Number 5

It seems like just yesterday we had this portrait painted of us. Where has the half-decade gone?

[Editor's note: Interested in starting a marriage of your very own? Find out more at marriage.rutgers.edu ]

Just One Drink!

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.

Why?

I have so much to write. About Phish, believe it or not, and about the triathlon, and my conference in Portland, and about South Ballsalina. But as you may have noticed, I ain't got no time for none of it. I hope some day to catch you up and keep this record current.

Until then, I've been busy googling stuff. And just now, I started to type a question in the search box that started with "why". Before I continued I couldn't help but notice what google suggested I might be looking to answer:

Really? The parakeet issue is the number one thing people want to know about? And dogs? They are that worried about why dogs eat stuff?

Why did I get married? I always forget. That is the 7th most common thing people google, and I find it hilarious. Can google answer that question for most people? I'm guessing it cannot. That's why they invented Bing.

I get people wondering about why the sky is blue, and the male nipple thing is a fascinating evolutionary question (thoroughly covered, along with the existence of the clitorus, by a Stephen Jay Gould essay) but where are the questions about god and the universe? Surely more people wonder about that than Michael Jackson's skin? What the hell?

Speaking of what:

Things to do today, in descending order of importance:

1) Determine my IP address.
2) Figure out what NOT to wear (you can deal with the ip address naked)
3) Try to find out what my name means.
4) Get to the bottom of this "Twitter" thing everyone's been talking about.
5) I'm guessing "strawberries" was not covered during task #2, so I'm going to have to figure them out too.
6) Learn the difference between "your" and "you're".
7) Determine what time it is, without having to tediously look in the corner of my computer screen.
8) Ascertain the nature of love.

How can I get all this done quickly? Google, that's how.

Speaking of how:

Pregnancy, weight loss, drug tests. The internet was invented for this sort of thing. I clicked on "how to get pregnant" and was sorely disappointed. NONE of the hits were any sort of humorous guide to getting pregnant. They were all for fertility clinics.

That brings us, of course, to when:

Will I die before Labor Day? Will I die when the world ends? Now we're starting to get some important questions answered. Important questions about pregnancy, yes, but important questions nonetheless. Maybe google says it best, when it says nothing at all.

"Who" and "Where" are not of interest right now, but I'll keep my eye on the screen. Out of necessity. Seriously, I am chained to this laptop. In the meantime, enjoy the Bard's latest web gem:

Best-of-Eleven

Things remain entirely out of control in bucketland. Not entirely in a bad way, just in a different way. The whole thing is starting to unravel on at least seven different fronts, but now is not the time to panic. It is the time to focus. It is the time to concentrate on just a few things: the things that one can control. Remain calm and centered. Remember back to a simpler time, an earlier time, an old crow/grandad/overholt time. Remember all the way back to early October, when we completed our six-game sweep of life commitment ceremonies.

Four bachelor parties, five bachelorette parties, four trips to Vegas, five rehearsal dinners, two tux fittings, six toasts, two acoustic sets, three hot tubs, one bonfire, and sixteen brunches all came down to one weekend in Paris. There is a lot to tell, obviously, but I think I'll just let the pictures do the talking:

Music please.


Action.


Congratulations you two. Long may you run.

I'll see everybody in April 2010, when we start it all again.

Uh. Whoop! Uh. Uh. Whoop!

I apologize for the less than Rocktober performance on the blog this month. I submit the following justifications:

1) Work went off the hizzy. Total insanity.

2) Triathlon training shifted from casual to militant.

3) I have not yet received adequate picture access for the October wedding we attended.

4) I REFUSE to write about the Broncos, for fear of jinxing them. I feel like they are tip-toeing over some pretty thin fate-ice, and I would hate to be the crack that plunges them into a frigid reality. I'm sorry, I know you are dying to know what I think about McHoodie Jr. and Whiskeybeard, but I can't right now. All I can give you is my ingenious invention for what to do with your old Jay Cutler jersey you don't know what to do with.

The piece of duct-tape on the back with "Orton + 2 first rounders" was well-received, but only good for one week of laughs. For more enduring joviality, you need something a little more subtle. The morning before the Pats game I carefully removed the seam around the T in Cutler, clipped the wings off, and resewed it over the right side of the E.
It went from: CUTLER
To: CU L8R

5) There isn't anything to write about. It's not like anything eventful has been going on lately involving transvestite brunches, Starz girls, my wife's job, clipless pedals, tsunamis or the future, or anything. So don't worry, you haven't missed a thing.

Luckily, the Bard, instead of updating his own blog, keeps me updated on all pie and cosmos related news items. He sends this video - which will be your new favorite thing ever if you like physics, the universe, or autotune.



Not to take away from that masterpiece, but for some reason this video acts as a poignant juxtaposition. I'm glad autotune turned out to have some value after all.



Bill-e! Bill-eeeeee! Bill-EEEEEEEEEEE!