, attached to 1998-04-02

Review by oongowa

oongowa This is a personal account of the entire tour...

I turned 21 on April 1st so I was looking forward to the best birthday party of my life. I won't go too much into how amazing the shows were since we all know that already. My show buddy Justin and I got twisted out of our minds for night one. Totally floored. Speaking of Twist, the Twist from night one is on my top 10 list of all time best Phish jams. Upon waking up in our hotel room on the 3rd, Justin tells me that he's as sick as a dog and has been puking and shitting his brains out all night. Turns out he caught the flu from his sister. We spent night two up in the seats since Justin didn't really have the strength to stand and he still had to visit the bathroom every 20min. There were a few times that he got tired of sitting and tried to dance a bit but he would eventually show the pain on his face and sit down again. We still laugh about him having to take a shit like 30 times at a Phish show. Doesn't get much more gross. What a trooper. Needless to say, night two was pretty tame for us and we were off to bed soon after the show. Justin had a good nights sleep and actually felt pretty good on the morning of the 4th so we started the drive up to Rhode Island.

Somewhere in Connecticut the clutch burnt out in Justin's car. Amazing fucking timing. We actually didn't even have tickets to that nights show but we did have 4 tickets to the 5th. Our plan was to try to trade a pair of the 5ths for 4ths. We pulled into the nearest town and sadly found out that our car couldn't possibly be ready for at least 2 days. We ended up staying in a motel near the garage and drank our sorrows away. At some point that night we were on the interstate throwing bottles at semi's....yeah, we were young and REALLY drunk. good times.

The next day we ran into some folks staying in the same motel that were nice enough to drive us to Providence for the show. The only problem was that they were continuing on to Boston and couldn't drive us back so we would have to find a ride back on our own. No problem...we still have 2 extra tickets to use as ride bait! SO....sorry this is dragging on....we find some nice, young hippy couple to agree to meet us after the show so that we could catch a ride with them back to our hotel. No problem, we sold them both tickets for $40, they were really happy, we were happy...everybody wins. After the show, Justin and I run over to our per-determined meeting spot and the nice young hippy couple isn't there. No problem...we wait...and wait....and wait....soon we start to realize that they are not gonna show. WTF. By this time it was getting pretty damn late and most people have gone home. We ask everyone we see and no one can help us out.

Finally this super drunk dude says we can ride with him. He's with 3 of his friends and they're all like
"Dude, we don't have enough room. They can't ride with us! It's out of the way!". Turns out that the guy owned the vehicle and he wasn't going to let us just stand there all night. The 6 of us pack into his Jeep Cherokee for the ride back to our hotel. His friends weren't very happy to have us packed in there with them. We got back to the motel fine, car was ready the next day and we shuffled back to Buffalo. I'm glad we saw 3 of the 4 shows that run but I'll never forget about the one we missed. Justin and I were chasing so many songs they played on the 4th.

I don't remember what that nice little hippy couple looks like but Justin says he'll never forget their faces and TO THIS DAY still looks for them on lot. I'd love to run into them.

Best birthday week EVER.


Phish.net

Phish.net is a non-commercial project run by Phish fans and for Phish fans under the auspices of the all-volunteer, non-profit Mockingbird Foundation.

This project serves to compile, preserve, and protect encyclopedic information about Phish and their music.

Credits | Terms Of Use | Legal | DMCA

© 1990-2024  The Mockingbird Foundation, Inc. | Hosted by Linode