“You coming from Hartford?”

I was checking us in at the Long Beach Hotel, feeling wobbly from the nine-hour drive to Long Island and a beer short of being ready for other humans, when this question was posed from across the lobby as I filled out paperwork for our stay. Before looking up from the counter to confirm the question was directed at me, I knew it was directed at me. Wearing a novelty tee with Patagonia shorts and Chacos, I looked the part of a man of a certain age checking in at a weathered oceanside hotel three hours before the start of Phish’s two-night stand at Jones Beach Theater, and the curly-haired everydude posing the question was of a similar age and wearing a similar uniform.

The answer to his question was, no, I was not coming from Hartford, but I knew exactly what he meant: Hartford was the previous show on Phish’s 2022 summer run, and his unsolicited query was a shorthand way of proclaiming he was following the tour and, with a friendly air of camaraderie, sizing me up as a fellow Head while he procured a bag of ice from a desk clerk. I replied that the Jones Beach shows were my first two of the tour, but my wife had been to the second of the two Philly shows while there for work and we also had tickets to our hometown show at Blossom Music Center the following week. He countered, in a non-competitive way, that he had been to Hartford and both Philly shows and also had tickets, in addition to Jones Beach, for the two Baltimore shows, Blossom and Detroit, and mentioned that his dad was joining him for Detroit – “We’ll see how that goes,” he concluded with a chuckle, then wished me a good show and disappeared up the stairs with his pregame ice.

For as much as I love music and have followed certain artists and certain scenes since I was 14, I don’t identify as any type of Head – not a Phishhead, Deadhead or metalhead, not a Wholigan, Juggalo or Swiftie. I haven’t declared a favorite artist in over 20 years, and even when I did, it never stuck. These days I struggle to rattle off a loose Top 5 on the fly. I don’t love music any less than I did as a teenager – in fact, I may love it even more – but as for ranking it, I don’t think about it that way as much as I did in my teens and 20s. Yet, after taking in my seventh, eighth and ninth Phish shows this past summer, I found myself pitting them against one another, then comparing every date I’ve seen since my first show in 2010 – the set lists, the jams, the ever-important but indiscernible “vibe” – which is behavior befitting of a card-carrying Head. There are chat rooms and fan sites and Reddits devoted to this sort of thing, and did I eavesdrop on a few after Jones Beach? Maybe.

Living and working in our spaceship in the burbs, and operating within a five-mile radius most days, we’re fairly disconnected from the world outside our decidedly square circle. And that’s partly by design. Pre-pandemic, our life in Boise, both professionally and socially, had revved up to the point of overheating – too many commitments, too many side hustles, too many yeses and not enough nos. And when you’re struggling financially, even the fun starts to feel like a chore. Our escape to the anonymous Midwest was a lot of things, but one of the big ones was a forced time out from going out. We’re still on the sidelines most weeks, but with concerts and nightlife returning to normal in this speciously-named post-COVID world, the action is everywhere again, and every now and then we step out to scratch that itch. Still, outside of Treefort, we did not set out to make 2022 a big concert year, especially a year of big concerts, but that’s what happened starting in February when Nine Inch Nails announced a September show at Blossom as part of a belated celebration of their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. That one was a no-brainer, especially after I sniffed around the Internet and found a presale code for $30 lawn seats. Erica and I both saw Nine Inch Nails as teenagers on the 1994-95 Downward Spiral Tour – she at the original Boston Garden, me at the Cleveland Convocation Center – but neither of us had seen them since. It felt like full-circle must-see-TV for our individual teenage selves and the music we’ve shared together since falling in love in our mid-20s; ditto scoring tickets a month later to Phish’s August Blossom show, our first time back at the venue since my Phish initiation in June of 2010.

That was supposed to be it for our personal 2022 summer concert series, until Magnolia decided to join high school band and we learned that marching band season kicked off with a weeklong overnight camp in late-July. A few evenings later, after a bottle of wine and a half-hour on a laptop, Erica and I had ourselves two tickets to paradise, or in this case, a trip to the Eastern Seaboard for a tiny taste of outdoor music and the ocean breeze while our kid was sweating through two-a-days in the Southern Ohio heat. Erica and I are not tourists of our pasts, but it’s hard to ignore the nostalgic tinge to these two concert experiences, even if, aesthetically speaking, Nine Inch Nails and Phish exist at distant ends of the ’90s alt-rock spectrum. Pop culture, for as much as it looks forward, has a perpetual thumb on the rewind button, and right now it feels like we’re at peak ’90s. Everywhere you look, Zoomer kids are shuffling around in Nirvana shirts, and this football season we heard not one but two high school marching bands perform “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Stone Temple Pilots, minus their dead original singer, hit the fair circuit over the summer, including a free-with-admission show at the Western Idaho Fair. The era’s slacker-skeptic temperament and detuned guitar tones are all over indie rock, particularly among the new wave of ax-wielding Riot Grrrls. If there’s a generation gap between Gen Xers and their spawn, for once it has little, if anything, to do with music: When we saw Snail Mail, one of Magnolia’s current favorites, perform at Treefort in March and again in Cleveland three weeks later, she covered Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight.” Six months later, I’d hear Billy Corgan and James Iha deliver an acoustic rendition of the song in the same arena where I first saw the Pumpkins in 1996, and while standing beside one of the same high school friends. As we waited for the lights to go down, $18 beers in our hands, Kyle and I surveyed the crowd from our chairs near the stage – a notable upgrade from the nosebleed seats we occupied 26 years prior – and pondered how many others had been at the ’96 show, when Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse was known as Gund Arena. Judging from the average age of the audience, and the number of graying concertgoers in Pearl Jam hoodies and Zero tees, I’d say we were wedged in among the same rats in the same cage.

Three months earlier at Jones Beach, when Erica and I wandered through Shakedown Street before Night 1, the Gen X signifiers were slightly different but nevertheless similar: Midnight Marauders blasting from a makeshift bar; a Colorado Audi sporting a CARINI1 license plate; a lanky Head, vibing on nothing in particular but possibly everything, wearing a Beastie Boys Atwater Basketball Association ringer tee. Fast-forward to Nine Inch Nails at Blossom for a glimpse of the aggro-rock version: a dude in a Kangol hat and Fear Inoculum tee; another in an oversized Type O Negative hockey jersey; the ageless, shirtless, mohawked hero of the mosh pit that erupted on the concrete walkway behind the pavilion during Ministry’s blistering opening set. Despite these through lines, the Phish and Nine Inch Nails shows were, in many ways, studies in contrast. Phish is a scene, a subculture, an alt-community with its own language and economic system, and most of the people we saw at Jones Beach looked the part to various degrees, from the weathered Deadheads who got on the bus the day after Jerry died to the Prius-driving couples using PTO to cosplay their younger selves while the kids stayed with Grandma. Nine Inch Nails’ sold-out homecoming, meanwhile, wasn’t so much a community as it was a hodgepodge of middle-aged humanity with disposable income: a sprinkling of goths and OG EBM punks, and more leather and cigarettes than we’ve seen and smelled in a while, but mostly dudes in T-shirts and women in sensible footwear, as Erica observed, who may as well have been there for the Cleveland Orchestra. (It should be noted that several of these folks opted to rent the low-back folding chairs instead of sitting on the grass, and I couldn’t help but imagine this show taking place in the ’90s and those same people using those same chairs to fling at the jerks in the pavilion.) Sure, there are chat rooms and fan sites and Reddits devoted to Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, and listeners who have stood by them all these years, but the music is not a lifestyle like it is for certain Phishheads. Which isn’t to say it’s any less important to the people who paid money to be there, as the admittedly cathartic singalongs to “Wish” and “Head Like a Hole” proved, but I got the sense that most of the middle-aged fans at Nine Inch Nails were there to step back into skin they long ago shed, to feel what those songs felt like at 15, only to shed that skin again once they got home. For devout Phishheads, the band – and the alternate universe it spawned – is home.

Where Erica and I fit in with it all, walking through these disparate worlds of fandom without being of them, I’m not entirely sure. While taking in the Jones Beach Shakedown scene, Erica declared, “I’ve never wanted to be a typical anything,” which explains, despite the 30-odd Phish shows she’s seen since her initiation at Great Woods in 1993, why she never went all in like some of her friends, and it explains why I’m not a goth or rave kid or anything else I’ve secretly longed to try on along the way. For certain people of a certain age – our age, the baby Gen Xers who sampled everything from the MTV buffet and liked it all – there’s a Venn diagram for this, and we’re clearly in it. I keep going back to an early Family Guy episode where Megan asks a boy she likes about music, and he rattles off a short list of ’90s alt-rock all-stars that have little in common beyond their target post-Nevermind audience: “I’m into Garbage, Phish, Blur… I also like Radiohead.” It’s funny because it’s true, and three decades later, the borderless Alternative Nation continues to fill the parking lots and lawn seats, only now armed with the spoils of adult socio-economic status and the sensibility one learns to embrace through experience, even if we did witness plenty of our peers acting like doofuses in broad daylight – cue the burly hero of the Blossom Phish show who attempted to stroll past a state trooper while sucking on a nitrous balloon.

I turned 45 in September, two days before the 30th anniversary vinyl release of Alice in Chains’ Dirt, and here at the presumed midpoint of my life, I still don’t have a fully-formed opinion on my generation and our place in the world, “then” or “now.” With most of the social and political chatter over the past 20 years focusing on Boomers and Zoomers and Millennials, be it back-patting or finger-pointing or both, Gen X has assumed the mantle of our era’s lost generation, and I suppose that could be traced to the rise in divorce rates in the ’70s and ’80s, the latchkey upbringings and, perhaps most tellingly, the discordant art we consumed for entertainment and to better understand ourselves. Shortly after moving to Ohio, we were driving in the truck and listening to a newly-acquired used In Utero cassette, and Erica remarked, “No wonder we were so angry.” Clearly, young Gen Xers had issues with self-worth: Two songs sharing the title “Creep” were released as singles by two different bands, with Radiohead dropping theirs on my 15th birthday in 1992 and Stone Temple Pilots following suit in November 1993. Six months later, Kurt Cobain killed himself, and a little piece of every kid he reached died with him. Just like that, it was over. The world – our world – eventually moved on, nu-metal shoved grunge out of the pit and the decade ended with the infamous dumpster fire that was the third iteration of Woodstock. How gross 1999 felt compared to 1992, and the reasons why are right there on the screen in the HBO documentary. Still, most of us managed to emerge on the other side of Y2K as well-adjusted adults, and here in our 40s and 50s, in our own low-key way, we’re the boiler room of the world, getting shit done and making things happen while our Boomer parents ease into retirement and our Zoomer kids wait in the wings to take over. It’s a good place to be, even if it boggles me to be here – the same age my father was when he drove my friends and me to Nirvana’s Halloween ’93 show at the JAR. At Phish and Nine Inch Nails, there were moments when I put myself in our parents’ shoes, asking, “Where did we go wrong with them?,” and other moments, back in my own Doc Martens, wondering, “Did the weirdos win?” – and in both cases, zeroing in on a sliver of truth.

Enjoy this week’s episode? Support independent writing and consider contributing to The Suburban Abyss tip jar, sponsoring an upcoming episode or telling a friend. Thank you for being here.