[The following is courtesy of Jake Cohen, user @smoothatonalsnd. Thank you, Jake! -Ed.]

“The reverse culture shock is real…”

“Having a tough time with re-entry.”

As Phish fans, most of us are used to feeling some version of this after a run of shows or a festival. Phish transports us into another world, one bound by community and a shared, intense experience, and it can be hard to readjust to “normal” life afterwards. Yet these are two texts that I got this past Monday, not after seeing Phish, but after attending an academic conference.

That sentiment is more or less unheard of after a typically staid affair, but this is exactly how I feel this week after the conclusion of Phish Studies 2.0. Co-hosted by The Mockingbird Foundation and Oregon State University in Corvallis, the conference left me spiritually charged up in the way only a Phish show can, and professionally stoked for the future of Phish Studies as a field.

Over 70 scholars (both amateur and professional), artists, community organizers, and musicians came together to share in their love, joy, and critique of all things Phish and our scene. What was truly unique and special about this event was the way that it went far beyond the normal confines of a conference, turning what can otherwise be a dry series of papers and roundtables into a colorful and lively cornucopia of Phishy activities. As Jnan Blau put it in his closing remarks Sunday evening, “we’re type 2-ing the idea of an academic conference.”

Highlights included the incredible “Our Intent is All For Your Delight” curated and built by Alex Grosby and his wife Meredith, a full museum-quality exhibit of photos, maps, artwork, video, and other relics and ephemera from each of the Phish festivals that also foregrounded the pre-history of these events with nods to 1992’s Roskilde Festival or 1995’s Sugarbush shows that featured camping. John Michael DiResta performed a staged reading of his short play “Nothing I See Can Be Taken From Me,” moving many in the audience to tears with his masterful weaving of Phish history with a story of queer self-discovery and joy. Visual artwork abounded, from a retrospective exhibition of posters by Lizzy Layne to phan portraits by Michael Sell and many more. Four music scholars led the conference through a guided listening session to three different eras of “Birds of a Feather,” or “stopping the jam to talk” as I called it. Given everyone’s positive feedback, I think our chomping was excused.

Another major touchstone was the affinity groups panel on Friday afternoon, bringing together representative from PHRE, Mike Side Dyke Side, the Phellowship, GrooveSafe, and Access Me. These groups who do important community activism work don’t often get a chance to all sit down together and talk about their common goals, struggles, and issues that we all face in the Phish community, and it was refreshing and urgent to hear their common concerns and hopes for the future of our scene.

In a delightful and exhausting move, we also got to rock out to three full two-set concerts at local venue Bombs Away Cafe as part of the conference (you try seeing three straight nights of shows followed by 9am weekend programming for 3 days!). Friday night’s festivities began with B. Elizabeth Beck reading from her new book of Phish-inspired poetry, then featured a mock panel of Phish Haters, poking lightheared fun at those who are less enthusiastic about Phish, followed by Portland’s The Walkaways, a Phish covers cover band (yes you read that correctly) that blazed through favorite covers that Phish plays like “Crosseyed and Painless” and a perfect “Skin It Back” with “Martian Monster” interpolations. Saturday welcomed back local Eugene jamband Left on Wilson who played a packed house with their inventive originals and some choice covers, including a fiery “Fuego,” a big sing-along “Possum,” and a rollicking “Punch You In the Eye” set 2 opener. Sunday’s band Special Purpose matched the more laid back vibe with jazzy and downtempo originals, while still working in a few excellent Phish covers like “Horn” and Phish-adjacent ones like the Scofield/MMW favorite “A Go Go.”

Despite all these type 2 conference excursions, the meat of the weekend was scholarly presentations. Concurring panels meant I only caught half the program, but I’m thrilled and excited to check out everything I missed on video, which will soon be hosted on The Mockingbird Foundation’s YouTube page. Of those I saw, a few highlights included Rob Collier’s amazing analysis of how Mike Gordon’s bass playing interacts with his bandmates during the 8/1/23 “Sample in a Jar” jam; Radha Lewis’s beautiful and masterful presentation on the benefits of online Phish communities for those in treatment or recovery from cancer; the quantitative analysis panel looking at show ratings, song selection, and song length presented by Paul Jakus, Jason Zietz, and Matthew Sottile; and Daniel Dylan’s thorough legal analysis of how space is claimed at shows, which led to a lively debate and discussion looking at how gender, entitlement, substance use, the law, and community norms can affect how we experience a show and the ways lived experience interact with abstract legal theories. Benjy Eisen gave the keynote speech to open the festivities, invoking the spirit with a rousing recitation of “Kung,” and making the argument that Phish is at their best when taking their 40-year tradition and relentlessly innovating, exemplified by the full theatrical Gamehendge and their groundbreaking Sphere performance.

Over and over again throughout the weekend, threads kept weaving their way through so many presentations and events like a worn-out San-Ho-Zay tease from Trey. Perhaps the most common of these teases was the idea that Phish is what it is because we experience these intensive, some might argue spiritual, embodied and emplaced experiences with music in a community that includes the band. This was apparent in RJ Wuagneux’s paper on affordances of groove and affect on display during the 8/6/10 “Cities,” or Leah Taylor’s examination of the therapeutic effects of communally dancing to Phish, or the interactive onsite sculpture by Brooke Nuckles that we all built throughout the weekend and then cut apart, much in the spirit of the Great Went’s sculpture burn.

Above all, it was the people who made Phish Studies 2.0 so special, starting with the incredible team that put together the conference including our local arrangements point person, Stephanie Jenkins. It was the conversations and discoveries among musicians, professors, artists, curators, activists, and everday fans curious to experience the Phish phenomenon on another level that revealed so many intricacies and connections in the ways we all experience and examine Phish. As a musicologist, it’s rare that I get to approach a single topic joined by equally passionate scholars in disciplines as far afield as sociology, theater studies, literature, public health, and law, but the understanding that comes from such a truly interdisciplinary endeavor is unmatched in any part of academia. Walking away from the 2024 Phish Studies conference and looking forward to what comes next for our incredible subfield, I’m simply left in the now with a wondrous glow.

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