You Don't Know Me but You Don't Like Me: Phish, Insane Clown Posse, and My Misadventures with Two of Music's Most Maligned Tribes

by Rabin, Nathan

  “Does Drew Barrymore suck a mean dick?” yelled someone from the audience.

  In most performances, a heckler who’d yell something like that would be angrily escorted out of a venue. Here it was a query that angrily demanded an answer, though I cannot remember exactly what that answer was.

  After Green finished his casually triumphant set, we rambled on over to the Ladies Night tent to witness the debut Gathering performance of Tila Tequila. It promised to be a folly of epic proportions. It did not disappoint.

  Like seemingly every other performer, Tequila came out an hour late to angry hoots and scattered projectiles. Violent J’s wife, Sweet Sugar Slam, a Juggalo fixture and the mother of Violent J’s children, introduced Tequila as an old high school friend. The desperation in her voice was palpable. Sugar Slam was trying to avoid the inevitable by presenting Tequila not as a controversial and reviled tabloid fixture but rather as a friend of the family. Heaven knows nothing resonates with Juggalos quite like the cry of “Family!”

  A smattering of burly security guards formed a human wall of muscle for Tequila to perform behind once the projectiles started flying. The intense security measures became a self-fulfilling prophecy. They felt less like a deterrent than a challenge.

  Tequila came out in a skimpy pair of Daisy Dukes and a bikini top. She was tiny, Lilliputian, even, and the presence of the lumbering men beside her made her seem even tinier by comparison. She looked like a miniature drag queen as she began performing selections from her new EP.

  Just about everyone we’d spoken to on the ground that day predicted that something unfortunate would happen to Tequila that night. There was a dark, malevolent energy in the air all day long, though it was difficult to determine whether all the ominous talk of Tequila’s imminent humiliation was Juggalo bluster.

  The moment she came onstage, Tequila was met with a flurry of bottles and other debris from festival goers who had been drinking and smoking and drugging for hours. Earlier that day a Juggalo excitedly told us about the time he filled a soda bottle with urine and shit, then screwed the cap on loosely so that it would come off in flight when he threw it at Andrew W.K. He looked to repeat that performance during Tequila’s set.

  In an attempt to hold on to her fading dignity, Tequila would dart purposefully between her offensive line of burly security guards, peeking her head out and lip-synching a lyric before immediately racing out of the way of a projectile. Tequila wasn’t a performer anymore. No, she was exclusively a target.

  That’s not entirely fair. She had other things to offer them as well. “Show your tits!” the crowd began to chant with more urgency and force than they’d chanted anything before. The cry was ubiquitous at the Gathering, but in this emotionally charged context it began to take on a menacing air. It was generally harmless, but the anger toward Tequila, however misplaced it might have been, felt visceral and real.

  It was impossible not to empathize with this tiny little woman confronting a crowd that seemed to hate her for reasons she couldn’t begin to understand. What could she do? The Juggalos’ anger toward her wasn’t rational. She hadn’t done anything to hurt them. All she’d done was become rich and famous exploiting her sexuality.

  In a bid to win over a hostile crowd, Tequila jeered, “I ain’t no Paris Hilton up in this bitch! I’m not no Lauren Conrad. I’m real.”

  Tequila was attempting to communicate with the crowd through coded language. She was trying to say, “I understand. I know what it’s like to have nothing. I know what it’s like to have to remake yourself from scratch because the world tells you you’re shit. I know what it’s like to be hated and misunderstood by people who know nothing of me beyond the media stereotype. I wasn’t born rich. I’ve had to fight for everything I have and I’ll never stop fighting. People like me and you never do.”

  That is what Tequila was trying to say when she said that she wasn’t Paris Hilton or Lauren Conrad. She was trying to establish, consciously or unconsciously, that she had a lot more in common with Juggalos than with heiresses and pampered reality-show princesses.

  Tequila’s performance became an epic battle of wills. Time seemed to slow down. Each song lasted an eternity. The fifteen minutes Tequila was slated to be onstage began to feel more like a week. Could she last? Would she make it through the set? Should she? “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere,” Tequila crowed in a supremely misguided attempt to impress the crowd with her toughness. Tequila faced an agonizing decision in that moment: Do you give in to a crowd that hates you, or do you try to win them over with your resilience and defiance?

  Tequila chose the toughness and resilience route. It was a mistake. Combined with the confrontational nature of her songs, it lent an air of aggression to her performance the crowd responded to in turn. It was as if she were daring the crowd to live up to its abysmal reputation. The more Tequila said, “I’m not going nowhere!” the more abuse she endured. At one point Tom Green came out to do a silly little dance and serve as a decoy to distract Tequila’s abusers.

  Green’s crowd-pleasing presence only slowed the abuse slightly. Like dogs, the crowd sensed fear and went in for the kill.

  “Show your tits! Show your tits!” angrily demanded the crowd.

  A panicked Tila Tequila threw off her top. It seemed a reasonable price to pay for this abuse to end. But the abuse did not end. It only slowed a little before it began again with great force and urgency. The fabled bottles of shit began raining down on the stage. Tequila was finally forced to admit defeat. She ran offstage. Juggalos ran after her in pursuit. They chased her to her trailer and overturned it. The next morning images of a bruised and battered Tequila were all over the news, along with her threat to file a lawsuit against Insane Clown Posse that would shut down the Gathering permanently.

  There was an air of grim inevitability to the Tila Tequila affair. There was only one way this story was going to end, and it wasn’t with Tila Tequila winning over the Juggalos. The problem wasn’t necessarily that Tequila was too pop or too mainstream. No, Tequila went down because she failed to understand the situation she found herself in. Unlike Green, she had fatally misread the room.

  Tequila wasn’t savvy enough to discern the signs. Green was smart and experienced enough to realize that he was playing a venue unlike any other he’d ever played before and adjusted accordingly. He understood that smoking a little weed was a small price to pay for being accepted by a drunk, high crowd given a four-day exemption from having to follow the rules of man. He understood that “Whoop! Whoop!” meant “I understand and respect that you’re very different” as much as it does hello. Tequila didn’t understand the curious tribe she had been paid to perform before and suffered terrible consequences as a result.

  That first day at the Gathering was so strange and surreal that what happened to Tequila didn’t strike us as particularly remarkable or significant. There was only one way the shotgun marriage of Insane Clown Posse and Tila Tequila could end, and that was with a blood-splattered divorce. Tequila’s violent removal from the Gathering was as preordained as any of the Joker’s Cards. It was going to happen anyway. There was no use delaying the inevitable.

  The following night, as we prepared to leave our Comfort Inn and descend into the heart of the Dark Carnival, a pair of burly, black, bullet-headed security guards accosted us.

  “You guys are headed to the Gathering, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I worked security there and I just got off an eighteen-hour shift, so I know how crazy things can get. You need to be careful, and I mean careful, if you want to get out of there alive. ’Cause a lot of people get stabbed there. One dude was just stabbed in the abdomen. Other people have been killed,” one of the security guards assured us ominously.

  “How can I be as safe as possible?” I inquired meekly, unashamedly taking the bait and giving in to the security guards’ scare tactics.

  The security guard had clearly given the matter a lot of thought. Speaking
with absolute certainty, he instructed, “I don’t know if you party or anything, but don’t lose control of yourself or your surroundings. Don’t buy anything on Drug Bridge. You never know where that shit came from or what it will do to you. Hold on to your woman at all times. Never let her out of your sight. Never. Stick to well-lit areas.” Then, pausing and pounding his fist in his open hand for emphasis, he continued, “Whatever you do, what ever you do, don’t go into Hepatitis Lake”—the not-so-respectful nickname for the campground’s sketchy-looking lake. “It’s called that for a reason.”

  It turned out all we really had to fear that night was the hateful invective of a prop comedian from the 1980s named Gallagher.

  Bitterness, rage, and failure had transformed Gallagher into something crass and ugly and wrong. He had become a pop-culture Gollum. Bitterness and disappointment had poisoned his soul. Whatever light or humor he may have once projected had curdled into something sad and strange and hateful.

  We sat outside the Fresh Ass Comedy Tent before Gallagher’s performance began. I was struggling to regain consciousness after ingesting a regrettable combination of Molly, vodka, pot, acid, mushrooms, and, most disastrously, hash. A chubby, affable Juggalo had offered to share some hash with me if I’d let him use my pipe. Cadence shot me a stern look I unwisely ignored before officially ingesting at least one illicit substance too many. As darkest night entered the dawn, the Gathering became a blurry series of snapshots.

  A scrawny teenager with sandy blond hair walked past us, bleeding profusely from his forehead, clutching a bat covered with barbed wire. “Are you okay?” Cadence asked.

  “Yeah,” he unsteadily but defiantly answered. “I mean, I’m just expressing myself.”

  At Insane Clown Posse protégés Twiztid’s big headlining gig Saturday night, the duo announced that they always tried to plan something special for each Gathering, something to set it apart from a regular gig. So they were very excited to announce that, as a one-time-only treat, they would be playing their upcoming album for the first time in its entirety. Oh, they wouldn’t be performing it live, mind you. No, they would be simply pressing a button and their new album would start playing over the loudspeakers.

  A muted wave of disappointment swept over the crowd as it began to disperse.

  This displeased some of the more loyal partisans. “C’mon, y’all! Where the fuck you going? This is Twiztid’s new shit! No one else has even gotten a chance to hear it yet, and you are all walking away like some bitches!”

  As we wandered away from the stage, we struck up a conversation with a couple selling dollar waters. “Aw, man,” the man said, “when I get high, I mean really, really high, my son looks just like Ronald McDonald.”

  We wandered some more and came to a wrestling ring where Officer Colt Cabana, a giant slab of toothy beefcake, informed the audience that they were all under arrest for a violation of Code 420 and would all be shuttled to prison imminently, where they would all be anally raped. Cabana was pitted against WeedmanJ420, a wrestler whose special powers involve his ability to smoke a fuck-ton of weed and still remain vaguely conscious. The next year we’d learn Officer Colt Cabana was a nice, college-educated Jewish boy from Wicker Park, but in that bleary moment he was simply one of a series of preposterous characters who floated into and out of my blinkered consciousness.

  A light rain began to fall as Gallagher began to perform. In my stupid and stoned and decidedly nonsober state I began wondering why the space in front of the stage was completely bare. My acid-stoked cerebellum conveniently forgot the nature of Gallagher’s act and obliviously assumed a front-row center seat would be ideal, or at the very least not the worst possible vantage point for any performer and/or any show, ever.

  I was making one mistake after another. With a fuzzy head full of misguided confidence, I led Cadence to the empty spot in front of the stage. It was then that Gallagher and his helpers took a sledgehammer to a wide variety of sweet and savory substances.

  In our bid to get out of the way of the rain, we placed ourselves squarely within firing range of whipped-cream pies, giant vats of mustard, and seemingly every sticky, gooey, staining substance known to man this side of Faygo Red Pop. In my drunken, fucked-up state I found myself thinking, “Sure this sucks. But it’s got to end soon, right? So maybe if I just keep my composure and ride out this whole Gallagher-smashing-watermelons-in-my-face-at-four-in-the-morning-in-Cave-in-Rock thing, I’ll be fine.” So I waited. And waited. During this time my whole body was inundated with an endless series of projectiles, each more skin-crawlingly repulsive than the last. I finally felt, on a physical level, what it was like to be a Juggalo.

  But the physical discomfort was nothing compared to Gallagher’s act, a bizarrely reactionary rant so overflowing with bile and bitterness that it barely constituted speech at all, let alone comedy.

  If Tom Green appealed to Juggalos’ innate vulnerability and outsiderdom, Gallagher appealed to something much uglier: He appealed to their sense of anger and resentment, to the sense that their misfortune was directly tied to the success of people with nicer clothes and tidier lawns. Of Obama, he whined, “He’s half black and half white. He’s a latte. There’s white milk in there. If it’s goat milk, he could be an Arab terrorist. He’s got bomb in his name!” It only went downhill from there. Gallagher’s contempt for the crowd was palpable. It was alienating. It was ugly. Finally it became unbearable. For all its ugliness, there was an underlying sweetness and innocence to much of Insane Clown Posse’s world, a poignant longing for connection and family and acceptance and togetherness. There was none of that in Gallagher’s comedy. It was just ugly and hateful and wrong.

  Cadence and I walked away in the light drizzle before the set was over and took two chairs near the exit while we waited for our chariot to pick us up and take us to the Comfort Inn. A Juggalo had warned us just before we prepared to leave that there was a SWAT team near the entrance ready to make its move and descend upon the Gathering with great force, but all we encountered was a single security guard passed out in a lawn chair.

  Just before he dropped us off, our driver, the racetrack announcer with the golden voice and complicated history with John DeLorean, dropped one last bombshell. “I might want to check that festival out because”—he once again paused for dramatic effect—“two of my favorite hobbies are face painting and nudism.”

  Shit, the eminently respectable, silver-haired man was a secret Juggalo all along. He just didn’t know it yet.

  My first Gathering left me with a hunger for more. Next year, I vowed, we’d do the Gathering correctly, staying all four days and really immersing ourselves in the music and the lifestyle. We owed ICP that much. More important, we owed the Juggalos that much. I owed it to these strange and beautiful people.

  It wasn’t enough to go to the next Gathering: No, in order to really understand ICP, I’d have to travel to the spiritual home of the Dark Carnival in Detroit and celebrate the most profanely sacred day of the Juggalo year: October 31’s Hallowicked.

  A BRIEF, UNFORTUNATELY EMO CHAPTER IN WHICH OUR UNRELIABLE NARRATOR LOSES HIS SHIT AND FUCKS UP BIG-TIME AND ALSO, IN A REALLY STRANGE TURN OF EVENTS, BECOMES AN EMPLOYEE OF “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC

  By the time I set foot at my first Gathering, the focus of this book had shifted radically. A book about Phish that touched upon the seemingly antithetical but ultimately simpatico universe of Insane Clown Posse had morphed slowly but surreally into a book equally devoted to Insane Clown Posse and Phish.

  My reasons for focusing on Insane Clown Posse were more emotional than journalistic, more personal than professional. When I set foot in Cave-in-Rock that August afternoon I had already experienced a devastating series of failures and fuck-ups that had put the future of this book in jeopardy. I had already spent part of the summer of 2010 following Phish without getting anything usable out of the experience. I had only myself to blame.

  I have a remarkable capacity for alchemizing joy, happiness, and
wonder into despair, depression, and misery. My antijoy machine transformed a gig so ridiculously sweet it still seems much too good to be true—spending a magical summer touring with Phish with my beloved girlfriend before the responsibilities of adulthood finally, climactically, and incontrovertibly crushed our youthful spirits—into something much darker.

  I had fucked everything up but good. When I searched my soul I had to concede that I’d entered into the project with the wrong goals and the wrong motivation. I had convinced myself that the entire book was a valentine to Cadence, an opportunity for us to experience a treasured relic from her past together before we embarked on our new life together.

  It was a gesture of love undercut by love’s psycho sibling, obsession. It wasn’t enough for me to have the woman of my dreams for the present and the future. No, I had to try to figure out a way to lay claim on her past as well.

  In hindsight, it was a selfless gesture of incredible, even unforgivable selfishness. Cadence sensed that in writing this book I was looking for something that I was never going to find, that I was searching for something that no longer existed, if it ever had. I was not being honest with myself about my motives. It wasn’t enough to simply explore something, to satiate my curiosity about human nature. No, there was something furtively avaricious about it. I had to lay claim to it. I had to make it my own.

  I realize now that what I longed for more than anything was to experience the joy and the exhilaration I felt that New Year’s Eve in Miami and throughout my first year with Cadence. I longed for transcendence, but my Jewish Midwestern brain told me that it was wrong to do so. If I was to seek out joy, I would need to do so under some sort of professional cover.