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Where It’s at
A guide to Phishing in Maine
BY CARLY CARIOLI

It’s been a cruel summer for the recorded-music industry, and the concert-tour industry isn’t doing much better. Downloads are up; record sales are down. Mariah Carey is playing theaters; Lollapalooza is drawing half-capacity. All of which suits Phish just fine. They’ve never relied on multi-platinum studio-album sales, or hit singles, or MTV videos, for their livelihood. Their tours appear to be immune to economic downturn, and each performance becomes its own album: within 48 hours of most gigs, fans can download the show, for a fee, from the band’s Web site. Those who worry that no one will make any money from on-line music should talk to Phish — who as it happens aren’t talking to the press these days, but they are selling their entire 2003 summer tour, in mp3 files, for $180. Next weekend they’ll wrap up their summer tour with the two-day "It Festival" at Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, Maine, the latest in a series of extravagant events they’ve thrown almost every year since 1996. The festivals have all been co-produced by Dave Werlin, the owner of Boston-based Great Northeast Productions.

"We kind of rewrote the book in ’96," says Werlin over the phone from the site. "No one else had done anything quite like this. And what has come out of that now is that there are a lot of imitators. There are so many smaller jam-band festivals, and then the big one [the Bonnaroo festival] in Tennessee, but I feel like this one has elements that nobody else touches, either because they don’t have the artistic vision or the financial resources.

"These festivals are like mirages in the desert, they’re there and then they’re gone. In the past, we’ve had symphony orchestras performing Debussy, we’ve had gliders doing aerial ballets, we’ve had people on trampolines wearing snowboards and skateboards. We built an Asian-themed pavilion in ’97 — what we called the Dojo HoJo — and a porta-potty pagoda, where we stacked six toilets on top of each other, took out the bottoms, and put a chandelier at the top. We’ll have a bona fide US post office staffed by official personnel and stocked with postcards custom-made for the show. We’ll have a 24-hour general store. We’re providing an Internet café.

"We capped attendance at 60,000 this year to make it a more comfortable experience. We’ll be the second-largest city in Maine. In the past, we’ve hovered in the 70s, and we were the biggest city in the state. We decided to let Portland win this one. Gates will open at 8 a.m. on Friday August 1, and we would urge people not to come before that. By opening the gates 33 hours in advance of Phish’s first set [5 p.m. on Saturday August 2], we’re giving people a chance to get acclimated, get their campsites set up. Every show that we’ve done, with one exception, we’ve set up a non-commercial 24-hour-a-day radio station exclusively for the festival, where we broadcast traffic information, weather, and the Phish sets live. This time, we were able to work out an arrangement with a powerful FM station, and we’ll be at 96.1 FM starting at 8 a.m. on Friday. You should be able to get it north of Bangor, and certainly it’ll come in clear from Houlton.

"We’re operating on 500 to 600 acres, and camping and parking takes up most of it. Everybody gets to camp with their vehicle, hopefully on the grass. That’s our goal. Everyone gets a 10-by-40 [foot] space, unless they’ve got an RV, in which case they’ll get a motor-home area. Loring is an airbase left over from the Cold War. It was built in the ’50s as part of the NORAD network and decommissioned in the mid ’90s. We came here in ’97 for the first time. It was also famous for a UFO sighting in the ’70s; there was quite a lot written about it. The runway is 12,000 feet long, and what we’re doing different this year, besides camping people on the grass, is that we’re placing the concert field midway down the runway, off the side of the taxi ramp. Instead of the last person in having to walk two and a half miles to the field, the farthest point will be less than half that.

"I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I’ve never seen a band that is so determined to give back something to their fans. I think the success of this band is pretty obvious — it’s all about roots. This is roots music, a roots band. There’s a very honest pact between this band and their fans: a very honest dialogue — and because of that there’s a lot of fan loyalty, and this is what makes a career."

The It Festival runs August 2 and 3 at Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, Maine; Phish perform three sets daily beginning at 5 p.m. each day. Tickets, at $137.50, are available through http://phishtickets.rlc.net or by calling (617) 931-2000.


Issue Date: July 25 - August 1, 2003
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