So, as many of you may know, the band Phish has reunited and is touring around the country. Tickets to shows are highly coveted items, and especially tickets to Red Rocks! When the special online ones went on sale a while back, I heard about it but didn't really think I'd order any. I have a kid now, things have changed, I thought, Phish isn't high on my agenda. But some of my friends encouraged me to try it just in case I got extra tickets and could share the love! So I did, and I lucked out, and now here we are in the middle of summer and the concert is almost here!
I have mixed feelings about it because Phish is such a nostalgiac thing for me. I spent a good decade of my life seeing them all over the country, ranging from Virginia to Colorado to Vegas, wherever I happened to be. Thinking back, my first concert was in 1994 at Univ Hall at UVA. I had just gotten back from my Semester in London (and anyone who knows me knows I was about All Things London after that) and hadn't been listening to Phish over there. Yet all my friends "stateside" were! So I decided to check them out and I still remember walking into the arena with our tickets in hand, seeing all the hippie kids with their hemp necklaces and dogs and rosy cheeks, full of excitement about the night ahead. Wow, I thought, this is my generation! I am finally here! It just somehow had a huge effect on me, much more than going to the Grateful Dead the year before with all the "old" hippies. :) Anyway, so that was the beginning of it all. The tape trading and traveling that went along with shows after that just became a part of me.
And then in about 2003, we saw Phish at the Pepsi Center right before their big "hiatus" (breakup) and it just wasn't the same. It seemed so corporate, and so much the end of an era. Everyone kind of went their separate ways, and we all grew up. Now that Phish has reunited and is touring again, I think it will be a blast but I know it won't be the same as it once was. I'll never forget those days of camping out and driving across country and dressing up on halloween and making friends wherever we went.
I have lots of faves, but here is one of my favorite travel songs and takes me back to those moments of just living, just being, just going with the flow!
All the way home we felt we had a chance
To review the coulds before we were born
And to invite a new game of can'ts
Absorbed in the clouds a voice from afar said
"With the right device you can make a pattern grow
Or you can tune up your car"
So we stayed on the train admiring the time
As the lights of the city drew near
We drank a little wine
They were blurry and green outer space in between
With a depth and a form unclear
Then we saw it up ahead
A flickering lantern lit up on the tracks
In the rugs that had covered up the bridge
From the banks of a river to the bed
Of the valley upstream to the place we live
The glass on the lantern cast back the sight
Of a drive-in movie we drove by below
We saw where we'd been in the pictures within
Projecting all the places we would go
So we follow the scene and flowed up your steps
To a smooth wooden floor in a trance
The train whistle melody woved through the trees
And in through the door to signal the turns of a dance
