I have never seen Widespread Panic live. I have a couple of their CDs and I freely admit I didn't "get" those. But now, having read Joshua Hyatt's observations in - of all places - Fortune Small business - I have an understanding of their appeal. Maybe I'll see them someday - it kind of sounds like a Rocky Horror-on-granola experience:
- No sooner has the band Widespread Panic taken the stage at Colorado's Red Rocks Amphitheater than I notice that everyone in the audience is pointing at me. Some use both index fingers; others jab in my direction with just one. Okay, I know I stand out from the other 9,399 audience members. My new FSB baseball cap, with its stiff brim, is facing forward. While other heads bob to the opening bars of Neil Young's "Are You Ready for the Country?" mine builds up to a rhythmic quiver. I am wearing a blue blazer, which has been slapped with a yellow schools' zone sticker, featuring the distinctively distended silhouette of Dave Schools, the band's bassist. Wherever I walk, fans tap the sticker, then give me a thumbs-up accompanied by a we-both-know-what-that-means glance. I don't, of course. And when I confess my ignorance to Kevin Teel, a 35-year-old diehard (104 shows) who is (I'm not making this up) an industrial hearing-testing program salesman and is sitting—actually standing, like everybody else—in the fifth row, he pats me on the back and puts me at ease. "The Schools' Zone," he assures me with a thumbs up, "is where you want to be." Whew!
I resume my awkward shuffling, only to feel something hit my back. A marshmallow lands at my overdressed feet—a tribute perhaps to "Cream Puff War," a punkish Grateful Dead song the band covers? That's what somebody tells me, but nobody's sure how the ritual began. Still, when I feel drops of water pelting me, I'm proud that I get it: The bluesy band has broken into Van Morrison's classic "And It Stoned Me." Folks reflexively flick their water bottles as soon as the sextet reaches the three-peated line: "Oh, the water."
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