Happy New Year and welcome to the 488th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the first puzzle of 2022! The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and dates of both mystery clips. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Stay safe!

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We are excited to unveil a new home for the Narration Chart!

First completed on the Silver Anniversary of the Crest Theater Gamehendge show, the chart now features 182 transcriptions of every available Gamehendge narration from April Fool’s Day, 1986, through the most recent “Harpua” from the 2021 Halloween run.

The project began in 2017 as a spreadsheet with links to the setlists, audio from phish.in, and all new transcriptions created by a team of volunteers from the phish.net forum. Its new placement within the site’s database will ease access and maintenance and hopefully increase exposure to this unique aspect of Phish’s performances.

In addition to the five “complete” performances (and one partial version) of the Gamehendge saga originally introduced in Trey’s thesis for Goddard College, The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday, the chart also includes a wide variety of performances from the two narrative heavyweights, “Fly Famous Mockingbird” (75 entries) and “Harpua” (57 versions), 23 different pleas to read the f***ing book, 12 “Rhombus Narrations” that served as an introduction to “Divided Sky” for several years during the first decade of the band, along with rare narrations accompanying songs like “Esther,” “Tela,” “The Lizards,” “The Sloth,” “Llama,” “Punch You in the Eye,” not to mention one very special “Wormtown.”

Volunteers will continue to keep the chart updated as new performances occur and new recordings appear (like last year’s 3/8/93 release!). Of course, please send along a note if you find any kind of narration (but banter ≠ narration) hiding in the recesses of old shows or if an egregious error requires an edit.

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Tamara Rubin interviewed Jon Fishman for nearly four hours via Zoom a little over ago, and shared clips of it on January 9th - but still very few have seen it. So, here's what she recently posted to Reddit:

Since almost no-one has watched this since last year (as I understand the connection between Phish and activism is not something that all Phish phans want to engage in) I wanted to share this again. Last winter I had the opportunity to interview my friend Jon Fishman on Christmas Eve. We chatted for about 4 hours but I cut the interview down into three bite-sized 10 minute segments. This is why the background gets so dark in the last segment (the ambient light at Jon's house disappears because I didn't know our interview would go that long and I didn't think to ask him to light himself for the zoom chat!) Thanks for checking this out. Once you click through to this link there are links to all three segments of the interview on YouTube. We talk about parenting, tour, the pandemic, politics and - because I am a childhood Lead poisoning prevention activist we also talk about lead poisoning... but that's really not the bulk of the 30 minutes of published interview - it's kind of fun... we edited it to be fun too (to make sure to show some of the fun from our call).

You can see all three clips on YouTube: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

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Welcome to the 487th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the second puzzle of December - shout-out to MJM HoFer @sumac22 for the clip! The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery clip. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 3 PM PT / 6 PM ET. Stay safe!

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Reminder: For the first MJM of each month, only folks who have never won an MJM are allowed to answer on the blog before the hint. If you have never won an MJM, please answer as a comment below. If you have previously won an MJM, but you'd like to submit a guess before the hint, you may do so by PMing me; once the hint has been posted, everyone should answer on the blog. If that's confusing to you, check out the handy decision tree that I threw together for you. If you're not sure if you've won before, check in the MJM Results spreadsheet linked below.

Welcome to the 486th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Tuesday, the first of December - shout out to @Zands for the clip! The winner will receive TWO MP3 codes courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net and last week's winner @raisinsnacks, who has kindly donated their second code to this week's winner. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Thursday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Stay safe!

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Decades ago, Rolling Stone had a web-based poll for best guitarist ever, with a long list of choices. For a younger guy eager both to spread love for Phish and to explore the developing web, well... that was just an open challenge.

It was difficult to vote for anyone (such as Trey) more than once, because submitting a vote went to another page, so you'd have to go back to the voting page, argh. The web then was simpler and mostly static, but bandwidth was smaller and slower, so moving forward and backward, well... that was just wasting time.

But I soon realized that I could copy the source code of that page, to create a page that instead directed back to itself. And voted for Trey by default, rather than needing to make a choice. And had no graphics, very little other text, and only one choice in the voting list (Trey, already selected) so was much simpler and so quicker to load. But... I still had to click a button, sigh.

Then I discovered that, instead of submitting by mouse action, I could have it automatically submit after a few seconds. And I learned that it worked for only a single second. And even 0.5 seconds. I eventually settled on 0.25 seconds, arbitrarily. Voting more than four times per second seemed excessive, regardless of His Crimsonness' greatness, amirite?

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Welcome to the 485th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the final puzzle of November. The winner will receive TWO MP3 download codes courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of both mystery clips, which are connected by a theme. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 6 PM PT / 9 PM ET. Stay safe!

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This year, over Dick's weekend, a member of the Phish community, Michael Hunt (@mjhunt) was diagnosed with stage IV hodgkin lymphoma. In lieu of a formal go-fund-me to help raise funds to support, Mike wanted to host an auction curated from his personal art and memorabilia collection.

Phish fans and photographers rallied around him and donated items that are now up for auction. The auction is full of signed Phish memorabilia, posters, vinyl, concert photography and collectibles as well as items from the Grateful Dead, the String Cheese Incident and more. They've included a complete set of TPC (including a brand-new, still in the box TPC) as well as the posters from the book.

Bid now through Sunday, November 28th at 1PM MT at ConsciousAlliance.org/InnerChi or you can make a donation to Mike's Support Fund at any time here. Every dollar raised through the auction and direct donations will benefit Mike via a grant from Conscious Alliance, a 501©(3) that supports communities in crisis.

To learn more about Mike, head here.

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Welcome to the 484th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the fourth puzzle of November - shout out to MJM Emeritus @wforwumbo for the puzzle and for mastering the clips! The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of all three mystery clips, which are connected by a theme. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Stay safe!

Hint: Will you take a cup of kindness yet?

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Welcome to the 483rd edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the third puzzle of November - shout out to MJM Emeritus @experiencechuck for the puzzle! The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of both mystery clips, which are connected by a theme. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 3 PM PT / 6 PM ET. Stay safe!

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Welcome to the 482nd edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the second puzzle of November. The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of both mystery clips, which are connected by a theme. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Stay safe!

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Reminder: For the first MJM of each month, only folks who have never won an MJM are allowed to answer on the blog before the hint. If you have never won an MJM, please answer as a comment below. If you have previously won an MJM, but you'd like to submit a guess before the hint, you may do so by PMing me; once the hint has been posted, everyone should answer on the blog. If that's confusing to you, check out the handy decision tree that I threw together for you. If you're not sure if you've won before, check in the MJM Results spreadsheet linked below.

Welcome to the 481st edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the first of November - shout out to @Zands for the clip! The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Stay safe!

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Halloween! It's the 5th most played date in Phish history, trailing just 12/28-31, and perhaps the second most sacred. We go into every show hoping for something unique that we will remember for the rest of our lives, but Halloween and New Years are the only nights where we are promised that something weird will happen.

While one of those nights revolves around midnight and whatever stunt might happen then, All Hallows Eve's focus is on an entire set. It started out straightforward enough. Phish would play an album of a band they loved. During the third one, they decided to create an ode to the release, something to explain why exactly they chose it.

But Phish evolve endlessly. They tried variants of it. We've gone from Phish covering an existing album to debuting a new one to turning a sound effects release into a series of songs to creating an entire fake band complete with back story, and playing as them. The Phishbills morphed from explaining the importance of the album to rock history to surreal flights of fancy. Would they find a way of topping that, or would we see the return of the already beloved tradition of covering a currently existing album? There are still many people would love.

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Who could have predicted a show that was made entirely of songs about animals? Many people did, and with last night's show, we finally uncovered the complex equation that reveals Phish's Halloween plans, once and for all. The answer is: they're fucking with us. They are always fucking with us.

If you can believe it, I actually didn't realize that the set was all animal songs until deep into the first set. My excuse is that I was just really into the music, man. But with "The Dogs" opener, clocking in at about nine minutes, we knew we were being subjected to another elaborate plan. The "Ocelot" brought us further into the animal kingdom, and "Turtle in the Clouds" gave us some much needed on-stage choreographed dancing.

By this point in the set, we were wondering if we were going to get another thematic show, with serious improv, like 10/28/21. But on this night, the service was to the bit, the bit led the music, and although we didn't see the levels of improv we saw on the other nights, it gave us a show with 25 songs and 201 minutes of music, and the kind of show you're not likely to see again. And you can always tell, when the band is doing a bit, when they know what's in store and we don't, they absolutely love it. They were relishing it. All night.

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The crowd went into night two of the four-night Vegas Halloween run with high expectations. After night one of the run, where the setlist literally went “backwards down the number line," the rumors swirled that there would be another theme---colors? Animals? Fans were caught up in a Lost-like mythology trying to decipher the number 4680, the total of the numbers from the prior night's song selection, in hopes that the band was leaving a trail of breadcrumbs leading to the Halloween surprise. Fitting, since hordes of fans descended on the nearby Meow Wolf, which itself is an augmented reality mystery within a a psychedelic playground.

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