Technology & The Mess at Coventry

“There can be no doubt that in our civilisation poetry is by far the most discredited of the arts, the only art, indeed, in which the average man refuses to discern any value.” (Orwell, 1968, p.3)
As poetry, besides Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, jazz, and classical music fans, twenty-minute songs without lyrics were not enjoyed by the everyman. Phish had a very specific kind of sound that echoed those four and in the beginning was only able to reach their audiences through word of mouth. Even with that, they had an impressive following in the early nineties for a band without a hit single.Their sound was for a more intelligent crowd. The commercial radio stations never played Phish (even after they released a few MTV-type songs), but they kept filling larger and larger venues due to the increasing popularity of technology.

When I first got into their music there was a fairly new message board online at rec.music.phish Through this media, the band got exposure to people who otherwise would not have heard. Spring (1997) asserted, the “Amercian broadcasting system [claimed] it was democratic because it was based on listener selection” (p.319). How can a listener select something they have never been exposed to? It is lonely to be the only one you know to like a particular band. In the past, adolescents who felt this way might run off to the city, San Francisco most notably,to be with like-minded people.

Without leaving home, the internet expanded the circle of people you could know.I did not have a car, but I conversed frequently with people who lived across the country and felt that I was part of a community. The same tool that enabled Phish’s fan base to grow led to the mess at Coventry. When I was a sophomore in college Phish played at the tiny Greek Theatre in Los Angeles and did not sell all of the tickets available. The next year they played the massive Irvine Meadows and almost sold out. The following year people were ready to sell their brother to get to that show.

The counter-culture that had developed in the mid-nineties as a peace loving community who looked down upon those on drugs at the shows had a new younger following who did not really get it. Due to news reports that focused on the few overdoses or arrests and not the thousands who avoided both, new fans were coming to the shows socialized to think that these were common. They were drinking and doing drugs irresponsibly and disturbing the people who were there for the music. What once was the exception was now the rule because of technology and mass media. In the beginning, the audio resources were scant; there was precise taping etiquette that if you failed follow you did not get any tapes of shows. There were, however, plenty of seats at shows and shows to go to. As the technology became more accessible, more information about the band and its music became available.

As these resources grew the fan base grew. In 1999, the most crucial of the resources started to run out, seats at shows and shows to attend. At a festival called Big Cypress we waited in twelve hours of traffic because there were more people than tickets available. Fall Tour 2000 was the first time I have ever not been able to buy a ticket through Phish, but my friend and I were still able to go to all of the shows. During the two year hiatus they took there were no shows, afterwards there were no seats. To get to their next festival, IT, we waited in fourteen hours of traffic. The population of the fan base became so large that the fan’s standard of living decreased. The culmination of increased demand with limited resources was Coventry.

References
Lenski, G. E. (2005). Ecological-evolutionary theory: Principles and applications.Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers.
Orwell, G., Orwell, S., & Angus, I. (1968). The collected essays, journalism and letters of george orwell.London: Secker & Warburg.
Spring, J. H., & Spring, J. H. (1997). The american school, 1642-1996 (4th ed.). New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.