|
|
Inaudible Hiss
by Dean Budnick - budnick@fas.harvard.edu
I could enrich your life with some scintillant humor about the lack of a Mikey cartoon this month but let's face it, you've long since forget that we ever printed any poorly-drawn, barely-legible strip...
So, here's something a bit more promising. Part one of a fictional work by the ubiquitous Jesse Jarnow, which should be humorous, enlightening and a bit more...
THE KNICK PAPERS
by Jesse JarnowOctober 10, 1999
Oberlin, Ohio
Dean:
After the second show at the Knick stuck under the windshield wiper of my car, along with about 37 flyers for upcoming shows by so-called jambands (it's your fault, Budnick), was a manila envelope. Inside was a tattered manuscript written on a hodge-podge of legal-pad paper, the backs of multiple receipts from gas stations across the greater northeast, and several XL-II labels. Here it is. It's confusing the fuck out of me, but perhaps you can make something of it.Jesse.
I feel it coming though I should write this first. Everything's gone all feverish and blurry, taboot. No Rice Krispy Treats for me tonight, folks; this is pure uncut life. I think. I might well be mistaken. My friend Erin came to me and told me that it was time for me to go. Ordinarily, I wouldn't take that so darned seriously, but things tend to take on more weight than usual in light of the events that led up to it. Erin disappeared during the first set of the second night at Nassau, just vanished... and came back at the Knick. The time elapsed between her disappearance and subsequent visitation didn't confuse me too much. I didn't have enough time to get boggled.
This is all spinning rapidly out of my control. To be perfectly honest, it never was in my control. I'm just losing the ability to describe it. The short version is that it has been proven, without a doubt in my mind, that there's considerably more than meets the mind going on at a Phish concert. I'm not talking about the usual drop-several-gel-tabs-and-taste-your-spearmint-flavored-brain mystic mumbo jumbo. Nuh-uh. This is cosmic truth, and it explains just why Phish are so goddamned good, dig? That's why it's time to go.
The first event that need be traced occurred on the first night of the Nassau run. I taped. After the gig, I took some time getting back down to the section to pack up. By the time I got to my deck, the area was pretty empty. I was patched out of a pair of Schoeps up towards the soundboard proper. As I dumped the D8 into the bag, I noticed what appeared to be an unclaimed box of DAT tapes sitting on the ground near my setup. I looked around. No one near me seemed to be looking for it, so I called out. "Anybody missing some blanks?" No response. I dropped the box in my bag.
Sitting in the hotel room the next day, I began cloning tapes of the first night for a friend. I was out of tapes, so I grabbed a blank out of the box. I pulled off the shrink wrap, popped it in my deck, and hit fast-forward to unpack the thing. The tape wouldn't start. Weird. I took it out of the Sony and looked at it. For some inexplicable reason, the tape was all the way at the end. Doubly weird. I rewound it. Out of instinct more than anything, I hit play midway through the rewind. There was a signal. With a flip of a switch, I returned power to my speakers. Phish came out. Triply weird. In an attempt to figure out what I was listening to, I went back all the way to the beginning.
It wasn't a show that I'd heard before, and it clearly sounded like 1999 Phish. There was a Meatstick on the tape, which kind of clinched that part. During the chorus just previous to the dance, a huge cheer erupted up out of the audience. Trey momentarily lost his way and began the next chorus several bars before Mike, Page, and Fish. He giggled, stepped back, and jumped back into the tune. How typical.
Though I didn't recognize the setlist, I figured that it was a recording of a show from earlier in the tour that I just hadn't had a chance to get a copy of yet. The only confusing part is that it sounded like a soundboard, though I wrote it off to just a darned good sounding auddie. I listened to the whole show. It was killer. I never got around to cloning the tape. On the way to the show, I played the tape to my friends Jeff - who would be running my deck that night - and Erin. We were staying relatively close to the venue, so we only got to listen to the first song of the tape -- a long and interesting Piper which began with a distant chord progression that only vaguely suggested the outline of the tune.
Surprisingly enough, the band opened with a very similar version that night at Nassau. With some palm mutes, Trey counted off AC/DC Bag and the band launched into it behind him. Page moved the band into ragtime territory while the band pushed onwards in the direction of pure, unadulterated funk. No shit. That was the second song on the mystery tape. Likewise, Suzy Greenberg was third on the tape and third in the lineup that night. The realization crept over me like the dawning of an imminent disaster.
At first, before any connections could be made, it was a distant feeling of discomfort -- an uneasy hum around the perimeter of my consciousness. Erin wandered off. "I've gotta go," she told me.
"Promise you'll come back...?"
"Of course." She hugged me and disappeared down towards the aisle.
As the song continued, the humming increased. Each individual moment made perfect sense, like nothing was wrong. When I stopped focusing, though, the vibrations became almost unbearable. Damn Fortuna to hell. Though I understood the concept perfectly well, it just wouldn't sink n: someone had taped the show the day before it'd happened. I could not grasp the fact that somehow this tape came into existence before the music on it had been made.
Then, the band started Meatstick. Just as it had clinched what I had heard before as being from 1999, the Meatstick confirmed that what I had heard was, in fact, what I was presently hearing. During one of the final choruses of the song before the dance segment, a figure appeared on the perimeter of the stage, rushing towards Trey and the spotlight. Trey turned to face him just as he approached. Simultaneous to that, a mammoth security guard encircled the figure's body with his massive arms. Lifting abruptly, he carried the body off. As he did so, the body flailed... and did the Meatstick, fingers encircling the side of head, arms rotating, and hands clapping. The entire effect was almost comical.
For me, it was almost completely canceled out. As the crowd roared, Trey giggled, and band reenacted the tape that I had exactly. This, I thought, was beyond even Phish's capacity for mind-fucking silliness. If that weren't enough to induce overload, after Trey and Mike had removed their instruments in preparation for the dance, Trey stepped to the mic. "We're gonna have out friend Erin come out and help us with this little dance that we've got going here." As usual, Trey didn't know how to finish a thought. "So, uh, we'd like you all to do the dance, we'd like you all to do the Meatstick, along with us if you want to, just, you know, do it..." Smiling even more foolishly than before, Trey hopped back and looked to the side of the stage.
Lo, Erin walked out. Stepping in between Trey and Mike, she looked straight out into the audience. On cue, in perfect synch with the musicians, she began doing the Meatstick dance. I was pretty far back, and couldn't particularly make out her face, but it was definitely her. I sensed a weird energy crossing from Trey to Mike. She happened to be directly in between them, somehow becoming a conduit for the crackling electricity that was sent skittering between the pair. I smiled for Erin. Though I knew that she knew various folks who, through tenuous associations, knew the band, I had no clue how she'd gotten up there.
I spent the rest of the show utterly boggled. I could barely pay any attention to the music. When I did, it's not like it surprised me all too much -- I'd already heard the show earlier in the day. I just kept waiting for Erin to show up. I figured that maybe she had some sort of explanation for all this gobbledygook that had transpired. I sat fixed in my seat for the entirety of the setbreak. She didn't show. Ditto for the second set. Nor did she show up at the car after the show. It was extremely unlike her. Jeff and I waited a good solid hour for her before taking off. During that time, I did my best to explain to Jeff my sheer and utter confusion. Though I played the tape for him, I don't think the weirdness was successfully transferred to his being.
April Issue: Home | Editors | Features | Columns | Photos | Regional | New Groove
Road Trip | Tour Journal | Venue | Levels | Ghosts | Homegrown | Inaudible | CDs | Charts
JamBands.Com is published on the 15th of every month. Submissions are due ten days earlier on the fifth of each month. Please contact the specific editor for the section you are interested in contributing to. For general content comments, please e-mail jambands@jambands.com. For all technical web site related issues, please contact Sarah Bruner or David Steinberg