Some thoughts on Phish and last night’s show at Starlight

Sometime in eighth grade, I bought Rift through one of those buy-twelve-CDs-for-the-price-of-one mail-order clubs, probably Columbia House. This would have been 1995 or 1996. I selected it primarily because I had seen it in an older cousin’s CD collection and — I am trying to be honest here — I was intrigued by the way the band spelled its name: Phish. Rift is a jigsaw puzzle of an album, folk tones colliding with some strange, mystical version of funk that I’d never heard before. It is also a concept album, I think, and although I don’t really know what the concept is, as I listened to it I could sense that there was some obscure message, or some kind of mystery, buried within it.

It did not, in other words, sound like Spacehog or Collective Soul or any of the other alt-rock bands whose albums I was buying through Columbia House. A couple weeks later I convinced my mother to drive me out to a Best Buy, where I purchased Hoist. Hoist was even better! “Julius” — those wild horns! That outro solo on “Down with Disease”! These guys were amazing, and nobody I knew had ever even heard of them! My secret! I was a Phish fan.