When Phish returned in 2009 I accompanied m’lady to a lot of shows, including Festival 8, the band’s eighth festival (hence the name) and the first one that they scheduled to coincide with their very exciting and sought-after Hallowe’en extravaganzas. It was also the first time they had held one of their festivals on the west coast, settling on the Empire Polo grounds in the Coachella Valley (yes, that Coachella) just outside of Palm Springs in Indio, California.

So there was a bit of travel involved. To wit:

With barely two hours of sleep to our name, m’lady and I arrived at the Ottawa airport on October 30th, 2009 at the ripe hour of 5:20am only to find that our departing flight had been delayed by enough hours to make catching our connecting flight impossible. The attendant told us the earliest they could get us to Palm Springs would be Saturday afternoon – midway through the weekend-long festival – so we took things into our own hands and made our own way, commando-style.

We re-routed ourselves to arrive at LAX by mid-afternoon where we took advantage of the festival’s loosely-organized shuttle system and switched our shuttle booking with nothing more than a nod and a smile. This put us on an hours-long bus ride full of fellow fans that would’ve almost got us onsite in time for the start of the evening’s concert if only the driver hadn’t got lost. When he stopped at a gas station to ask directions the bus emptied and we all went in and bought all the beer we could carry. The next hour was spent binge-drinking on the bus with vacation elation, and when we finally arrived onsite the festival folks had a well-oiled group of greeters ready to make up our lost time. They helped us load our gear into a stretch golf cart and whisked us to an area where we could pitch our tents, then the same cart drove us to the gates of the concert field, and just like that we made it onsite in time for the final song of the first set, the rather appropriate Time Turns Elastic.

The second set was great (and much more relaxing), the crowd was pumped and the venue looked amazing. A canopy of stars told us that there was not a cloud in sight anywhere at any time, majestic mountains ringed the wide sky and the pancake-flat pitch that held the main stage area was littered with palm trees on every side. It was glorious; truly an oasis in the desert with plenty of space for revelling, and sight-lines galore.

The stage featured a big-screen on either side and the video looked just fantastic (no wonder, the weekend’s footage was edited into a theatrical release called Phish 3D). It was total pro, with tons of angles and cameras, lots of boom stands including a huge one near the sound board, and all of it in HD. Lightman extraordinaire CK5 had a rainbow of illumination aimed at 100+ palm trees filing away from the stage in infinite perspective to the left and the right and it looked simply amazing. I often find myself in awe of what Kuroda brings to the band and he went all out again for F8, including the best Phish visual gimmick ever to close this first evening: a huge amorphous floating glowing golgi light-emitting apparatus that was utterly impossible to stop gaping at in wonder. Come to think of it, the eye candy was killer in all directions. Glancing away from the stage the eyes were blessed with wondrous works of art that decorated the back of the field. Fire-spewing towers of twigs formed a semi-circle outlining the main viewing area, and beyond that were a myriad of interesting art installations.

Explorations had to wait for this old man though. After such an arduous day of sleepless travel and lacking in any serious nutrients I was on the verge of collapse when the concert ended, so with hardly a bit of muckimuck I went back to my tent and spent the night shivering myself awake again and again in the cold desert night, too tired and lazy to dig out my sweater.

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