The mad scramble for NYE tickets

How many Phish fans does it take to cripple ticketmaster.com?

I do not know the exact number, but try logging on at 10 a.m. the day New Year's Eve tickets go on sale and you will experience it firsthand.

It happens every year - hundreds of thousands of fans trying to get tens of thousands of tickets. It is maddening.

Not that the top brass at Ticketmaster or Live Nation, especially that dipshit prick CEO Irving Azoff, will do anything about it as long as the money keeps rolling in. They do not give flying crap about you or me. They laugh at us while the screen says, "Your wait time is approximately five minutes" for a half-hour straight. And then they laugh at us again when half the tickets go to their buddies in the "ticket broker" business.

"Ticket broker", if you did not know, is a euphemism for "legal scalping". Funny how I can get a ticket for neither Dec. 29, 30, nor 31, from Ticketmaster.com at face value, but other sites have them on sale for hundreds of dollars. Assholes. Fortunately, I got the 28th from Phish's own limited mail-order system.

See, I am old enough to remember the good old days when your chances of getting a ticket depended on how badly you wanted it. Tickets went on sale at 10 a.m. on a Saturday? That means camping out Friday night at the local Ticketmaster outlet. First in line had first dibs, fair and square.

For New Year's Run shows in 1994, 1995, and 1997 (including NYE for the latter two), I was in the front section on the floor at Madison Square Garden with my best buddies and my brother. Why? Because we had the balls to camp outside in front of a god damn strip mall building in New Jersey in late October. That is why.

And hanging out all night with fellow Phish fans was FUN. You met people. Exchanged stories. Maybe agreed to a few tape trades (we listened to Phish shows on cassette in the pre-mp3 days, and copied and mailed them to each other).

In the late 1990s, they started the wristband system to keep people from camping out. Goodness knows they did not want people having fun in the middle of the night in non-residential parts of town where no one would be bothered. To my knowledge, no crimes were ever committed at these sleepovers. No violence. Just a bunch of people waiting for the store to open to get their fair reward.

The wristbands ensured that whether you got there at 9:00 the night before or 9:00 that morning, everyone present at opening time had an equal and random shot at the good stuff. They gave you a wristband with a number, then they called the number that would be first, and went in sequential order.

It is no big surprise then, that I did not get tickets to NYE 1998 (though I did manage to score Dec. 29 and 30). And after that, Ticketmaster truly became Ticketbastard.

NYE 1999 was an organic affair, a festival ticketed through Phish's organization, so tickets were plentiful and easy to obtain. And that was the last NYE I have ever attended.

2002 was damn near impossible as the first show back from hiatus - instead I landed a single ticket to the Virginia show on Jan. 4. And 2003 and 2009 were in Miami, so they were out of reach. But the last three years at MSG have been the same circle of Hell, over and over.

I wonder if I should even care this much. Listening to the recordings, I found last year's shows to be good, but nothing more special than any other Phish show until the third set of NYE.

Not that I am a 3.0 hater. I am totally on board with new Phish. Summer tours this year and last were possibly the best ever. The problema are that damn Garden and the pressure of delivering huge NYE returns when the memories of those previous extravaganzas have still not faded after all these years.

Still, I continue chasing the dragon, hoping that if I get lucky enough to snag that golden ticket, I will see an MSG show that blows my mind the way it did in 1995 and 1997.

That is not likely, but I requested floor-seats only, effectively narrowing my odds of actually attending in favor of increasing my odds of enjoying it more if I do. There is a deep frustration being stuck in the 300s and 400s, struggling to hear the band in the echo cavern near the ceiling of MSG. It is floor-only from now on.

With that in mind, I think I will be happier attending the one show on Dec. 28 with my seat on the floor than attending two or more with crappy seats. That way, if they play an average 3.0 show (which is to say, awesome but with no crazy frills), I will have a perfectly excellent time.

Then I'll go to the Trey Anastasio show in Montclair in January and probably have as good a time!