“They eventually worked the songs into the catalog and started writing new material, which I think was a better idea.”
A total of seventeen songs either appeared in the original Gamehendge or were later added to what might be termed the world of Gamehendge . Anastasio’s song cycle always seemed more like a work in progress than a finished product, with his senior study submission looking more like a first draft in hindsight and the Gamehendge concert performances more like dress rehearsals. There really has been no final form for Gamehendge, though the run-throughs on June 25 and July 8, 1994, suggested the following came close to a fixed running order: 1. “Kung”
2. “Llama”
3. “The Lizards”
4. “Tela”
5. “Wilson”
6. “AC/DC Bag”
7. “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent”
8. “Fly Famous Mockingbird”
9. “The Sloth”
10. “McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters”
11. “The Divided Sky”
This lineup omits the only non-original on Anastasio’s tape (Jeff Holdsworth’s “Possum”), sensibly replacing it with “McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters,” which had been an early inspiration for the project and obviously belonged on it. Moreover, two of the Gamehendge dwellers’ ritual chants open and close the tale: “Kung” and “The Divided Sky.” Finally, “Llama” was inserted as a communiqué from Gamehendge future that served as a lead-in to the extended recounting of its historical past. Here’s how Anastasio described “Llama” in notes accompanying its lyrics on A Picture of Nectar: “Many years after the overthrow of Wilson, a rebel soldier crouching high on a hilltop above the war-torn forests of Gamehendge spots a group of loyalists approaching from their lakeside encampment below. His trusty llama stands beside him, loaded down with a canvas pack that holds two large bazooka-type guns to the animal’s sides. Near the man sits a cache of blastopast, each capable of destroying the entire hillside in an instant.”
The songs that follow “Llama”—the core of the musical play, as Anastasio originally conceived it—relate the story of how this desultory and destructive civil war began in what had for thousands of years been a place of “peace and tranquility.”
A number of other songs have ties to Gamehendge. “The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday” served as the instrumental music behind Anastasio’s opening narration on the senior study tape. The group performed “The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday” quite a few times, always joining it with a Hebrew folk song (“Avenu Malkenu”) and then reprising “The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday.”
“Icculus” was a spoken tribute to the god of Gamehendge and the bible he bestowed upon its people, The Helping Friendly Book. A genuine rarity, it could be as amusing as it was intense. “Read the book! Read the fucking book!” shouts Anastasio in a memorably profane version from 1994. The concept and name were appropriated by fans Richard Stern and John Friedman in 1990 for their pioneering collection of Phish set lists, which they cleverly christened The Helping Phriendly Book. The “HPB” took on a life of its own, and eventually show reviews were added to the set lists. The voluminous work of numerous “phriendly” Phish fans, documenting set lists from 1983 to the present, now resides online at www.phish.net/hpb.
Anastasio has asserted that humor is a key to Gamehendge. Perhaps the funniest moment comes in “The Lizards,” when the noble knight Rutherford the Brave fords a raging river, realizing too late that his suit of armor would cause him to sink and drown (thus allowing Anastasio to rhyme “sunk” and “thunk”). This necessitated a heroic rescue by a creature called the Unit Monster. As for the Lizards, they’re drolly described as “a race of people practically extinct from doing things smart people don’t do.” “Punch You in the Eye” was written after the Gamehendge saga but also involves evil king Wilson, along with an unfortunate kayaker who accidentally lands on its shore. He is captured and tortured but escapes, vowing to Wilson that “someday I’ll kill you till you die.” The song’s principal virtue, beyond further establishing Wilson’s venal character, is the music: spacious, burbling rock funk that opens into a mamba featuring Page McConnell’s nimble Cuban-style piano and Anastasio’s Santana-esque guitar. It is a brilliant piece of music that would be the centerpiece of another band’s catalog, but Phish never even recorded it.
“Harpua” is often set in Gamehendge but involves a different gallery of characters: the monstrous canine Harpua, a runaway cat named Poster Nutbag, and a heartbroken teenager named Jimmy. The part where Trey narrates Jimmy’s adventure afforded Phish all kinds of opportunities to interpolate other bands’ songs, either as snippets or in their entirety, within the “Harpua” narrative. One time they performed an entire album—Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon—inside of “Harpua.”
“Axilla” was allegedly the last Gamehendge-related song to enter the repertoire, at least according to McConnell (speaking in The Phish Book). Introduced in 1992, it involves warrior mythology without directly referencing any Gamehendge characters, so the connection is elusive.
Just how all these stragglers fit into the larger framework of Gamehendge is something that Anastasio himself perhaps never quite figured out. (Which doesn’t mean that he can’t still do so.) This much is obvious: Extracted from the whole, “Wilson,” “The Lizards,” and “AC/DC Bag” were performed with great frequency, becoming standards in the group’s live repertoire.
Phish performed the “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent” and “Fly Famous Mockingbird” tandem often in the early nineties. Anastasio would extemporaneously weave fanciful tales from the stage, enlarging the Gamehendge myth as he expounded on Forbin’s efforts to reach the great and mighty Icculus in his quest to liberate the Lizards. After 1994, “Forbin’s”>“Mockingbird” became rarer than mockingbirds’ teeth, and its appearances were cause for celebration.
“Trey has a side to him that loves Broadway,” Brad Sands noted of Gamehendge in general and “Forbin’s” in particular. “‘Col. Forbin, I know why you’ve come here!’ To me, it’s Broadway all the way.”
Phish is known to have performed Gamehendge in its entirety just five times. Set lists are unavailable for some late-1980s gigs, so it’s possible there was another performance or two. Gamehendge debuted at Nectar’s on March 12, 1988, when the second set was given over to the song cycle. It was bookended by a cover of jazzman Charlie Mingus’s “Jump Monk” and “Run Like an Antelope.” This maiden performance of Gamehendge opened with “McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters,” a song cowritten with lyricist Tom Marshall that, along with “Wilson,” had set the whole conception rolling in Anastasio’s fertile mind.
“McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters” began as a poem Marshall sent to Anastasio in 1985. He posted it in his UVM dorm room for a year, and it turned into something else when Anastasio began work on Gamehendge at Goddard. McGrupp was Colonel Forbin’s dog—the one he was out walking when he fell through the time portal into Gamehendge—and the song recounts the colonel’s adventures from the perspective of an observant shepherd. Though it didn’t appear in the submitted version of The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday , “McGrupp” showed up all five times the Gamehendge suite was performed, displacing “Possum” as the closing number.
The breakout of Gamehendge at Nectar’s was the first Phish gig attended by their manager-to-be, John Paluska. He has these recollections of the performance: “I remember thinking it was a pretty bold thing to do in a little nightclub. There was a fair amount of narration, so it was asking a lot of an audience to follow, a lot to assimilate in a bar setting. It was all very new and it was impressive and almost hard to take it all in.”
Curiously, Gamehendge wouldn’t be performed again for three and a half years. They came close a few times, such as their first New York City gig (at Kenny’s Castaways in Greenwich Village), a few weeks after the Nectar’s Gamehendge. They played everything except “Tela,” albeit out of order (insomuch as there is an official order). Gamehen
dge also seemed to be on their minds during a weekend stand at The Front, another Burlington venue, in October 1989. Over the course of two nights they performed every song from the saga, breaking out “Tela” for the first time in over a year and suggesting that Anastasio was still tinkering with the songs and their running sequence.
The next full performance of Gamehendge was at the North Shore Surf Club in Olympia, Washington, on October 13, 1991. Although Anastasio had a cold that night, it was still a strong performance. Yet the omission of “The Lizards,” the interpolation of “The Landlady” and “Reba” between “Wilson” and “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent,” and the jumbled song order indicate that perhaps Phish backed into Gamehendge sideways that night. Still, there was plenty of narration.
The West Coast got its second Gamehendge on March 22, 1993, when it popped out early in the second set at the Crest Theater in Sacramento. This mammoth set included both a complete Gamehendge and a “Mike’s Song” trilogy. The next one emerged during a fabled 1994 show in Charleston, West Virginia. Referred to as “GameHoist” in fan shorthand, it found them playing a full Gamehendge for the first set and their latest album, Hoist, complete and in order, during the second set. They played to a fairly empty room that night. A special show like that was Phish’s way of “punishing” fans for skipping shows in out-of-the-way places—or, looked at another way, rewarding those die-hards who did expend the extra effort to make the gig. This “you snooze, you lose” strategy, as they called it, helped inculcate the notion among the growing horde following their tours that no show was worth writing off the itinerary, lest they miss a once-in-a-lifetime event like GameHoist.
Incidentally, this Charleston show also served to ignite further such adventures by Phish, according to longtime band associate Eric Larson. Their first complete performance of one of their own albums gave them an idea that blossomed into their Halloween covers concerts.
Larson recalled: “They got talking after the show and said, ‘What if we did somebody else’s album? What if we did it on Halloween? That could be a surprise.’ That’s what started it all, that show in Charleston, and it was spontaneous. They didn’t plan to do that; they just did it.”
The final performance of Gamehendge was only two weeks after its West Virginia breakout, making for the closest consecutive per - formances of the epic. They reprised Gamehendge at Great Woods, outside Boston, during the first set of a two-night weekend stand. Apparently this one was planned in advance. Kevin Shapiro recalled telling Jon Fishman that he intended to skip Great Woods to see the Aquarium Rescue Unit. Without giving anything away, Fishman strongly suggested that Shapiro attend, intimating that they had something special planned. It turned out to be Phish’s last complete performance of Gamehendge.
Gamehendge doubtlessly got a double airing in close proximity because Phish had begun discussing the possibility of releasing Gamehendge as an interactive CD-ROM. They announced plans to do so in their fan newsletter and mentioned it in interviews. Then, just as quickly, the idea was dropped.
“It was one of the few things they ever announced they would do that they didn’t do,” noted Shapiro.
Anastasio shelved it, having made the decision that he didn’t ever want to profit from Gamehendge. Moreover, there was a lack of enthusiasm for the Gamehendge project among the other band members. No doubt the project would have taken a lot of time, effort, and expense. Given that Phish was in the process of breaking nationally, producing a Gamehendge CD-ROM might well have been an untenable commitment at that time.
In January 1996, Anastasio said, “Gamehendge is on hold. All I can think about right now is the new album” (which would turn out to be Billy Breathes). And it was never put back in play.
In April 2001, I spoke with him about the possibility of including one of the Gamehendge shows in the Live Phish series, which had just been announced. The band members were in the process of selecting the first six shows to release. The conversation is typical of the way forward-thinking artists tend not to obsess over or even clearly recall events in the past:ME: Have you thought of putting out any of the Gamehendge shows?
ANASTASIO: Kevin’s just printing them up today. I’ve never heard them. There’s two, right? The Crest Theater . . .
ME: I think there’s five. There’s Nectar’s in 1988, one from Olympia in ’91, the Crest Theater show from Sacramento in ’93, and then you did it in Charleston, West Virginia, in ’94.
ANASTASIO: That’s where we did Hoist for the second set!
ME: The GameHoist concert!
ANASTASIO: Which one do they like?
ME: Well, I like the Sacramento ’93 show. You also did it at Great Woods in ’94. That one I haven’t heard.
ANASTASIO: I don’t think that one’s worth . . . [trails off ]
ME: The ’93 Sacramento Gamehendge is very nicely done.
ANASTASIO: That’s definitely an idea.
But, alas, none of the twenty numbered volumes of LivePhish or subsequent concert discs or downloads have yet turned out to be Gamehendge shows.
In my opinion, Gamehendge remains a major piece of unfinished business. Let me draw a parallel. In 2004, Brian Wilson resurrected, recorded, and released Smile. This abandoned 1967 album had been intended as the Beach Boys’ follow-up to Pet Sounds, a majestic pop opus. But the pressure got to Wilson, the Beach Boys’ leader, and he let go of it as various psychological issues made it increasingly difficult for him to function. More than a quarter-century later, Wilson triumphantly re-recorded Smile—which turned out to be every inch the classic that pop mythology had purported—putting that ghost to rest.
Gamehendge begs for the same rite of revisitation, completion, and closure, whether Anastasio does it with Phish or as a solo project, as Wilson did with Smile. It deserves to take its rightful place alongside such conceptual classics as the Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia, the Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow, Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage, the Kinks’ Preservation, Acts I and II, and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.
FOUR
Growth Spurt: 1988-1992
Late one summer evening in July 1988, Phish had a decision to make. They’d just finished the second night of a stand at Nectar’s and were caucusing outside the club at 2 in the morning. Monday had turned to Tuesday, and Phish had been booked—or so they believed—to play a bunch of shows in Colorado, commencing two days hence. At the time, Mike Gordon handled bookings, and his girlfriend (and future first wife) Cilla Foster had put him in touch with Warren Stickney, the owner of a club-restaurant in Telluride called the Roma Bar, where she worked. Some vague promise of a monthlong tour had been made, which got amended into the less glamorous offer of gigging at Roma for a week for a thousand bucks. But as the date loomed, Stickney wasn’t returning Gordon’s calls to confirm arrangements, and Phish grew uneasy about traveling across the country on blind faith.
Still, Phish was up for an adventure, and the idea of playing outside of New England was appealing. By this point the group had been around for nearly five years and hadn’t yet extended their reach much beyond the local circuit. Their biggest step forward thus far in 1988 had been a booking at The Front—a popular new Burlington club that was the next step up from Nectar’s, in terms of size. This gave them a larger hometown venue to play at for the next three years. This was progress, but Phish hungered for more and were ready to take their show on the road.
Still, the westward jaunt “was really up in the air,” recalled Paul Languedoc. “If we got out there, would the band actually be playing, or would it just be a big waste of time? Mike finally got hold of Stickney at the last possible moment, and there was a big discussion among the band members about whether we should do it. We did, just for the fun of it, I guess.”
They had a vote and decided to leave then and there for Colorado. The traveling party consisted of the four members of Phish and their skeletal road crew of Languedoc and lightman Tim Rogers (who preceded Chris Kuroda). They called their pals Ninja Cust
odian to sub for them at Nectar’s, crammed gear and bodies into their claustrophobic, plywood-walled GMC cube van (aka “The Love Den”), and, as Gordon put it, “just drove forty hours straight to Colorado.” That is, until the van gave out at 10,000 feet, necessitating emergency repair by soundman Languedoc, who also served as Phish’s equipment manager, all-purpose fix-it guy, and miracle worker. He built Anastasio’s guitars, Gordon’s basses, and the band’s road cases. In fact, his invaluable expertise led to an in-joke that Languedoc had actually constructed the band members.
Phish and crew rolled into Telluride, but Telluride didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet. Unbeknownst to the band, many locals were boycotting Roma for owner Stickney’s alleged nonpayment of staff and musicians. As a result, perhaps six to twelve people a night would turn out to see Phish—not that there was a glut of potential customers in this ski resort during the summer season. Those who did cross the picket line, so to speak, honored the boycott by not buying food or drinks at Roma.
On a promo picture advertising the gig, the band acknowledged the possible payment predicament with these handwritten addendums: “We drove 2000 miles expecting Warren to pay us $1000,” “Vermont’s Most Naïve Rock Band at Roma Fri and Sat,” and—with an arrow pointing to their likenesses—“Suckers.”
“Despite everything, it was a blast, a great experience,” contended Languedoc. Moreover, Stickney ultimately made good on the grand he owed them. Phish played seven gigs in Colorado, including five at Roma on successive weekends; one at its competitor, the Fly Me to the Moon Saloon; and one at the Aspen Mining Company. Fly Me to the Moon was directly across the street from Roma, and because this venue was kosher with Telluride’s night owls, it was packed for Phish’s lone gig. Two years later, they returned for an encore performance.
Phish Page 9