Wednesday, August 11 2004 – It was finally time to go, my friends had packed up the 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee and were ready and raring to go for a six-hour ride to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

But, there was only one thing missing. Me. I was in my bed and it was about 7:50 a.m., when I faintly heard “BYRNE!!!!, BYRNE!!!!!!!” being yelled from outside my window. The yelling had barely penetrated the booming sounds that were coming from my air conditioner and fan, but it was enough to rouse me from my near hibernation.

When I finally looked out my window, I saw the fully packed Jeep and thought to myself, “Oh shit I better get a move on!” I opened my door and heard banging from my upstairs sliding door. My two friends, Mike Shoenthal and Dave Radcliffe, and a friend of Mike’s who I had never met before named Matt Blatts were waiting to be allowed into my abode. I opened the slider without making any eye contact with my friends for fear that they would harass me about not being awake yet, and quickly bolted towards the shower.

After all the packing shenanigans were over, it was time to head over to our friend Elyse’s house to meet up and be on our way. Without Elyse we would have had no opportunity to have made it to this festival. Just weeks before at a party at her house she asked our group of friends if we would be interested in working at the final Phish show at Coventry, Vermont.

The deal seemed too good to be true.

We would be getting paid $500 for working three days with the once in a lifetime opportunity to see the concert which had recently sold out with over 70,000 tickets purchased. The only thing we had to do was give her our names and addresses. Dave, Mike and I were the only ones who gave our info and weeks later after thinking that all of it would probably fall through, we got the word that we were actually hired for the event.

After some waiting around at Elyse’s house because she and her friends were too incapacitated to drive, we were finally off. Our drive cut through Connecticut, Massachusetts and finally after six hours of driving we had arrived at our destination in Coventry, Vermont at about 4 p.m. Before we could do anything, we had to do the most important thing of all before entering the concert site, which was purchasing beer, of course.

There was a lot of controversy in actually purchasing three 30 packs of Busch Light because the clerks at the Coventry gas station weren’t believing Dave’s freshly turned 21 ID. Finally, after 20 minutes of arguing with the clerks, we finally managed to get the 30 packs into the Jeep and we were off to the concert site.

When we arrived we were informed by the concert staff to head towards the employee check-in center. This is where we received our employee wristbands, which could get us just about anywhere at the venue. Next, we were off to our campsite, which was a configuration of large canopy tents with hard plastic floors called Mash Town that you could pitch your own tent underneath which came in very handy over the next several days for many reasons.

We were finally all set up and it was almost time to work. Our shifts would be from 7:30 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. When it was time to start work, we were given orange Coventry parking T – Shirts, reflective orange vests and those light saber-like glow sticks to point cars in the right direction.

A group of about 15 all hopped on the back of a pickup truck and we were off to work, or so we thought. As we drove through the area the Vermont air was perfect, it seemed like nothing could go wrong. We were all dropped off in a large field and told just to wait. The cars, which would be the first cars to enter the campsite, wouldn’t be let in until about 2 a.m. That gave us about six hours of bullshitting around.

Towards the end of our waiting around we felt a light drizzle come down. Everyone grabbed a garbage bag and made their own poncho out of it. 2 a.m. was approaching and we were given a briefing by our bosses that these people coming in were only temporarily going to be in that spot until the morning, and that they could not pitch their tent there.

As soon as the cars started arriving so did the rain, and it would not let up for days. For a little while it was pouring down on us and all I could see through my garbage bag was the headlights of the line of cars coming in and the red glow of my pointing stick. After a couple of hours the parking situation turned into a free for all due to the mud and the fact that the parking crew had stopped caring. The lot was turning into a huge party, all we had to do was take off our vests and turn off our glow sticks and we could just flow right into the scene without being noticed. All me and my friends would do for hours is ask people if we could bum a beer, then wander around some more and keep asking, by the end of our shift we were all pretty fucked up.

When the sun came up the lot was in complete chaos. All the parkers formed a row and informed the cars to gun it down a hill with a bump that went into a puddle of mud. Even the people parked in the lot were getting into it. They were standing on top of their cars and cheering on certain cars that would have a tough time making the jump, like a CRX, an old Cadillac El Dorado, and those classic VW hippie buses.

Finally our shift was finished. A group of us packed into a mini van and were off to breakfast. Some sick fuck in the front seat blasted a classical song on the radio from the Nut Cracker, this was definitely the song I didn’t need to hear at this time. After a breakfast of steak and eggs we were brought back to Mashtown to “sleep.”