No Ticket? No Cash? It's Phish. No Problem!

New York Times ^ | 12-31-2002 | MICHAEL WILSON

[jmc813]

passer-by checking out the crowd outside Madison Square Garden yesterday afternoon might have thought the Knicks were, like, hot, man. Lots of college-age kids in clothes that didn't match, dreadlocks peeking out from under homemade hats, hopping from one two-toned sneaker to the other in the cold.

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Truth is, they couldn't care less about the Knicks. They couldn't care less about basketball, or sports, or sleep, or food. Pass by the Garden any time today, and they will be there, for it is all about the Big Ticket, perhaps the biggest in the country tonight.

Dude.

Phish is back, two years after many feared they were breaking up for good.

"A lot of people base their lives on Phish tour dates," explained Jon, 35, of Ogden, Utah. "When that got taken away from us, it's like a drug. It hurts." He dropped everything for the band's mini-tour — tonight and three nights in Hampton, Va. "Now that it's back on, we're stoked. You know?" A main tour begins in February.

Phish shows, and the fans who turn out for them, are legend, and the concerts bring in more money than the band's albums. The New Year's Eve shows are considered the best: sprawling over six hours, the three-set jam sessions spill exhausted fans onto the streets just before dawn.

A "new fan" has seen perhaps 30 shows. Veterans stockpile bootlegs — concert recordings welcomed by the band — that can take days to listen to.

So when the guitarist Trey Anastasio, the bass player Mike Gordon, the pianist Page McConnell and the drummer Jon Fishman announced in October 2000 that they were creatively burnt out and needed to try new and separate things, panic swept through the Phish-head community.

"It was like a huge deal," said Will Hermes, a critic with Spin magazine. "They're the godfathers of this larger scene of jam bands."

Earlier this year, the band returned to the studio to whip out, in two weeks, the album "Round Room." Its rough, spontaneous quality, the foundation of the live shows, has drawn mixed reviews from critics. But that did not put off the fans, who are expected to turn out in force for tonight's comeback show.

"This is probably the hottest ticket in New York City this year," Mr. Hermes said. "People are coming in from all over the world, certainly all over the country."

Jer Harrison and his wife, Natalie, flew in yesterday from Los Angeles. It is Mr. Harrison's 56th show. Mrs. Harrison teaches high school, and counted down the days in her classroom with her students. "They thought I was actually going fishing," she said, until some tuned in to the band's recent "Saturday Night Live" performance.

Mr. Harrison is 30. His father met him in New York for the show, his 26th.

James J. Flynn, a general manager of the Pennsylvania Hotel, estimated that half the hotel's 1,705 rooms were rented to Phish fans, many of whom made reservations in mid-August, when the show was announced. Many fans did not have tickets. Person after person said these things just work out: someone appears with an extra ticket because someone else did not show up.

More likely yesterday, the person to show up was a scalper. "Yesterday, they jacked a person $500 for a Phish ticket," and it was a counterfeit, said a Garden security guard watching the crowd. He shouted repeatedly through a bullhorn for scalpers to move on, pointing them out: "The fat guy using the phone. He's a scalper. And the guy in the green hat, and the two guys with him."

The group of fans ignored them. They can get large, those groups, especially in smaller cities, prompting a request on the band's Web site Dec. 20 that the ticketless stay home:

"Even if no ticketless fans show up, sold-out Phish shows in communities like Hampton are high impact events that strain the normal daily flow. Add ticketless fans to the equation and the situation can quickly become overwhelming to the local community. Thanks in advance for respecting the Phish scene."

Tarra Yaseen, 18, arrived in New York from Chicago with her friends, in a $500 car bought just for the trip. "They gave us a ticket for sleeping in the car. Eighty dollars, for, like, laying down in your car. We're going to try to get it taken away," she said.

They were living yesterday on crackers and cold soup and cheap cigarettes from Indiana. "We spent all our money," she said. "We spent, like, $9 on parking, and then we have to go to Virginia."

[Notforprophet]

Dude, it's like so totally a groovy scene, man. Phish is like, far, far out there, man, you know?