This was my very first Phish show! I was in my last semester at SF State and really on the bus w/ the GD, getting ready to see 17 Dead shows that summer. But a pal & I were hearing the buzz about Phish and so we went down to the Warfield on May 27 to try to get tix to see them that night. There were no tix to be had, but someone had a pair for 5/29 in Laguna Seca and we were like, phuck it, why not, Monterey isn't that far...

I don't remember much about the earlier bands, except that I was not digging 4 Non Blondes and was glad I didn't join my pal in eating shrooms, haha... I hardly knew any Phish songs at this point, so it was pretty much all new to me and I therefore couldn't appreciate the magnitude of a Divided Sky opener, something I would then chase until Magnaball. I membah thinking David Bowie was a very weird song and that the show felt like it was kind of all over the place. It was the acapella Freebird closer and epic 5 song encore that made the biggest impression on me and I dug the GTBT finale.

And so I was left feeling like ok, these guys are kinda weird, but they definitely rock... I only saw one more show in 1994 at Kent State when I was back home in Cleveland in the fall and then I saw a handful of summer 95 shows only because they were convenient to hit in between west coast Dead & east coast Dead. I was not even connecting Phish as the Gen-X heirs to the psychedelic rock counterculture throne, not even after Jerry's untimely departure from the planet and the one fall 95 show I saw in San Diego. I was in a spiritual black hole that fall due to the demise of the GD and I just didn't know what to do... But then a friend in Cleveland invited me to join him for the MSG-Woostah run and I was like, "Phish is playing NYE at MSG?!" That seemed potentially significant since I had seen the GD there in '94 and been blown away by the energy from the NYC crowd.

And so it was that I was hooked by the Phish on 12/29/95 during the Real Gin jam & then reeled in for life by the Gamehendge Time Lab show where I grokked that the music gods had provided a next generation to carry the torch. I had visions of Bluto Blutarski in my head that night at MSG saying, "Over?! It's not over, nothing is over until we say it is!" Go Phish!