In my life, I’ve been incredibly lucky to be an early and long-time follower of two of the world’s greatest rock bands, The Grateful Dead and Phish.

Sometimes, people ask me what the biggest difference was between “following the Dead” and “following Phish”, and I tell them it’s the deep and lasting friendships I’ve made with Phish fans from around the country.

And I also add how a bunch of those friends came together to do some wonderful things as a group: publish a couple of well-received and sold-out editions of a book about Phish that the band liked enough to sell in its store, formed a charity that has donated over $620,000 for music education programs for underserved kids, and refurbished the Phish.net website for Phish 3.0 as a monster up to the second Phish historical performance database, all still as non-commercial and “by phans, for phans”, as it was in 1994.

And the reason for any difference -- between the Dead and the Phish -- had nothing to do with their music or the fans of each band.

It was all timing, between a band that came of age in 1970 and one that came of age at the dawn of the internet age twenty years later.

When you went on a Dead tour, year after year, you would see many familiar faces in ticket lines and shows. But, aside from chance meetings with a few people, it was hard to really make new friends with other Dead fans you just saw or chatted briefly with at shows.

Yet with the Phish, there was always (from 1990) people having discussion groups on the Internet (first email, then a listserv, then the Usenet newsgroup rec.music.phish in 1992). Every email address was a person, who you could talk with or trade tapes with.

Tape trading was practically the only way in the early to mid 1990s you could hear lots of recorded Phish outside of the limited catalog of songs on their few studio albums. Lots of songs in the rotation, like “Mike's Song”, “PYITE”, or “Halley's Comet”, were not on any recordings, so you had to hear them on a tape, at a show or not at all.

And to get tapes, you had to be social and seek tapers and traders out. Dead and Phish tape trading were among the earliest computer BBS communicating “social networks”, along with other out of the mainstream, geographically dispersed hobbyists like civil war reenanctors or role-playing gamers.

It was all in the timing. An unknown band in Vermont, through the technology of internet email and exchanges of cassette tapes, became famous by being publicized by its wired fans, mostly New England college kids all of whom had access to email on their greenscreen terminals on college mainframes. Like the early Facebook, mostly addresses ending in .edu.

And there was no better way to exchange information about setlists, tickets, tapes than the internets, first email, then r.m.p., then a website, www.phish.net, one of the world’s first public “world wide web” servers started by Brown University Phish fans and the tapers called “The Netspace Project”, netspace.org.

“Meetups” or “.netgatherings” grew organically out of this culture. At shows and festivals, it was natural for people to try to schedule meetups. Many were small scale affairs, a few people in the corner of a bar near the venue, sometimes they were announced but didn’t seem to happen.

But at some of the big festivals and holiday runs, there were some memorable net meetups that people who were there still reminisce fondly about today, in particular, Mustang Sally’s during the 1997 Holiday Run, and the chilly, post soaking rain windstorm meetup at the Great Went.

The Great Went Meetup is memorialized by some small blurry fan photos at Pages 650 - 651 of the first Phish Companion. I’m there in my rain parka, thrusting out a bottle of Dean Budnick’s home-brewed “Great Went White” beer. There are photos of some other gaggles of people...the only one I can recognize is my friend David ZZYZX Steinberg, who is easily identified, even without cape or clipboard.

I stood next to David and Marcie Vogel Frahm near the tapers pit in my hometown Glens Falls NY on the “White Album” Halloween, 10/31/94. As with strangers in a crowd in the Grateful Dead days, I didn’t know them. Two years later, we and about a dozen other other friends who’d met through “netting” on r.m.p. and then started going to shows together, founded The Mockingbird Foundation to write a book about Phish and donate the proceeds to charity.

That’s how all that started. Phish friends who met on the internet. Always very hard to explain to people’s parents at a lot of weddings we’ve gone to since, at least a half dozen, I’m sure.

The saddest thing about Coventry was to be on a tarp with perhaps a hundred people I’d known for years, friends from all over the country, who thought that they’d never see most of these people much anymore if Phish weren’t going to play. Our vacations together had been scheduled by Phish’s touring for years.

But I’m sure everyone who’s gotten this far understands this.

The friendships we’ve formed and good works we’ve done seem like icing on the cake, or a way to take the good energy and karma that Phish’s music represents and pass it along, to create even greater things.

That’s why, even in this day where there are a zillion Phish websites, and Facebook and lots of other public and private lists and boards online to read about Phish or discuss things, we still are psyched to maintain the world’s greatest free reference guide to Phish’s music which is powered by our setlists, song histories and reviews. The guts of The Phish Companion(s) online, up to date, as a database, with even a mobile version (m.phish.net) optimized for smartphones.

But as important as keeping track of setlist archives is, we want to still help Phish friends “socially network” on the internet as we did when we started this, why we maintain a discussion forum and do meetups. Because it’s in our DNA that one of the important functions of hosting a Phish fan website is to help other people find what we did, lasting close friendships, and going to shows not just as individuals in a mammoth sea of people, but surrounded by some good friends. Real friends, not “internet friends”. It makes seeing the Phish all the more fun.

We site admins sometimes have to remind ourselves of this, especially when it involves diving into the forum for the zillionth time to wag our finger at some newbie who joined yesterday not to start flame wars about glowsticks or moderation.

Most of us feel strongly that although the web forum or holding organized netgatherings at festivals might not be unique any more, or as necessary to enjoyment of Phish as it was in the tape trading days, phish.net’s being a social hub and friendly, safe “coral reef” for phans to hang online and form friendships and communities in the sea of concert-going crowds is still an important piece of our mission.

Hope to see all of you reading this who are at SBIX at our meetup, Saturday, noon, next to the Waterwheel tent.

If you liked this blog post, one way you could "like" it is to make a donation to The Mockingbird Foundation, the sponsor of Phish.net. Support music education for children, and you just might change the world.