The story of my first Phish show actually begins the Saturday before, while all of you fools were having fun at the 6/18/94 Chicago show. My roommate and some friends had a “great place” to drink at an apartment complex in the grass under some trees where no one ever went. Being only 20 years old, we all thought it would be good to go out there and have some fun. Now I had mostly stopped drinking at this point, but my roommate had 3 Lowenbrau beers and I had never tried it before, so I figured I would have one. I drank about a third of it and we hear “what are you doing back here?” and see some flashlights. So my roommate, 2 or 3 friends, and I were all cited for underage drinking. The cops said there would be a small fine, but no jail time, and we should learn our lesson.

We all showed up that following Monday in court, pleaded no contest, and think we are all good because none of us had prior records. So they take us to a room to wait for the judge to call us back in to receive our punishment. While we were waiting, one of our friends says that one of his friends was given the max penalty to teach her a lesson for underage drinking and the judge reduced her sentence after a couple of hours. Well, I guess the clerk overheard him and told the judge because the next thing we know the judge tells us each one by one that we get the max of $1000 and 6 months in jail! We could not believe it.

So they take us downstairs to the jail and the other guys in the cell just laughed at our story. Our friend that had spilled the beans said the judge was just messing with us. And we told him to shut up! But the guards told us that the judge was so upset that he was sending us to the county jail and was enforcing our max sentences. So at the end of the day, they transported us downtown to the county jail. We were together, but we were in lockup with a guy that was facing murder charges…this was the real deal. One of our parents was able to get us in the same cell, but it was with 8-10 other guys.

The next morning, after eating the “great” food at the county jail, they transported us in our green jumpsuits back to see the judge. He asked us who shared his little secret and my friend fessed up. The judge yelled at him for a while, but he reduced our sentences to time served and we were on our way…except they had to transport us back to the county jail to check out and the transport only ran at the end of the day…and we had tickets for our first Phish show that night!

Somehow we made it back to the county jail and got checked out in time. One kid got dragged straight home, but the rest of our parents thought spending the night at the county jail was punishment enough, so we were on our way to the show! We walked in just as the jam for the opener, Runaway Jim, was starting. I didn’t know that song (only had Nectar, Rift, and Hoist and no live tapes at that point), but the nice guy next to us filled me in.

Of course, as we all know, during the fifth song of the first set, the band had to tell us to leave during The Horse because the fire alarm went off. Everyone just chilled outside until they let us back in to finish the show. The crowd went nuts when Trey said they were playing through, made the “smoking in the boys room” joke, and started up Fire. Oh, and hopefully you already know that the Split from this show is out of this world and the Hood is pretty good, too…

Needless to say, it was quite a memorable experience for a first Phish show that I will never forget...and I've never had a Lowenbrau since.