Phish
Lincolnshire Regal 16, Chicago (August 14, 2003)
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Phish
Lincolnshire Regal 16, Chicago
August 14, 2003 |
So when Phish played their last two shows at an airport near Coventry, Vermont, on August 14th and 15th, where was I? At the Lincolnshire Regal 16, a movie theater in suburban Chicago. That's right, for the final shows of my favorite band, I drove a half-hour or so to the land of mini-malls and mega-malls, to Panera kingdom, to a faceless sprawled out parking lot of a suburb, so I could watch the shows from the relative comfort but utter lack of ambience of a movie theater.
And it was good.
I could have gone to Coventry. I could have afforded it, and I could have made the time. I could have snagged a ride with fans driving in from Hartford or Montreal and met up with old friends for one last Phish hurrah. But like so many of Phish's old fans these days, and the group themselves, I seem to have become a grown-up. This grown-up couldn't summon the effort to halt real life and put the trip together, and this grown-up ended up happy to have made that choice.
I had a few other friends who weren't going to the shows either, though I think reasons more practical than an inflated sense of their own maturity kept them from slogging to Vermont. A few weeks before the big finale, Phish announced that they were going to broadcast both shows in their entirety, live, into a few movie theaters around the country. My friends and I decided to go, to be part of Phish's end in at least a small way, and it turned out to be almost as good as being there.
Right from the start, our suburban multiplex adventure was just like a concert experience. It began with a frantic online scramble for tickets (in: Fandango, out: Ticketmaster), replete with wild browser refreshing and unrestrained joy when we scored a set before they sold out. On the big day, we jammed a car full of coolers, refreshments, games, and silly hats and piled in, just as if we were going to Alpine Valley or The Gorge. Then we checked into the Hampton Inn across from the theater, and, well, that wasn't like going to a real show at all. But we partied and we listened to pump-up music, and joined by occasional acquaintances and randoms, we amped ourselves up ... to walk across the parking lot and into a movie theater where normal suburbanites were watching "Alien vs. Predator."
We walked past the ticket marketplace outside and into our theater, a big stadium-seating job, and took up spots close to the front where there would be room to stand and dance. The screen was enormous, and for the first half-hour or so, the cameras just panned through the audience waiting for the show to start, showing us poor exhausted fans who had braved days of swamps and traffic. We all had our hardships: they were standing in ankle-deep mud; we had to deal with carpet that was a little bit sticky from spilled Mountain Dew. Right from the start, we did what they did. We were in the crowd, standing and buzzing just like they were. When the band walked on the stage, everybody actually on-site went berserk -- and so did we, quickly getting past the absurdity of clapping and cheering at an unresponsive screen.
The band opened up with "Walls of the Cave," and it was clear that the simulcast was going to be a professional production. The sound was great, as was the camera work -- right in the band's faces, right on their hands as they played, then panning out to cover the crowd, the scene, and the lights. We could even see their feet, something you can't ever glimpse at a concert -- Trey Anastasio's boots stomping on one of his dozen effects pedals, Jon Fishman's mud-encrusted Birkenstocks keeping time on the bass drum (no, we couldn't see up his dress).
The movie crowd was there to see a Phish show and treated it like one, and in doing so made it a Phish show. When the band made gestures at their monitor engineers to adjust the mix, we yelled for the theater staff to turn down the lights and up the volume, which they did. If the concert-goers had to carefully skirt the State Police on the way up, we had to sneak whiskey past ushers and into the theaters in Diet Coke cups. When the crowd threw glowsticks, making an audience lightshow, we threw glowsticks, making a visual scene in Theater 11 and drawing the music and the concert back from the screen and up the theater aisles. When they batted balloons around, we batted balloons around. And when they clapped and cheered and sang and danced, so did we, one crowd separated by hundreds of miles.
At the end of the first night's show, the fans in Coventry retired to their campsites for rest and to party a little more and to watch the crazies around them debauch themselves; we retired to the Hampton Inn to rest and party a little more and watch Olympic highlights on SportsCenter. On the second night, during the last Phish show, keyboardist Page McConnell broke down when it came time to sing "Wading in the Velvet Sea", a ballad about a love far away. I'd wager the multiplex fans were closer to the band during this moment than the fans in Coventry were. Here was our hero and friend breaking down as something we all loved came to an end, something that deserved quiet and reflection and appreciation, and we could be quiet and just watch and empathize and cry.
I stood there with my hands on my head, near tears, ecstatic to be able to be a part of the event. And that's what it was -- it didn't feel like watching a DVD. It was a live event. If you're a sports fan, it was like the best part of watching live sports -- the feeling that you might see something extraordinary and unexpected and historic, and that it's going to unfold right in front of you in a way no one in the world can predict. We got all that in the movie theater, piped in with the digital picture and the Dolby sound.
JEFF GRAY | Jeff Gray used to be an important mover and shaker in Chicago, but gave all that up to live on a beach in rural Hawaii. You'll notice him if you're there, he's the one who's very tall and a little bit sunburned. His musical tastes tend towards the mainstream -- Phish, Radiohead, The Strokes -- but he'll argue to the death that those bands are mainstream because they're 100% awesome. Jeff's always on the lookout for the next great pop song, tidbits about Michigan football, and 80's action movies on cable.