Run Like an Antelope
On the Road with Phish
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3.3 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
One journalist's wild summer on the road with the world's most popular cult rock band, Phish.
Despite their enormous success and their status as America's biggest cult rock and roll band, Phish remains an enigma. Each of their albums has sold more than 500,000 copies, and their concerts sell out instantly, but the band makes a virtue of ignoring the mainstream, and the fans rather prefer it that way. In Run Like an Antelope: On the Road with Phish, Sean Gibbon deftly and hilariously chronicles this unique musical subculture.
Inspired by the offbeat road stories of Hunter S. Thompson and Bill Bryson, among others, Gibbon resolved to follow Phish and their kite's tail of hundreds of thousands of followers on their 1999 summer tour. What he discovered is a new kind of American tribe: a mixture of aging, resigned Deadheads, wealthy college kids, and dedicated Phishheads, all bound together by their belief in the band, passion for the music, and energetic spirit, which transform Phish into an experience. His ensuing adventures among the Phish fans constitute a memorable, insightful, uproarious odyssey into this new frontier of American pop tribalism. Whether he's being kidnapped by a group of ebullient Georgia Tech coeds, or being serenaded by devoted fans on the institution of Phish, Gibbon navigates the wild, fascinating Phish experience with verve and a keen eye, brilliantly communicating both the enormous energy of the band's music and the distinct character of their fans.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This chronicle of a summer tour with the celebrated Vermont jam band Phish does little to highlight the intriguing aspects of the band or its horde of followers, and even less to distinguish the evidently self-absorbed author. One problem is Gibbon's halfhearted attempt at doing an impersonation of Hunter S. Thompson. "Screw it. I got to write this sucker," he says early on. "Couple thousand words a day is what I'm aiming for. Crank it out." The real failing, though, is Gibbon's attitude toward Phish fans, and his reluctance to actually talk to them. What Gibbon doesn't seem to understand is that the people he lampoons as grubby potheads hawking grilled cheese sandwiches to get by are the very ones whose stories would make his book a success. Anyone can drive by a Phish show and see a lot of strange people, but isn't it the job of a book like this to go beyond the counterculture veneer and discern the participants' perspective? Surely something keeps them coming back besides the long lines, noisy campgrounds and traffic jams that Gibbon so often points out. The music can't be the whole story, but rather than ferret out the subtleties of this groupie culture, Gibbon devotes his pages to documenting his every queasy feeling, frenetic exultation and passing opinion. At one point, his brother joins him for a few shows and says, "I just think for the book you need to go and talk to people and find out what they're doing, where they're from... I think it's got to be more than just your observations." Readers will want to hug him, but Gibbon is unimpressed. It seems he just wants to crank this sucker out and get back to Burlington for a little peace before all those damn college kids come back.
