When I first got into Phish back in the early 90’s, the newsletter was just called the Phish newsletter, no weird name, no nothing. But it did include a little serial comic strip in it. Yes, there was a comic inside the newsletter, made by Pollock, perhaps it’s something you could find online with some Googlin’? The story being told in the strip, three panels at a time, was of Phish going to the Moon to play a gig or something like that. I can see in my mind a picture of the band next to a rocket ship, soundman Paul Languedoc part of the crew as well, trying to get their spacecraft working again. They weren’t quite science-fiction soldiers, no, but the dorkiness of space travel and problem solving and the otherworldiness of their music were all there. Here, today, two days removed from the Halloween run some almost-30 years after that comic strip came out, I am thinking once again about that nerdy little bauble and if it fit in at all to the inside jokiness of the Halloween “gag” we witnessed Sunday night.
The more I think about it, the more I am struck by the thick, intertwined mesh of inside jokes the Halloween set, the accompanying comic book, the previous night’s Harpua narrative, and really, the whole weekend presented. At some point during Thursday night’s show, when it became clear they were doing a countdown numbers set, I tweeted “Feels like a show for the most enumerating fanbase in the history of the universe.” I think I sold the fanbase and the band very short on that one. It wasn’t just the numbers that Phish played around with, but also the constant rumor mills of their rabid fanbase, the Phishhead propensity to find meaning in not just the math of it all, but also in thrown-away lyrics, or even weirdness like a platform breaking on NYE. If you pay attention to Trey’s monologue in Harpua, he keys in on all of this stuff, very subtly at times, but whether it’s lyrics or the 10/20/30/40th anniversary of an album they’re definitely going to play, or whatever, he mocks all of it. Lovingly, of course, but it’s all there.
The hyperawareness of the band, not just of their own history and mythology, but of the Phish fan’s ability to take seemingly small details and world build around them was, in retrospect, what this weekend was all about. The legends of certain sets — whether it be the Jam-Filled Night at the Baker’s Dozen, or the spell-something sets of Dicks or that night back when they played only songs that started with “M” in St. Louis — were all present in the 4 nights in Vegas. It’s quite clear to me now that the Numbers Set Thursday and the Animals Set Saturday were not merely whimsy, but more of a Russian Doll’s worth of inside jokes (Internet: they’re going to play “Animals” this year! Phish: Correct!), the band uncovered over the course of the weekend. They were played this weekend for a reason. It’s not just that each set was a theme, but that the whole weekend was a theme.
If you take this all together, you can think of it as the Phish Cinematic Universe, a joke I’ve made before, akin to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where each movie is connected in some way to the others, themes and characters creating throughlines in places they don’t really have to be. Taking that idea to its natural conspiracy theory end, it makes perfect sense that this goofy weekend would culminate in an actual comic book. And look carefully through that comic book, it’s just one inside joke after another, some being visual, some being lyrical, some just referencing random bits of Phish minutiae. The fact that one of the squares from the production “broke” a la Trey’s platform on NYE2019 is the tell on the whole thing (it’s in the comic, too!), a goofy visual joke that would be weird on its own, but taken as part of a night’s and weekend’s worth of this dorky shit, it makes perfect sense. Who knows, maybe they were even slyly referencing that comic from the old newsletter, too.
I’m not a musicologist enough to find similar types of clues in the music itself (beyond the lyrics stuff), but I imagine there are likely musical call-backs and “insider baseball” type reveals to be found. There’s already been some talk of these songs coming out of certain recent highlight improvisation, as many new songs do. Perhaps some conspiracy theorist can find meaning in the actual jam segments they chose, new layers to uncover.
Whatever you thought of the music Sunday night, I think you have to appreciate what the band did. It’s a love letter to us, their ridiculous fanbase, a nod to their own extreme nerdiness, and, most of all, a lot of freakin’ fun. It inspired 4 amazing nights, not to mention lots of material to dork out on until the next one.
Let me know what you think…
