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

  It soon became apparent, however, that the men did not entirely seem to know what numbers meant. They had boasted that the Gathering attracts 3.2 million people every year, which would be impossible even if it somehow occupied most of a major city, let alone a tiny little circle of nowhere called Cave-in-Rock.

  The two men were in a furious race to determine who could relate the most sordid anecdotes in the least time. There was a distinct element of gamesmanship to it; one of the Juggalos talked about getting stabbed; the other copped to getting shot in the leg while innocently waving a gun at the person who shot him.

  “I was in fucking hell, prison for eleven months, man. And I did it all for love. My fucking ’lette, man. She’s my goddamn heart. My life would be so much easier if I could just fucking let it go and move on but I can’t. The last time I saw my PO he even said to me, ‘You still love her, don’t you?’ and I was all, ‘Shit. Yeah,’ ” the Juggalo with the scraggly beard said with unexpected tenderness. When he spoke of his ’lette his bravado faded a little to reveal an incongruous vulnerability.

  It was disarming until the bearded man mentioned that he was six years older than the woman he ended up in jail for fucking (with her parents’ consent, he was quick to point out) and that at fifteen, she would be legal in just three years. I started to do the math, then stopped abruptly when it got too ugly.

  “I don’t fucking know my family, man. My family fucking hates me. This is my family. Juggalos are my family. Both our dads are Hell’s Angels and they fucking hate Juggalos. Everybody hates Juggalos. The girl I got in trouble for, she’s fucking dating a Juggalo Holocaust now,” the hirsute Juggalo lamented.

  “Shit, if he’s dating a real ’lette then he ain’t no real Juggalo Holocaust,” the man’s friend added.

  “Sometimes, man, I miss her so fucking much, I miss her so fucking much,” he began, “that I’ll just call her phone over and over again from other people’s phones and other people’s houses just so I can hear her voice for just a few seconds. It’s enough for me just to hear her say hello.”

  The man smiled, but it was a sad smile.

  The topic then switched to topics more conventionally associated with Juggalos. A snitch had infiltrated their gang, they announced dramatically, before speculating about his identity.

  It felt as if they were putting on a show for us, but it wasn’t until the conversation nose-dived into unsavory territory that the Phish fan got a little wary. He had never heard of Juggalos or Insane Clown Posse, but he had the kind of open mind that wants and needs to believe the best about people. Billy, the Phish fan, didn’t judge. He was hungry for experience, but he didn’t judge.

  Billy was bursting with excitement and curiosity about the world around him. Greyhound buses are a little like Phish shows: You don’t necessarily have to go around making introductions or asking questions because people are all too happy to talk. If you’re as shy and self-conscious as I am, that’s enormous comfort.

  I’m not particularly sure how the exchange began, but the man seated behind Billy and me decided to fill the dead time between cities with an elaborate monologue about his life. Once upon a time he was a big-time college football star. “Big-time,” he told us. “Look me up.” Those were the glory years. “Girls were into the whole football thing, being with a big football-playing stud.” Then college ended, and with it his ephemeral sports fame. He was no longer the star attraction anymore. As the roar of the crowd faded and then dissipated entirely, he began drinking more and more.

  The man kept stressing how important he had been, how people had looked up to him. He’d had girls, plenty of them. Then he’d slipped into an endless personal freefall that showed no signs of ending or even slowing down.

  He was headed to Cincinnati, he declared, to handle some important business. He was going to find his wife and win her back, he proclaimed. She had taken up with another man. He was no good for her. He beat her. So he was going to either win his wife back or get drunker and go searching for pussy. As with the Juggalos, there was an undeniable element of performance to the man’s monologue. At one point the man had an animated conversation on his phone that Billy suspected, not without cause, he was staging exclusively for our benefit.

  Hunger continued to elude me. It was conspicuous in its absence. In my state I could only fantasize about what it would be like to want to eat. That was the curious condition I found myself in: I wanted to want. I hungered to hunger. Yet my stomach decided that it was no longer in the food-eating business. Like the rest of me, it didn’t seem to know what to do. It had turned against me.

  Yet in a cruel burlesque, Billy and I traveled to a Big Boy in Cincinnati all the same. Billy had the gaunt, wired look of someone who has never eaten and perhaps never will. I looked at food with palpable revulsion. We were quite the duo, a pair of road-worn lunatics engaging in the preposterous masquerade that we were interested in a primal human endeavor like eating.

  Our waiter was mentally challenged, and when Billy asked about the salad dressings you could see the furious mental exertion at play as he strived to remember every option. There was something quietly heroic about the man’s understated professionalism, a poignant quality to his striving. It was a lot of work to remember all those dressings, but he was up to it. Billy is a talker, and when he talked to the waiter I couldn’t quite ascertain whether he was sizing him up, fucking with him, or genuinely trying to engage with him. That was the live-wire duality of Billy.

  Travel enhances. If I’d never dropped acid in the bathroom at that Big Boy in Cincinnati and conversed with the waiter, for example, I never would have learned that in Big Boys west of Ohio, the restaurant chain’s signature hamburger is served with Thousand Island as its “special sauce,” while east of Ohio, tartar sauce is the flavoring of choice. For some reason this information felt enormously important to me at the time. In hindsight, it may have been the acid.

  If I had any questions as to where Billy was coming from when he bantered with our waiter, they were answered when he faced the waiter’s boss, shook his hand, and told him, “I just wanted to tell you that our waiter did the best job of any waiter I’ve ever had. I just thought you should know that.”

  Anticipating the comment, the manager responded, “You know what, sir? We have someone say just about the same thing during every single one of his shifts.”

  I was lost and far from home the summer of 2011, but Phish’s carnival of light was like a beacon leading home, emotionally if not geographically. As exhilaratingly foreign as the road could be, especially when it’s traversed via long, sleepless Greyhound bus rides, there was something extraordinarily comforting about the Lot, about seeing the same vendors and T-shirt stands and gloriously alive, wonderfully unselfconscious people in venue after venue.

  I loved hanging around the Lot with Billy. For someone who had squeezed an awful lot of living into his twenty-four years, a lot of it hard, some of it agonizingly painful (nearly a year in prison, a stint dealing drugs), he still retained a remarkable capacity for joy and wonder. He looked at the homemade T-shirts with winking Phish in-jokes and handmade posters and delicious-smelling but stomach-twisting and suspiciously cheap foodstuffs with amused appreciation and nothing in the way of cynicism. He said that someday he wanted his children to be the doe-eyed waifs selling dollar waters after a show. I wanted my children to go to Phish shows as well, albeit in less of a child-labor-intensive capacity, though given the dire financial straits I now found myself in it might not hurt the theoretical future children of mine to brush up on their water-selling skills.

  We sat in the woods near a ring of nitrous oxide tanks and talked to a woman in her thirties who spoke about how she had followed Phish for a summer while pregnant. She had experienced a natural high dancing sober with a baby in her womb. We talked to a guy and his buddy passing a bottle of whiskey back and forth about the differences between Phish and Furthur and the Disco Biscuits and Widespread Panic shows.

  By that
point the Lot felt strangely like home and the songs like old friends. Sometimes that’s because I’d lived with them for decades, like the killer version of the Talking Heads’ “Crosseyed and Painless” that anchored the band’s second set that night in Cincinnati or the Rolling Stones’ “Loving Cup” from Exile on Main Street, one of those albums that had the respectable critics’ stamp of approval.

  Once upon a time I had a knee-jerk aversion to Phish playing funk. Like so many of my first impressions regarding Phish and their fans, that now seems incredibly close-minded of me. Phish are phenomenal at playing funk. It doesn’t matter that they’re pasty middle-aged white men.

  It was stupid of me to feel otherwise. On good nights, Page plays the synthesizers and keyboards like the second coming of Bernie Worrell, Trey plays a mean funk guitar, and Mike and Fishman form a ferociously tight rhythm section, the cornerstone of every good funk outfit.

  It was dumb of me to think Phish performing a Stevie Wonder song called “Boogie On Reggae Woman” was ridiculous because, c’mon, they’re a bunch of assistant-professor-looking motherfuckers and the song is called “Boogie On Reggae Woman.” Now I wish they played it every concert. Hell, I wish they played it for me every morning when I wake up. There’s something incredibly liberating about that cover and Phish’s gloriously unselfconscious embrace of funk in general.

  Speaking of friends and dancing white boys, I looked behind me during Phish’s second set that night and saw the Golden Child and Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger dancing shirtless and delirious. I wanted to go over and say hi, but I was caught up in the moment and when I looked behind me again a song or two later they were gone. It was like they were apparitions or mirages. One moment they were there, the next they weren’t.

  While I was free to continue my strange voyage, Billy took a night Greyhound to Buffalo to return to a job he felt ambivalent about at best. So I said good-bye to him after the Cincinnati show as he boarded a bus back to his hometown with a mind full of trepidation and a body racked with something like ten hits of acid. Billy was due back at work imminently, but I had a night or two before the next show. I mentioned to Billy that I would be looking for some weed to help me sleep through the night when I shuffled up to Buffalo later myself.

  Billy booked me into a Motel 6 he had a long and complicated history with and waited for me to hit town. Immediately upon returning to Buffalo, he had tried to give a homeless man at the bus station twenty bucks and got robbed of his entire wallet in the process. That was Billy in a nutshell: He possessed the kind of ferocious, indiscriminate, and reckless kindness that can get you in trouble. Scratch that. He possessed the kind of ferocious, indiscriminate, and reckless kindness that will get you in trouble. There were no half measures in his world: Everything was done with pummeling intensity and absolute conviction.

  When I finally arrived at the Motel 6 in Buffalo late the night of June 7, Billy and his best friend, Matthew, were waiting for me with a look of impish delight. Billy told me that in his drug-dealing days he’d made that particular Motel 6 his home base. His eyes danced as he recounted half-forgotten ragers, bottles of coke, oceans of meth, and enough K to wipe out a small continent. His stories made me feel a dark, malevolent energy to the Motel 6. It felt absolutely nothing like Tom Bodett had made it out to be. I’m pretty sure they hadn’t left the lights on for us.

  Though he could be quiet and introverted at times, when he was feeling chatty, Billy always talked more than was necessary. He talked because he had bottomless curiosity about the world but also because he liked to fuck with people. He may not have been a con artist, but he had a con artist’s intuitive grasp of human nature, the preternatural ability to read people instantly, and the gift of gab.

  So by the time I checked into the Motel 6, Billy had chatted up some old connection and when we headed up to my room things got sordid very quickly. All I wanted was enough weed to last me through the night, but as soon as Billy, Matthew, and I passed the threshold, my hotel room stopped being my phenomenally shitty hotel room and became a drug den.

  “Do you mind if we bump some K here in your room?” Matthew asked eagerly.

  I confess that I had no idea what he was talking about and misheard his question as, “Do you mind if I bottle some keys?”

  I didn’t want to be rude so I said sure, at which point he began chopping up queasy-looking lines of powder the color and consistency of laundry detergent and started snorting. There were deep black bags under Matthew’s eyes. His eyes looked glassy and lost. He was a nice kid, but he was gone into the ether.

  Every element of the scenario amplified the sadness: The dinginess of the hotel room was exacerbated by the overpowering stench of smoke, failure, and desperation. The incongruously chipper bedspread seemed to make a mockery of a bed that barely qualified as a double. Billy and Matthew were lost in their own little world, snorting lines of what I later found out was ketamine and trading stories that meandered and meandered en route to going nowhere.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” Matthew asked.

  “Go right ahead.”

  “No. I mean, I understand completely if you don’t want me to smoke in your room. It’s not a big deal. I could just as easily go outside and smoke,” Matthew replied empathetically.

  “Dude. You’re doing lines in my hotel room. It’s okay if you smoke.”

  I was at best a day tripper, a Sunday driver, yeah. All it took was some lines of K and the lost look in my new friends’ eyes to make me feel terribly melancholy. I wasn’t surprised, just sad, though that sadness and the judgment it implied felt awfully hypocritical considering the mind-altering substances I’d already consumed during the journey and the fact that I had specifically asked them for drugs.

  Throughout the evening, friends of Billy and Matthew’s passed in and out of the doors of my sad little motel room to do lines, smoke pot, and bask in the majestic beauty that is the Buffalo Motel 6. Eventually the young mob disappeared and I was able to sleep and prepare myself for Billy’s big hometown show in Darien Lake. As if all that wasn’t exciting enough, the Darien Lake show included a free pass to the water park connected to the venue.

  Phish! Water slides! Wave pools! Pirate-themed attractions!

  My new friends did not quite feel the same way. Being locals, the water park didn’t hold the same exotic appeal for them that it did for me. When we got to the venue they loitered around the Lot, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells while my interior monologue/inner child impatiently pleaded, “Water park! Water park! Water park! Water park! Let’s all go the water park! There are slides and rides and attractions of all kinds! Let’s all regress in a hippie-friendly environment!” I wanted to see what a theme park populated exclusively by Phish fans would look like. I wanted to experience the hippie takeover of a wholesome family institution. As with Insane Clown Posse and the Gathering of the Juggalos, there was something incongruously innocent and childlike at the core of the debauched circus that was a Phish tour, and nothing spoke to this duality more strongly than the prospect of an afternoon at a water park and then an evening of drugged-up exhilaration at a show.

  It was to no avail. After failing to convince my friends, I ended up trekking over to the water park by myself, and while I tried to make the most of it, there are few things in the world sadder than a solitary thirty-five-year-old man on an inner tube in a wave pool surrounded by families and toked-up revelers partying with their friends.

  After about an hour, I headed back to the Lot to hang out with Billy and his friends. They were sitting peacefully in a circle underneath a giant tree.

  I enjoyed the Darien Lake show just as I had enjoyed every Phish show, but there was something unmistakably melancholy about it. My time on the road was drawing to a close. I was torn between this exhilarating path and the ferocious pull of home, both in the form of a woman I loved and missed with every fiber of my being and a job that was much more to me than a job.

  In the second set Phish played “B
ackwards Down the Number Line,” the opening track on 2009’s Joy, the comeback studio album after Anastasio’s arrest and the crumbling of the Phish empire. It is both my favorite Phish song and a song that eloquently seemed to capture everything that I was feeling that summer, all the joy and sadness and regret and hope and feverish nostalgia for a past I had never experienced firsthand but foolishly sought to recapture for myself.

  Maybe that’s what we’re all looking for: art that reflects who we are, what we’ve been through, and how we see the world; art as a deep, dark, truthful mirror. It’s poetically apt that an album heralding a fresh start for Phish begins by invoking the past in such a heartbreakingly bittersweet way.

  According to Anastasio’s introduction when he debuted the song at the Rothbury Folk Festival with Gordon on bass in 2008, his songwriting partner Tom Marshall sent him the lyrics on his birthday in 2007. The two were estranged at the time, or at least were not collaborating, but Anastasio was so moved by the words that he translated them to music and their fruitful and fortuitous partnership was reignited. At the Rothbury festival, Anastasio says he thinks it’s about “getting younger,” but like so much of Phish’s music, it’s open to interpretation: It means exactly what you want it to mean.

  To me, it’s a birthday song about the fundamentally bittersweet nature of birthdays, how we at once celebrate surviving another year while simultaneously hurtling closer to the grave, away from the sanctity and promise of a youth we can mourn and romanticize but never regain. But it’s also a song about the complicated nature of partnerships, about how the inexorable march of time and a shared history can both pull us together and tear us apart. I loved the way that Trey’s voice strained poignantly to hit the notes that night, especially at the beginning, how its delicacy renders it forever just out of his vocal reach but he makes a heroic effort all the same. I love how human and vulnerable and aching the song sounds. I love the words, but the words wouldn’t mean anywhere near as much as they do, and the song wouldn’t be anywhere near as profound, without all the complicated history behind it, not just between Trey and the band but also the band and its fans, the fans and one another, and Trey and Tom Marshall. To paraphrase Tippy Walker’s character in The World of Henry Orient—a film, appropriately enough, about rabid musical fandom—hearing “Backwards Down the Number Line” made me awfully happy in a sort of sad way.