Last weekend I went out to see Rosso De Lucca at the Tabernacle here in Atlanta. A wonderful old friend I love dearly and have known since I was 12 asked me to come out with her and her husband and some friends of hers from work. We don't get to hang out too often ever since she had the three kids, so I jumped at the opportunity to have a fun night out with them.
Well it seems I went off and got myself into a bit of trouble.
Now those of you who know me, know I tend to be a pretty laid back fella most of the time, but under the right conditions, in the right environs… I can tend to get a little weird, and when I get drunk, well… all bets are off. But I think I've done a really good job over the last ten years learning to let that little sensor guy in my head actually stop something from coming out my mouth right away, and putting it under review with either the asshole committee, or the sarcasm committee, or the "am I going to regret this in the morning" committee. So in my mind... this particular night… I thought I was on some of my best behavior, and I thought the sensor guy was doing a pretty good job.
Apparently I was wrong.
Turns out my good friend got some feedback from her work buddies who all said I was rude, and an asshole, and that I was mean to them all night long. Now yes, there are times when I get drunk and be a prick for no reason, but I didn't remember this being one of those nights. And then there are other times when someone else is being a prick, and the only thing you can do is to step up and be an even bigger prick right back, but her friends were all very well behaved, very nice people, and never even came close to giving me any kind of a reason to be mean to them. So when I woke up the next morning with a brain-penetrating hangover, I never had a moment's thought of "oh shit, did I piss anyone off last night"?
I was really quite worried when my friend emailed the next day asking, "What the hell had I done to her friends. I ran over everything I could remember in my head, and just couldn't understand the criticism. I thought about it all night, and even the next morning at work. Finally around noon she emails me back with the list of things I had done wrong.
1) I said the band sucked. Apparently quite loudly and… very possibly repeatedly. Although I don't have any strong recollection of this, I can easily see this happening at the end of the night when I had a pretty good buzz on. Although since I had left the night thinking the main band wasn't too bad, but that the first band we saw sucked, I have a feeling I was talking about the first band. (OK, so I'm a music snob, and a loud drunk.) On the whole, I'm not seeing how I was being mean to anyone that I was with that night, since this conversation happened after the show, at the end of the night. After all, her friends weren't actually IN the band, and I've been threatened with an ass kicking before when I've screamed across the bar at the actual band on stage about how much they sucked. (In my defense, it was my 21st birthday party, and they just wouldn't play a Phish song) So I can understand how I might have been annoying, but I don't see how I was mean to anyone
2) I like to talk to strangers. My friend was talking during the show in the crowd about how with three kids she wishes her husband would get a vasectomy, and I commented on how some chicks might not like that, and what if he were ever be single again, would it help him or hurt him in picking up chicks? So I asked the group around me, and they seemed to be split down the middle depending on if they wanted to have kids or not. (If they wanted kids, not hot, if they didn't, hot) So I decided I needed more data, and tapped a group of three women on the shoulders, and asked them if they would find a guy with a vasectomy "Hot or Not". There were protests from my group as I began talking to them, but they all engaged in a short discussion with me for a while, and it was all in good fun. Well, again, somehow I was being mean to the group, by asking these three women these questions. So, I can understand that it might of made them feel a little uncomfortable in some way, but I don't see how it was being mean to them.
3) I tried to talk good about a new friend. There's a new girl at work, and she just got out of college, and she is a biology major and I really respect her work ethic. She's working doing accounting stuff, but I figured, hey, I have a good friend who works in biology kinda stuff, I'll pass her resume on and hope something good happens. So I find out one of the guys I am with this night, is the guy who got her resume back about a month ago. So I spent a few minutes telling this guy that she is a good girl, and I vouch for her, and that he should keep her in mind. He tells me he doesn't have any jobs open right now, so I tried to make sure he kept her in mind whenever the time came to look for new people. Seems he found that I was being mean to him in some way. I actually saw that he was a bit annoyed with me after a few minutes, so I stopped talking about it, but all I did was talk about someone who could be a good person for him to work with someday… and for that… I guess I'm just a big asshole.
So those are the three things I did wrong. I said a band sucked, I talked to strangers, and I tried to help a friend get a new job.
Yeah… I'm a real bastard.
So I spent the last few days wondering how it could have been that although I thought I was in good humor and not being a prick all night long, this new group of people just didn't like me. I almost had myself convinced that it's because I shaved my head, and maybe somehow I look more intimidating now… but then on a Phish message board I found my answer.
I heard an audio clip tonight of Trey Anastasio that was recorded last night. He was doing a live interview with a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine at a small venue with a crowd of about 600 people in New York City and someone happened to tape it and post it on the Internet. He was asked a question like, "What do you feel helped bring about the jam band era and why do you think so many people gravitated towards that music when they did" And he gave a great answer about the different eras of music, and how in the 40's swing was popular, but in the 50's people rebelled against swing, and the jazz combo started becoming the new thing, then the next rebellion was rock and roll which started in the 50's and 60's, and that by the 70's the record companies realized how much money they could make off of this rebellion, so a machine cranked up living off the emotional value that the populous had with this new music. Then by the 80's the record companies had it so down pat, and they would release the perfect single at the perfect time, and all the music became very mechanical and electronic sounding
He said that the way he began writing music, was to be rebellious against the current standard that music had become, and that he wanted to use lyrics that made no sense, and play 20 minute long songs, and play the craziest stuff he could think of, to "jump off a cliff" while playing and do everything opposite of what music had become, and to do something more emotional than what was going on at the time
And while listening to that recording, that's when something jumped out at me about myself. How I've always been rebellious. How I like to stretch the limits of what's socially expectable. How sometimes I like to jump off a cliff and see where it goes, or just pick my feet up out of the sand, and let the water take me off a waterfall. I've always seemed to be happier when instead of planning everything, I just let things go where they wanted to go.
And that's when I had an even deeper thought. "I can't ever date or even possibly marry someone who doesn't love Phish". Because I live that way. I love Phish because they play music similar to who I am inside. A complicated mess of humor and oddity that can take a twist at any moment just looking for something extraordinary and new. That's why the people I went out with thought I was mean to them, because they aren't Phish fans. They don't have that same sense of things about them. They don't have the same expectations. To them, it's about the 4 minute song, ABABCA. Don't do something you aren't supposed to do, stick to the script. Don't rock the boat. And although I have mellowed out over the years, I can still go off script on a moments notice.
The good friends I have appreciate that about me. Sometimes the new people I meet… well, not so much. And over the years I have always found it so easy to get along with someone who loves Phish. There seems to be this natural bond that forms right away. Phish fans are hedonists, we like our beer cold, our women sweaty, and our music crazy. We get bored easily doing the same old thing over and over. We get bored with the typical rock song. We don't always want each day to be just like another day, and get restless when the days start merging together in a work related stuper of similarity. We bitch about how bad bands suck and we like to talk to strangers for fun.
So in an instant, it all seemed so clear. I can never date a woman who doesn't like Phish as much I do. We won't get along. We are doomed from the start, because we are too different. I'll always be pissing her off when I go off script, and she will be boring me to tears after a few months.
I need to meet someone who can be methodical about the details one moment, and then the next moment, be willing to go somewhere she's never gone before. (Think Reba)
So in a way, it's all very calming to me. I seem to have hit on something that makes sense to me. I seem to have unlocked some deep dark universal secret about myself. But then Trey throws me another curve ball.
He says, to answer the earlier question, that he helped create this new genre of crazy rebellious music, he helped the jam band scene gain momentum, and that after 20 years as being crazy became more established and the norm, and he had 100,000 people traveling from across the country to watch him play, he found himself wondering how to rebel against the very something he helped create.
Can you imagine? Living long enough to not only help create a revolution, but then wanting at the end of it, to rebel against the very thing you helped create?
So now I can't help but wonder, am I still living the 20 minute jam life, when someday I'm just going to be finding myself back in the 3 minute pop song world? It seems to me that society has never really kept up with the Phish craziness, and most people I meet don't even like Phish at all. So maybe the wild and crazy Shawn will always be weird in this world, and I won't have to rebel against what I've become. But now I'm going to be thinking about it if that day is coming. Until that day, all I can do is be myself, and that includes pushing the boundaries of what is normal, and although some people just won't like it, there's hopefully going to be a small core of people who revel in it.
By the way, if there's any female Phish fans out there reading this to the end, I'm single, and I like long walks on the lot, and heady veggie burritos.
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