Phish Festival Frenzy Throws Fans for a Loop

Posted on Jul 14th 2009 12:00PM by Benjy Eisen
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Phish has taken to making big announcements via video and multimedia clips on their Website. No big surprise there. But the clips can sometimes go viral and cause ripples that spill out from Phish Nation into the real world. The latest episode launched a few weeks ago when Phish responded to rumors of a much-anticipated Halloween-weekend festival via an announcement that merely read "Save the Date" with a map of the United States and the dates in question, October 30 to November 1.

Phish fans immediately began speculating, theorizing, and blogging. That, combined with information from various next-door neighbor's sister's friend's credible sources led many to believe that the festival will go down in Indio, CA -- home of Coachella and Stagecoach. The location makes sense for many reasons and, indeed, many initial hints seemed to point that way.

Even the phrase "Save the Date" could refer to the fact that Indio and the Coachella Valley is in a large date-farming region filled with famous date palm groves. One theory is that "Save the Date" is going to be the name of the festival itself, because of this.

The map of the U.S. on Phish's mysterious announcement page has been undergoing changes: states seem to get eliminated one by one or, more often, in groups. Some states were sunk by fire ants -- a move that many saw as yet another hint that the event will be in the Coachella Valley where fire ants have become a problem. Other states got dragged away by boats; others turned around by some kind of ghost-like version of Vanna White.

Without any known facts about the festival itself -- other than the dates -- the chatter and speculation alone was enough to motivate fans to book travel to Indio and even rent nearby houses, Coachella-style, for that weekend. The rabid, preemptive activity even made the local news.

But Phish just threw fans a curveball. On Monday, it looked as though California got eliminated. The flash addition to Phish's "festival map" shows California being flown away by hot air balloons (hot air balloons, by the way, are common in the Coachella Valley). But instead of writing off California as the location of Phish's Halloween festival, fans are now debating whether or not the "blackened" states aren't part of a larger puzzle, or if Phish will end up flying into the festival on hot air balloons. Other fans, meanwhile, are scrambling to find potential festival sites in the remaining "active" states. Arizona's Datelan Army Airfield proved initially to be a popular alternative candidate. It's become partly a game of cat-and-mouse and partly a "Where's Waldo?" kind of joke.

Of course, in typical Phish fashion, part of the joke is that the announcement may or may not be codified, may or may not have a prank element, may or may not have hidden flash clues and may or may not even reflect where the actual festival is going to occur.

Case in point: earlier this summer, fans were convinced that Phish was planning a festival in Georgetown, TX because a video announcing the band's summer tour zeroed in on a Georgetown farm via Google Earth. It took a segment by the local Fox News affiliate to convince anybody otherwise. The big news there is that Phish fans were forced to believe Fox News.

For those who care not just about "when" but also "where" Phish is playing, their next tour begins on July 30 at Red Rocks in Morrison, CO. But if you didn't already know that, don't bother going -- the entire tour sold out instantly.