Doctor Bob Was A Real Jerk
The hippie dream died at Altamont, but a lot of us must have missed the memo.
In my 20s I was fortunate to have a very loving, enabling girlfriend, who enabled me to attend 4 or 5 music festivals per summer. They always had either Phil Lesh or Bob Weir headlining Saturday night, unless it was a small regional type thing, which meant that MA natives Max Creek and Strangefolk were playing some ungodly number of sets. Toward the end of my festival career, it didn’t matter what band was playing, as I was likely stuck in a tent somewhere smoking DMT while inside of a deep K hole, or some other complex clandestine chemical compound. I would be under the influence of so many drugs that you could sell me something fake and I wouldn’t even know.
I had this alter ego that I transformed into at festivals and drug band parking lots: Dr. Bob. At first I was bobber (because of my head bobbing tick, I hated this), then baba O’riley in the 52 hours of traffic I waited in outside of the “last Phish show” in Coventry Vermont. Once I started wearing these tweed sport coats, I felt like my grandfather, the professor. After all they were his sport coats I inherited when he died in 2002. So I became Dr.Bob. i was not aware that one of the founders of AA was named Dr.bob… that’s just one of those funny things that the universe does for its own amusement.
Dr. Bob was a mouthy, shitfaced Masshole who should have been punched out, luckily, I was surrounded by wannabe hippies who were pretty docile. Dr. Bob travelled with a crew of people who trafficked in hard party drugs and psychedelics. My friends made a lot of money, but I could never sell any drugs because I consumed them all, which was fine with me as they tended to come for free. there were like minded (drunken asshole) boston people that liked Dr.Bob for laughs but there were definitely softer more gentle vegan hippies that did not appreciate the abrasive cocainized whiskeyfuck that Dr. Bob was. I recall loudly listening to Ghostface Killah at 4 am at some festival, and having one of these patchwork-clad patchouli people ask me to turn it down, and just telling him to go fuck himself. What an asshole I was.
When I started going to hippie festivals at age 16 i had this pride in being there for the music, and i scoffed at those who were partying really hard. eventually I was stuck in the campgrounds getting about as fucked up as a person could get. I retired from festivals after Phish’s superball IX in 2009. All of the hippie drug orgies kind of bleed together , because they’re all exactly the same if you never make it to the stage.
There are many stories to be found in these years in the tent cities, and I’m sure to dig them up sometime, but for now I’ll just say this: thank God I retired before the proliferation of smartphones. As far as I know there is no video document of me being a pisspants trashlord asshole on 7 substances at once in some decommissioned air force base or ski resort. There is a photo of me after destroying a campsite at my last festival, though, and it speaks volumes.
