A friend of mine in the music industry e-mailed the other day (no, he’s not a psycho Offspring fan) and mentioned he read about Iowa State on his favorite Web site, Jambands.com.

The online mag reported on the recent Phish show in Ames and police chief Dennis Ballantine’s verbal outcry against the band. The headline read “Iowa State May Ban Phish.”

In an interview with Jambands.com, Ballantine gave what I considered to be a rather zany remark.

“This a fairly small community with a college,” he said. “Friday night and Saturday we had 35 drug arrests. We had complaints from businesses of people trying to beg money off of customers who were out at stores. They just disrupted the entire community for the two days they were here.”

As comical as this sounds, it actually did happen and has created quite a controversy with loyal Phish heads, who claim they were harmless hippies with a severe case of the munchies.

My friend, who already has tickets for Phish’s millennium concert, and I were chatting about the negative effects of overly-strict security at concerts, when he mentioned, “The funny thing is, if they would have searched everyone through the door, they would have made 12,000 arrests.”

Very true.

Also not a very good argument for the Phish head community.

They do have to realize the only pragmatic way to avoid arrest issues is to not break the law.

I realize asking a Phish head to stay clean is like asking a Korn fan to leave his wallet chain at home, but you’re not going to get much sympathy from cops — especially in a “fairly small community” — with a a bag of weed in your fanny pack.

But the real issue centering around the supposed Phish head riots in the Hilton tailgating lot is the genre of music.

A hostile Phish fan wrote the Daily saying Phish heads are about “peace and love” and that a Phish show is an enlightening experience.

I agree.

Traditionally, jam bands are about mellowing out and opening your soul to the music.

It’s the headbangers like those guys at Woodstock — Limp Bizkit, Rage Against The Machine and Metallica — who are about violence, rioting and arrests.

Right?

If so, then how do you explain back-to-back riots that broke out a month ago in a Hartford, Conn., parking lot at the concert site of none other than sensitive crooner Dave Matthews?

Or flashback to 1958, when a West Berlin concert was cut short by rioting. The band on stage — Bill Haley and the Comets.

So maybe the genre of music doesn’t have all that much to do with out-of-control crowds.

Maybe, just maybe, it has to do with the simple fact that large crowds feel powerful — even if they’re more up in smoke than Cheech and Chong.

I don’t blame Phish fans for getting pissed about police condemning their idols. They didn’t do anything wrong. Phish heads did.

There were a few more than 35 arrests — 65 just on Saturday — the weekend of the Iowa game, yet I never heard Ballantine saying we shouldn’t bring the Hawkeyes back.

Musicians, unless their core audience is over 30, such as the notoriously wild party thrower Jimmy Buffett, are always going to get the finger pointed at them.

But they don’t incite riots. We do. With or without the munchies.

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Corey Moss is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Urbandale.