My first time seeing Phish I walked in knowing almost nothing about the band and was completely blown away by what I saw. If I was truly honest with myself I could probably say it was the greatest musical experience of my life at that point, but at the time I lumped it in with so many other great musical moments of my concert lifetime that had come courtesy of bands like Rush, The Grateful Dead, The Tragically Hip, Stevie Ray Vaughan and so many others.

But really, going from hearing just two studio tracks (Golgi Apparatus and Contact) to standing right in front of Fishman and witnessing a shockingly entertaining night of music in Ottawa that included Trey and Mike bouncing on trampolines, two completely acoustic/unamplified numbers, barbershop quartet stuff, The Great Gig In The Sky, and a Led Zeppelin encore; they even played Golgi, so I knew one of the songs! If I take out a slide rule and make a few charts and graphs and carry the one in all the correct places there’s just no denying that it had to have been one of the best concerts I ever saw. Though the last time I saw SRV was pretty epic, not to mention the first time I saw the Stones…

And there’s the rub. I went to an awful lot of concerts (still do) and I simply placed Phish on my large lists of bands that I should make an effort to see whenever I could.

Then I met m’lady.

Before I met m’lady I had seen Phish twenty times. Pretty cool huh? Mmmm-hmmm.

She was somewhere around show number eighty when we met; including two European tours and every show Phish has ever played in Japan. She was/is a superfan. For her the band was simply unmissable at all costs, and when we first started going to shows together (starting with the band’s comeback shows at the Mothership in Hampton, Virginia in March of 2009) I realized that all of her friends were superfans too.

At the time I was still very unclear on what the songs were called (still am), but sitting down with m’lady and her crew was like talking to a bunch of Phish encyclopedias.

I thought I was a fan, but the truth was if Phish was playing in my hometown and on the same night The Stones, Roger Waters, Springsteen, or heck even The Beach Boys were playing somewhere else in town I would have a hard time picking my show. On the other hand, m’lady and her crew would have no problem making their choice.

On August 5th, 2017 I finally joined their ranks (fan-wise, not encyclopedia-wise).

It was the penultimate night of Phish’s stunning thirteen-show run at Madison Square Garden, a crazy little thing called The Baker’s Dozen. Like every other night in the series, specifically themed doughnuts had been handed out to the first few thousand people through the door. This time the flavour was Boston Cream, which roused much speculation amongst the pre-show crowd over what Boston or Cream-themed cover songs the band might play. Everyone was pulling for Boston’s Foreplay/Longtime, a song the band has pulled off several times before.

My seats were in the Madison Club, a completely upscale first-class area directly behind the stage. I counted just 196 seats in the vast section, replete with fancy carpets, a private bar, bathrooms with attentive attendants, ultra wide, deep leather seats and each one was outfitted with its own very convenient marble table.

And what a place to watch CK5’s light show from! No other light guy in the business spends as much time and effort lighting up the audience as Chris Kuroda; with him the band enjoys just as good of a light show as the crowd does.

So I was super-comfortable, feeling great and loving the show when midway through the first set Phish started into Cream’s Sunshine Of Your Love. I started jumping up and down. Then in the chorus they made a brilliant bounce to Boston’s More Than A Feeling. Wow, that was awesome!

Then they snap back to Cream…Tales Of Brave Ulysses, then back to Sunshine Of Your Love, then into the Foreplay jam with White Room lyrics sung overtop, oh it was very, very incredibly fun. They genuinely played Boston Cream on Boston Cream night. These geeks were cool, no doubt about that.

And that was the last moment of my casual fandom of Phish. For it is what I heard next that pushed me over the edge into deep, deep Phish fandom. The next sound I heard would be my entrance into the world that I had been looking in on for all of these years. The phrase “M’lady loves Phish and I love m’lady so I see a lot of Phish concerts,” would no longer be my goto explanation as to why I go to the shows. All of that changed when Trey stepped up to the mic and said:

“Tomorrow’s doughnut flavour will be ‘Kansas/Metallica’.”

Oh my lord, I almost died laughing. Then Fishman explained that they had been waiting twenty years to deliver that joke: this entire record-setting historic run of concerts at Madison Square Garden that had brought tens of thousands of people to New York City from all over North America and beyond for the trip of a lifetime all sprung from the idea of playing the Boston/Cream medley and following it up with the Kansas/Metallica joke.

That is just so very, very cool. Greatest. Band. Ever.

It took a hundred-and-one Phish shows for me to find my jam but now I get it. I won’t be missing these guys much anytime soon.
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