Reel in a Rollicking Crew

11/16/94, Ann Arbor, MI, Hill Auditorium

I went to the University of Michigan, but when it comes to UofM nostalgia, I’m pretty deficient. Over the nearly two decades since I left, I gradually decided that college sports were unethical, cutting the main thread that connects most people to their alma mater. I’m terrible at keeping up with friends from that time, most of whom have been wise enough to stay off social media. Last time I visited campus (the day after a Phish show at Pine Knob, natch), there were so many new school buildings and condos and chain restaurants that it hardly stirred up any memories.

There are essentially three things from my Michigan days that I hold dear: the house where my roommates and I threw basement shows for pre-fame acts such as Death Cab for Cutie and Ted Leo, the record store where I worked (which somehow still exists!), and traders@umich.edu. This e-mail listserv provided me with my first non-dorm social circle away from home, created some of the longest-lasting friendships of my life, and fanned the flames of my Phish fandom forevermore. I swapped countless tapes and CD-Rs with traders@umich members, road-tripped and saw most of my 1.0 and a majority of my 3.0 shows with at least one representative, and wasted half a day in Big Cypress traffic with two cars full of them. 

It all started with my favorite concert of all time — not just by Phish, but by anyone — at the Palace of Auburn Hills on December 6th, 1997. I got a ride to the show from the music editor of the Michigan Daily, where I had started dabbling in record and concert reviews. He was supposed to write about the Phish show that night, but when he saw how deeply I was into them, he generously handed over the assignment. (Probably for the best, as his favorite part of the night was “when they played the ending to ‘Let It Be.’”)

My review ran December 8th; the first line was “Allow me to introduce myself, I am a Phish snob.” At lunchtime, I logged into Pine and found an email from Mark “markah” Hutchison, inviting me to join traders@umich, a group for trading tapes from Phish, the Dead, and the other active jambands of the era (MMW? Moe.? Galactic? Moon Boot Lover?). What’s more, he extended an invite for an in-person gathering as well, that coming weekend, when the traders crew were gathering to get fresh, first-generation tapes, from *an actual taper*, of the Palace and Dayton shows (the latter of which I had skipped because I was a responsible college freshman in his first semester and didn’t want to go out the night before classes...great choice, younger Rob). 

The taper turned out to be Dave Schall, who recorded both shows on his new Neumann U-87 mics and generously spent all week dubbing four-packs of Maxells for a dozen or so of us to pick up at his house that Saturday. This story is my version of the old “walked to school ten miles uphill both ways” cliche; you kids today can’t imagine the thrill of getting a recording of a show you had attended only one week later. The night was an incredible blur full of dorky Phish conversations; I even got a ride back to my dorm from Aaron Rosenthal, whom I recognized from rec.music.phish posts — an actual celebrity! Giving me a ride home!

Since I didn’t really have any friends who could keep up with my Phish obsession back in the Chicago suburbs, the night was my introduction to a whole new canon of older Phish concerts. Schall, in particular, was a relentless evangelist for August 1993, from which I had only collected the Red Rocks show at the time. He had DATs of almost the entire month, most in SBD, an unfathomed luxury to me and my hard-earned collection of hissy 8th-gen AUDs. 

Because a lot of the traders@umich participants were upperclassmen, this show, roughly three years prior at the Hill Auditorium, also loomed large in their collective history. In some ways, it was as converting an experience for them as the Palace show was for the new, younger members of the email list. For me, who didn’t even hear Phish until 1995 and had seen his first show at the massive Alpine Valley in 1996, the idea of catching Phish at the Hill — that smallish, ornate old concert hall on campus where my roommate performed in the men’s glee club? — was impossible to imagine. Having not heard the tape, the stories from the show almost sounded like fairy tales: a 34-minute Simple?!? Two bluegrass sets?!? I now know people who actually experienced the Chalkdust Torture from A Live One as it happened?!?!?

[If Fall 1994 is, as Brian Brinkman nicely put it, “one of those tours where many competing visions of Phish collided,” this particular show is a 20-car crash on the highway. But, you know, in a good way.]

In our hyper-connected present, it’s worth remembering how platforms such as rec.music.phish, the Phish channels on Prodigy and AOL (the PhishBowl!), Andy Gadiel’s Phish Page, and phish.net were so important for sharing information in the 90s; the recent wave of Phish history podcasts have done a good job of hitting this point. Phish is not an easy band to get into, and these resources were essential for radicalizing thousands of fans without access to IRL mentors. It’s been great fun to watch the same thing happening over the last decade with Phish Twitter, both for new fans finding each other and forming their offline crews, and for continuing the conversation with fellow old-timers from previous platforms — I’m genuinely thankful to still have a way to hear Charlie Dirksen’s grumpy takes 25 years later. 

But beneath those broader platforms, there have been likely hundreds of smaller, local, unsung channels through which Phish fans found each other and more easily transferred friendships from online to offline. And even if the technologies have changed, these communities live on. Traders@umich still exists in sporadically-active Facebook group form; markah still graciously shares the link whenever I write somewhere about Phish (he probably already shared this post several paragraphs ago). In 2009, a handful of us got Coney Islands before a pretty blah show at Detroit’s Cobo Arena; it wasn’t the Palace (RIP), but it was a pretty good substitute. Last year, my two best traders@umich friends and I finally reunited for a show — My Bloody Valentine, which symbolized how we’d all grown beyond Phish in some ways…or maybe not, I’m pretty sure we all came to Loveless through Trey’s recommendation.

Just as Phish provided the path through which I met these friends, their continued existence provides a reliable way that I can stay connected to them. Sure, looking at old photos or listening to tapes is nice, but it’s even better to fire up Gchat and reminisce with my friend Andrew about how good our seats were that stormy night in Columbus when Trey first announced NYE 1999. Too much nostalgia can be a drag, too much fixating on your college experiences and allegiances unhealthy, but sometimes it’s nice to have at least one active link to the past, even if it’s through a defunct email list.

[Stub from Golgi Project.]