Thank you everyone who read, skimmed or Commented on my absurd, fake-review of the covering by Phish of the parody-prog-music of a fake-band’s fake-album’s fake-songs.

Phish doesn’t often want us to take them too seriously, and never has.

This trait (among many others) is what attracted many of us to their music in the first place. And frankly, it’s not in our best interest to take ourselves too seriously, either, especially when we are fanboying and fangirling about what our favorite jamband did or did not do.

Of course the KV set didn’t “anger” me. I can’t be more happy that Phish conceived, wrote, and performed an original musical work in their Halloween set this year—this time as parody—and managed to surprise their fans by doing the unexpected yet again. But if my two cents on the album had treated it (and you) with kit gloves, at least some of the inane beauty behind Kasvot Växt would have been lost.

That you’re taking the time to read this likely means that you, like me, are in the minority of fans who love Phish’s music so much they sometimes (if not often) enjoy reading the online opinions of other true-believer-fans like themselves. So it should come as little surprise that given how important Halloween is in Phish history, and how hundreds if not thousands of fans were hoping Phish would pay tribute in the second set of October 31 to a highly popular classic rock album, I could not skip the opportunity to trumpet the irony of “criticizing” a work of parody performance art and music by a band I’ve loved for 30 years: a set that covered the music of a non-existent band’s non-existent decades-old album’s non-existent songs. What band does that?!?

Only PHISH. The 10/31/18 Kasvot Växt set was and is deliberately and literally surreal, regardless of what anyone thinks about the quality of any given song at any given moment. And so frankly, even if I believe a commenter wholly missed the point of something I wrote that was intended to be absurd, false, vague, bizarre and/or outrageous, it would be unreasonable and even silly for me to be Upsvët By Thät.

Let’s never forget the ridIcculousness from which “Icculus” was birthed, after all. We are all Phish fans, even those of us who run to the bathroom with the first notes of “Brian and Robert” or “Alaska” or “Stealing Time From the Faulty Plan” or [your least favorite song].

You enjoy yourself this holiday weekend, and may there be glue in your magnets.