Understanding ‗It‘: Affective Authenticity, Space, and the Phish Scene By C2010 Elizabeth Anne Yeager Submitted to the graduate degree program in American Studies and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson, Sherrie J. Tucker ________________________________ Ben Chappell ________________________________ Henry Bial ________________________________ Eric Weisbard ________________________________ Nicole Hodges Persley Date Defended: December 14, 2010 ii The Dissertation Committee for Elizabeth Anne Yeager certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Understanding ‗It‘: Affective Authenticity, Space, and the Phish Scene ________________________________ Chairperson, Sherrie J. Tucker Date approved: April 18, 2011 iii Abstract ―Understanding It: Affective Authenticity, Space, and the Phish Scene‖ is an ethnographic study of ―scene identity‖ around the contemporary rock band Phish. Utilizing data generated from six years of ethnographic fieldwork, including over one hundred and fifty interviews with Phish scene participants, this project explores how the production of space at Phish shows works to form a Phish scene identity. I contend that the identity of the Phish scene, what the band members and fans refer to as ―it‖ and I call a spatial articulation of affective authenticity, is produced and formed by scene members themselves, drawing from the interrelations between the production of space (practices that create a specific environment) at shows and a white, middle and upper-middle class cultural memory of the Grateful Dead scene. I situate this process amidst a cultural backdrop of 1980s and 1990s identity politics and in particular, multiculturalism and suggest that Phish scene identity be analyzed as a middle class performance of resistance that achieves community and meaning without resisting class privilege. Following many American, cultural, and performance studies scholars as well as numerous anthropologists, sociologists, and both musicologists and ethnomusicologists, I treat performance as a ritual and posit Phish scene participants can be seen to achieve a social efficacy in their performance of resistance that although heightened from everyday life ultimately serves to replicate the structures of such life. Research regarding the affective nature of ―it‖ and its relationship to the process of cultural memory, collective remembering and forgetting, can be seen as an insightful and powerful theoretical and methodological tool in cultural studies, for it exposes information iv pertaining not only to subject identity, but also to the discourses and contexts which help articulate such identities. This dissertation begins to examine what interdisciplinary scholars are to make of textual and spatial connections. How does one work to understand these affiliated, and oftentimes, affective relationships? And, in the case of Phish scene identity, how can one understand ―it‖? v Acknowledgements Given that I am the first in my family to earn a college degree I want to begin by thanking my parents, Michael and Victoria, for their continued love and support as I navigated my way through Gettysburg College, the University of Alabama, and the University of Kansas. To my mother, thank you for suggesting I enroll in a philosophy course as an undergraduate at Gettysburg. You taught me at an early age the importance of critical inquiry. To my father, thank you for showing me how music and culture are interrelated. You taught me the best way to live life requires finding a way to do what you love. I am forever grateful to my dissertation committee. To Sherrie Tucker, thank you for believing in me and this project. You knew not just when but also how to push me. To Ben Chappell and Henry Bial, my deepest thanks for tirelessly reading, re-reading, and commenting on various forms of this project over the years. To Eric Weisbard, thank you for challenging me to write about music in a way that mirrored my own passion for it. To Nicole Hodges Persley, thank you for helping to keep me grounded when I was having trouble articulating my own voice. This manuscript represents a spectrum of voices. Thank you to every individual who took the time to talk with me both in passing and in great detail about a part of your life you cherish and protect so much. To borrow a line from Trey, ―This one is for you.‖ Finally to my best friend and husband, Keith, thank you for always believing in me and, when necessary, for turning the music up and reminding me what it means to get it. vi Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 1 ―Phish was where it was at‖: Situating Place in Space .......................................................................... 1 ―What‘s in a Name?‖: Phish with a ―P‖ ............................................................................................ 8 Getting It: Phish and the Grateful Dead .......................................................................................... 14 Setting the Scene: Mapping Time, Space, and Place ....................................................................... 19 ―I try to convey what you strive to condone‖: Classed Performance, Rituals, and Resistance .......... 25 ―I‘m showing my cards early‖: (Ethno)graphic Tales ..................................................................... 28 Style & Organization ..................................................................................................................... 41 Chapter One .......................................................................................................................................... 47 The New Counterculture?: ―Maybe So, Maybe Not‖ .......................................................................... 47 ―What‘s the Use?‖: Spatializing Articulation.................................................................................. 50 Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, California – Fall 1966 .................................................................. 52 Countercultural Students: SNCC, SDS, and the Free Speech Movement ......................................... 56 A Rejection of Culture: Turning on, tuning in, and dropping out .................................................... 60 The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Positions on Black Power ................................................. 62 ―Please don't dominate the rap, jack, if you've got nothing new to say.‖ ......................................... 65 Burlington, Vermont - 1983 ........................................................................................................... 69 Prep School Hippies and Hip School Preppies: Generation X and the Postmodern Turn ................. 75 Chapter Two ......................................................................................................................................... 85 Pre-Show: Getting (Back) on the Train .............................................................................................. 85 The Rock Concert Experience Business ......................................................................................... 88 (802)860-1111 ............................................................................................................................... 95 The Business of Live Music ......................................................................................................... 106 Segue .............................................................................................................................................. 113 March 6, 2009, It‘s all Hamptoning! ................................................................................................ 113 Chapter Three ...................................................................................................................................... 124 Show: ―I Feel the Feeling I Forgot‖ ................................................................................................. 124 Something‘s Shakin‘ on Shakedown Street: Miracles and Other Acts of Commerce ..................... 128 vii Getting In .................................................................................................................................... 133 Chapter Four ....................................................................................................................................... 159 Post-Show: ―This has all been wonderful, now I‘m on my way‖ ...................................................... 159 The Old Home Place .................................................................................................................... 160 Time to Go .................................................................................................................................. 174 The Old Home Place Revisited .................................................................................................... 179 Sharing in the Groove: Communitas............................................................................................. 181 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 194 Making Sense of it All: Phish Scene Identity, Music, and America‘s Middle Class..........................