Trey's narration from "Harpua," 12/30/97:

...and I'm gonna tell you about this, this morning, when I was waking up, I started thinking about, um, 1974. Some of your probably weren't even alive in 1974, but I was ten years old, since I was born in 1964, and I was going to John Witherspoon, uh, Middle School, I was in fourth grade, and, um, something happened that year that was very profound and had an effect on me and changed the whole course of my life, and changed the course probably of the band, the whole life of everyone in the band, and, uh, I suppose, in turn, some people out there who come see the band. And, uh, what happened in 1974, I was in fourth grade, and I really wanted my parents to get me a TV in my room, and so this was a thing that went on for a couple years, where I would ask my parents whether they would buy me a TV, and let me have a TV in my room, um, they're like, "No, no, you're gonna watch too much TV," so finally they let me have a TV in my room, um, they gave me a black and white TV, and the bad thing that happened was that I started watching TV like six hours a day, and what would happen would be on Saturday mornings I would wake up, I had this ritual where I'd wake up and I would get four slices of, uh, Pepperidge Farm white bread and a stick of butter and an electric frying pan, and I would melt an entire stick of butter in an electric frying pan and make French toast, and then sit down in front of the TV and watch like, you know, 17 hours of TV for the entire day of, of, uh, my Saturday afternoons. And, so, this would go on for the entire year there when I was in the fourth grade, that's what I would do, every Saturday, I would sit around and watch TV, and at five o'clock, uh, there was a show that used to come on called "Lost in Space"—did any of you see "Lost in Space"?—and I remember waiting for "Lost in Space" to come on. And um, there was this one particular Saturday where I made my French toast and I sat down in front of the TV and I'm sitting there and waiting for "Lost in Space" to come on, five o'clock comes along, "Lost in Space" comes on. I'm sitting there eating my French toast, and I had this little rubber ball I that used to play with that was sort of like shaped like an udder, um, it had udders all coming off it, and I'm sitting there watching "Lost in Space," and about halfway through the TV show, there was this part where Will Robinson and the robot, you know, they're walking along one of those cheesy sets in "Lost in Space," they go around the corner, and they end up in this sort of clearing. And, um, this clearing, the weird thing about it was um I'm sitting there watching TV and I'm thinking this clearing is the identical that is behind the school that I went to, the John Witherspoon school that I mentioned before. And it was a place that I had been before. So I'm watching TV and I'm thinking here's Will Robinson and the robot hanging out in this clearing that I go to on, um, you know, during recess in fourth grade. Completely strange moment. And, um, I look down at the foot of the robot—I know this is a long story, but it's very profound and important, so please listen; it changed my life—and at the foot of the robot is this udder ball squeezing squeak toy that I also had in my hand. So this completely, you know, I'm sitting here looking, here's this clearing and the udder ball, and suddenly I realize that the robot is sending messages directly into my brain.

Four slices of Pepperidge Farm white bread fried in an entire stick of butter in an electric frying pan: Phish. Saturday TV, the udder ball, the clearing behind the school you went to in fourth grade. The way that recesses there could be science fictional. The way that, after hours of passive entertainment, once the executive function of the brain is lulled into silence, the magic starts to happen, characters within the medium begin speaking to you, directly into your brain, showing you the places where you feel the most like yourself: Phish.

Rock pollution

The destruction and dispersal of Earth's mineral life is a longstanding hobby horse of mine. Rocks are essentially a non-renewable resource; the conditions under which many of them were made will never be repeated again on Earth. Yet we blast them apart in shocking accelerations of entropy. Imagine a graph of the average size of rocks over the last 150 years, or a map that tracked the irreversible diaspora of rocks across the Earth. Even rockhounding, a practice that connotes care and respect for the mineral kingdom, transports rocks far from the site of their natural origin. (When I was ten I stole a rock from a national park in New Brunswick. I had been searching desperately for fossils that whole year and had finally found one, a thick reed whose ribs were clearly delineated in the red sandstone. That rock belongs to the Bay of Fundy. I am saddened to remember a friend's return from a grad school scouting trip to the Midwest: he brought home a cache of geodes, which we hammered apart on his front porch. I believe I still have one at my parents' house, unsmashed, thank God.) Yet for some people this is a joke .

(Some older rock writing here and here.)

Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time

Let me try to explain what just happened. I am laying in bed, attempting to fall back asleep, then suddenly, faintly, from outside: "I don't really ca-a-are, if it's WRONG or if it's right!" Steely Dan! I call Hilary in to listen. "I don't hear it." I open the window and we look out. Is it the guys at the construction site across the street? No, it's coming from a maroon van parked outside our apartment. The music stops but the guitar keeps going. I look closer. The man in the driver's seat is holding a miniature guitar (Thunderbird-shaped). He rewinds the music to get the part right. The angle from the third floor is pretty steep, so we can only see his hands. I dress quickly and we run down to the street. A Dodge Ram 250, giant curtained windows, amazing twisted stripes in a gray-to-white fade, a ladder on the back. It's "Any Major Dude" now; he's harmonizing with the melody. I dare to look as we cross the street. Buzz cut under a tall hat, cheap aviators. I want to know: is this the real thing or a hipster put-on? We stand around the corner where we can only see the guitar's headstock in the open window. A little bit of "Barrytown," then cut to "Pretzel Logic." I look in again on the way back. His hat has an eagle-and-flag motif, and there's a tiny flag hung by the passenger seat. The guy is in his 20s or 30s. His chin is long and hard. I know he's looking at me through those shades. Back inside, I take up my perch at the window. He flips through a CD book. "Black Friday," then "Dr. Wu." He gets 85% of Phil Woods' sax solo. Suddenly he puts the guitar away and takes something from the passenger seat. Please tell me he's rolling a j. It's a keyboard phone and he's texting madly. He takes a Marlboro from the pack in his breast pocket and readjusts his coffee cup. A girl, early 20s, opens the passenger door and hops in. Her clothes are neutral and offer no clues. She has a backpack. There is a tremendous sound, he chunks the shifter into drive, and the van heaves off down the hill. I'd like to think a drug deal, or worse, had been completed, but she was probably across the street filming for his thesis project. Well, A+.

It feels weird to write about something other than Deepwater Horizon. But I am going to report on Phish 3D, which I watched at the cinema last night. There is never an appropriate, culturally sanctioned time to discuss Phish, so we might as well go for it in the midst of a major ecological disaster. (Going for it in the midst of a major ecological disaster would be a good description of Phish tour. The carbon cost of Phish probably warrants a measure like extinctions per show; I think I spent more time in a private vehicle during my four days of tour last summer (a short, noobish run, by Phish standards) than I did during the rest of 2009. But because this perspective on touring requires some minimal systems thinking, plus an admission that the way we do things is for the most part not ok, it seems extreme, optional at best. However, the clarity of the narrative of the oil spill, with obvious and immediately understood causes and effects, makes it quite real-seeming and scary, though it can't really compete with the ongoing, not-new ecological disaster of our normal form of life.)

Expecting a sellout crowd, I got to Fancyland (our nickname for Cinematic Grand Stadium at Clark's Pond, the sort of movie theater that has advanced concessions, extremely steep seating, and everything else irrelevant to the cinematic experience) an hour early (yet another expression of my DSM IV-caliber Phish problem). I was alone in Auditorium 4 for a long time. When people started showing up (maybe about 20 in all, no nerdy element (besides me), no hippies, no scumbags, no one under 30, mostly working-class dudes with their girlfriends (who probably also go along for disc golf and sit through Derek Trucks on Pay-Per-View)), it became clear to me how awkward this social situation was. Since it's Phish, are you supposed to chat with the people next to you? Do you present yourself as you might at a show, where the myth of the Phish Community causes you to act knowing and kind and generally phony? (At a show at least you are assembled for a real event.)

One guy shouted as he came in, "Who's going to Hartford?" Why did he shout this? Did he have tickets to sell? (If he miscalculated demand and overbought tickets to summer shows, he is not alone.) Or was he thinking that most of us Mainers would just be catching Phish in Massachusetts, their nearest tour stop, whereas headier fans like he would hit the second-nearest stop as well? Did he mean to refer to last summer's Hartford show—mediocre till halfway through the second set and then redeemed by magic—which has made the Comcast Theater (formerly New England Dodge Music Center, formerly Meadows Music Theater) a sacred venue?

Aside from this outburst, cinema etiquette prevailed and distance was kept. Perhaps the audience understood that shared enjoyment of Phish is bizarre. If you're eating at McDonald's, you don't go up to someone at another table to talk about how awesome the food is. (Yet any time I encounter Phish music in the larger world, it's hard to resist making a great display. I heard "Free" at Rosemont Market sometime in winter 2009 and teared up and tried to explain to the cashier how hearing that song in public was kind of a life event for me. This amazing Disease jam was coming through the double-doors of a work room at the Co-op in Brattleboro (actual Vermont Phish!), so I had to peek in and talk to the guy washing the vegetables (it turned out to be from Vegas 96). Last month I heard "David Bowie" coming out of some guy's car in the Whole Foods parking lot; even though it was just the Junta version I felt like it was ok to walk over to his car and wave.)

Phish 3D has three acts, culled from performances at Phish's Festival 8, held in Indio, California over Halloween weekend last year. The first act is a composite that represents a normative nighttime set; the second is assembled from a daytime acoustic set (way out of the box for Phish); the third is from their surprise "musical costume," a Phish Halloween tradition—this time out they do Exile on Main Street, with a horn section and backup singers.

Like the stop-motion animation in the Mr. Fox movie, the 3D is kind of awesome for the first few minutes, then your brain adjusts to the medium and you stop noticing it, and it's up to the content to carry the rest of the film. (Maybe the recent proliferation of 3D movies can be explained this way: a pirated 3D movie watched over the Internet would just be a blur.) It turns out that Trey, Mike, and Fish are ok in 3D, but Page is extremely interesting; he sits within a multi-level keyboard fort (Rhodes, Hammond, Moog, Clavinet, Yamaha grand piano, others) that lends itself to geometrical study, and his reflection in the top of the grand looks really cool in 3D.

Without recognizing what was happening, I had the classic Phish experience while watching the movie: Why was I excited about this, and why did I inconvenience myself and others to get here? Phish is not good. I could get up and leave; that would be liberating. Phish is a business, and it's sick the way they manipulate their audience. I'd be having more fun reading in bed. Then an inner shift occurs, and you're in that other place, perfectly attuned, in awe of these masters of music, and they suddenly put down their instruments and bow and walk offstage, and you think, When can I see them again?

Amazingly, it was the acoustic set that effected my conversion. I couldn't believe that they actually sounded better, fuller, more colorful and psychedelic, without all their gear; plus their voices blended well. I love Phish pretty much unconditionally, but it was a revelation to hear that they can actually play. Then the Exile stuff: it is a rule of Phish that when you go to see Phish, you see just those four guys, no opening band, no guests. But here the additional players were the opening that allowed the music to happen; their excess noise-soup floated Phish along; the weird emptinesses were filled, they were playing against something, inside something, bigger than themselves. The sound of Phish is so incessant and fatiguing (especially new Phish; read this article about the compression and gating and digitizing of their live sound) that it's an incredible relief to hear them in a swirl of non-Phish sounds. They're relieved, too—you can see from their expressions how happy they are to be free from Phish, released into the larger social world of music. (My dream job: Phish jam coach. First order of business: Saundra Williams and Sharon Jones and the horn dudes are in the band now.)