081404 Phish, Coventry, VT

I don’t know if I’ve made reference to Chris Hood in these ticket stories before but I’m guessing that I have.  Probably more than once.  

Chris Hood was a good man who was full of vim, vigour, and a whole lot more.  The guy was a dynamo of class and cool.  He was my friend and back in December of 2002 he took his own life.

I was on the road with nero at the time.  We were in Massachusetts, staying with the guitar player’s mom and stepdad (who was, incidentally, the head coach of the UMass football team at the time and in a few years would earn a Super Bowl ring in his first year as head quarterback coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers).  Shortly – like, in mere minutes – after we got the horrible news of Hood’s passing via email the four of us had to jump on the bus for the drive to the next gig.  It proved to be a long, somber drive that was consumed with emotion, tears, and several loud bursts of anger.

If I’m not mistaken the next show was in Burlington, Vermont, though the Burlington play might have been a few shows on.  I do know that all of our friends from back home in Ottawa had been planning to drive down to Vermont for the weekend and absolutely storm the gig, with Chris Hood leading the pack.  Of course with the tragic news everyone opted to stay home, and the sad band ended playing to a room sparsely occupied by strangers and a few American friends that were too new to understand our grief.

Fate being what it was, it wasn’t until August 14th, 2004, on the first night of the biggest stain on Phish’s concert history, the band’s farewell trainwreck festival called Coventry that will forever haunt Phish fans worldwide, that I stood in the crowd and heard the band play their epic fan-favourite, Harry Hood for the first time since Chris Hood had died.

And it was then, as they closed out the shockingly bad and infinitely sad opening night of their infamous weekend of doom with the normally upbeat, reggae-tinged song that I began what has become my Hood ritual, a rite that I have repeated (by my calculations) twenty-nine times in the 108 Phish concerts I’ve seen since Coventry (at the time of editing).

The ritual(s) consists of a couple of poignant (to me at least) tilting-my-head-towards-the-sky, raising-my-arms-in-the-air-and-singing-along-as-loud-as-I-can moments.  To wit:

When Phish sings “Harry!” the whole crowd screams, “Hood!” to which Phish responds, “Where do you go when the lights go out?”  Again and again this goes on, and every time it comes I scream “Hood!” with Chris at the forefront of my mind.  It’s more of a plea than a tribute, more akin to the whole anger part of him being dead.

It’s at the end of the song though, when the band brings the nearly lyricless tune to it’s climax that I sing out loud and proud in a loving tribute to my friend .  Yeah, when that ending comes around, you’ll never catch me not singing at the top of my inevitably emotion-strained voice:

“You can feel good, good about Hood!”

Over and over.

“You can feel good, good about Hood!”

“You can feel good, good about Hood!”

It helps, but not much.*

Rest in peace my friend.  You are missed.

*Curiously, during this first Hood at Coventry, as I was emotionally singing this repeated refrain in what I thought was going to be a one-time tribute (the weekend was, of course, supposed to be the last Phish shows ever) the band did something they never do.  They stopped playing and let the crowd (it felt like mostly me) sing the part a capella.  Then they picked up again and finished the song.  They’ve not done that again before or since.