Phish's Spectacular 1994 Blowout in Kent State's MAC Center

• Saturday, November 12, 1994, Phish in the MAC Center.

This is one of the most storied and well documented shows to ever happen at Kent State, and lucky for us this is an event that happened only 17 years ago, so a good amount of archival materials and memories are still intact. This was the first major concert to be held in the MAC Center since its renovation and re-dedication from The Memorial Gym to The Memorial Athletic and Convocation Center.

The show itself was a complete sell out and the party atmosphere before the concert was in typical legendary Phish pre-show fashion. The Student Center parking lot and the C parking lots adjacent to the Michael Schwartz Center were filled with hippies, gypsies and Volkswagen buses identically ripped out of some festive Grateful Dead event. This was commonplace for a Phish concert but highly unusual for Kent, Ohio.

Phish was on tour for their album Hoist and were completely in their musical prime on this night. This was Phish's only ever appearance at Kent State or in the city of Kent, and by the following summer their growing popularity would only allow them to exclusively play the largest sports arenas, stadiums and summer sheds in the country where they remain a fixture to this day. A complete setlist for the show can be found here and a handful of detailed reviews written by Phish fans can be found here. The show also is referenced here and here.

In 2005 Phish released a small chunk of this concert (tacked onto the end of another show) as part of their LivePhish.com series. You can download it here. Also of note is that the entire Fall 1994 Phish tour was professionally recorded for their following official live release A Live One. The Kent State show was in that pool of recordings and in addition to the incredible audio surfacing as part of their download series, four professionally recorded tracks have surfaced on Vimeo. Click here to listen to "Harry Hood". Click here to listen to "Down With Disease" and click here to listen to "Foreplay" and "Long Time" all in incredible sound quality and all authentically from that night at Kent State. Don't be afraid to give these tracks a little volume.

It also must be noted that two days after this concert Phish spent about a week filming this cool lengthy documentary, which will give you a pretty clear sense of exactly where their career was around the time they played at Kent State.

As you can imagine, The Daily Kent Stater went to town on this show. Click here to see the original advertisement and click here to read the original review of the show. Note that the Kent Stater accidently published the photograph from the concert in reverse. I went ahead and re-reversed it, and then had it blown up so that it can be viewed properly.

Also take a good look at that photo. I was sitting in the third row on the floor and I distinctly remember that in the time leading up to the beginning of the performance, balloons began being batted around in that floor section. First there was one, then three and then what seemed like hundreds of balloons of all sizes being batted around. Then, the lights went down and Phish came on to a roaring applause. You can see in that photo the stage littered with those balloons. My recollection is that the stage security had all the balloons popped and out of the way by the end of the first song so I am going to assume that this photo was taken within the first 10 minutes of the concert. Also of note about the Kent Stater's reporting of the show is that the front page of the issue immediately following the concert boasted these notorious headlines.

I had the great pleasure recently to talk with Kent State graduate Dan Soulsby, who was the All Campus Programming Board (ACPB) Concert Committee Chairman for the 1994-1995 school year and was the chief promoter on this concert. This show was 100 percent his idea, and he and his staff were the ones who made this entire thing happen. Dan was only 22 years old on the night of Nov. 12, 1994, and this is what he told me about his experiences with bringing Phish to Kent State:

How did the idea come about to bring Phish to Kent State for the 1994 fall semester?
Dan Soulsby: First off let me thank you for tracking me down and writing a piece about this amazing show! Secondly, none of this would have been possible without the help of a great staff of ACPB board members that were around me at that time. It was a team effort that made this show happen.

We were talking about doing a show at the MAC Center because it had just been renovated because by the early 1990s that old Memorial Gym was kind of a ****hole, so the Undergraduate Student Senate wanted to do a big show in the newly renovated MAC Center and fill the place up. At that time there weren’t too many bands that could put 6,000 people comfortably into a venue like that and I narrowed it down to like five different bands that I felt could possibly fill the place up. I actually had The Kent Stater post in the paper a questionnaire about “Who would you want to see play in the new MAC Center?” The whole time though I was trying to convince the powers that be that if we brought Phish to the MAC Center we could sell the place out.

A lot of the college kids in those days knew who Phish was, but the problem was the people who had to write off on this thing and hand out the money, i.e., the fraternity kids on the Student Senate had never heard of them. I mean you can ask 10 different people on campus what’s in and what’s hot right now and you’ll get 10 different answers. So they were worried about giving me the money, but just before the school year started they gave me like the largest budget ever given to a KSU concert committee ever, with the goal for me to bring a headlining band to Kent State.

I went after Phish not too long after that survey went out, and on Sept. 16, 1994 we made them a formal offer of $37,500 plus 85 percent of net profits to play in the MAC Center on Saturday, Nov. 12, 1994 and Phish was cool with it and by Oct. 6 we had a signed contract between Phish and Kent State University. We also got 20 percent of the money from all of the merchandise sold at the show which is big, so it had the potential to generate more money for the University than anything I'd ever seen.

At that time they would have much rather played some place like Kent State than somewhere up in Cleveland. Their album Hoist had come out in March of 1994 and this concert that we did was like eight months later. I think Hoist had become their most commercially successful album up until that time. They had a string of albums in the early 1990s: Rift, Lawn Boy, Junta, and Picture of Nectar . By the fall of 1994 Phish was just starting to gain a lot of popularity and more commercial success and it was Hoist that really had propelled them into the mainstream.

I actually got into an argument with Phish's management because I insisted that we have a special student ticket sale before they went on sale to the general public. I didn't want them going onto Ticketmaster or anything until our students got the first opportunity to buy the tickets. I knew that they had a lot of Phisheads traveling with the band who pick up tickets and I didn't want some scalpers buying up a whole bunch of great seats to try and sell back to our students in the weeks leading up to the show. I said I wanted our students to have first crack at 'em and they did. They showed in numbers to the special sale and most of them bought the maximum they could buy.

I want to say that the concert sold out like within just a few days and it shut up all the naysayers pretty quick when they saw how fast tickets sold. The people at the Kent Stater and the student government had no idea who Phish was (until) after we sold out the MAC Center, and then they were believers! Of course now that we had a sold out Phish concert on our hands this led to all kinds of other problems...

What do you remember about the weeks leading up to the show?
Soulsby: I remember several meetings with the police force and they were extremely worried about all this illegal activity that they perceived would be going around in the parking lot, like they thought this was going to be some kind of San Francisco Hell’s Angels rally or something and I was telling them 'no it wasn’t going to be like that.'

They were really worried there were going to be all these hard drugs. That was their main concern. So it almost got to the point where they were going to cancel the whole event so I told them "I already signed the contracts and we're gonna have to pay them the money anyways." They made me hire so many police. I thought it was funny because I told them so many times that you don't need this many cops but they said 'If you're gonna have it, you're gonna need to hire all of our police force.' The chief was worried. They were telling me all this misinformation about the kind of angry crowd they were going to attract that I knew was just plain wrong. I kept telling them 'ummm no...it's not like that.' In the end they made me hire 22 police officers, 38 hall security officers and 18 campus security persons for one show.

In the semesters before we did Phish, I booked De La Soul with A Tribe Called Quest, The Lemonheads and Koko Taylor and they didn't make me hire 30 some police officers. For this one it was like ... overkill. Think about how many exits there are for the MAC Center. It's like, what are they doing? What were we paying these people for?

When did Phish show up in town?
Soulsby: I think they showed up the night before. I don't believe we put them up. I think they stayed on the buses because I remember those big tour buses pulling up behind the MAC on the Friday and then there being a bunch of students standing outside and trying to meet them. I remember I had to have the campus security guys put some gates around the buses so the students wouldn't try to get autographs or bug the band.

At what point did you actually encounter the band?
Soulsby: I remember the soundcheck. I remember going to the MAC Center and there were like a dozen security people getting into place and then just our staff ... and my sound guy working with the Phish sound guy. And Trey was on stage alone, just soloing, testing out his pedals which I thought was so cool. The sounds he was making, it was like an orgasm for your ears. I remember thinking it was kind of cool that a band that was as big as Phish were still doing a soundcheck. I was just in awe watching Trey play guitar and then the whole band came on stage and finished out soundcheck.

Since I was the head promoter for the show I got to eat dinner with Phish, so after the soundcheck I walked with the band over to the Schwebel Room and on the way they were asking me about the Kent State shootings. Luckily I had taken a class called peace and conflict studies and learned all about it and I was able to answer all the questions they had. I didn't take them to the memorial or anything but I pointed out the area since it all happened behind the MAC Center. During our dinner in the Schwebel Room I just didn't know what I wanted to talk about or anything. I didn't want to start gushing or acting like a fan so we just did like small talk. I remember saying things like that I had never been to Vermont, stuff like that.

What do you remember about the time between your dinner at The Schwebel Room and the start of the concert?
Dan Soulsby: I remember the anticipation leading to the opening of the doors and the police and security thinking that the gym was going to fill up in like five seconds, but I knew they were going file in slowly. It wasn't general admission or anything but the security were acting as if it was like a Justin Bieber concert or something.

Did you get to see what was going on in the parking lot?
Soulsby: I didn't have time to. I really wanted to. We were so busy inside the MAC just making sure everything was set up right. I remember that we had a bunch of volunteer ushers to show people where their seats were who we didn't have to pay but they got to see the show for free and I remember having to throw one of them out because I'm like 'dude, you're not showing anybody where their seats are. All you gotta do is just show e'm where their seats are with your little flashlight and then you can watch the show.' And then I came back 20 minutes later and this guy was just still dancing so I had to call security and told them to kick this guy out because he was pissing me off.

What distinct memories do you have of the performance?
Soulsby: Oh boy, I was running around so much backstage and in front of the stage that i can't even remember the whole set but I know it's online and I'm looking forward to downloading it. I remember my parents came down to the show and I asked my dad about what he thought and he was impressed that they were actually really good musicians. I think he was just expecting a bunch of guys to go up there and just fiddle around or something.

During the set break we were having problems with the folding chairs that we had set on the gym floor. They were zip tied together and people were pulling the zip ties off and pushing them away and I remember the fire chief and those people were worried about that because of the fire codes. I remember trying to handle that by bringing down more volunteers whose job it was to just keep the aisles clear so the crowd could still dance.

What do you remember about what happened immediately following the show?
Soulsby: I remember getting a check for Phish and sitting down to go over the numbers for the night. We had to write them a check and we had to get our checks from them for 20 percent of the merchandise sold. I'd never seen numbers in the hundreds of thousands before. It was over $100,000 we were talking about! Ya know when you're in college you're lucky to have $3 in your pocket and $0.99 cents left on your flashcard, so when you are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars it was just mind blowing. I remember breathing a sigh of relief that there were no EMS incidents.

What happened to Phish after the show? Did they stay in town?
Soulsby: I remember hearing stories but I don't know. I'd like to know. I'd heard that they might have gone down to to get a piece of pizza. I don't know if that's true or not, but I did hear they were socializing with people after the show.


Dan Soulsby currently owns Mentor Signs & Graphics, an advertising/marketing agency specializing in large format printing, vehicle graphics, banners and trade show displays. In his spare time he blogs about his small farm in Hudson, Ohio.

Images for this story are courtesy of The Daily Kent Stater and the Department of Special Collections and Archives, Kent State University Libraries as well as Dan Soulsby. Additional editing by Shane Hrenko.

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