In a new interview with The Guardian, popular singer/songwriter Sharon Van Etten shares her experience at her first-ever festival, Phish’s Big Cypress. At the festival, Phish played a marathon seven-and-a-half hour long set to usher in the new millennium, playing from December 31, 1999 through to January 1, 2000.
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Sharon Van Etten, who is scheduled to play at Governors Ball and Glastonbury this summer, said that the festival was essentially a “shitshow,” since it was held on an Indian reservation where authorities turned a blind eye to drugs. She introduces the story by saying she wasn’t into the band, but her brothers and sisters were, and they got her a ticket.
Read her account of Big Cypress below:
“It was crazy and I was just trying to keep it together. I’m walking around with my siblings, taking notes of all the characters that I’m seeing around me and I realise they call it Big Cypress because there’s only one tree on the whole reservation. One tree that has ice blocks under it, shaped like stairs, where all the – I’m sorry – dirty hippies were sitting on and sweating all over. It was so disgusting.
“By the end of the first day all the toilets are full to the top, I’m walking around in direct sunlight and all of a sudden I realised I was swelling – I had these shoelaces tied round my wrists because I was cool or whatever. So I asked my brother and my sister: ‘That’s weird, right? That’s not normal?’
I started freaking out and they ran me back to where we were camping – because of course we were camping for three days – and they’re pouring cold water on me. And I was sat there thinking that I was dying and all of a sudden Phish start playing and my brothers and sisters leave me. So I was sitting in a camping chair, and I guess I had some heat exhaustion and Phish are playing and I’m surrounded by all these really tripped out people on a campsite and I literally thought I was going to die. That was my first festival experience.”
Van Etten compares that experience to her first performing at a festival, saying that the Philly Folk Festival in 2009 “was the exact opposite of that.” Meanwhile, Phish will return to the festival game with Magnaball, this August.
[Via The Guardian]