Indio, California – It sounds at once terrifying and boring: three days, eight sets, one festival. All devoted to one jam band.
“Jam” is probably an ill-defined musical genre, but for my purposes will be defined as a band that spends more time on stage freaking out on their instruments than playing melodies or singing. That probably doesn’t exclude jazz, but jazz isn’t really on my musical radar.
The genre became popular with the Grateful Dead, I think, but lives on in the likes of String Cheese Incident, Widespread Panic, and the undisputed champions of jamming, Phish. When I see phish with a ‘ph’ a whole lot of things come to mind, including trustafarians, dope-smokin’ frat boys, pretention, new-england elitism, ben and jerry’s, whimsical nonsense lyrics, and 40-minute music detours into oblivion.
I do like me some ben and jerry’s.
I’m a big pop music fan, and although I’m not really sure what that’s supposed to mean, to me it means that I like theme, I like melody, and I like songs that last three to five minutes. I’m also a fan of avoiding hordes of annoying people. So you would think camping out for three days in the desert with tens of thousands of Phish phans to attend a phish phestival would be a phucking nightmare.
Yet, if you know me well enough, it also sounds like a challenge. Last year I had my first positive jam experience at a Deadline Friday concert, with the help from some jamburger helper. It seems I had been missing that key chemical ingredient all along. I wished those songs would never. fucking. end. man.
And I like hanging out with the Bard and the Model, who graciously invited us and hosted us for the weekend. So why not?
I’m not sure what it is about jam bands that attracts such dedicated cultures of people - people willing to follow the band around the country. I suppose the jammyness means that concert-goers can expect different shows every night. But still – I would not follow around any artist I love, even if they promised to play a different show every time. Once would be good for me. There must be something more to Phish than just variety and unpredictability, and I was curious to see what the fuss was about.
Another intriguing facet to Phish Festival 8 was that it occurred over Halloween weekend, meaning that the band would don a secret, musical costume for one of their sets: covering another artist’s entire album in sequence. The band started with a website of 99 album covers, brutally axing two or three a day until at festival time only eight remained – representing the eight campgrounds surrounding the venue at the Empire Polo Grounds in Indio.
In order of least appealing to most, the possible albums were:
King Crimson, Larks’ Tongues in Aspic
Radiohead, Kid A
Genesis, Lambs Lie Down on Broadway
Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland
Prince, Purple Rain
MGMT, Oracular Spectacular
Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
David Bowie, Hunky Dory
If nothing else, it was fun to meet people and talk about where they were camping. I was kind of hoping we’d be assigned to Electric Ladyland, but I’m married so maybe it’s just as well. We drove in Friday morning and got shunted into Kid A. Aside from the occasional shirtless dude soliciting a dollar (Um, it cost you $200 to get in here, which could buy a shitload of tempeh were your priorities more keenly attuned to survival) our camping neighbors were polite and non-threatening. Golf carts circulated with mobile Mexican food, shower trailers were nearby, and the more entrepreneurial shirtless dudes weaved among the sites selling all sorts of drugs, by code words I’ve never heard of. This whole idea may not be a bad one after all.
We set up shop, cracked some beers, snacked, tuned up the guitars, and relaxed in the shade. When the sun went down and the heat broke, we hiked down Idioteque avenue, crossed over to Broadway (where the lambs lie down), took a left at the Ferris wheel and successfully smuggled all sorts of whiskey, tequila and food into the grounds.
The large grassy expanse was dotted with vendors, art installations, bloody mary bars, dragon spirals and flaming towers. The band and its legions had clearly spent a lot of time and effort into making the place stimulating.
The band’s first set opened with a fun tune called “Party time”, for which the only lyrics are “Party time! Party time!” Now that’s a way to open a concert. How did they know that I would like party time? This was already going well. Yes, there were also 20 minute epic jams that dull the senses and set the mind wandering, and one song featured a vacuum cleaner tube solo, but all in all it sounded pretty good. I was surprised at the handful of songs I recognized, buried deep in my subconscious from visiting my older brother at an ivy-league school in 1994.
I was amused to observe that a phish fan’s favorite pastime is throwing glow sticks. Sticks plural. Like 150 at a time. I don’t know who brings them all, but once they are unleashed people scurry about re-collecting them into armloads that they can hurl all at once in key moments. Big crescendos or triumphant returns to the chorus are met with 100 separate neon volcanoes erupting at once. Bring a sturdy hat.
Day 2 featured delightful breakfast burritos with HorseyCow’s home made Texas hot links. The Bard and I entertained the local environs with the sound check for our very own Halloween set. A sound check that turned out to be the actual concert, but whatever.

The second day featured three sets, with the infamous Halloween set sandwiched in the middle. The night before the band had strangely given away their album choice, by prefacing a song they play as a “hint for the Halloween album”. The song turned out to be called “David Bowie”. The only lyrics, as you might have guessed, are “David Bowie!”, peppered with the occasional “UB 40!”. The band is not big on verbosity.
I thought Bowie deserved a little help from our backpack-clad campground nomads. A little something to make all you pretty things Oh! So! prettier (and drive your mamas and papas insane). Mix in a little Rock Star, a sixer of PBR, a whiskey or two, and you are ready to take JUST ONE DRINK! FROM YOUR LOV’N CUP!
Wha...?
Yes, those merry pranksters threw out a red herring, and actually tore into Exile on Mainstreet by the Stones. The other 30,000 people knew that of course, because the band distributed playbills that afternoon. I refused to look at them, and somehow avoided anyone spoiling the surprise.
What a great set. They brought in a horn section and some soul singers and went for it. We decided that shit on a shingle would sound pretty good with a horn section and some soul singers. The crowd loved it, as gauged by the number of glow sticks in the air at any given moment. The fans, by the way, are really good at making crazy costumes. Some of them were a little much in our condition, but mostly they were amusing. We staked out a spot near a giant troupe of Devo costumes. I couldn’t stop laughing at their commitment to jerky dancing, as if it were a Devo concert, no matter what the tempo of the song was. And when particular costumes got too much to handle, I just focused on my friend Grolschenstein, a nearby stranger who was dressed as a Frankenstein mini-keg of Grolsch.
During the late set captain crunch and I explored the art installations, eventually lying on the grass below an amazing and amazingly dangerous fire shack. A metal frame held some sort of fire-proof-cloth domed ceiling. Some flammable gas lighter than air was pumped into the dome and lit with a blowtorch on a pole. Then the attendant adjusted the gas levels to create a back-draft-eque flame monster that cavorted about the ceiling following waves of gas. He struck a balance between having it flame out and blowing us all up. Every few minutes he would err on the side of safety and he’d have to relight. It was warm, cozy, and mind-blowing. I’m going to remember that one for our next fire-relief benefit party.
After the show we cruised up to the outdoor movie theater for a showing of “Halloween”. It turned out to be the Rob Zombie remake, however, which is more twisted and gory than the original. Too much for us coming down from jamburger helper – we retreated to Kid A.
The band played three more sets on Sunday, but sadly I had to abandon the Captain, Bard and Model for the Palm Springs Airport and a flight to Portland for a conference. I chugged a vitamin water, pulled my hat down tight, and wheeled my bag through the dust and heat to try to reach a road that had taxis. I felt horrible. The kind of horrible you feel when you have just had a great time. That horrible feeling I have on a lot of Sundays, because I’m just that lucky.