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

  The biggest anticlimax of the night had nothing to do with Twiztid. Just as Violent J had promised at the Gathering, Hallowicked marked the unveiling of the second Joker’s Card of the second deck. Now, the concept of a second deck struck me as a little suspect. Like so much of the mythology of the Dark Carnival, the Joker’s Cards have a split identity.

  On one level, they represent little more than a clever sales gimmick. On another, they’re the spiritual cornerstones of an entire makeshift faith.

  Yet after the final Joker’s Card was revealed, Insane Clown Posse went from being a group with a mysterious spiritual message to a pair of aging, weird-looking white dudes in clown makeup.

  So they reupped for a second deck of Joker’s Cards in 2009. This was problematic on multiple levels. The new album’s title (and the first Joker’s Card), Bang! Pow! Boom!, was both defiantly silly and suspiciously similar to the title of the Black Eyed Peas’ single “Boom Boom Pow,” a song with little if any spiritual portent.

  The revelation of Bang! Pow! Boom! seemingly left nowhere for the second Joker’s Cards to go but up, but when Violent J casually mentioned that they should probably get around to showing the second Joker’s Card of the second deck, his tone hovered somewhere between nonchalant and mildly apologetic.

  It was easy to see why when the second Joker’s Card of the second deck was revealed to be . . . the Mighty Death Pop. When the Card was unveiled, I found myself thinking, “You’re fucking kidding me, right? The Mighty Death Pop? That’s the big revelation? You’re really just fucking with us now, aren’t you?”

  “What were you expecting?” Cadence asked skeptically when I expressed my disappointment.

  “I dunno, I guess, uh, the iconography of the first Joker’s deck is at least interesting and evocative on an aesthetic level. The Ringmaster. The Great Milenko. The Riddle Box. Jack and Jake Jeckel. Those are powerful and mysterious concepts. But Bang! Pow! Boom! and the Mighty Death Pop—those just seem stupid.”

  It was then that I realized that I’d become invested enough emotionally in Insane Clown Posse’s career to be disappointed by them. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that I began counting the days until the next Gathering of the Juggalos. But I had a whole lot more to see and do before that could happen.

  PHISH FOR REAL THIS TIME: MY BRAIN EXPLODES WITH JOY ON THE VERY FIRST NIGHT OF THE TOUR

  I entered the fields of Bethel Woods on May 27, 2011, on the precipice of a complete emotional collapse. My body was turning against me. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I trembled with anxiety. I nursed fantasies of collapsing in a fetal ball and waking up weeks later, a new man. I thought about committing myself to a mental hospital.

  I was losing my mind. My equilibrium was off. I had dizzy spells. I fell with disconcerting regularity. Anxiety and depression waged a fierce war for supremacy in my increasingly fractured psyche. I began to feel like I was about to lose my mind. I worried that I had experienced a profound and irreversible psychic split, that something had shattered in me that could never be made whole again.

  I began to feel as if I were in The Source Code. It was as if the mangled corpse of my career as an author was in a room somewhere, yet my inexplicably functioning mind was still being sent off to run a series of increasingly insane-seeming and nonsensical errands for reasons I couldn’t begin to understand.

  I was suffering from a peculiarly twenty-first-century malady: an excess of awesomeness. I was simply doing too many amazing things at once. Separately, every aspect of my career exuded joy and potential. Together, it all somehow alchemized into something terrifying.

  Ambition had been the engine that had fueled my career. But my ambition had turned on itself. Ambition respects only itself; it’s never satiated, because satisfaction would defeat its whole purpose. It doesn’t want the hunger to ever leave. It’s always keen to remind us that the wolf is at the door and everything will fall apart tomorrow unless we push forward mercilessly in pursuit of the material possessions and professional accomplishments that inevitably fail to fill the hole deep inside you where love and self-acceptance should be.

  I was convinced I would never be able to finish this book, that I would let down the profoundly good people whose faith in me I now considered delusional. A massive tax bill had swallowed up my life’s savings and put me deeply into debt. Bill collectors hounded me. The time I had taken off for this book, much of it wasted on pursuits and expensive trips that proved fruitless, jeopardized my position at A.V. Club. A book I hoped would bring me and Cadence closer instead was having the opposite effect.

  I was headed for a fall. There were no two ways about it. My ego had gotten too big. I had lost touch with what mattered. I was pinballing madly toward oblivion. And now I was professionally, morally, and financially obligated to go out onto a road whose primal darkness I was convinced would consume me. They would find my battered corpse by the side of the road somewhere, identify me solely by my iPhone, shake their heads, and think that I just never should have left the comforting embrace of home. Cadence was the engine behind this book but I had to leave her behind because I couldn’t afford to take her on the road and she couldn’t afford to take the time off work or school. I was consumed with guilt and shame over the failures of the previous summer.

  When I left for Phish’s first show at Bethel Woods on May 27, 2011, I couldn’t muster up the energy to maintain the illusion that I was following Phish as a responsible journalist with a story to cover and a book to turn in. I wasn’t going to Bethel as an author or a journalist or a sane human being. I was a runaway. It didn’t matter that I was thirty-five and running away from a life that should have filled me with joy; I was just another lost soul on the road in need of emotional rescue.

  I had imagined that I could put one over on myself. My conscience knew better. When given a choice between the easy way and the hard way, it invariably chooses the way that might kill me.

  In the strange summer of 2011, that meant heading out to follow Phish with almost no money, no car, no traveling companions, no real plans beyond hitting as many shows as possible without losing my job, a body riddled with anxiety and borderline paralyzing panic attacks, and a frazzled mind that could not see past October out of a strong conviction that at some point in the summer I would lose everything and crumble into nothingness.

  It had been decades since I had felt so fragile and weak. I couldn’t use Cadence as a buffer between an increasingly terrifying world and myself anymore. That had been the ruin of the botched attempted first tour. If I was going to survive the summer, I would need to become a kindness-seeking missile. I would have to lose myself and find myself. I would need to bleed. I would have to suffer. There could be no journalistic objectivity or distance; I would have to live the life.

  I had never felt so powerless or doomed. The night before I left for Bethel Woods I held my editor and friend Keith’s newborn baby in my arms for the first time and came close to weeping uncontrollably. I was half convinced that as long as I simply held on to this baby, this bastion of purity and innocence, I would be fine, but if I was to let go of the baby for even a second the darkness would consume me.

  I entered the party bus transporting revelers from the Port Authority in Manhattan to Bethel Woods praying that the primal embrace of the crowd would save me, that it would set my rhythms right again. I was scared. I was freaked out. The prospect of attending a show without Cadence was terrifying. At that point, everything was terrifying. I liked Phish because I loved Cadence. With Cadence out of the equation, everything promised to be different. Different and weird.

  I entered the bus alone. In every sense. A half hour into the ride the darkness began to crack and a light entered in the form of a goddamn lunatic from Milwaukee. In every group of friends, there is one buddy who is a little wilder and crazier and a little more out there than everybody else but also freer and more fun. The kind of friend you worry about and secretly envy. He or she is the rock star in the group, the
wild card, the manic imp.

  That clearly was Jared in his group of friends. A row or two behind me Jared and a fresh-faced kid from Milwaukee who looked unnervingly like the character actor Kevin Corrigan passed around a bottle of Seagram’s Seven Crown and told strangers stories about some kids they knew who were “fucking stupid” in a way that made you really, really, really want to know what “stupid” meant in that context.

  Jared had a spirit about him. He had charisma. He had magnetism. He had an aura. He was a rock star and a movie star even if he never touched a guitar or stepped in front of a camera. I went from thinking, “Who the fuck is this guy?” to “I want to party with this guy” over the course of about five minutes.

  I would discover that Jared was an archetype you see at every show: the guilelessly enthusiastic (relative) innocent convinced he’s about to have the best fucking weekend of his entire life. You know what? Oftentimes he does have the best fucking weekend of his entire life. His desire to party like no one has ever partied before becomes a strange, glorious, self-fulfilling prophecy.

  It was sweet. Two twenty-something roommates from the Midwest were out for a big weekend in the big city. They glowed with excitement. Everyone did. If you were to make a map documenting levels of excitement, anticipation, and exhilaration in our country, I suspect you would find the densest, purest pockets of excitement, anticipation, and exhilaration in cities where Phish is playing.

  Phish fans very visibly convey a level of excitement about their favorite band that outsiders find hard to fathom. No one needs to explain why people got excited about the Beatles. They were beautiful. They were brilliant. Their genius was self-evident. But people are flummoxed as to how a group notorious for playing endless versions of songs with titles like “Divided Sky,” “Fluff-head,” and “David Bowie” could inspire such feverish devotion. There’s something downright un-American about getting so goddamn excited about a band that means nothing to the vast majority of the American public.

  At the epicenter of the Phish experience lies the tantalizing promise of instant friendship and freedom from judgment. If you grew up feeling lonely or weird or ostracized, the idea that people will inherently like you just because you enjoy the same music as them is incredibly powerful and appealing. That’s true of Juggalos as well. If anything, it’s even more true of Juggalos.

  But it went far beyond that. Most rock ’n’ roll shows promise a good time. Phish shows offer the possibility, if not the promise, of transcendence. It’s not just the music but rather a strange, hard to quantify combination of music, history, drugs, and nature that combines to make a truly ecstatic Phish show not just a concert but a borderline spiritual experience. It also involves really great fucking acid.

  That was the key that night at Bethel. Jared, the Kevin Corrigan look-alike, and I didn’t leave the bus so much as we raced deliriously to the venue. Upon hitting the Lot, we encountered a shirtless man whose tattoos clearly marked him as a native of Detroit. He saw the look of excitement and anticipation in our eyes and immediately made it his business to hook us up with whatever we wanted.

  It’s a curiously ubiquitous custom at Phish shows: You meet an absolute stranger who intuits what you need and makes it his immediate goal to fill it. There’s often a mutually symbiotic nature to the exchange, since chances are the goal you both share is scoring Molly or doses.

  Whatever the reason, a shirtless guy with Detroit tats decided that it was of the utmost importance that I and some other dudes he had met five minutes earlier secure the drugs of their choice.

  There was an instant chemistry between us, both because we were fucked up and because we were all from the Midwest. I had once believed that the Internet had rendered geography irrelevant. If you can send ideas and energy out into the world, then why should it matter where you are physically?

  That now seems naïve. Of course geography matters. Cities matter. Cities get in your bloodstream. They tell you who you are. They’re in your soul. They define you.

  For the purposes of the conversation we were having, that definition was incredibly literal. I was Chicago. Jared—or Golden Child, as I would come to think of him—and his best friend Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger were Milwaukee, and Detroit, well, Detroit was Detroit. It was written in ink on his skin.

  He had a Detroit kind of personality as well: tough, funny, a bit of a hardass, but underneath obviously a good, decent, salt-of-the-earth-type motherfucker.

  He was fucking funny as well. “Dude, I fucking love my girlfriend but you have sexy fucking eyes. I bet you’re dating someone way out of your league,” Detroit told the Golden Child.

  “He is,” answered Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger.

  “Not the girlfriend, but the girl I am fucking is really fucking hot,” the Golden Child clarified.

  Detroit wasn’t backing down. He was going all in.

  “I’m not saying you’re gay or anything but I bet there are times when you’re drunk and you see those eyes and start thinking about women,” he said to Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger while somehow managing to retain his air of brawny Midwestern machismo.

  Detroit let the matter rest, but there was no denying that this was a sexy motherfucker. Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger had a full-time job on his hands at Bethel Woods keeping him from fucking every woman who smiled at him. At Bethel Woods every woman and a number of men smiled at him. With intent. How could you not? The energy he was sending out into the world was unbelievable. He was rolling, having the kind of night that he would never forget if only he was able to remember it.

  “Dude. I like your fucking T-shirt. I will trade you for it,” barked Detroit as he pointed to my Creation Museum T-shirt reading, PREPARE TO BELIEVE.

  I fucking love that shirt, but the one he was offering in exchange was arguably even sweeter: a dingy, dirty, caricature of Frank Zappa.

  It felt like karma. Cadence loves Zappa, or at least she did back in her days of youthful passions, so the shirt felt like a talisman. It would keep me safe. It would protect me from sinister spirits of the road. Between the incredible purity of a newborn’s innocence and the iconic weirdness of Zappa, I had it covered. I was set.

  I loved the Creation Museum shirt because it had a history. It had character. It was an indelible document of a surreal trip Cadence and I had experienced to the epicenter of creationist self-delusion. Cadence and I were driving down to North Carolina when we saw a sign advertising the Creation Museum. At the exact same time we looked at each other and said simultaneously, “We need to pull over and go there.”

  The shirt told a story. When I traded it for the Zappa shirt, the story became Detroit’s. He might not know the story. He may not care. But it’s there all the same.

  We were trading old stories for new ones. I was trading in the story of the Creation Museum for the story of how I met a strange and awesome man from Detroit in the parking lot of a Phish show in Bethel Woods, fucking Woodstock, man, and traded a T-shirt I loved and meant something to me for a shirt that meant something important to this man.

  Monetarily, the shirt was worthless. It literally had almost no value. Its value was entirely sentimental, abstract.

  I need more things in my life with completely intangible value. I had driven myself half insane chasing an impossible mirage of professional success when what I was really hungering for was human connection and life experiences. I had gotten it backwards. I imagined that if I achieved enough professional success, human connection would follow. Turns out it doesn’t work that way. You can’t expect people to come to you, no matter who you are. You need to meet people where they are, on their terms.

  Detroit started passing around a beer that quickly became community property. Everything became community property in the Lot at Bethel. I had forgotten that.

  Before I knew it, I had secured Molly and doses. Oh, but these were no ordinary doses. If the brown acid at Woodstock has become lazy shorthand for bad drugs, then the LSD seemingly everyone
in the state of New York and I consumed during Phish’s first show at Bethel was its inverse. If the brown acid was evil incarnate, then this LSD should have had angel wings. Fuck, I’m not sure it didn’t.

  It does not seem at all coincidental that seemingly everybody at the show that night was on the same killer batch of LSD. It’s damn near impossible to understand the Phish experience without understanding LSD, for the Phish experience and the LSD experience are inextricably intertwined.

  LSD and Phish shows each traffic in the beautiful illusion of international brotherhood, in the gorgeous if unfeasible belief that we are all united in some strange existential sense, that we’re all passengers in the same great cosmic journey. This illusion becomes palatable because everyone at a Phish show generally is on the same wavelength. Their minds are open and hungry. They experience a sense of community with everyone around them rooted in music but also in drugs and memory and nostalgia and a history so fierce it takes on an almost physical presence.

  LSD is central to the Phish experience in the way it twists and distorts and stretches time. To outsiders, the idea of a twenty-minute jam to a song with a title like “Divided Sky” or “Fluffhead” sounds like torture, but Phish fans have patience. They have to. If they don’t have the patience to follow Trey’s muse wherever it wanders, then they’re probably not going to be Phish fans for very long.

  That first night in Bethel I issued a series of silent prayers that the band would never stop playing, that we’d all grow old and die and Trey, Mike, Jon, and Page would still be up there onstage rocking out.

  When I entered the venue, the woods came alive. The overwhelming sense of dread that had overtaken me for months was replaced by sheer exhilaration. I experienced an inexplicable surge of pure joy. This strange concert in this city and venue I’d never been to before began to feel like the best kind of home.