As I spoke, my psychiatrist got a purposeful look on her face that concerned me. Something was wrong with me. Something was desperately wrong with me on the road, but I didn’t know what it was. That ignorance was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. I am not immune to the tawdry, self-mythologizing romance of depression and mental illness. It’s one of the few perks of being a crazy person.
“I think that it sounds like,” my psychiatrist began brightly, “judging from your experiences on the road, that you might have a mild case of”—she paused dramatically, or at least it felt that way to me—“bipolar disorder.”
The “bipolar disorder” part of that equation completely negated the “mild” part. My first response was denial. I couldn’t be a manic-depressive. Where were the manic episodes? Where was the mind racing and thoughts jumbling madly and talking up a storm and writing, writing, writing as if my heart would stop beating the moment I stopped? Oh yeah. That’s what I had been experiencing for the past few months. At first I thought it might be panic attacks, but the more I thought about it, the more my shrink’s diagnosis made sense.
When I told people later of the bipolar diagnosis, nobody seemed the least bit surprised. No one muttered, “That can’t be right! Not you! You seem so sane and grounded!” Instead the responses I received were more of the “Well, duh!” and “What took them so long to figure that shit out?” variety.
Whatever I had, my friend Billy had it too. I thought about sitting with him at that Big Boy in Kentucky with two profoundly unappetizing meals we both knew neither of us was going to eat. I thought about him sitting silently in a stoned, seemingly semicomatose state in the gazebo that night at his family home before suddenly jutting upright and talking a blue streak about everything and anything, the words spilling out of his mouth in an uncontrollable burst.
Now I was able to put a name to that unsettling and oddly intoxicating feeling I’d been experiencing for the past few months: bipolar disorder. I was bipolar, which felt like both a cause for relief and a cause for concern.
When I mentioned the bipolar diagnosis to my therapist (I’m one of those lucky souls who gets to see both a therapist and a psychiatrist) later, she said her colleagues joked that there were primarily two kinds of bipolar disorder. There was the kind that got you promoted and the kind that got you arrested. I was pretty sure I had the first kind. I feared that unless it was treated, it would morph into the second variety. The diagnosis lent clarity to emotions I’d been experiencing over the course of the tour even if it felt a little fuzzy.
Am I bipolar? I honestly don’t know. I suspect my psychiatrist doesn’t ultimately know either. She’s subsequently conceded that she doesn’t know exactly what happened to me that summer, whether my seeming mental break was attributable to bipolar disorder, the drugs I was on—prescription and otherwise—or the pressure I was under. At the time, my diagnosis felt like an answer I didn’t even realize I was looking for, but I suspect I will never truly know exactly what happened to my mind during the summer of 2011: It remains a mystery, even to myself. But if the ultimate cause of my breakdown remains unknown, the bipolar medication (the powerful sedative and antipsychotic Seroquel) my psychiatrist prescribed did wonders for my mood and sanity, so I approached the arrival of Phish’s massive Super Ball festival in upstate New York feeling saner and steadier than I had for a very, very long time.
BACK IN A NEW YORK GROOVE: FEELING LIKE A KARMA BILLIONAIRE AT SUPER BALL 2011
When I first saw Phish in Miami during their New Year’s Eve run in 2009, it meant little to me. When I went with Cadence to see Phish play their annual festival Super Ball IX in Watkins Glen, New York, in July 2011, it meant everything. Whatever outsider credentials I might have possessed were gone, replaced with the guileless enthusiasm of a zealot.
I didn’t just want to see Phish; I needed to see them. Wild horses couldn’t keep me away from Watkins Glen, where I would be experiencing my very first one-band festival. You know who plays at Super Ball IX? Fucking Phish. You know who else? Nobody. If Phish were any other band, this might come off as the height of arrogance. After all, it’s one thing to see Phish perform for four hours over the course of a single night. But an entire weekend of four-hour Phish sets? That registered as unbelievable generosity, an unimaginable abundance of riches.
The festival took place at the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway, a gloriously natural venue that in 1973 hosted the single largest festival in rock history to date, the Summer Jam featuring the Allman Brothers, the Band, and, naturally enough, the Grateful Dead.
If left to my own devices, I would happily settle for a low-budget realm of Greyhounds and Motel 6’s, but I wanted better for Cadence, so we signed up for a package deal for Super Ball IX that included everything: tickets to the festival, lodgings at a nearby Ramada, and buses to and from the show every day and night. It was a little like going to summer camp in your mid-thirties, only with drugs and Phish and no responsible authority figures to ruin your fun. In that respect it was like the most fun-nest summer camp ever.
The excitement on July 1, the first day of Super Ball IX, was infectious and irresistible, a replay of the feverish anticipation that preceded the monumental first show of the tour at Bethel Woods, a soul-consuming sense of exhilaration at the prospect of three whole days of nothing but Phish. For a brief idyll, Watkins Glen turned into a city exclusively for Phish fans. It was a jam-band utopia, an entire world that springs to life for a few days every year, then goes into hibernation until it’s time for the next Super Ball to come around.
Super Ball IX was a little like a Phish tour in microcosm. It begins with boundless excitement and anticipation, with a spirit of optimism so thick you can feel it in the air, and ends with the audience feeling simultaneously exhausted and exhilarated.
For all the open drug use on display, there was something unmistakably wholesome about the whole affair. Maybe it was the Ferris wheel towering high over the fairgrounds at Watkins Glen, or the preponderance of booths for do-gooder organizations such as Phish’s pet charity, the WaterWheel Foundation, but it was remarkably wholesome for a Phish festival and a far cry, thank God, from the bad vibes of Coventry.
More than anything, Super Ball IX had time on its side, something Trey underlined when, after an appropriately epic “Bathtub Gin,” he casually remarked, “We’re not in any rush because we’re going to be here for, like, four days or something,” to the rapturous applause of the crowd. Accordingly, the group’s first set of the festival was even more relaxed and unhurried than usual, with soulful covers of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars”; “Peaches En Regalia,” by my guardian angel from the first night at Bethel, Frank Zappa; an exquisitely exhausted, world-weary, and rare version of “Torn and Frayed” from the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street; Ween’s “Roses Are Free”; and Bob Dylan’s “Quinn the Eskimo,” along with inspired renditions of originals like the set-opening “Possum,” “The Wolfman’s Brother,” and “Bathtub Gin.” Playing the first set of a three-day festival, Phish had nothing but time on their hands, and they made the most of it.
The pleasant-Friday-in-the-country vibe underlined the reassuring truth that there was absolutely nothing cool about Phish in 2011. They had become a quintessential geek fixation in that they appealed almost exclusively to a small but fiercely committed subsection of the populace that was knowledgeable and invested in the group to an almost unhealthy degree; they meant nothing to the vast majority of the population. Three decades on, Phish fans could still believe, with justification, that the band was still their own special thing, that it belonged to them and not to the world at large. There is a beauty and a purity that comes with never making it into the mainstream, with never quite breaking through, either by design or happenstance.
Like the Gathering of the Juggalos, Super Ball IX drew the geekiest of the geeks, the hardest of the hardcore. Phish shows may have a richly merited reputation as good places to score and use drugs, but no one was going to ma
ke the trek all the way to Watkins Glen, New York, and listen to one band perform for nearly eleven hours over the course of three days solely to score some Molly, just as the remoteness of Cave-in-Rock seemed designed to scare away neophytes and dilettantes attracted by the infamy of the Gathering.
So it seemed altogether appropriate that upon entering the festival, we sat by a picnic table where we uncovered a familiar novelty: the contemporary Juggalo, far outside his natural habitat. The two Juggalos were recognizable by their telltale markings: The stouter of the two sported a Hatchetman with a cane, while the thinner Juggalo sported one of the Amazing Jeckel brothers on each of his legs.
Cadence always gets excited when we spy Juggalos, especially in such a seemingly incongruous context. But if this treatise has taught us anything, it’s that seemingly impregnable divides are nowhere near as concrete as they appear, and unbridgeable gulfs have a strange way of proving strangely bridgeable.
“Are y’all Juggalos?” Cadence asked excitedly.
“Nah, nah. We’re not Juggalos,” said the larger and more talkative of the two. The bigger, less attractive one did most of the talking and appeared to be the brains of the operation.
“Really? ’Cause we were at the Gathering last year and we saw all kinds of tattoos like those,” Cadence relayed.
With those magic words, the young man’s charade dissipated and they threw themselves into discussing every Juggalo’s favorite topic: Juggalos. (To be fair, that had become arguably my favorite topic at that point as well.) As he aimlessly fondled an outsize bag of weed, the older Juggalo relayed the story behind the Hatchetman with the cane. He’d gotten it in honor of a buddy of his whose foot had become so horrifically mangled in an accident that it twisted backwards and died not long afterward.
The Hatchetman-with-the-cane tattoo couldn’t help but remind me of the Hatchetman tattoo the Juggalo with the thousand-yard stare sported at the Greyhound bus station in Ohio. I began to wonder how many Hatchetman tattoos commemorated dead friends. As I wandered over to the bathroom, my imagination was suddenly inundated with images of dead Juggalos. Suddenly all those Hatchetman tattoos I’d seen at the Gathering and at Hallowicked began to take on a ghostly, elegiac quality.
Juggalos die disproportionately young. They die because they are overwhelmingly poor and lack access to good health care and live in impoverished neighborhoods in broken homes riddled with domestic violence and child abuse. They die because they drink and drive and take the kind of foolish, reckless chances young people habitually take because they can’t see past the next ten minutes, let alone the next ten years.
The Dark Carnival’s moral component takes on a new urgency in this context. For an eighteen-year-old Juggalo, death isn’t something that will happen eventually, to you and your parents and the people you love somewhere down the road. It’s not an abstract specter. It’s something that lurks around every corner.
Insane Clown Posse sparked one of its habitual tidal waves of bad publicity when it threatened legal action against the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles, which advertised a “Funeral for a Motherfucking Dead Juggalo Baby,” ostensibly hosted by Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope.
The show riffed on a very ugly and public confrontation between a Juggalo whose baby had died and the nefarious forces of Juggalo Holocaust, and while I find the idea of threatening legal action against a satirical troupe abhorrent, I’m equally disturbed by the glib sadism of trying to glean cheap laughs out of something as sad as the death of an infant.
When I got back from the bathroom, the stouter Juggalo passed me a joint and showed me footage he’d shot on his BlackBerry of the storage facility where he lived. He’d pimped it out as nicely as anyone can trick out a space designed to temporarily house inanimate objects.
“Dude, you’ve got mushrooms all over your face,” he said to his buddy.
The happy-go-lucky friend simply smiled a big shit-eating grin and said, “Dude, I found a whole eighth of mushrooms just sitting there, waiting for me in the fucking Porta-Potty. That, dude,” he said before pausing dramatically, “is why I am a karma billionaire.” Karma billionaire: What a lovely concept.
Throughout my trip there were times when I felt fucked by fate and times when I felt like a karma billionaire: I felt like a karma billionaire when I discovered that one of Phish’s managers was Jason Colton, the brother of writer and editor Michael Colton, a man I’d worked with a decade earlier on a website called Modern Humorist.
It was a fairly shaky in, but when Jason texted to ask if I wanted to meet up with him for a beer the next day, I figured I had nothing to lose.
The manager knew of my unsuccessful appeals to Phish’s publicist for press tickets, and while he never said so explicitly, he seemed understandably skeptical of my motives. Shit, I would have been skeptical of my motives. They were impure, perhaps terminally so, but not where Phish was concerned.
Having trawled along the gutter of the Phish experience for weeks on Greyhound buses and in sad little motel rooms, it felt exhilarating to suddenly have insider access. Jason had a stash of VIP wristbands to the Sierra Nevada beer tent at his disposal and invited us to help ourselves. Having read about the decadence and debauchery of Phish during the hedonistic years, I was both disappointed and relieved to find the VIP tent a fairly sedate affair. The sticky-sweet smell of corporate synergy lay heavy in the air as Phish toasted a fortuitous and symbiotic business relationship with Sierra Nevada, consummated with its signature Foam beer (“Foam” is both the name of a Phish song and, unfortunately for the folks at Sierra Nevada, a generally undesirable characteristic in a beer), and Cadence, Jason, and I kibitzed with a master brewer who was just a little too handsome and stared at Cadence just a little too intently.
Then a titanic force swept into the tent looking like an exact cross between Jerry Garcia and Dr. Demento, with a little Santa Claus thrown in for good measure. Jason greeted him warmly. The gentleman immediately apologized to all assembled if he didn’t recognize us the next time we ran into each other, as he was suffering from Face Blindness.
I’d never heard of Face Blindness, a medical condition that makes it impossible for sufferers to recognize faces even upon encountering them countless times. Within the context of Phish World, that had to be a particularly vexing condition. Where else are you regularly called upon to remember the faces of people you’ve known for an hour and a half from within a sea of similarly shaggy, ecstatically smiling faces? Community is everything in Phish World, so being unable to even recognize people had to be a terrible, terrible handicap in every sense.
This eccentric gentleman hadn’t let his unfortunate condition keep him from making a substantive contribution to Phish World. For close to two decades, he’s held an unofficial position as the group’s resident timekeeper. Since the early 1990s, he’s timed out every song of every concert from his vantage point in the front row of every Phish show. Actually, that’s not entirely true: For a good five-year period he was banned from the front row of Phish shows because Anastasio found him and his timekeeping distracting.
For a group and scene synonymous with hedonism, Phish is incredibly conducive to obsessive-compulsive geekiness. The Internet played a huge role in spreading the band’s popularity. Long before other groups figured the Internet out, Phish was smartly playing both sides of the equation; they were huge live draws, but they were just as massive in the shadowy world of file sharing. Phish dominated and continue to dominate two fields that allowed them to remain invisible to the vast majority of rock ’n’ roll fans. They never sold massive units or got much in the way of radio play, so they became secret superstars, giants in their field and nonentities to much of the world.
When Jason asked if Cadence and I would be interested in going backstage to check out Phish’s radio station, The Bunny, my eyes grew as big as saucers and I beamed, “Oh, God, yes.”
Backstage was a lot like the VIP tent: incongruously good, wholesome fun. It was decked out like a
proper campground with lots of nice trailers for the band members and their families. The radio station occupied a funky little trailer with wood paneling and some very agreeable radio jocks inside.
Then came words of magic. “Hey,” Jason began casually, “they’re about to give out the trophy to the woman who won the race. Would you like to watch from the side of the stage?” I was, at this point, more or less sober, but the moment that magical query was asked, I instantly felt high as a kite.
If I had been asked if I wanted to go backstage at a Phish show three years earlier, it would have been an empty gesture.
But now it was absolutely exhilarating being at the nexus of that much positive energy. It felt a little like being inside a nuclear bomb or the eye of a hurricane. I stood there alongside Cadence as we looked out at tens of thousands of happy revelers and sideways at four ravishingly unassuming middle-aged men who somehow seemed simultaneously wonderfully human and godlike. That is the essence of Phish’s divinity: On a really good night they play like gods but walk the earth as mere mortals. They don’t just look like mere mortals: With the exception of Trey, who looks like a Muppet version of Jesus, every last one of them looks like your high school vice principal.
After the prize was given, Jason asked if we’d like to go to the other side of the stage to catch a few more songs. I was torn between not wanting to outstay my welcome and not wanting to waste the opportunity of a lifetime. I only wished my friend Billy from the road could have been there to share it with me. After all the valleys we’d experienced together pinballing across the great spooky Midwest and East Coast, it would have been wonderful to have been able to share a peak with him as well.
We stood at the side of the stage, utterly transfixed, while Phish began their second set of the day with the thematically appropriate “Runaway Jim” before Trey announced the winners of the Runaway Jim 5K race, then segueing into “McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters,” “Axilla I,” and “Birds of a Feather.” They weren’t my favorite Phish songs, not by a long shot, but I nevertheless felt unbelievably blessed to experience them from such a privileged vantage point. In a strange sort of way it felt as if everything I had been experiencing was mere preamble leading up to that particular moment.
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 Page 16