Phish @ Hampton 2009: Charging Back up the Mountain

Before I add my $0.02 on the Phish reunion at the venerable old steam cooker known as Hampton Coliseum, I urge you to read Ace Cowboy's hilarious but nail-on-the-head review of the weekend down in southeast Virginia. Read here. Or read Randy Ray of Jambands.com, pretty good takes on the shows: 3/6, 3/7, 3/8.

Jon Pareles of the New York Times also helped frame the context of the shows here.

For good video clips of the Hampton shows and general commentary check out the Coventry Phish blog.

(More of my pics from the weekend are here.)

Now that you've read that, I'll try to make a bit of my sense of what went down, though I wholeheartedly concur with Ace's remarks.

My journey from New York City to Hampton, VA was not without it's own drama. Through sheer cosmic luck I was invited to join a great old friend who suddenly had a set of tickets come available. After witnessing the Coventry debacle on a Cineplex simulcast nearly 5 years ago, I was not too thrilled about jumping back on the Phishwagon when tickets went on sale back in the fall of last year. But as soon as I knew I'd be heading down, that good ol' pre-show "stomach churning" that Ace Cowboy mentioned began in earnest. Fast forward to Thursday and I am boarding a direct-to-Newport News-bus in Chinatown, my shoes soaked after stepping in a chilly pool of slush while loading my gear in the luggage bay (a quick thaw of the recent blizzard turned all NYC curbs into footbaths). I had visions of stepping on the bus, raising my devil-horned fists in the air and shouting to all the NYC phish fans on board, "What's up Phish heads, ready to rock!" Alas, all I saw was row upon row of weary African American and Asian faces, who no doubt had not the faintest clue why a white boy would be cheering about a slimy soup ingredient. I took my assigned seat in the back of the bus, next to a 300 lb. Jamaican man and right in front of the bathroom door. If you've ever sat near the bathroom on a Chinatown bus... no need to go on. I will say it seemed to provide a convenient venue for smokers who couldn't wait until the next truck stop. At least the cigarette stench masked any other odors dwelling within. We barely pulled away from East Broadway before more drama unfolded. A near riot broke out when the Chinese woman managing the passengers, I'll call her the busführer, got into a verbal exchange with an older African American woman who refused to sit in a broken seat in the very last row.

"I will not sit there for 6 hours. You have to fix this seat!" she cried.

"Sorry, bus full, sorry, you sit there," barked the Chinese woman in her broken English almost as abrasive as when she spoke Chinese.

"You cannot treat us like this, you must fix this seat, are you listening to me!"

"Bus full, no other seat, you sit there or leave now!"

Finally the complaining passenger managed to finagle a seat up a few rows when a younger fellow left, and the Chinese busführer came back with an unsuspecting female Chinese passenger who was frogmarched into the broken seat. Not only was she infuriated by getting the broken seat, she was visibly nervous about sitting between two young African American men. You could see her inbred fear of darker races oozing from her pores. She released a fusillade of verbal projectiles in Chinese at the busführer, and they took turns insulting each other's ancestors, or so it seemed. Even the large Jamaican man next to me seemed nervous. Not more than two minutes after the dust settled, our kamikaze bus driver was pulled over by NYC's finest for running a stop sign. All I could do was nestle under one of my neighbors arm flabs, crank up my iPod to full volume and enjoy the phish show in my mind for the next 6 hours...


Fast forward to my reunion with Jeff and Kenny at the hotel in Hampton around 1 a.m. I thought all the drama and discomfort of the bus ride was behind me and I could focus on enjoying the bigger reunion that lay in store for us... Until we decided to grab a late night bite at the Waffle House. Jeff at the helm of his rental car sped us around the block toward the nearest Waffle House, which I surmised is a down-market southern cousin of IHOP, if you can imagine. We couldn't make the left turn due to an endless median, so we sped on another half mile or so to where a left was permitted, whereupon we spied another Waffle House. Let's eat our grease closer to the hotel was our consensus, so we sped back to the first one. Once inside we simply could not find a seat as too many like-minded phishheads were seeking the same late nite grindage. "Screw it, let's go back to the second Waffle House." We walk in and are immediately aware of a vastly different scene, similar to my initial encounter on the bus; we were the only whities in the joint. Perhaps we were on the wrong side of the interstate. Perhaps we foolish yankees had crossed an unspoken color line that stubbornly persists down here. It wasn't like we had just driven into a crack-infested ghetto on the other side of the highway, all around stood Cracker Barrels and other 'big box' stores. Anyway, folks there seemed to be caught up in their own late night reveries to pay us much mind, and we were just happy to dig into some cheap and salty breakfast food. Little did we know it would all be served up with a front row viewing of the next episode of Cops: Hampton.

Short-staffed and falling behind on orders, our waitress took a break from bickering with the cook to put on a sugary smile and patiently take our orders. It would be our last direct encounter with our waitress. From then on she became entwined in a passion play with an intoxicated customer who refused to pay her bill, threatened bodily harm to the waitress, and sin of sins, call our waitress a 'ho'. Oops. Waitress would have none of that, and quickly the gates of hell swung open.

With eyes ablaze and finger in full wag, she let out a barrage of vitriol I hadn't seen since, well since a few hours earlier in Chinatown. Damn, what a day. "You do not come in my restaurant, threaten me, then call me a ho! I served nine years in the pen and I do not let that happen to me! I will get my justice, mmmm-hmmm. I am on the phone with the po-leese right now. I have your license plate number bitch, you will not get away with this... (on the phone) Uh-uh, yeah, are you sending someone down here now? How soon? Send them now, they's about to walk out. Send someone now!"

The dine-and-dashing ho-calling customer was in disbelief things escalated this far, but she and her girls were not gonna let it go either.

"Oh, what, now you be callin' the cops? Shit bitch, look at you, a 'po-po ho', callin yo po-po!"

We were sitting between the waitress and the naughty customers, and I was ready for our waitress to jump over the barrier, across our table and throw her whole body onto the crowd. If 9 years in the pen taught her anything though, it was showing restraint when you have a prior record. Unfortunately, this whole drama prevented our food from getting delivered some 20 minutes after ordering, so our man the cook saw we had been sitting there quivering in the corner without our order so he kindly delivered it up. Sure enough, more cursing and yelling ensued when not one but three patrol cars showed up. They must've been doing dry runs for the Phish mob coming into town. At that point we didn't even dare ask for our drinks, and were happy just to leave some cash on the table without even seeing the check and getting the hell out of there. Keep the change guys!

Sated yet confused, we settled in for a night of quiet rest before the main event. Oh yeah, the Phish shows. Well, without going into blow by blow detail, I will say that it was just an overwhelming joy just to be back in that old familiar spot; sitting in a steamy, hazy old school arena with great old phish-loving friends, catching up on five years of life stories, waiting for the lights to go down as the pre-show jitters fueled all kinds of speculation and excitement. Even when not on stage Phish was building the tension, and the release was oh so sweet: Fluffhead. It will be hard to forget 14,000 diehard phans screaming "and I sure got some powerful pills, OH YEAH!" in unison. I sure hope some anthropologists were on hand to document our curious social phenomenon; surely it must seem like a bizarre cult to the uninitiated.

Anyway, though not entirely mistake-free, the first night's show was a huge 'thank-you' to all the phans who stuck with phish throughout the years, and indeed, pushed them to great heights, and perhaps great lows as evidenced at Coventry. Of course you can't blame the phans for the Coventry debacle, I would put that squarely on Trey's drug-addled condition at the time, but they clearly were trying to make up for that embarrassing display by playing incredibly long and energetic shows all weekend. I was also struck by the hopeful tone of the first night's song choices and build-ups/improvisations within the songs. Definitely resonated with Trey's remarks in the NY Times article about picking up a nation in the dumps. If that is truly Trey's mission, he will find a lot of yearning listeners as they travel across the country this summer. And judging by the confident performances of Page and Mike, the always rock steady foundation laid by Fishman, and the renewed sense of self exhibited by Trey, the fans will be well rewarded for their patience. While Trey may been the weakest link among a group of incredibly talented musicians finally maturing in their musical identities, I had the sense he only needs a few more months of steady rehearsing and performance to exceed the great guitar heights he climbed night in and night out throughout the 90s. Welcome back guys. Just in time.

Massacre on the Hudson: Birdstrike!

Yes, God was his co-pilot that frigid day in New York City. Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III is rightfully crowned the hero of the day after he expertly glided the engines-out Airbus A320 jet down to a perfect water landing in the chilly Hudson River, where all of the passengers were able to miraculously escape alive. Any number of other variables could have determined a much more gruesome outcome. If the flight was at night, most certainly there would have been fatalities, probably due to a magnified sense of panic leading to death by drowning or hypothermia. Or who knows if the pilot, a decorated veteran of commercial and military aviation, who fortuitously even had glider-flying experience, would have been able to time the landing right in the dark–one miscalculation and the landing could have resulted in the break-up of the fuselage in the frigid waters. Or what if the pilot tried to go for it and land at Teterboro Airport in North Jersey, only to fall far short in some swanky, Sopranos-like suburb.

Well, these scenarios are moot of course, and along with the media, it all ignores the greatest tragedy of the day: the death of dozens of innocent birds, who were wrongly accused of causing this near-disaster. "Birdstrike!" they glibly say, was to blame. Birdstrike–as if the birds planned all this; as if they were some Al Qaeda sleeper cell of islamic Canadian Geese who struck their target with the precision of a shoulder-fired Stinger missile. In fact these poor geese were the unwilling victims in the whole affair. With visions of Florida in their tiny brains, they thought they were on their way to a long winter of grazing and pooping on unfrozen golf courses across the Sunshine State. Instead they were cuisinarted, atomized, and finally, unfairly blamed for their own blood-and-feathers fate. Where is the Audobon Society? Where is the Friends of Waterfowl Avoiding Aircraft Collisions (FWAAC!)? Where are the morally-upright people of Canada, standing up for their national geese?

What I hope is that I can start a national debate on the efficacy of the term "birdstrike." It's as neutered, insidious and unjust a euphemism as "collateral damage" or "post-traumatic stress disorder." Then perhaps we can start recognizing the senseless tragedies of these birdkills going on all the time thanks to our lust for air travel. Otherwise, we will all have bird blood on our boarding passes.