12/31/99—> 1/1/00 Big Cypress Seminole Reservation, FL—Jeremy D. Goodwin
The next afternoon, the strong 12/30 show was in the books, but there really was very little room for gloating. Three-set Phish shows in December in the Everglades are certainly not to be discarded lightly, but everyone’s mind was occupied with the question: What the hell are they going to do tonight? It was easy to make idle predictions like Gamehendge, a cover album (to fully integrate the three life-cycle rituals into an inferno of psychic convergence), a “Harpua” or “Forbin’s” at the least.
I didn’t really play any of these games, because I’d finally learned enough about Phish to realize that I very rarely have any idea of what they were really going to do. We did have some information to go on, however. Crew members had been seen riding around in the 12/31/94 hot dog in the backstage camping area, and there was a rumor of “no guests.” My only prediction, if it can be called that, was an often-repeated assurance that “something really weird is going to happen.” In general. In totality. There were too many powerful forces converging. The one thing I totally counted out was normalcy.
During the afternoon set, I had to continually remind myself that, despite the beautiful outdoor setting and perfect weather, I was in fact at the Phish New Year’s Eve show, dancing barefoot on a tarp. It literally was thrilling every time I again consciously became aware of these usually incongruent circumstances. After the first set concluded mightily with “After Midnight”, and the crowd had started wandering away for a few short minutes, an enormous roar suddenly arose as we walked back towards the campgrounds…the feeling of mutual joy and anticipation gave me chills. Particularly anticipation. It was not a “that was a great set” cheer. It was a “we sure have something in store for us” cheer. After all, the band had just fucking promised us that we were gonna find out what it’s all about. And that’s what I’m in this for in the first place.
For day two, we had staked out our tarp directly in front of the soundboard. I continually marveled at the perfect sound, and we congratulated ourselves for securing such a perfect location. I arrived at that tarp sometime before 11 PM, and did not leave until after 7:30 AM. I spent the entire Midnight Set within a twenty-foot radius on a green tarp directly in front of the soundboard. I did not need to go to the bathroom, I did not need to eat, I did not need to sleep, I did not need to do anything except take in the most amazing musical performance in the history of rock music.
After attending the previous three NYE shows alone, it was a welcome pleasure to hug upwards of twenty people during “Auld Lang Syne”. My friend Jeff summed it up with elegant precision the next morning: “I can’t believe what I just did, where I did it, and who I did it with!”
The set started off at an accelerated pace (“Disease” and “Gin” were standout versions right out of the gate), but nothing tremendously weird was happening. The “Heavy Things”/cheesecake episode was enormously amusing. We got primed for “Twist Around”, as many in our group had fond memories of the Spring Run version, but it was pretty brief. Had it been a regular set, the “Caspian” probably would have ended it.
And then the unmistakable opening riff of “Rock and Roll”. This was the first uproariously brilliant jam of the night, and it featured a spellbinding sequence that sounds composed, and no doubt got me jumping up and down. The exuberant chorus provided one of my first peak experiences of the set.
When this Velvet Underground rock gem finally ended thirty minutes later, we got a “YEM”. It featured a laugh-out-loud “cheesecake” vocal jam.
And the band leaped into the electrifying rhythm of “Crosseyed and Painless”. It was a tremendous thrill to see this live, and the energy surging through the crowd was palpable, at least from my vantage point. It was now nearing the two-hour mark, and I started trying to piece together the fragments of the set in my mind (I wasn’t even bothering to attempt to keep a setlist). I realized that the jam was really good, and said to Noah, “You know, I’m beginning to think this is a really hot set. Like, if it was just a regular second set. I mean, really hot.” He agreed, or perhaps just wanted me to stop babbling. I remember getting so utterly lost in this blazing jam that the closing vocals totally surprised me. Listening to the FOBs, it’s easy to see why; they really do come out of nowhere.
It was during the ensuing “Minestrone” that I began to adjust to the atypical flow of this unprecedented set. Until now, it had been a total party atmosphere in the crowd. I mean that in the best of ways: it was high-energy, New Year’s Eve-type stuff. But our internal clocks were noticing that we had exceeded normal second-set territory. I heard someone say something like, “So this is how you play all night, you have to have the guitarist play acoustic by himself.” It wasn’t in any way a criticism, just someone thinking out loud, trying like everyone else to comprehend the feat that was just beginning to unfold in front of us.
The short acoustic number was not much of a breather for the band before launching off into “Sand”. It was during this very long jam that the mood started to shift, aided no doubt by the very spacey and experimental character of the music. This was basically tied (with “Roses”) for the longest and strangest jam of the night, and during the psychedelic mayhem I believe a lot of people shifted gears, mentally. It was the length of the set, as well as the music, as well as whatever little toys people had put into their heads; the regular trajectory of a set had already been way overshot, and we were left to grasp at the shards of bizarre sounds that bombarded us…with no reference point, floating submissively in the dark improvisational currents. Personally, that’s why I go to Phish shows, and I was happy to immerse myself in the space odyssey unfurling from the stage. However, some people were getting cold out there on the raft, and one member of our group finally said, “I want them to play a song now.”
By the end of this jam, we had traversed beyond all semblance of a normal set’s rhythm. The band must have sensed this, because they simulated a normal set-closer by whipping out “Slave”. The gentle beauty of that classic song was no doubt the salve that many craved, and it provided a wonderful, thrilling release. I consider this the end of the first internal “set” of the night.
The next string of songs were a bit disjointed (“Albuquerque”, “Reba”, “Axilla”, “Uncle Pen”, “David Bowie”, “My Soul”), and while boasting a “where did that come from?” brilliantly nailed “Reba”, seemed like a transitional stretch. There was a very long pause, during which Trey and Fish appeared to have disappeared from the stage. It was strange, cause we were all just standing around, sort of waiting for something to happen. If they had said, “Okay, we’re taking a five-minute break,” I don’t think anyone would have complained, but I guess they wanted to keep the continuity of the set intact. As Mike and Page hung around onstage, occasionally hitting a stray note, I quipped, “Hello, I’m Mike…I’m not a good public speaker.” It was pretty funny the first time, but apparently I unfortunately took to repeating the line during other weird pauses yet to come.
Then “Drowned”. It’s hard to fault the band for working up crowd energy with such excellent cover selections, seeing as they were only the conduit for thrilling improvisation. The “After Midnight” jam is absolutely spine-tingling, and I distinctly remember the surprise and delighted shock I felt when it happened. The sublime power of this moment comes across clearly on the recordings. Those in our group marveled at the fact that, despite the hour being around 5 AM, from our vantage point looking forward, it could as well have been “second song, second set.” We were still packed in among a swarming throng of excited concert-goers, up to the gills in energy. I’m sure the energy and pure physical proximity of the revelers dispersed the further you got from the stage, but it was quite intense to experience all this from so close.
It might have been around here that our friend Kaz stretched out on the tarp, rolled up in a blanket, and took a nap. He got in a good thirty-minute power nap, stood up, and resumed dancing. It was that kind of night.
By now, some members of our crew had dispersed…off to expel bodily fluids, acquire food, take refuge in the nearby backstage campgrounds for a spell, and otherwise reassemble their internal psychic elements. Eventually it started feeling less like Phish was performing a musical concert for our benefit, and more like we were all subsumed together into a giant, pulsing, organic mass, propelled by the sounds and lights coming from onstage. As Kaz put it, people were living, breathing, sleeping, taking a shit, just existing…as the spectacle continued on, like some musical sun that pulled us all along through its gravitational pull and kept our pulses going.
I periodically checked my watch, and Raras and I joked about how fun it was just “whiling away the fours” and then “whiling away the fives” and then…”whiling away the sixes”?! At 6 AM on the dot, “Lawn Boy” started, and only in this context could the lounge number legitimately seem surreal. Beau quite memorably remarked, “It’s a little early in the morning for a ‘Lawn Boy’.”
During Fish’s intro to “Love You”, eighty thousand of us seemed to experience a brief mental drift, led my Fishman at the front of the stage… it was finally punctuated by Fishman’s remark, “Oh, are we at a rock concert?” (This bit made it into the retrospective video shown at the 12/2/03 anniversary show.) It was a perfect comment, and summed up my feelings precisely. Was this a rock concert? What was it? At this moment Sting was probably waking up for his yoga and a morning jog, and Phish was still onstage playing its New Year’s Eve show.
“Roses Are Free” seemed to glide up out of the silence slowly, as the band eased back into gear after the Henrietta break. Very casually, apparently at complete ease with themselves as a band and with the eighty thousand people on the premises, at about 6:15 in the morning, Phish proceeded to play what I consider their greatest jam ever. The interplay between the four is astounding, as they seem to pulse and breathe together as one sparkling, inspiring mass. It was as if all conscious barriers and egos had been transcended through sheer exhaustion, all pretenses stripped bare, and all that remained was the music. The glorious, transcendental music. It’s like everything that had ever happened in their career, and everything that had happened through the night’s marathon project of incessant creative exploration, had accumulated and led up to and enabled this breakthrough. It was a musical (and I suspect, for the band, a personal) epiphany. As they glided along in this aesthetic hyperspace, I kept thinking how damned improbable this whole situation was. In fact, I took a picture of the stage, just to prove it was actually happening.
During “Roses”, the sky began to lighten. By the end of “Bug” it was already daylight, and I started wondering if and when they were ever going to stop playing. I also noticed the enormous screens, literally for the first time in several hours. There was an extreme close-up of Page’s face, with red light streaking through his hair. I quipped, “I am Page…I am the Sun God!” It was pretty strange, honestly. It was sometime around here that a member of our group suddenly produced a still-cold bottle of champagne. The process of handing it around and gulping from it seemed so absurd that it was hilarious, and we started chanting “Happy New Year!” in a kind of hybrid of seriousness, sarcasm, humor, and joy that I cannot describe accurately.
Then “Hood” started, and someone said, “Again? Okay.” It was simply an exhausted mistake made by the band, and adds yet more flavor and character to the set. I think Dan Seideman had dozed off briefly, but he staggered to his feet when “2001” sent yet another surge of electricity through the crowd. Okay, this is absurd. Beautifully, triumphantly absurd. The glory of nature had subsumed much of Kuroda’s artistic space, but orange, red, and white lights pumped as the band lit into a particularly fiery version of this musical orgasm. Suddenly, everyone was dancing again. I chose this time to mill around the tarp a little more, taking a few pictures, basking in the improbable triumph of it all. Near the end, the band apparently experienced another stream of consciousness moment as they briefly wandered into a reggae flavor, as if to revisit a parallel version of “Hood” that they had accidentally started earlier.
It didn’t occur to me that this was the preliminary finale of the set, it just seemed like yet another song. I was absolutely shocked that they next went for “Wading”, one of my least favorite Phish originals. This is the only version I ever bother to listen to on tape or CD, out of respect for the coherence of that last hour of the set, but it made our group mutter and scratch our heads.
The resumption of “Meatstick” caused a general wave of joy and release, as we realized that things were wrapping up. To this day, whenever I hear the beginning of a “Meatstick” it immediately conjures up that feeling of communal triumph, accomplishment, and shared joy that connected us all on that millennial morning in Florida. Trey said a few nice things, and then the band actually slipped into another spacey jam. It was as if they literally could not get off the stage! They were clearly savoring the moment for as long as possible. Finally it ended, and they rather quickly ambled offstage. I believe Trey had his arm around someone’s shoulder.
It wasn’t until the first George Harrison vocals of “Here Comes the Sun” that everyone realized it was a record playing, and that the event was over. At this point we broke into an enormous ovation, celebrating everything we had heard, lived, learned, and gone through in Big Cypress. Our group gathered our belongings and took a hurried picture, after which Brian said, “Okay, we’re crazy,” and headed for bed.
I set off alone, with my backpack and blanket. I made my way into the woods, and proceeded to lounge out in the grass in one of the most beautiful physical environments I have ever seen. I felt that I was experiencing the Transcendental concept of microcosm/macro cosm…while savoring the purely sensual and personal experience in my brain, I simultaneously felt no bigger or more important than the moss on the trees. I felt like I merged into the landscape, an unseen bump on a log. I watched a few people walk by with drums and set up in an open zone in my field of vision. The drum circle slowly grew, people gathered and danced, the rhythmic tones heightened in intensity…and then slowly dissipated, as people wandered off, and finally the last members of the circle said their goodbyes and ambled away, perhaps to start another one somewhere else. And the zone was open again. I had to have been the only person who watched and listened to the entire cycle. I spent a few hours in pretty much the same position, gazing at the trees, listening to the people, contemplating the beautiful blue sky from which I was shaded by tropical trees. I knew that as soon as I left the woods, the spell would be broken, so I remained for as long as I was comfortable.
By the time I wandered back to some friends’ campsite, they were waking up. (Along the way I had left a note on Bertolet’s camper: “Hi. Jeremy Goodwin, 1/1/00.”) I stretched out on the grass, and gazed at the clouds doing their little dance in the sky. We contemplated what we had experienced the night before. I said it felt like we had seen the band naked…we had all bound up together and then simultaneously unraveled. It was almost like the band had put their sanity and psyches on display, for us to marvel as they dissipated. It seemed incomprehensible to think about another “normal,” two-set show after this. We had just seen the peak of rock musical accomplishment in the twentieth century. I really wanted to go to whatever the next show would be, wherever it was, just to see for myself the first post-Cypress moment and watch the circle become complete.
“I don’t know what I could possibly ever need or want this band to do for me again.”
They had just jumped through an enormous hoop for us, and I felt one hundred percent satiated. I never needed to see this band play again. What more could I possibly expect them to do for me? I felt like the entire Phish oeuvre had been made complete in a way. Of course, I loved the band, and knew I’d want to see many shows in the future…but I was positive that in all honestly I didn’t really need any more. They had fulfilled my personal and aesthetic needs like no rock band could possibly ever hope to do again.
And thus, as I lay on the ground lazily chatting and watching the clouds, I felt an unexpected twinge of the bittersweet, realizing that we were gliding atop a plateau, a high point, from which all future Phish happenings would look back and feel the shadow.
The next afternoon, the strong 12/30 show was in the books, but there really was very little room for gloating. Three-set Phish shows in December in the Everglades are certainly not to be discarded lightly, but everyone’s mind was occupied with the question: What the hell are they going to do tonight? It was easy to make idle predictions like Gamehendge, a cover album (to fully integrate the three life-cycle rituals into an inferno of psychic convergence), a “Harpua” or “Forbin’s” at the least.
I didn’t really play any of these games, because I’d finally learned enough about Phish to realize that I very rarely have any idea of what they were really going to do. We did have some information to go on, however. Crew members had been seen riding around in the 12/31/94 hot dog in the backstage camping area, and there was a rumor of “no guests.” My only prediction, if it can be called that, was an often-repeated assurance that “something really weird is going to happen.” In general. In totality. There were too many powerful forces converging. The one thing I totally counted out was normalcy.
During the afternoon set, I had to continually remind myself that, despite the beautiful outdoor setting and perfect weather, I was in fact at the Phish New Year’s Eve show, dancing barefoot on a tarp. It literally was thrilling every time I again consciously became aware of these usually incongruent circumstances. After the first set concluded mightily with “After Midnight”, and the crowd had started wandering away for a few short minutes, an enormous roar suddenly arose as we walked back towards the campgrounds…the feeling of mutual joy and anticipation gave me chills. Particularly anticipation. It was not a “that was a great set” cheer. It was a “we sure have something in store for us” cheer. After all, the band had just fucking promised us that we were gonna find out what it’s all about. And that’s what I’m in this for in the first place.
For day two, we had staked out our tarp directly in front of the soundboard. I continually marveled at the perfect sound, and we congratulated ourselves for securing such a perfect location. I arrived at that tarp sometime before 11 PM, and did not leave until after 7:30 AM. I spent the entire Midnight Set within a twenty-foot radius on a green tarp directly in front of the soundboard. I did not need to go to the bathroom, I did not need to eat, I did not need to sleep, I did not need to do anything except take in the most amazing musical performance in the history of rock music.
After attending the previous three NYE shows alone, it was a welcome pleasure to hug upwards of twenty people during “Auld Lang Syne”. My friend Jeff summed it up with elegant precision the next morning: “I can’t believe what I just did, where I did it, and who I did it with!”
The set started off at an accelerated pace (“Disease” and “Gin” were standout versions right out of the gate), but nothing tremendously weird was happening. The “Heavy Things”/cheesecake episode was enormously amusing. We got primed for “Twist Around”, as many in our group had fond memories of the Spring Run version, but it was pretty brief. Had it been a regular set, the “Caspian” probably would have ended it.
And then the unmistakable opening riff of “Rock and Roll”. This was the first uproariously brilliant jam of the night, and it featured a spellbinding sequence that sounds composed, and no doubt got me jumping up and down. The exuberant chorus provided one of my first peak experiences of the set.
When this Velvet Underground rock gem finally ended thirty minutes later, we got a “YEM”. It featured a laugh-out-loud “cheesecake” vocal jam.
And the band leaped into the electrifying rhythm of “Crosseyed and Painless”. It was a tremendous thrill to see this live, and the energy surging through the crowd was palpable, at least from my vantage point. It was now nearing the two-hour mark, and I started trying to piece together the fragments of the set in my mind (I wasn’t even bothering to attempt to keep a setlist). I realized that the jam was really good, and said to Noah, “You know, I’m beginning to think this is a really hot set. Like, if it was just a regular second set. I mean, really hot.” He agreed, or perhaps just wanted me to stop babbling. I remember getting so utterly lost in this blazing jam that the closing vocals totally surprised me. Listening to the FOBs, it’s easy to see why; they really do come out of nowhere.
It was during the ensuing “Minestrone” that I began to adjust to the atypical flow of this unprecedented set. Until now, it had been a total party atmosphere in the crowd. I mean that in the best of ways: it was high-energy, New Year’s Eve-type stuff. But our internal clocks were noticing that we had exceeded normal second-set territory. I heard someone say something like, “So this is how you play all night, you have to have the guitarist play acoustic by himself.” It wasn’t in any way a criticism, just someone thinking out loud, trying like everyone else to comprehend the feat that was just beginning to unfold in front of us.
The short acoustic number was not much of a breather for the band before launching off into “Sand”. It was during this very long jam that the mood started to shift, aided no doubt by the very spacey and experimental character of the music. This was basically tied (with “Roses”) for the longest and strangest jam of the night, and during the psychedelic mayhem I believe a lot of people shifted gears, mentally. It was the length of the set, as well as the music, as well as whatever little toys people had put into their heads; the regular trajectory of a set had already been way overshot, and we were left to grasp at the shards of bizarre sounds that bombarded us…with no reference point, floating submissively in the dark improvisational currents. Personally, that’s why I go to Phish shows, and I was happy to immerse myself in the space odyssey unfurling from the stage. However, some people were getting cold out there on the raft, and one member of our group finally said, “I want them to play a song now.”
By the end of this jam, we had traversed beyond all semblance of a normal set’s rhythm. The band must have sensed this, because they simulated a normal set-closer by whipping out “Slave”. The gentle beauty of that classic song was no doubt the salve that many craved, and it provided a wonderful, thrilling release. I consider this the end of the first internal “set” of the night.
The next string of songs were a bit disjointed (“Albuquerque”, “Reba”, “Axilla”, “Uncle Pen”, “David Bowie”, “My Soul”), and while boasting a “where did that come from?” brilliantly nailed “Reba”, seemed like a transitional stretch. There was a very long pause, during which Trey and Fish appeared to have disappeared from the stage. It was strange, cause we were all just standing around, sort of waiting for something to happen. If they had said, “Okay, we’re taking a five-minute break,” I don’t think anyone would have complained, but I guess they wanted to keep the continuity of the set intact. As Mike and Page hung around onstage, occasionally hitting a stray note, I quipped, “Hello, I’m Mike…I’m not a good public speaker.” It was pretty funny the first time, but apparently I unfortunately took to repeating the line during other weird pauses yet to come.
Then “Drowned”. It’s hard to fault the band for working up crowd energy with such excellent cover selections, seeing as they were only the conduit for thrilling improvisation. The “After Midnight” jam is absolutely spine-tingling, and I distinctly remember the surprise and delighted shock I felt when it happened. The sublime power of this moment comes across clearly on the recordings. Those in our group marveled at the fact that, despite the hour being around 5 AM, from our vantage point looking forward, it could as well have been “second song, second set.” We were still packed in among a swarming throng of excited concert-goers, up to the gills in energy. I’m sure the energy and pure physical proximity of the revelers dispersed the further you got from the stage, but it was quite intense to experience all this from so close.
It might have been around here that our friend Kaz stretched out on the tarp, rolled up in a blanket, and took a nap. He got in a good thirty-minute power nap, stood up, and resumed dancing. It was that kind of night.
By now, some members of our crew had dispersed…off to expel bodily fluids, acquire food, take refuge in the nearby backstage campgrounds for a spell, and otherwise reassemble their internal psychic elements. Eventually it started feeling less like Phish was performing a musical concert for our benefit, and more like we were all subsumed together into a giant, pulsing, organic mass, propelled by the sounds and lights coming from onstage. As Kaz put it, people were living, breathing, sleeping, taking a shit, just existing…as the spectacle continued on, like some musical sun that pulled us all along through its gravitational pull and kept our pulses going.
I periodically checked my watch, and Raras and I joked about how fun it was just “whiling away the fours” and then “whiling away the fives” and then…”whiling away the sixes”?! At 6 AM on the dot, “Lawn Boy” started, and only in this context could the lounge number legitimately seem surreal. Beau quite memorably remarked, “It’s a little early in the morning for a ‘Lawn Boy’.”
During Fish’s intro to “Love You”, eighty thousand of us seemed to experience a brief mental drift, led my Fishman at the front of the stage… it was finally punctuated by Fishman’s remark, “Oh, are we at a rock concert?” (This bit made it into the retrospective video shown at the 12/2/03 anniversary show.) It was a perfect comment, and summed up my feelings precisely. Was this a rock concert? What was it? At this moment Sting was probably waking up for his yoga and a morning jog, and Phish was still onstage playing its New Year’s Eve show.
“Roses Are Free” seemed to glide up out of the silence slowly, as the band eased back into gear after the Henrietta break. Very casually, apparently at complete ease with themselves as a band and with the eighty thousand people on the premises, at about 6:15 in the morning, Phish proceeded to play what I consider their greatest jam ever. The interplay between the four is astounding, as they seem to pulse and breathe together as one sparkling, inspiring mass. It was as if all conscious barriers and egos had been transcended through sheer exhaustion, all pretenses stripped bare, and all that remained was the music. The glorious, transcendental music. It’s like everything that had ever happened in their career, and everything that had happened through the night’s marathon project of incessant creative exploration, had accumulated and led up to and enabled this breakthrough. It was a musical (and I suspect, for the band, a personal) epiphany. As they glided along in this aesthetic hyperspace, I kept thinking how damned improbable this whole situation was. In fact, I took a picture of the stage, just to prove it was actually happening.
During “Roses”, the sky began to lighten. By the end of “Bug” it was already daylight, and I started wondering if and when they were ever going to stop playing. I also noticed the enormous screens, literally for the first time in several hours. There was an extreme close-up of Page’s face, with red light streaking through his hair. I quipped, “I am Page…I am the Sun God!” It was pretty strange, honestly. It was sometime around here that a member of our group suddenly produced a still-cold bottle of champagne. The process of handing it around and gulping from it seemed so absurd that it was hilarious, and we started chanting “Happy New Year!” in a kind of hybrid of seriousness, sarcasm, humor, and joy that I cannot describe accurately.
Then “Hood” started, and someone said, “Again? Okay.” It was simply an exhausted mistake made by the band, and adds yet more flavor and character to the set. I think Dan Seideman had dozed off briefly, but he staggered to his feet when “2001” sent yet another surge of electricity through the crowd. Okay, this is absurd. Beautifully, triumphantly absurd. The glory of nature had subsumed much of Kuroda’s artistic space, but orange, red, and white lights pumped as the band lit into a particularly fiery version of this musical orgasm. Suddenly, everyone was dancing again. I chose this time to mill around the tarp a little more, taking a few pictures, basking in the improbable triumph of it all. Near the end, the band apparently experienced another stream of consciousness moment as they briefly wandered into a reggae flavor, as if to revisit a parallel version of “Hood” that they had accidentally started earlier.
It didn’t occur to me that this was the preliminary finale of the set, it just seemed like yet another song. I was absolutely shocked that they next went for “Wading”, one of my least favorite Phish originals. This is the only version I ever bother to listen to on tape or CD, out of respect for the coherence of that last hour of the set, but it made our group mutter and scratch our heads.
The resumption of “Meatstick” caused a general wave of joy and release, as we realized that things were wrapping up. To this day, whenever I hear the beginning of a “Meatstick” it immediately conjures up that feeling of communal triumph, accomplishment, and shared joy that connected us all on that millennial morning in Florida. Trey said a few nice things, and then the band actually slipped into another spacey jam. It was as if they literally could not get off the stage! They were clearly savoring the moment for as long as possible. Finally it ended, and they rather quickly ambled offstage. I believe Trey had his arm around someone’s shoulder.
It wasn’t until the first George Harrison vocals of “Here Comes the Sun” that everyone realized it was a record playing, and that the event was over. At this point we broke into an enormous ovation, celebrating everything we had heard, lived, learned, and gone through in Big Cypress. Our group gathered our belongings and took a hurried picture, after which Brian said, “Okay, we’re crazy,” and headed for bed.
I set off alone, with my backpack and blanket. I made my way into the woods, and proceeded to lounge out in the grass in one of the most beautiful physical environments I have ever seen. I felt that I was experiencing the Transcendental concept of microcosm/macro cosm…while savoring the purely sensual and personal experience in my brain, I simultaneously felt no bigger or more important than the moss on the trees. I felt like I merged into the landscape, an unseen bump on a log. I watched a few people walk by with drums and set up in an open zone in my field of vision. The drum circle slowly grew, people gathered and danced, the rhythmic tones heightened in intensity…and then slowly dissipated, as people wandered off, and finally the last members of the circle said their goodbyes and ambled away, perhaps to start another one somewhere else. And the zone was open again. I had to have been the only person who watched and listened to the entire cycle. I spent a few hours in pretty much the same position, gazing at the trees, listening to the people, contemplating the beautiful blue sky from which I was shaded by tropical trees. I knew that as soon as I left the woods, the spell would be broken, so I remained for as long as I was comfortable.
By the time I wandered back to some friends’ campsite, they were waking up. (Along the way I had left a note on Bertolet’s camper: “Hi. Jeremy Goodwin, 1/1/00.”) I stretched out on the grass, and gazed at the clouds doing their little dance in the sky. We contemplated what we had experienced the night before. I said it felt like we had seen the band naked…we had all bound up together and then simultaneously unraveled. It was almost like the band had put their sanity and psyches on display, for us to marvel as they dissipated. It seemed incomprehensible to think about another “normal,” two-set show after this. We had just seen the peak of rock musical accomplishment in the twentieth century. I really wanted to go to whatever the next show would be, wherever it was, just to see for myself the first post-Cypress moment and watch the circle become complete.
“I don’t know what I could possibly ever need or want this band to do for me again.”
They had just jumped through an enormous hoop for us, and I felt one hundred percent satiated. I never needed to see this band play again. What more could I possibly expect them to do for me? I felt like the entire Phish oeuvre had been made complete in a way. Of course, I loved the band, and knew I’d want to see many shows in the future…but I was positive that in all honestly I didn’t really need any more. They had fulfilled my personal and aesthetic needs like no rock band could possibly ever hope to do again.
And thus, as I lay on the ground lazily chatting and watching the clouds, I felt an unexpected twinge of the bittersweet, realizing that we were gliding atop a plateau, a high point, from which all future Phish happenings would look back and feel the shadow.
