Welcome to the 433rd edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday Tuesday, the first and easiest of September. 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 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Stay safe!

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Well, here we are, just over eight months into the hellscape that is America in 2020. Nearly every aspect of life has been changed for the worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. The simple act of going out in public requires us to wear a mask (those of us who give a shit about other people, anyway). Social circles have often shrunk to immediate family and maybe the closest of friends. Many people are unable to visit parents and grandparents in nursing homes or who otherwise fall into high-risk groups for the virus. Millions more have lost their jobs and face financial uncertainty and the very real health risks, both physical and mental, associated with long-term unemployment. And that’s to say nothing of the nearly 200,000 Americans and 900,000 people worldwide, who have succumbed to the disease and countless others experiencing long-term side effects.

So in the grand scheme of things, being unable to go see live music is a pretty small sacrifice. And yet, for those of us who love live music, there is a void. Presumably for anyone reading this, the lack of Phish shows is a big part of that. It impacts everyone differently. Some fans were probably hit hardest when Phish officially postponed summer tour to (we hope) 2021. Others may have felt it most back in July when tour was scheduled to kick off in Eugene, OR. For me, the realization this week that I wouldn’t be getting on a flight to Colorado was that moment. Sure, I had known for months that Dick’s wouldn’t be happening this year. I just hadn’t counted on how much of a part of my year Dick’s had become. In addition to being Phish 3.0’s annual festival hiding in plain sight, it had earned its own spot on the calendar. August, Dick’s, September. Indeed, most years we managed to cram a month’s worth of memories and good times into those three days. Will summer even turn to fall without Dick’s? I guess we’ll find out.

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As the COVID-19 public health emergency began to develop, The Mockingbird Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving access to music education, began fundraising efforts to grant money to programs that were actively developing strong responses to challenges presented by the pandemic. In the past, the Foundation had issued Emergency Response Grants on a regional basis, such as in the aftermath of a natural disaster. But the pandemic presented a national-level crisis with both immediate and long-term effects, and we knew it would cause seismic shifts not only in musical teaching techniques, but also in governmental and charitable funding of music programs nationwide.

Mockingbird announced the COVID-19 Relief fundraising effort at the end of May. We allocated $25,000 of existing funds to launch this effort, while asking the Phish fan community to donate $25,000, which we pledged to match, totaling $75,000. Not only did the community help us reach the goal within only two months, their collective donations were double that goal! We are thus able to fund $100,000 in grants for this round of emergency giving. We cannot thank all of our donors enough for your amazing support of music education!

Hundreds of individual donations were made through our fundraising channels over the summer. Many of the donations were exceptional and substantial, and there were sizable donations not only from new donors but from long-time donors as well. Among the donations, sadly, were numerous tributes to family members and friends lost to COVID-19, dramatizing its impact on our community and the communities of many other music fans nationwide.

Our community’s spectacular fundraising response inspired us to promptly identify needy programs that were facing new challenges arising from the pandemic. We developed different criteria to review previous applicants and grantees, and also examined inquiries submitted for our 25th Round of annual giving within approximately the last year, the application period for which concluded on August 1st. In addition, we researched outside our customary channels for organizations that were creatively providing - or seeking funds to try to provide - musical education to students in this time of unprecedented challenges.

Mockingbird announced our first COVID-19 Relief Response grant to Girls Rock Detroit on June 25th, one month after launching the campaign. The $5,000 grant helped their summer camp to continue virtually after they lost the ability to host in-person fundraising events. One week later, we announced that Heartbeat Music Project in Crown Point, New Mexico, would receive $5,000 to support their music education program for Navajo (Diné) children living in the Navajo Nation, which suffered COVID-19 related illnesses and deaths disproportionately to other regions.

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[Thank you @Choda for sharing your thoughts on Dick's, as we head into this special three-day holiday weekend of "Dinner and a Movie" Dick's webcasts. If you watch any of them please consider donating to Phish's charitable arm, The WaterWheel Foundation, as all funds donated to WaterWheel this weekend will benefit The Mockingbird Foundation, whose volunteers run dot net. -Ed.]

If the Great and Knowledgable Icculus took me from the Earth on this day of our Gamehendge, September 4th 2020, I would stand before him in my Birthday Suit (for being naked in front of a powerful deity is a requirement if y’all didn’t know) and be judged for my life as a faithful Phish fan (and trust me, I saw 28 shows in 2.0). Icculus would peruse his iPad Pro and check out my stats:

The Great and Knowledgeable (GK) Icculus: “Ah Mr. Choda, I see you saw the final 'Faht' performed live?”

Choda: “Yes Icculus! I almost died driving back to Ithaca that night but totally worth it.”

GK Icculus: “It says here you saw the longest single Phish jam of all-time?”

Choda: “Yes, my sweet Icculus! It was a glorious night in Worcester ‘97!”

Then, Icculus would pause briefly, and look up from the screen, stunned:

Icculus: “OH MY!! You attended every show at Dick's?”

Choda: “Mighty Icculus, all I can say is: I LOVE DICKSl!! (Just ask [phish.net username withheld])

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Here, finally, are the results from Phish.net's #hometasking challenge #9, as well as the overall results from our (first?) series of #hometasking challenges...

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Welcome to the 432nd edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the final and most difficult of August. 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. Good luck!

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[thanks to phish.netters @Mshow96, @Ry_storm, and @jimmylovesposter for their work on the "Jam of the Era" tournament, and to @philospliphy for the essay that follows - ed.]

Voting in the final matchup of the phish.net forum “Jam of the Era” tournament is open until tomorrow at 9 am EDT. Vote here.
In celebration of the two finalists the bracket organizing committee is pleased to welcome guest contributor, @philospliphy.

In the Long May They Run podcast, Trey reveals that an obscure book of urban planning theory became the band’s "bible" when they first began planning their independent, infamous, and shockingly successfully festivals. A Pattern Language (APL), by C. Alexander, et al., proposes and defends a mode of communal living wherein all social functions − from the privacy of the marital bed to the sharing of collective meals to the labor of workers in diverse fields to the pedestrians passing them all on the street − are creatively weaved into an organic, but open whole, designed to balance basic, yet contrasting, human needs like solitude and communality, productivity and rest, self-expression and family and community responsibility, darkness and light.

The discovery of this book, of course, corresponds with the time after which Phish had firmly and permanently become an arena-level draw, and during which the group achieved heights of musical performance, economic success, and cultural impact that no one at Nectar’s, or even on the farms of Ian or Amy could have anticipated. The interconnected community they had always sought to build through music was not only actualized, but seemed poised to become a substantial and permanent fixture on the American cultural landscape. A band that had tailored their career so that they needed to prove themselves and win over audiences every night could now not only write its own ticket, but freely set its own benchmarks. The shift to more collective, less guitar-centred improv in ’96, the hard turn towards funk and darkness in ’97, the surprise covers and more spacious sound of ’98, eventually giving way to the ambient bliss from ’99-'00 reveal a band always reaching for a new height, or finding a new way of integrating their catalog and hard-won connection with what was, for them, most interesting or challenging at the moment. It’s no wonder that, after "The Show," Fish thought they should stop; by the new millennium, a band built around having to earn its keep night after night had literally nothing left to prove. And if the band’s 2004 performances aren’t proof enough, Trey’s Charlie Rose interview makes clear that he knew the Phish that he founded and that did, indeed, "conquer America" wasn’t built to last; playing music so diverse, complex, and risky demanded 100% commitment to the project and, once it ceased to become the primary – and virtually sole – focus of the lives of all of the members, it was destined to get "sloppy around the edges" and become something else. Trey, Mike, Fish, and Page are, after all, human beings, rather than musical machines (even if they occasionally sound that way), and APL is grounded in the idea that being fully human requires us all to balance our work – independent, creative work of passion, though it may be – with the other vital facets of our lives, lest any one of them become all consuming, and thus damaging to ourselves, others, or both.

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Welcome to the 431st edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the fourth of five August editions. 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. Good luck!

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[thanks to @Mshow96 for the announcement of the final vote - ed.]

The users of the phish.net forum have put their extra time during this forced break from touring to good use, reflecting and deliberating on what it means to define an era of Phish musically. To that end, the community has assembled a bracket of 64 landmark jams from the last decade plus of creative output from the Vermont quartet.

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Welcome to the 430th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the third of August. Thanks to @justino for his help on one of 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 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. Good luck!

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Welcome to the 429th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the second of August. 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. Good luck!

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Welcome to the 428th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the first and easiest of August. 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 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 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Stay safe!

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Welcome to the 427th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the fourth and hardest of July. 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 four 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. Good luck!

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Welcome to the 426th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the third of July. 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. 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. Good luck!

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Welcome to the 425th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the second of July. 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. 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. Good luck!

Answer: 26! That's how many MJM Emeriti sit in the MJM Hall of Fame now, after @serpent_deflector hit his walkoff shot this week. After his 5th and 6th wins, back-to-back in MJM407 and MJM408, it looked like a foregone conclusion he'd waltz into the Hall of Fame. But the very next week, @Chicken_Sub_In_Your_Hand burst onto the scene with his first win, and ended up racking up all seven needed to skunk @serpent_deflector and take his spot in the HoF. Not to be denied, the model of persistence ultimately prevailed, crushing this week's contest (typo notwithstanding) and finally cementing his legacy as one of the best to ever play the game. This week, he made mince meat of the "Carini"-themed MJM, quickly identifying the 12/30/12 and 7/24/18 "Carini"s, a veritable night and day pairing of the wide-ranging, 3.0-blossomed tune. For his efforts, he gets a backhanded compliment on the Hall of Fame page, yet another LivePhish code, the realization that he wasted hours of his life poking through random snippets of outro ambience on the internet in hopes to win $10 of MP3s, the thankless task of helping me choose which clips to run week after week, a wicked case of the Mondays for the rest of his life now that he can't play for keeps, and of course, his very own digital key to Phish's Vault, courtesy of Kevin Shapiro. Congrats @serpent_deflector, and welcome to retirement! Uh, you might want to avoid Florida for the next year or so...

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