I’d like to tell you a little story about a very special man I met recently. It all started when I decided, out of the blue, to go for a long drive out in the country. I regret to admit I wasn’t very prepared for this spur of the moment road trip, and found myself running out of gas in the middle of nowhere. Miles from the nearest gas station and without my cell phone, I decided to start walking. My long drive in the country had just turned into a long walk in the hot Texas sun, made even less pleasant by the fact that there was a dead possum right in the middle of the road when I stepped out of my car, but that’s beside the point. So there I am walking along, trying my best to enjoy the fresh air, when I hear a car approaching behind me. I turn around to see one of those old Volkswagen buses, that all the old hippies love, slowing down and beginning to pull up next to me. This VW is pristinely restored and has one of those Westfalia camper tops on it, not to mention one of the wackiest paint jobs you have ever seen. The windows are rolled down, and this fella who’s driving hollers over at me “Hey brother, you look like you could use a lift”.
The Good Samaritan behind the wheel, who introduced himself as “Fluff” invited me to hop on in. Fluff definitely had a style all his own. He had a full chest length beard, and long dreadlocks decorated with all sorts of charms and beads. He was wearing homemade patchwork corduroy pants, sandals made of rope and a t-shirt with a picture of Mr. Rogers on it that said “Whatever you do take care of your shoes”. And for whatever reason, he had a Uno card pinned to the side of his hat. Despite his unusual appearance, he seemed like a really kind guy and I took him up on his offer.
As we’re riding down the road, Fluff leans forward to turn up the stereo. It was a real jazzy, upbeat tune that had some oddball lyrics about your hands and feet being mangos. “Who in the world is this?” I asked. “You mean you don’t know brother? These are my boys from Burlington, this is Phish. You dig it? This tune right here, Mango Song, it’s kinda poetic to me ‘cause it’s from the first show I ever saw, and it’s the first time they ever played it.”
“That’s cool” I replied “when was that?” Fluff told me it was sometime back in March of 1989 in the band’s hometown Burlington Vermont. Fluff got this twinkle in his eye when he started talking about the show and how the music affected him. He started telling me about how after he discovered this band, he felt compelled to spread the word about how awesome they were. So he drove down to see his buddies at Amherst College in Massachusetts. There was a big show/party at “the Zoo” that the band was playing and he had to make sure everyone knew about it. He told me about this song they played called Fluffhead, which he adopted his nickname from, and how the night of the show halfway through the song someone pulled the fire alarm. The song was interrupted, but the band just made a joke of it by following it up with a ripping cover of Fire by Jimi Hendrix.
After those couple of shows he saw in March and April of 1989, Fluff told me he didn’t get a chance to see the band again for about a whole year. But coincidence found him, and the band, in Colorado at the same time, in the spring of 1990. He was working in Fort Collins that April, when he found out Phish was going to be playing at a little venue called the Canyon West Room. Fluff got so excited telling me about how he got to see them debut a cover of the jazz standard How High the Moon. He also got to see them do an uninterrupted version of Fluffhead this time, that segued into a cover of Highway to Hell. Weird stuff indeed.
Three years later, in the spring of ’93, Fluff decided to make the pilgrimage way down south for Mardi Gras. Of course it was all part of the plan that while he was there, Phish was scheduled to play at Tipitina’s, in the heart of the French Quarter. The song playing on the stereo is this driving epic rock jam, and Fluff is practically dancing in the driver’s seat as he tells me how the music sometimes makes him feel like some kind of alien…in a good way, whatever that means. This song on the stereo, Tweezer Reprise, from the encore of that show in New Orleans, builds to a ridiculous climax and ends like an exclamation point to Fluff’s story. He then reaches down and flips the tape over to the other side.
Fluff kind of came back to reality for a moment when the song ended. He proceeds to tell me that after partying so hard in New Orleans, he decided it was time to buckle down and return to school. The next three years he didn’t get to see any shows, but he listened to a lot of bootlegs tapes that he traded with other kind folks on the internet. He mentioned a now defunct usenet group called rec.music.phish that he spent a lot of time on in the campus computer lab, keeping track of what the band was playing and meeting other like-minded people to trade audience recordings of shows with. He told me how disappointed he was to miss seeing the band’s performance of the entire Talking Heads album Remain In Light while he was finishing his last semester of school, but that only made him more determined to make the next year a momentous one.
My driver now seems to be fully engrossed in telling his and the band’s intertwining story and is paying little attention to where we are actually going now. The second side of the tape we are listening to, although I can tell it is still the same band, is very different from the jazzy, noodly jams from earlier. It sounds funkier, loose but focused at the same time, and in a way, very psychedelic. With money he had been saving up for the past few years, Fluff bought a plane ticket to Europe the year after he finished college and set out to see every show of the Phish summer tour that year. He started out in Ireland and was completely blown away when, at the first show he had seen in four years, he had the treat of seeing the debut of seven new original songs, and two new covers. But that was just the beginning, as the tour progressed, Fluff saw and heard some of the most experimental and exciting music he’d ever experienced. He seemed to especially enjoy the two back to back shows he saw in Amsterdam. Those shows sounded exceptionally weird, even for a band like Phish.
I didn’t really mind that we had already passed a couple different gas stations as Fluff went on about his adventures in Europe and how he returned to the States in midsummer for the second part of his summer tour expedition. I found it odd at first that someone would want to see the same band so many times in succession, but from the sound of it, these weren’t your run of the mill concerts. I kind of wish I could have been there with Fluff, dancing barefoot on the lawn of these great amphitheaters, and just embracing the beauty and joy of something so unique and special every night. Fluff zig-zagged all over the country that summer, and ended up with around 75,000 other “Phish heads” in northern Maine at a festival called The Great Went. It all sounded so strange to me. I asked how on Earth he managed to afford to just go from show to show with no job for an entire summer, he just grinned from ear to ear and said to me “Jah will provide”. Umm, ok.
Once that whirlwind summer tour was over, Fluff was back in the northeast and settled down for the year before he thought about going to any more shows. A whole year passed, and then another summer tour came and went. Fluff told me that when he goes that long without seeing his favorite band he starts to get a little antsy. So when everyone else around him was worrying about the impending Y2K, all Fluff could think about was which show he was going to be able to see that December. Rochester, New York was close enough for a road trip, so he bought tickets online and hopped in the van. Fluff said he’s been lucky to see some really cool debuts of songs, but the new song they played that night, Jennifer Dances, just did not float his boat. He just shrugged his shoulders and said that when a band has that many different songs in their catalog, they can’t all be winners.
After the turn of the century came and went, Fluff decided he needed to do a little more exploring of our great wide country and hopped on a bus to California. That fall, in the year 2000, he was living in L.A. when it was announced that Phish would make an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It was to be one of the last times the band would play together for quite a while. The band had announced an upcoming extended time-out, and Fluff wasn’t going to miss a chance to see them at least one more time. Like any diehard fan would, Fluff got up at the crack of dawn and waited in line all day to secure his spot in the audience. Fluff told me that although it was nothing like seeing a full show, he couldn’t have been more excited when Jay Leno introduced his favorite band and they began to play Twist, a song off the relatively new Farmhouse album. Little did he know it then, but that was the last time he would see them play for nine years.
There were a handful of shows here and there over the next couple of years which Fluff was not able to attend. He got a little emotional telling me about not being able to make it back to the east coast in 2004 to see what was said at the time to be the last performance ever. He always had his tapes to listen to, and the years passed on, but Fluff didn’t give up hope that he had seen the last of Phish.
Fluff never stopped enjoying the music, and he did see a lot of new bands in concert through the early and mid 2000’s, but he yearned for that old familiar fun of a Phish show once again. Patience and faith rewarded him in 2009 when, like a phoenix from the ashes of a fire, Phish announced they were back together and, after a re-introductory set of shows in Hampton Virginia, there was a summer tour planned.
Fluff never went into detail about what he actually did for a living, but he had managed to save quite a bit of money while living on the west coast. He told me how he had found the beautiful bus we were traveling in at a “Rainbow Gathering” in California, and bought it on the spot from a kombucha brewer and his wife. Fluff made a few customizations of his own, and hit the road hoping to make it to the east coast by the end of May for the opening show at Fenway Park in Boston. However, as with any cross country trip by VW bus, there were setbacks and delays, and he didn’t quite make it in time to see the first couple shows of the tour. Fluff told me he rolled into Jones Beach, New York on the last day of the band’s three night run of shows. When the opening chords and crowd chant of fan favorite Wilson filled the amphitheater, Fluff said he finally felt home again. The second set of that nights show had an epic and grandiose scale, and my new friend was especially struck by the debut of a brand new song called Twenty Years Later. The song had a special significance to Fluff, since he himself had been on a twenty year roller coaster ride since first seeing the band way back in 1989.
About a year after seeing the show at Jones Beach, Fluff was visiting friends in Ohio for a wedding. There just happened to be a show coinciding with the wedding that weekend. The wedding was to be on Sunday, and since there were no other plans set for that Saturday, he and a couple of the other groomsmen had time to cruise down to Cuyahoga Falls to catch the show. He told me how he didn’t have a ticket, and I wondered why you’d make a road trip to a concert without knowing you could get in or not. Fluff said there was always a miracle waiting for him in the lot. The parking lot of these shows, the way Fluff described it, was like some exotic foreign bazaar. A place where you could find literally anything you needed, and diversity was fully embraced. All Fluff had to do was stroll along what he called “Shakedown Street”, which is apparently the common name for the main thoroughfare of the parking lot, with his finger in the air and ask “Who’s got my miracle?”. Well, Fluff got his miracle ticket for the Cuyahoga show and was absolutely delighted to hear a couple covers debut that would likely never be played again; Lookout Cleveland by The Band, and Instant Karma by John Lennon. That night’s encore, an older original entitled The Squirming Coil was playing on the bus’ tape deck, and as the song’s beautifully classic piano solo drew to a close, Fluff started to slow down and pull the van over to the side of the road. Wait a minute, I thought, we’re right back where we started. There’s my car! “Hey brother” said Fluff “I am so sorry, I just now remembered, I’ve got a spare can of gas in the back there. I totally spaced it, bro. My bad.” No, I thought, it wasn’t bad at all.
Use a QR scanner at the cache to listen to any of Fluff's favorite shows