhelmingly positive majority of fans in the Phish organism deplore confrontation, especially confrontation that springs from a sense of moral rectitude. A lot of these people gave up on the scene years ago, opting to experience shows as in-and-out surgical strikes instead of risking unpleasant encounters with the underbelly of the lots. Who can blame them?
Truth is, Phish's Sixth Man is on the disabled list, and the big game is only months away. The crowd that descends on Big Cypress -- a fragile wildlife refuge and Indian reservation -- will bear a greater responsibility than perhaps any major concert crowd ever has. And what happens at Big Cypress may set a tone that determines Phish's longevity, or lack thereof, as a viable touring act. It could be a party to end all parties, or a headline to end all headlines.
It's time to call upon the best we have, to invoke creativity and positivity as a weapon. It's time to acknowledge that each and every person in an audience is part of a larger organism, a player in a fluid performance that doesn't begin with the first pull of a plastic pick across a metal string, or end when the lights go down.
It's time to take a page from people like the sparkling, winged faeries of the Halley's Comet Clan from Seattle, who you surely noticed if you did any time on Phish's West Coast jaunt this Fall. Apart from looking pretty damn cool, the costumes these Phish-heads sport at every show are a brilliant and non-confrontational response to the choking conformity permeating the scene. Says founder Holly Finn, "I think the sparkly thing evolved out of me wanting to just be right in [the crowd's] face about not having to look or act a certain way. Seeing us making huge spectacles of ourselves seems to relax people, to help them enjoy the show -- which is why we should all be there." Cue applause.
Of course, I'm not advocating that 80,000 people go out and buy wings for New Years Eve (though you can at www.faeriecreative.com if you're so inclined). I am, however, encouraging everyone to use the millenium -- regardless of where they celebrate it -- as a chance to express themselves. A chance to consider the importance of their individual actions to the sanctity and fruitfulness of the live music experience. To consider that it may no longer be enough just to refrain from destructive behavior, and that a bright and sparkling counter-offensive is long overdue. To dig into our wellspring of creativity and resurrect the Sixth Man.
Chris Bertolet was recently disqualified from the National Fingerpainting Championships in McKittrick, CA, for using a thumb.
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