Coventry (or) The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

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OneMoreRobot3021

Registered: 06/06/03
Posts: 61,037
Loc: the sky

Coventry (or) The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

#3017517 - 08/18/04 09:29 AM (22 years, 8 days ago)

"Damn shame about that concert."

Yes, Larry. A Damn Shame, and thanks for putting it so tersely, so poetically, so perfectly completely. A Damn Shame.

Ani and I ripped the batty a few times and went to meet Lucy, my better (and way prettier) half outside where she works. We hoisted our tents and sleeping bags on our backs and trudged to the subway through the light rain, caught a train at Grand Central, and slept in Lucy's house.
It was a gentle sleep, in a nice country home, with a lovable little Shih-Tzu dog named Gizmo, Lucy's wonderful parents, home cookin', and a comfortable, warm place to sleep. We woke up the next day, and attended to the first order of business:
Get Stoned and Get Dunkin' Donuts.
We took off driving - a five and a half hour trip that would take us through NY, CT, MA, and finally VT - a gorgeous drive, to be sure. It's great watching the landscape change, how the world has a different personality depending on its latitude and longitude, it's place in space and time. Great times, great tunes, great road trip with great people. AWesome! Right? Right. Right?
Five and a half hours of smooth sailing, 80+ MPH with no problems down multiple freeways, and then
5:20 P.M. Thursday Afternoon We Hit Traffic
Boom
STOP!
This is it.
The line goes on forever.
Sit, and watch it grow forever behind you, like the endless tail of some dumb beheaded animal.
For 40 hours we sat there.
In 40 hours, we moved: 1.5 miles. 1.5 miles!
Everyone int he cars all around us for miles and miles (20 miles behind, 15 miles ahead), were getting wasted, getting stoned, getting whatever they could, and it was madness. The right lane and the shoulder of this two-lane highway were completely filled with Phishhead cars. When we got there, the line was still just the right lane...it was right after we got into the right lane that people started filling up the shoulder - we were so pissed, everyone was, but anyway, we stayed in the right lane and just waited patiently. Maybe if we'd gunned into the shoulder from where we were, we would have seen Phish's last concert.
But alas, it was not meant to be.
After two nights of sleeping in this already ridiculously cramped and packed car, we woke up the final morning in a delirium. It was Saturday morning, and all of our dazedness, our fatigue, our fucking dementia was held together by this idea that wow, it's 8:00 AM and Phish goes on at 5:00 PM so I will be able to get in.
But, as I'm sure you've read, there had also been heavier rains in that area then there had been since 1906. Which led to the flooding, and the mud.
And at 9:30 AM, after forty hours and ten minutes, they said, we're sorry, but you have to turn around. Mike Gordon said it on the radio, and he sounded sad, and we immediately did what everyone else was doing.
We backed our car into the grass beside the highway and tried to calm down and plan for a 15 mile hike to the grounds.
By the way, when this happened, we were at the .5 mile mark from the exit - the exit was the cutoff point that stated who had to turn around. SO FRUSTRATING.
And what was more frustrating was that we couldn't do it - I mean, it;'s my girlfriend's parents car, and beyond even that, we just weren't prpeared to make that decision, to just ditch the car, our only way of getting back to NY, by the side of some random highway in Vermont?
So we turned around and drove to a nearby Rest Stop to find out if Lucy's brother had gotten on his plane to Burlington - he had a VIP Parking Pass and could have gotten us in with his car if we could only get in touch with him.

But he didn't even fly up, because the VIP road was completely sunken, flooded, done for, and they had advised him things were looking glum.
So after a lot of agonizing, we turned around.
We put the new Modest Mouse album on the radio, and it was a really bittersweet ride back to New York. We spent the weekend getting ripped on the half-ounce we'd bought for camping but now had at our disposal in the comfort of a warm house. We played with the dog. We came back to the city, got a really good dinner.
And man, I'm just so disappointed.
And how is it that I'm reading all these reports that 60K people got in? It sounds absolutely impossible to me. 20 miles of cars lined up two by two behind us addds up to thousands of people, thousands, and not all of those people parked their cars and walked to the venue.
Then I found out that on sunday that after a while Phish/Great Northeast Productions had set up a shuttle service that was taking people to the Coventry site...you should have been there, though, when they told us to go home. They pretty much made it sound like, that's it, we can't get you in, we can't let any more people in and we're sorry but you have to go home.
And they teased us bad when they said the band would definitely refund the tickets OR otherwise try to make it up somehow.
And then yesterday the post on Phish's News section of their site pops up, this bland message about how to obtain refunds. Not even an apology or some acknowledgment that the people who missed out really got screwed. Some asshole on Phantasy Tour had the gall to tell me I wasn't a dedicated enough fan since I didn't make it in, but if anything I was listening to the band's wishes and trying not to contribute to a goddamn mess.
I'm pretty sour about the whole ordeal now. Definitely cried about it twice when just laying in bed thinking about the act of seeing Phish.
And tonight my friend Smilky's coming in to the city and he's gonna tell us all about it - he made it in, said it was raw and muddy.

Tonight's gonna be an awesome psychedelic show though - The Music play at the Bowery Ballroom. In Britain they have a jamband type of following where people tape all their shows and travel all around the UK with them, but it hasn't translated over to this side of the lake yet..but if you're in NYC, check it out.

--------------------
Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake.

-Erik Davis

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