The Lure
by John Mancini
I was lying down in the back of the bus studying the drawing on the ceiling. It was a meticulous black and white drawing from the M.C. Escher school of impossible intersecting planes and infinite loops. I’d traveled in my friend’s VW bus the previous two years, and I’d inadvertently spent a good deal of time staring at this original piece of art. Anyone who had looked at it long enough would have noticed the cryptic statement woven into the minutiae:
“If you fear it will kill you – if you love it will set you free.”
It seemed like good advice to me at the time and had become my mantra while on tour. I enjoyed taking risks and felt pretty fearless.
In August of 1996 I traveled from Red Rocks, Colorado, to Plattsburgh, NY, to see the ultimate summer festival, The Clifford Ball. Already, the first day was winding down. In the middle of the night I heard noises outside the bus and got up to see what was going on. A crowd was forming in the road, and there was Phish playing on the back of a flatbed truck decked out with strands of lights and torches and flanked by police on horseback. There were maybe two dozen or so fans around them just then, and the band was just jamming quietly while cruising through the lot at 3am. I got in with the others and walked along with them for a little bit. I’d just seen these guys play three sets, and now here I was following them around an Air Force Base on foot in the middle of the night – still drawn to the music like a bug to a light. Everyone in the procession seemed joyfully mesmerized, happy to share in the profound weirdness of the moment.
The moment is fleeting and you have to catch it. You have to be in it to affect the possibilities. The show is starting and you’ve got to get inside. There’s something about summer tour – you know it’s coming. You can feel the need to get the wheels rolling under you again, to get out there on the road and out of town – the need to get down.
The year after Clifford Ball, I went in the same bus to The Great Went. By then, we were all veterans. We knew the terrain, expected heavy traffic. On our way in the locals held up welcome signs. Bumper to bumper Phish heads making our way through another remote Northeastern town, our dusty vehicles loaded down with tents and coolers and acoustic guitars – parading down Main Street like we were there to free them with our grilled cheese and homemade tee shirts. And some of them knew that, that we were there to help – not just their economy, but also to lift spirits. We felt like an alien invasion. We had come to their planet to perform our special ceremony with rock music and glow sticks. We came in for a landing, found our spot and raised our flag.
Once you have been initiated it is hard not to return. The music becomes part of the texture of your existence, a shared experience, and memories of freer times. Though the scene evolves, the feeling stays the same, like a gathering of tribes, everyone chasing a good time, the rising action of tour culminating in that awesome moment – the big festival – the memory of which becomes like that of a dream. But it’s also in the leading up to it – the “let’s get this show on the road” feeling. It has a magnetic pull, the lure of mystery and adventure. It’s in the music, too. It’s in the way some songs can wind you up tight and then set you loose. There is a necessary tension, an anticipation leading up to the event that fuels this moment. Maybe it’s that suspended chord, or sudden change of key, in the intricate extended fugal composition that gives way to an explosive jam. It’s the feeling of entering the arena during the first song of the first set, and finding your friends – a welcoming feeling that takes you back and lifts you up. It feels like victory – all confetti and streamers and everybody’s glad you made it. We’re all in the bathtub now.
Tension and release have their place in all arts: climactic third acts in films, areas of dark and light in paintings, the broken phrases and enjambments of poetry — and they have their place in touring as well, in mastering the art of the fleeting dramatic moment, finding your place in the crowd, and living an artistic life – in keeping it bouncing. Improvisational musicians speak of losing themselves in the music, stepping out of the way and letting the music come through them. The same goes for travelers. It’s what the French call flaneurie – this romantic drifting through the world. As always, there’s an element of risk, facing the unknown and welcoming the transformation. Who else besides Phish would chance playing a lullaby to a parking lot full of seventy thousand people in the middle of the night?
So once upon a time I strolled along with the crowd in what has come to be known as The Flatbed Jam, the stuff of legend. I followed along for a little while, but you had to keep turning your head to see them while walking straight, so eventually I gave up and headed back to the camper. I never would have imagined it, and who would have believed me, but from second set finales, even from brilliant dreams like this one I turned back for the comforts of the bus.
During the summers of 94-97, I spent a lot of time in that bus, following Phish. I studied that strange design that covered the ceiling long enough. It was one of those things you can never forget once you’ve seen, and you always saw something new. I guess that was the point. It was in how you approached a thing. Every situation has possibilities in it; all that is required is your presence. There’s nothing to fear. Tour would come around again in the fall. The festival would return next year – and of course, if you were feeling really ambitious, there was always the west coast leg.
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