This past weekend, I went to Alpine Valley to see Phish. I saw them Saturday night (6/26/04)… It is supposed to be their last show at Alpine, and from the looks of the crowd, people believed it. I haven’t seen lines of cars waiting to pull into the lots like that before. They were about a mile or more long (in both directions) on highway 43, near Bowers road. So, rather than sit in line like chumps… we figured that we would find a “shortcut.” Basically, this involved us taking some back roads, weaving underneath the highway…. and ultimately we came out at the intersection of bowers road and the road to the parking lots.. we probably saved about two or more hours of waiting in line.
I sort of knew it was a bad sign when I saw people looking for tickets along the highway. Getting into the parking lot showed similar results… many many people with their fingers in the air, looking for tickets. When we pulled into our “spot,” the attendant mentioned that there were 36,000 people who attended the previous night’s performance and that there were already that many people in the lots. Not including the numbers still waiting in their car lines… Also, the attendants gave up on attempting to park the cars in the normal rows (with big distances between cars) and instead just parked the cars tightly together. So… I spent a good portion of the day walking around looking for a ticket. Heh… Kristina, Ryan’s girlfriend, was even offering rim jobs for a ticket 😉 I was ready to sit in the parking lot for the entire show when all of a sudden one of the guys I was with offered his ticket from the night before…
I went to the show with a friend and some people that he knew. There were two people (Brandon and Scottie) from
I took the ticket to the first gate that we came to, and was promptly turned away… they used scanning machines to verify the ticket, and noticed that it was for the previous day. So naturally, I turned around and went to another gate. This time, the corrals were pretty much empty, so I had my pick of who I wanted to turn me away. I decided to go with the guy with the mustache, for some reason. I walked up to him, not paying attention to the ground, and handed him my ticket. As he scanned my ticket, he noticed that I was wearing sandals and advised me not to step in the glass beneath my feet… meanwhile, the machine probably told him that it was a Friday ticket, but out of luck, he was pre-occupied telling me about the glass and didn’t look at the machine. So, he said “have a good show” and I pretty much floated beyond him into the venue. I was able to find Ryan, and the other people we came with, right away and we found our spot just before the show started…
I’ll omit the exact details of that kickass show, but if you’re interested in the setlist, head here. Otherwise, go grab the soundboards…