Blame It On Your Brother

7/26/99, Noblesville, IN, Deer Creek Music Center

SET 1: Farmhouse, Back on the Train, Vultures, Sleep, Gumbo -> NICU > Beauty of My Dreams, Bathtub Gin, Mountains in the Mist, Axilla > Stash

SET 2: Wolfman's Brother > Piper, Theme From the Bottom > Down with Disease > Jam -> Split Open and Melt

ENCORE: Woodstock > Julius

Listen

In 1995, Phish completed their summer tour on a ski slope in Vermont while Dead fans rioted 900 miles southwest at Deer Creek. It was a symbolic moment, the dour near-finale for one band’s thirty-year run taking place simultaneously with their successor’s last successful trial run for a full-blown festival. Four years later, Phish were themselves in Noblesville, peacefully (if anticlimactically) concluding their latest American run while another concert disaster unfolded, this time 700 miles back northeast. For the 24,000 fans at Deer Creek, many of whom had spent the night before sleeping in cornfields without TVs or newspapers, Trey’s speech about what happened that weekend at Woodstock ‘99 came as a surprise.

“Anybody who’s been watching the news and seeing what’s happening the last couple of days, I don’t know. The live concert experience is going down kind of a bad tube, I feel like, in a lot of places, other than right here with you guys. ” Trey boasts over a paranoid Split Open and Melt jam. “We appreciate being a part of that. It’s very, very, very rare and special to be able to be part of a band that’s playing with an audience like you guys are, listening and everything. That became really evident in the last couple days with what happened in New York and all that shit. To me, it’s like, if you start with greed as your motivation, you’re going to end up with burning things and stuff like that. It’s like, what a big fucking surprise, you know. But hopefully nobody gets hurt and everybody’s happy.”

Reading the full details when I got back home, it felt a little like driving through a busy intersection only moments before a huge, fatal pile-up. Just four days separated Camp Oswego from the start of Woodstock ‘99; both were festivals held on airstrips in upstate New York in that summer’s sweltering July heat. Without festival traffic, it would take you 70 minutes to drive from Oswego County Airport to the decommissioned Griffiss Air Force Base…and oh, by the way, I wonder where the Woodstock organizers got the idea for throwing a music festival on an air force base? And while the scale of the two events was uneven – roughly 50,000 for Phish versus 220,000 for Woodstock – size alone couldn’t explain the wildly different outcomes of these two events.

The narrative of Woodstock ‘99 immediately calcified; the irony was just too rich. If it had just been branded as an extra-large stop on the latest Ozzfest tour – which would’ve better suited the lineup and target audience – the cataclysmic ending wouldn’t have carried nearly as much weight. But the ultimate symbol of the peace and love 60’s degrading into a mud pit of sexual harassment, violence, and capitalism was irresistably compelling and remains so, with two different documentary films and a podcast series coming out in the last five years*. 

Those retrospectives circle around the usual suspects for what went wrong at Woodstock: the aggressive nature of the music, the predatory pricing and poor planning skills of shitbags John Scher and Michael Lang, an absurd amount of drugs and alcohol mixed with a total lack of security and infrastructure. But my guy Steven Hyden* has maybe the most chilling takeaway, saying at the end of Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage:

“When you take off the rose colored glasses and look at Woodstock and what it actually was, it was about sequestering yourself from society and really living the kind of life that couldn't be sustained. Like if we all did that, if we all went into a field with no police, do a lot of drugs and listen to rock music all day long, I mean, things would fall apart pretty quickly.”

That hits close to home. And so does a lot of the documentary footage, which when it’s not showing Kid Rock** or enormous mosh pits, looks a whole lot like my foggy memories of Oswego. The talking heads observe that the Woodstock audience was seemingly 90% college-aged white dudes and that the weekend’s boiled-over rage could be partially chalked up to the entitlement and resentment of that privileged demographic. As a white dude who was in college in the late 90s who had attended a music festival that same month, all I can say is: ouch.

Back then, it was easy to say “yeah, of course those meatheads would riot,” and chuckle imagining fans lighting fires and tearing down plywood to crowd-surf during Farmhouse. Yet for all that Phish took great care of us at the 90s festivals – I don’t remember how much bottled water cost at Oswego, but there were plenty of free water stations – there does seem to be an element of luck that things never went sour (until, in 2004, they did). 

In a funny way, Phish throwing their own festival created a sense of responsibility among the fans; if we behaved badly, we were disappointing our heroes, not some faceless cabal of promoters. But by 1999, it wasn’t as clear that everyone was there to see their favorite band. Oswego was where I first started to notice the people who seemed to be there for the lot instead of the show, the same parasitic partiers that pushed the Dead over the cliff for good back in 1995. The international waters of a festival was of course going to draw this crowd, and their numbers seem to swell in correlation with the variety of drugs on offer in the campgrounds. 

So Trey’s speech – and the ili-advised half-cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” afterwards –  felt ever so slightly tone-deaf at the time, and even worse now, knowing what lay around the corner for Phish. For all his talk of the “journey of happiness of love” and the rare, special relationship Phish had with their fans, that covenant was starting to show cracks. Tonight is a pretty listless show with a lot of auto-pilot improvisation, and coming the day after their onstage promises to party hard for Kuroda’s birthday, it’s not hard to speculate why. The peaks and valleys of this tour’s final four shows were about to become the norm for the next five years of Phish, as the band members fought their demons offstage and couldn’t always leave them there. We talk a lot about the band feeding off the crowd’s energy and vice versa, and that energy from both directions was increasingly threaded with dark, sickly streaks.

But the wheels don’t fall off all at once. One personal shock of watching Woodstock 99 footage now is that, at the time, it didn’t make me hesitate for a second about going five months later to Big Cypress, where giant outdoor festival anxiety was accompanied by the non-zero risk of global civilization collapsing from a computer bug while we hung out in the Everglades. And a little bit of traffic aside, Phish would pull that one off too, another winning roll on the craps table of large-scale festival logistics. But even if they could still throw a party that didn’t end in a white riot, they started to lose sight of the conclusion of Trey’s speech: “Be safe and be happy and just continue the fucking cool path. It’s 1999, let’s just keep it going.” For all that we wanted to feel superior to the barbarians of Woodstock ‘99, hubris was about to call in its debts.

* - Who also did the Woodstock ‘99 podcast, Break Stuff, and is the true authority on this disaster as far as I’m concerned.

** - A reprehensible character who surely will not turn up again in this Phish newsletter!