Phish.net
Phish.net is a non-commercial project run by Phish fans and for Phish fans under the auspices of the all-volunteer, non-profit Mockingbird Foundation.
This project serves to compile, preserve, and protect encyclopedic information about Phish and their music.
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The Mockingbird Foundation
The Mockingbird Foundation is a non-profit organization founded by Phish fans in 1996 to generate charitable proceeds from the Phish community.
And since we’re entirely volunteer – with no office, salaries, or paid staff – administrative costs are less than 2% of revenues! So far, we’ve distributed over $1,000,000 to support music education for children – hundreds of grants in all 50 states, with more on the way.
So great to read all of this!
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I wrote 7,500 words about—and I am very surprised to say this—one of the truly great all-time American rock bands, Phish, and the fascinating and fathoms-deep community that has grown around them. It is my first piece for GQ, possibly the most fun I’ve ever had writing anything, and maybe my favorite bit of writing. We are a Phish family now, sorry.
Last Saturday night, I took Tina to her first Phish show. I wasn’t some grizzled scene veteran or anything. I’d seen the band once in college, and I didn’t care. I saw them twice at Sphere earlier this year, and, while amazed by the whole technological enterprise, I left cold and unconnected to the band and its music. But I’d tried again—this time, for fours days in a Delaware field near NASCAR’s Monster Mile for my first piece in GQ, about a Phish festival called Mondegreen—and I was stunned. It was one of the most generous and beautiful music experiences of my life, and I’d mostly talked to Tina only about Phish since I got home, whether that meant regaling her with bits of trivia I learned as I reported or hiding a cardboard Jon Fishman sculpture I’d found in the field after the fest’s second night in assorted places around the house. As the Phish shows neared in Denver, too, nearly half the folks in the Boulder sauna were talking about Phish, remembering all the shows they’d seen at “Phish Dicks†or what they expected from this annual four-night stand. She was swimming in it.
Though she said she was excited about the show, in the sense of some excitable anthropologist, she didn’t expect to like it at all. In fact, we drove two cars an hour or so to Denver on Saturday evening, including our van with a bed. If she really hated all these songs about lizards and freezers and soul planets, she could dip out early and go to bed, as all the kids who didn’t get a miracle partied in the parking lot around her.
That didn’t happen: Before the show, she briefly met Mike Gordon. During the first set, as I was awkwardly doing what Phish fans beautifully call dancing, Tina started laughing. “I have been waiting for this music my whole life,†I exclaimed. “It’s something I can finally dance to.†She laughed until she cried. She cried again when I told her about “Page Side, Rage Side†and “Mike Side, Dyke Side.†During setbreak, after I told her about Chris Kuroda’s legendary status as a light designer and after she marveled at his work, she marched right up to him and proclaimed: “I hear you’re A WIZARD.†I have now spent significant amounts of time interviewing every member of Phish, but I have never spoken more than a “Hey†to Kuroda. I see him a little like Mike Krzyzewski, a master of craft who I don’t deserve to question. And … she just talked to him!
And then, early in the second set, maybe as Phish tunneled their way through a 25-minute “Kill Devil Falls,†Tina looked at me and said, “I don’t know, I kind of want to come tomorrow night, too.†As we were leaving, climbing the stars through a mess of beaming fans, she beamed, too, trying to parse what had actually happened. “Why is Phish so…good?†she asked more than once. She had to be at work at 5 a.m. on Monday, Labor Day, so she was convinced that this had been her first and final show for a while. Maybe next year, as an N.C. State fan might say.
We slept restlessly in a parking lot behind a truck stop that didn’t really exist and woke up when the sun was already up with very vague adult hangovers. I’d had some weed for the first time in months, Tina a very rare two beers. We stood in a line for a bakery for the better part of an hour. A lot of tiredness for a little Phish, felt like. But then we found some caffeine, and Tina voiced her thought of the night before: I kind of want to see it again. Trouble was, aside from the pre-dawn work schedule, our best friend, Ezra, had just flown in after finishing the Appalachian Trail for a second time. We’d been storing his car since the day we moved into our house, and he was finally here to get it.
I’d asked him if he wanted to see Phish, and after laughing at my photos from the festival in Delaware, he wanted to witness his first show, too. He was my + 1. Some texts were sent, a favor asked. We had Tina a ticket.
We three wandered the lot scene before the show, marveling at it all—the Phish flags flying as if from pirate masts, the grilled cheeses of all sorts on griddles, clusters of balloons filled with “ice cold.†We had dinner inside the show. (Crab legs!) And then, per the instructions of Patrick Jordan, one of the band’s managers, we were in front of the soundboard before the band walked onstage. “History,†he had said of what was about to happen. Indeed, they opened with “Dog Logâ€â€”a silly song they haven’t played since 2012 and only once since reuniting in 2009. We were and are all at various level of newbie, but it felt like we were all in something participatory and new, like we had arrived in time to watch an act still unfolding and evolving. That, turns out, is the whole trip.
Ezra loved it, asking so many questions about what they were playing and why it worked and harmony and rhythm and how a band that made such f***ed-up and often out music had gotten so popular. He was stunned at the amount of attention their fans paid, too, listening like sports analysts watch a basketball game, no matter how hard they partied. Tina left just before set 2 ended, wanting to beat traffic out of the venue so she could drive to her job’s parking lot and sleep.
Phish closed the four-day run with a cover of “Sabotage†(sixth time ever they’ve played it, it ruled) into a reprise of “Tweezer.†Tina got three hours of sleep before waking up at 4:30 a.m. to help dozens of hikers out for their Labor Day recreation, but early that morning at work, the first thing she texted me: “What did I miss?â€
We are a Phish Family now, turns out. We suddenly share a log-in for Live Phish. We are planning on going to the New Year’s Eve stand in New York. The cardboard sculpture of Fishman—for two weeks, Tina’s rightful bête noire—is now a family pet, and a comment
Tina made on Phish’s Instagram account on a post about my story has, of this writing, 332 likes. “I’m in the culture now,†she said a few days back, half-joking.
I’m very glad I finally fell for Phish at the age of 41, not back in Raleigh at Walnut Creek (newly 20) or in Las Vegas at Sphere (a month left of 40). Had I become a devotee at 20, Phish would have ruined my life. I have an addictive personality, and I would absolutely be a wook (all respect to the wooks, you are an absolute inspiration, you truck no hate from me). I wouldn’t be here right now, fairly sure. It was better to fall in absolute love with them in a field with two old friends I cannot thank enough for being my spirit guides on this descent into chaos, @mattalston and @madeofoak. (Also, same goes to @tweetenhagen, who joined us only in spirit, and @arandallm, who shrugged and laughed after my encounter with the asshole at the start of my story.) They’ve answered an innumerable amount of Phish questions for months now with endless patience and good humor and the occasional, “No, you’re wrong about that, man, keep thinking.†A whole secret set of gratitude.
It is so easy to be cynical about Phish, to assume that the music sucks based on jokes you’ve heard about them or even music you have heard 10 or 20 years ago. I was in that camp for so long, prepared with preloaded disdain based on what I thought I knew, and I am so grateful to have been proven wrong, to let engaging with the actual thing change my perception of the actual thing. Talking to friends, I get the sense that the late 30s and early 40s are the true danger zone, where we settle forever into assumptions about how the world works and what we value and what is good. That seems like the most boring and dead-end way to live, and I hope to be proven wrong until my very last day here, to enjoy being challenged by something unexpected. Thanks to Phish for that chance, and thanks to GQ for letting me write about four older self-proclaimed dorks who are not only one of the great American rock bands but have created a community of caring, accepting people who still f***ing love to throw down. Phish rules, and if you scoff at that, joke’s on you!
Go read the story. Go listen to Phish. I can’t wait to keep listening forever.