I was friends with Howie Greenberg before I was a fan of Phish, which seems hard to believe, as I’ve been a phan for over 30 years. But I met the Shmooz my freshman year of college at Binghamton in upstate New York, before either of us knew who Phish was. It was almost predetermined that we’d be friends since it turns out our mothers both knew each other from the same Hudson Valley county of Rockland. Howie’s mom had a shoe boutique in Spring Valley, and my mom was a big fan of that store. I remember going into it many times as a young child, getting dragged along on errands. So when college rolled around, I knew I was supposed to meet Howie before I did, but that’s all I knew.

Howie and I met that freshman year, but our friendship was cemented once we both pledged the same fraternity our sophomore year. The fine brothers of Pi Lambda Phi had extended us both a bid, and with a small pledge class of 9 guys, Howie and I bonded right away. Both kids from Rockland County, we shared a lot in common and seemed to be on the same page with most of our points of view. He became a true brother, him an only child and me growing up with only an older sister. We’d started to spend time hanging out both in Binghamton and when home for breaks in Rockland. Howie brought me over to work both the summers of junior and senior year at Dellwood Country Club near our homes as golf caddies. It was a great way to spend the summer, lugging bags for cash for mostly hacker assholes wasting their summers on pretentious rounds. We’d work in the morning, then spend the afternoons either at the local bar watching World Cup soccer or driving around in the evening with good tunes on the radio and a joint in our hands.

Our first Phish show together was in December 1993, when we saw them on a snowy night at the New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum. And after that, and for many, many more shows to come, Shmooz would be my co-pilot to my favorite live band, a.k.a. my happy place. We saw them again in April 1994 when Phish came to our college town and played the Broome County Arena. The show was one of the highlights of our college, as we partied all day at the fraternity house, which was then just a short walking distance away from the arena. The summer of 1994 after we graduated from college remains one of my fondest memories, as Shoomz and I hit the road for a few weeks to “follow” Phish as good as we could in the New York area. Shows that summer at Jones Beach, Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Big Birch, and the Garden State Arts Center somewhat cemented what would become a lifetime passion for both of us, in the form of hearing a lot of good live music and touring around to see Phish.

When that summer was over, I moved off to Chicago to start law school. Howie was back home, trying to find work around NYC. But before too long, he got frustrated with his search and living with his mother at home, decided to follow me to Chicago in the hopes of finding solid work there. And while I was living in a studio apartment just a block away from my law school, I opened it up to Howie. We found a futon for him to sleep on, and for five months, we made it work as best as possible. Many a night were spent playing gin rummy or a stoner’s game of dice or yatzee, called Zonk. Unfortunately, Howie wasn’t having much more success finding real work in Chicago, and with my school year ending, he decided to head back to New York.

For the next few years, I would see and talk to Shmooz regularly when visiting family back in New York a few times a year. He got an apartment on 67th Street or so, upper west side, and seems to be finding his groove. And, of course, we’d see Phish together. When I was home for Christmas break in 1994, before he moved to Chicago, we did three legendary nights, which included a show at the Philadelphia Spectrum, followed by their first ever show at Madison Square Garden (where we splurged for good, second row floor seats), and then their New Year’s Eve show at the Boston Garden, where me, Shmooz and five other college buddies had a mighty good and somewhat legendary (to us) time. In the summer of 1995, Shmooz came back out to the Midwest to see Phish’s first appearance at Deer Creek in Indiana and again, adding a few of our other college buddies, lots of good drugs, and yours truly locking the keys in a rental car, we needed to drive from Chicago to Noblesville, epic status was once again reached for our Phish experience.

So why was Howie known as the Shmooz? Because I never saw a guy so at ease with talking to just about every other human he came across on this planet. It was a gift. It was genuine. It was authentic. And it was all Howie. He loved talking to people. He was curious and interested in everyone. Whatever your story is or was, Shmooz was there to ask you about it. It was just so natural. Many times we’d go to a show together, and before I could get my jacket off in our seats, he was making friends with everyone seated around us and making introductions. Finding out your level of Phishperience. Seeing what we may have in common with everyone and anyone else in the arena. Making new friends was always easier with Shmooz. He was generous and kind with almost everyone he met, the kind of person who would buy you a beer before he even met you.

Despite the depth of our friendship, I will say there were times when Howie and I were not so close. For a few years after the 9/11 tragedy, he lived in NYC, but retreated from most social contact. He was suddenly hard to get a hold of, or make plans with. And when I did speak to him, the friend that I had previously known seemed not to be present. He became more dependent on substances and less dependent on human contact. It was heartbreaking for me. How can a guy who was such a social butterfly, the fucking Shmooz, suddenly not want to talk to anyone? He tuned out for a while, and I just had to deal with the fact that I had lost Howie’s friendship. Everyone who was also friends with Howie had the same experience, and no one seemed to be able to help with the situation. And that friendship was lost for almost a decade.

In late 2009, I moved back to the New York area after living in Chicago for 15 years. To keep in touch with friends, like most, I signed up for Facebook. Turns out, just months later, I heard from Howie through Facebook. He was living and working in Boston, had been for years, but was now on the verge of relocating to Singapore. He needed help retrieving some of his things from Boston after moving most of his stuff into storage at his mother’s house in Mahwah, NJ. Luckily, I was free that weekend, so we reunited in Mahwah, and I drove him for a weekend up to Boston, where he packed some things and said goodbye to his New England crew. And like old friends or brothers, we picked up where we had left off. But also, just like that, Howie was moving halfway around the world.

Howie spent five years in Singapore, where he continued to work for British Telecom, as he had in Boston. I could never tell you for sure what he did for a living exactly, but I know that he both in charge of certain customer services representatives, but also called upon when the shit hit the fan, as the manager to call when emergencies happen, systems go down and crash and such. Howie was their “calm in the storm” and would help folks get their telecommunications systems back up and running.

I’d see Howie during the one trip per year he’d make back to the States during that 5-year span. If it was during the summer, we’d play a round of golf. If it was over the Christmas holiday, we’d go see Phish at YEMSG. Then around 2015, Howie transferred back to the States, again thru British Telecom and moved to Norfolk, Virginia. I was thrilled to have my buddy back close enough that he was at least now within driving distance for a visit. We’d see each other regularly when he was visiting family in the NY area, and I’d occasionally go down to Norfolk for a visit. We started seeing plenty of shows together, including some of the Baker’s Dozen run at MSG. We got to visit the Mothership for Phish’s run at Hampton Coliseum in October 2018, as it was just 20 mins from Howie’s apartment. For a couple of years, Howie joined a crew of my friends who had a steady yearly golf trip. We made trips to Myrtle Beach, Pinehurst and Austin, Texas with a crew and of course, the Shmooz fit into the crew just great. The last two years, he was happy to be the house coordinator for stocking the place with food and drink before everyone else arrived, a position I think he relished. Maybe it was his desire to make other people around him happy or create the perfect social conditions for everyone to have a great time.

Howie was always down for a good road trip, yet another of the things that we connected on. We both loved to drive AND since no one but Howie was allowed to drive his car, it always created a question as to who’s car was taken anywhere. For trips down south to golf, I would drive from NY to Norfolk, and then let Howie drive us to the Carolinas. The SiriusXM stations that were programmed as favorites in his car were the identical ones programmed in my car, so there was never any fighting over tunes.

And my favorite road trip memories were built in the summer of 2021, when after Covid shut down Phish for almost 18 months, the Summer Tour was in swing, so I drove down to Nolfolk, picked up the Shmooz and we headed toward two shows in Nashville. After first a stop in Ashville for some good BBQ, we hit Nashville for a few nights, two fantastic Phish shows and the buzz of music always coming from that city. We were both so overwhelmingly filled with joy as live music was back, and we were happy and grateful to be a part of it again. After a stop in Louisville to visit the Brown Hotel and the Louisville Slugger bat factory, we continued the tour for three nights at Deer Creek. It was great to have Shmooz there with a bunch of my old Chicago friends. Good times and good music, and after a year and a half of a global pandemic, the world started to feel right and somewhat normal again.

Unfortunately for Howie, things kinda got shitty quickly for him. Shortly after returning from our roadtrip, his Aunt passed away with whom he was very close with. Then, just months later, in February 2022, his mother passed away as well. While Howie’s relationship with his mother was always a tumultuous rollercoaster, Howie was left to deal with her estate as the only child. And while I had hoped the burden of caring for his mother was lifted from him, I think his regret and despair over the way his mom passed (alone, from a fall, probably due to her alcoholism) were a weight he could not carry. On August 19, 2022, Howard Seth Greenberg took his own life at his apartment in Norfolk, VA. He was 50 years old.

One of the last things Howie did for me before he passed was to send me the tickets we had purchased to attend Phish during Labor Day in Denver. We had done the trip to Denver twice before, in 2018 and 2019, after making friends with some Denver folks at the Baker’s Dozen run in 2017. Shmooz had told me that his work and selling his mother’s house was taking up so much time, he couldn’t make the trip we planned to return to Denver in Sept. 2022. He transferred me the tickets and told me to have a good time. He felt terrible canceling out on the trip, so the tickets were on him. And then he was gone.

I have continued to go to Phish shows since Howie left. I continue to love the music like no other music. I continue to love the community atmosphere, and friendship that I find at the Phish shows. But it’s not really the same for me. I have lots of wonderful friends that surround me for these shows, but my long time brother and partner-in-crime is not, and it makes me a little sad each show. So what I try and do is carry on the Shmooz legacy and I encourage everyone out there to be a little more Shmoozy. Talk to the people you don’t know around you. LISTEN to the people around you who you just met. Make connections with people, whether they are momentary or lasting. It’s how I keep my friend’s memory alive with each Phish show I go to.