Don’t get on the bus.

Once I started seeing bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish on a fairly regular basis the odd and angular travelling roadshow that inevitably follows the scene around from arena parking lot to arena parking lot gradually became somewhat normalized. I started being able to discern the many helpful, smiling faces that beam from every corner of the culture from the genuine freaks and weirdos and soon became able to spot and avoid sketchy lot rats from a fair distance away. It was early in this Shakedown training that I started noticing the bus.

The bus is hard to miss; it’s actually two busses one on top of the other that have been sculpted and welded into a single vaulted and very flashy mondo-bus. I can’t remember when I first saw it but it’s probably been there since my first show, undoubtedly parked on the fringe of each parking lot blending into all the other sights so strange and wonderful back then. But once I started to gain some familiarity with the scene the bus began to stand out.

The bus is conspicuous enough: brown paint, silver chrome, and cleverly contoured with bubble windows all art deco cool. When the bus finally caught my eye it really caught my eye, but there seemed to be something fishy about it.

Early on I found myself right outside of the bus after a show somewhere. There were a few young people hanging around near the open door who were obviously part of the bus entourage, and inside I could see someone way up high, sitting at a table and mundanely working on some paperwork or some sort of task. Up close the bus loses absolutely none of its charm. It’s a beautiful piece of machinery with curves like a ’50’s Cadillac. I mean the thing is stunning. The car-guy in me was dying to see inside but my Spidey-senses told me otherwise. I soon moved on.

It was immediately clear to me that the bus had some sort of cultish thing going on. The night that I got close I found out they had a motto, and it was a creepy one: We’ll Drive You Home. I forget if I saw this motto on some literature or if it was printed on the bus itself, but either way it seemed pretty clear that they were preying on young, lost post-psychedlic souls who would probably be getting a redefinition of the word “home” thrust upon them.

Occasionally the bus would come up in late-night post-show conversations and a few second or third-hand stories would trickle out about somebody’s friend or sister or whomever who ended up on the bus for months or years or both. You’d hear tales of kids dropping contact with their legit family or even birthing children into the bus cult…scary stuff, and not very fun at all.

And then on November 27th, 2009, as I was walking through the lot heading in to the first of a two-night stand of Phish at Albany's Knickerbocker Arena I saw two of the heady, quasi-doubledecker cultmachines parked nose-to-front. There were two of them?!?!?

First off, it was a nifty little spectacle. Cult or not, the bus, or rather: "busses", were quite beautiful - when I become a billionaire magnate and can afford adequate parking I might just get myself one - and seeing two of these creations face-to-face tickled both my obsessive-symmetry bone and my admiration for well-sculpted motorized vehicles.

Secondly, discovering that there was more than one bus suggested that this wasn’t just a small, grassroots gathering of the brainwashed, this was an organization. This was exactly the sort of coordinated and well-financed cult that keeps parents awake at night worrying and wondering why they ever let their innocent and impressional son or daughter go away for the weekend to see some weird band with their strange, odd-smelling friends.

And seeing those two busses together suddenly made all of those late-night horror stories about the bus-people ring true.

Don’t get on the bus. These cultish weirdos give regular old fun-loving neo-hippie weirdos like me a bad name.

Oh, the show was great. Maze, Fluffhead, Harry Hood, and how can you go wrong with a My Friend, My Friend second set opener? You can’t. And don’t get on the bus.

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