Phish Story

On the back cover of Run Like an Antelope: On the Road with Phish, author Sean Gibbons lists one of his credentials as being "a huge Phish fan."

Of course he is.

So it's surprising, then, that this book features Gibbon the Phishhead sharing equal time with Gibbon the Author. The former is at his best when he passionately describes Phish's music and the community that it fosters. The latter is at his worst when he writes with contempt about the nasty conditions he endures while touring. What emerges is a sort of two books in one.

The first, aimed at readers who know nothing about the Phish scene, is an amusing picaresque tale of the hero, Gibbon, as he follows Phish's summer tour of 1999, accompanied by various sidekicks and in search of the answer to the eternal question: Why do people go on tour with Phish? Along the way, this modern Don Quixote encounters adventures that are sure to entertain his readers, like his experience after consuming an "extra-dank" brownie in the parking lot. It's like reading a story about some mysterious, faraway place, where people drop everything to chase around four guys from Vermont.

The only problem with this element of Run Like an Antelope is that there is a huge group of people who actually do live in that different world. They are the audience for the second book, and they are who Gibbon is insulting. On tour, he doesn't exactly set his gearshift for the high gear of his soul; he instead lingers in third, hesitant to really rev the engine.

Gibbon writes on the first page that, "The idea is to write from the inside out, the crowd's perspective." To the serious Phishhead, however, Gibbon was nothing more than an outsider disguising himself in an attempt to write an exposé on the Phish subculture. Run Like an Antelope is what Jack Kerouac's On the Road would have been if Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty used a travel agent. Gibbon even rented a beat-up GMC Jimmy to drive so he wouldn't stick out in a clean, new car. He booked hotel rooms for every night of the tour, while typical Phishheads were out selling grilled cheese just to be able to afford tickets. On tour, Gibbon was little more than a narc with a laptop and tape recorder.

Probably the most insulting thing about the book is Gibbon's negative attitude toward the tour and the people with whom he shared the parking lot scene. His descriptions of fellow "phans" are nothing but a string of stereotypes, ranging from their armpit hair to the nappiness of their dreadlocks. He seems as if he doesn't want to be on tour at all, constantly cursing the heat or the dirt or the people or anything else that makes him slightly uncomfortable.

For Phishheads, the saving grace for Run Like an Antelope is the memories it invokes of Phish shows of the past. Reading Gibbon's chronicle of his tour, no phan can help but yearn for the lazy summer days of hanging out with friends, eating extra-dank brownies, kicking back and sharing the groove.