MANCHESTER, N.H. — Alleged Phish “mega fan” Walter Pratt admitted he has only seen the popular jam band perform live 72 times this year, sources high on nitrous oxide confirmed.
“Look, no one could accuse me of not loving Phish. I drop Phish references into every conversation I have. Ask anyone — no one can stand me,” said Pratt. “Anytime someone says the word ‘freezer,’ I immediately say ‘seize her with a tweezer.’ Normal people have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. But I had a busy year. I got a new job, moved across the country, and my wife gave birth to triplets. In normal years, I would have seen them easily 200 times by now. But I thought I was doing pretty well given the circumstances, even though I keep getting dirty looks and someone threw an entire bong at my head.”
Phish merch guy Greg Vaughn, however, believes Pratt’s reasons are a cop-out.
“The Phish community is generally pretty accepting and open-minded, but one thing we can’t tolerate is a poser in our midst,” said Vaughn while sorting a box of 300,000 Phish LPs. “Summer tour is more than half over, and Walter has experienced maybe 400 hours of jams, if we’ve estimating generously. If he wants to keep his cred, he has a couple of choices: he can go to every remaining tour date this year, or he can eat 20 pints of Phish’s Ben and Jerry’s flavor in one sitting. We need him to do one or the other to prove his commitment.”
Jam band sociologist Audra Kimmel confirmed that Pratt’s situation is both unusual and contentious in the Phish community.
“Research estimates that 90-95% of Phish fans have no lives, so these kinds of cases are highly unusual, and can cause rifts between fans,” said Kimmel. “Fans typically need to rack up a minimum of 600 hours of Phish shows in a given year to maintain credibility among their peers. How they accrue those hours is flexible —they can come from many different dates, or two or three particularly long shows. But if someone comes in under quota, they risk being called out on one of Phish’s 983 fan forums, and there’s no coming back from that.”
At press time, Pratt was frantically googling “microbus prices” in an effort to restore his image.