Confessions of a Phish Wife
By Michelle Ruiz
Every year, for the past six years, I face the same conundrum in the run-up to New Year's Eve: Spend this festive holiday without my husband or spend it with him at a five-hour Phish concert. In the interest of kissing him at midnight, I usually choose option B. Instead of watching the ball drop with loved ones, I have gazed up, in awe and confusion, as the members of Phish (a quartet of grown men) ride in on a giant hot dog high above the noodling masses of New York's Madison Square Garden. While singing a song named "Meatstick." Partially in Japanese.
My name is Michelle, and my husband is a Phish fan.
Phish-wifery is a plight that can make even golf widowhood seem cushy. My husband's Phish fandom is a calendar-consuming siege that hijacks most major holidays: There's New Year's at MSG (though, in a rare gift, last year Phish took us to Miami); Halloween in Las Vegas—I stayed back, but he couldn't bear to miss it, even though it was our daughter's first Halloween, and she was going as a strawberry; and July Fourth in Chicago, where Phish's shaggy frontman, Trey Anastasio, was replacing Jerry Garcia in the Grateful Dead reunion shows. In years past, he has decamped to "Hampton," "SPAC," and other venues beloved by Phish-heads but located in regional cities that, significantly, when I'm deciding whether or not to join, do not have reputable spas. Flights, hotels, tickets, and signed concert posters are not inexpensive. "I wish he'd set a Phish budget," one sister in Phish marriage, whose husband attends approximately 15 shows a year, told me. Spoiler: He doesn't.
As Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele brilliantly put it in one of their farewell sketches, "When dudes get into Phish, they don't come back." My husband (who asked that I not name him) doesn't just go to one Phish concert when the tour comes to town; he goes to all four, because each night's set, each 13-minute jam, is its own special snowflake. "Will's still determined to hear that one song that he hasn't heard yet," my friend and fellow Phish WAG, Katie, told me of her Phish-obsessed boyfriend. When my husband doesn't burn airline miles to fly to the shows, he "couch tours"—live-streams—them, raising a glass of Sauv Blanc to profound Phish lyrics like "Whatever you do, take care of your shoes."
The show doesn't end with the show, either: The next morning, my husband spoons not with me, but with his phone, refreshing Mr. Miner, the preeminent Phish blogger and set-list analyzer. "They did 'Weaselface,' 'Bubble Trouble,' straight into 'Spongehead,'" Key and Peele mocked of the morning-after set-list reflection ritual. Those are faux Phish songs, but they're not far off. I know "Fluffhead" is a real Phish jam. And "'Fee' is a song about a weasel," my husband said.
Phish-heads are a merry, mighty brand of music nerd and offer a wealth of trivia. Once, a friend of my husband's casually referenced "The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday"—you know, the title of Anastasio's senior thesis. Of course! That same friend's wife—we'll call her Anita, because she'd rather her real name not be Google-able in an article about Phish—found out on their second date that he was into Phish when "he let slip that Page McConnell's father was a doctor." It struck her that the handsome, thoughtful investment banker across the table knew what the father of the keyboardist for Phish did for a living. "However," she said, "on a second date with someone you really like, you are blind, blind, blind."
Phish superfans like Anita's husband and mine are sneaky that way. Though stereotyped as hemp-necklace-and-hacky-sack stoners (aka "wookies"), many Phish-heads are employed, (largely) responsible adults who work in corporate America, avoid all illegal activity, and simply never fell out of high school love with Phish jams like "Gotta Jibboo." CNBC's Dan Greenhaus is an open Phish-head, and so is the ardent group of political journalists who gather via the Listserv JournoPhish. Akin to the grown-up Grateful Dead fans private-jetting to the reunion shows profiled by Katie Rosman in The New York Times, preppy hippies approach Phish with professional precision, conference-calling to strategize on tour announcement day. It's an unofficial holiday for Phish fans—less so for some of their partners.
Phish and its music are polarizing—either you get it or you don't. Katie is one of the partners who don't. "I am constantly like, 'When are they retiring?'" she wondered aloud one afternoon over coffee. "It's this constant hope of, Will this be the last one?" Katie was a Phish fan in high school and simply outgrew their music ("The lyrics are like Dr. Seuss, except not as clever"), and she finds the Phish stoner stigma a little embarrassing. "It took me a year into dating Will to tell my parents that he was a Phish-head," she said. "We did it over dinner one night. I was like, 'Guys, I have something to tell you . . .'"
It took me years to "find out"—I say "find out" with mock solemnity; after all, Phish fan is better than Ashley Madison member—the depths of my husband's love for Phish. I knew he was a fan, but when we first met, the band was broken up. By the time they reunited in 2009, we were living together, and his secret was laid bare.
I took the if-you-can't-beat-them, join-them approach: I like a party, which is what the shows seemed like; I wanted to be the cool girlfriend; and I wanted to spend New Year's with the guy. I downloaded the poppiest songs—"Bouncing 'Round the Room," "Backwards Down the Number Line." As a Broadway fan, I admired the Cirque du Soleil–like acrobats that rocketed from within the crowd at my first New Year's show. "It was almost as good as a Britney show," Anita noted. "Almost." I enjoyed—still do—the anthropological study, and the Instagram ops, of the preshow parking lot. Dreamcatcher saleswomen! Men in gorilla suits! My gold medal Phish Wife moment, though, has to be New Year's 2013, which I attended at nine months pregnant (in the comfort of a friend's company box with a very impressive dessert buffet, but still).
Phish fandom "is like getting to lead a double life," Anita said. "To go from a desk job to watching a girl pour glitter on herself for 30 minutes while twirling in her seat stands out,"
But as the years passed and "time turned elastic," especially once my husband and I had our daughter, Phish became a little less fun for me. My priorities shifted. If I was going to stay up super-late at a concert and suffer through a hangover the following day with a baby, I'd prefer it be for Beyoncé. At the band's last New Year's bonanza, I began to crack at the four-hour mark: My husband heard jam nirvana; I heard Anastasio singing the word wombat over and over. I became less willing to sign off on his out-of-town Phishing trips when they meant taking care of my daughter solo. "The money and my own vacation time are where I start to draw the line," Anita added.
For now, I'm on hiatus. I'm not going to kill my husband's joy nor stand in the way of something he loves so passionately (it's a force so great, I'm not sure I could if I tried). But I've decided to sit out this year's New Year's show. I don't necessarily need to go and shout "Wil-son" at just the right moment; being supportive, in rational doses, is my new way of being the cool wife. And whether or not I wade back into the Phish universe (chances are, I probably will), I know a vast network of Phish wives have my back. "It's reassuring to know that we're all going through it together," my friend Gillian said.
Ellen Scanlon, who is married to a Phish fan in San Francisco, may have said it best when she told me that rather than harping on her husband's Phish obsession, she "decided to focus more on asking myself, What do I like to do? and then going out and doing it." Though hobby feels like too weak a word to describe my husband's love of Phish, instead of feeling like I need to participate in his hobby, I'm focusing on my own—dance classes, SoulCycle, Broadway shows, and reading for pleasure—and a few we share. We both genuinely love University of Virginia basketball; the day the new schedule was announced was a holiday we could both get behind.
Not being with my husband on New Year's isn't optimal. But I'll see him on the 1st. Just as soon he's done reading Mr. Miner.
TopicsFirst Person
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