Never Never Going Back There

7/8/94, Mansfield, MA, Great Woods Amphitheatre

It’s typically unwise to make predictions about what Phish will or won’t do, but I’m confident in one prognostication: Phish will never play a “Gamehendge set” again. In the over 20 years since this show, the final-to-date appearance of the full saga, most fans have given up hope that Trey’s senior thesis will return to the stage. But every time there’s a Halloween show, a festival, an anniversary, an undersold date in an out-of-the-way venue, or a conspicuous show gap for any of the songs, a little bit of what-if? buzz resurfaces.

Let it go. They’ll never play Gamehendge again, because they don’t need it any more. In fact, this show (in combination with the Gamehendge set played two weeks earlier in West Virginia) might just be the exact moment when they realized they had outgrown their formative mythology. 1994 is a year of many transitions, none bigger than the evolution from Hoist to A Live One. But these final Gamehendge sets are themselves a molting, and the two sets of 7/8/94 possibly demonstrate it better than any other single show in the year.

In his 2013 book, You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, Nathan Rabin draws a link between two bands not commonly lumped together in pop culture, Phish and the Insane Clown Posse. Musically, the two bands have almost nothing in common. But the places where their two Venn diagrams most overlap are a detailed mythology and an obsessive fanbase, and these similarities aren’t coincidence.

One of the best things a band can do to inspire fan loyalty is to create a story, preferably intricate and obscure enough that only true fans get it. Some bands do it with their own origin story (or an embellished version thereof), some bands create their own fictional backdrop. Gamehendge, or The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday, played the same role for the early days of Phish as the Dark Carnival/Joker’s Cards saga of ICP — a deep source of weird names and esoteric storylines that allowed fans to more firmly define the Us against the vague Them.

For the first decade of Phish’s existence, the TMWSIY material served as another form of secret language by which the band could single out the faithful and informed. After all, it takes a pretty dedicated fan to search for and acquire a cassette copy of some guitarist’s college thesis. The cheering that always accompanies certain Gamehendge-related words (including “Icculus,” “Helping Friendly Book,” and “Gamehendge” itself), no matter where they appeared, was as ritualized as yelling D’oh! at the end of the Simpsons theme. It was a way for the band to identify loyalists in the crowd, even in an undersold bar thousands of miles from Vermont, and for the fan to demonstrate their knowledge — the mutual pleasure of landing an inside joke.

It’s for those reasons that the 3/22/93 Gamehendge is my favorite live performance of the song cycle. Apparently unplanned (at least going into the show), Trey interrupts the middle of It’s Ice and thanks the crowd for being such a “great, attentive, quiet” audience, narratively steering into the intro to Lizards. It feels like an initiation for the Sacramento crowd, not so much a prize for fans chasing a “special show,” but a guided tour of the band’s central mythology to usher those well-behaved fans into the inner circle.

Opening with a pre-planned Gamehendge set in front of 20,000 people at Great Woods is the opposite of this experience, in many ways. There are big cheers in all the right places, even from some diehards who catch on to what’s happening as soon as Trey mentions a 52-year-old man sitting in a dentist’s chair over the mayhem of the second-ever NO2. The narration feels stiffer, almost rehearsed, not the usual train-of-thought Trey storytelling heard in 3/22/93 or the majority of Forbin’s > Mockingbirds. And of course, it’s the second performance of the saga in only 16 days, a double lightning strike for what had been an ultra-rare event.

The most likely explanation for this rapid return is the fabled Gamehendge CD-ROM, teased in a 1994 Doniac Schvice and then never delivered. Was GameHoist in West Virginia a dress rehearsal for this performance? Was the inclusion of the 7/8/94 Stash on A Live One possible because they were professionally recording this show to release the first set? And how would Phish’s career have played out differently if they released their absurd rock opera as their first live album instead of A Live One?

In Parke Puterbaugh’s biography, he writes that Trey shelved the CD-ROM because he didn’t want to profit from the story and the rest of the band lacked enthusiasm for the project. It’s telling also that they still haven’t released any of the Gamehendge sets via LivePhish to this day. In a Q-and-A from the book, Trey claims to have never even listened to any of these shows (!) and appears less than pleased with the 7/8/94 version:

PP: You also did it at Great Woods in ‘94. That one I haven’t heard.

TA: I don’t think that one’s worth… [trails off]

Whatever their reasons for aborting the project, this show makes a tidy argument for why they made the right call. TMWSIY has a pretty slim plot; in fact, it’s completely ridiculous. And there’s a moment in every Gamehendge set where Trey appears to remember this central flaw and starts rushing the narration — compare his words-per-minute here to the relaxed fireside storytelling of the first-known performance on 3/12/88. By the end of 7/8’s Gamehendge, it’s just “Errand Wolfe is the new Wilson, something something, let’s flash-backward (???) and listen to what this shepherd has to say?” If a whole slew of new listeners were forever alienated by a lyric about rotting solar garlic, imagine what commercial damage this story could have done?

But more importantly, Gamehendge/TMWSIY was Phish’s sacred text for their first era, and it just wouldn’t be right letting the uninitiated hear it without “doing the work.” Like any good inside joke, it spoils if you use it too much, or too many people figure out what it means. Even playing a two-night stand at a large outdoor amphitheatre, a significant attendance achievement, feels wrong somehow, like allowing too many people into a VIP area.

Then again, the take-home message from this show is that they really didn’t need Gamehendge any more. The second set has its own secret code, one much more nuanced than knowing who The Sloth and Mr. Palmer are, and one with much more potential for band and audience growth. Perhaps relieved after the effort of playing through TMWSIY for a recording, Phish conjures up three excellent jams that are all the more rewarding for devoted fans that knew what was going on.

It’s true that appreciation for Phish only grows with time, and it’s part of why they’re such a hard band to initially get into. If the 7/8/94 Stash was the first version you ever heard, you very well might fall in love with it, so long as you are one of the rare breed of music fan not frightened off by a 12-and-a-half minute song. But if you had seen the song performed multiple times, heard dozens of versions on tape, and observed how their approach to the song’s improvisation evolved through the years, there’s even more to notice and enjoy; here, especially, how the band’s collective tension-release methods have sharpened enough to cut diamond.

Sure, it turned up on A Picture of Nectar, but you have to be pretty dedicated to notice the Manteca riff tossed around between Trey and Page during a sublimely peaceful Reba jam (superior, in my opinion, to the more-loved version in the previous show). Or how smoothly the band slides into and out of Frankenstein in the middle of You Enjoy Myself, a segue so well executed that a first-timer might assume the song just always contains an Edgar Winter tribute.

Now that they’re filling Great Woods on two consecutive nights, there’s maybe a little more confidence that the in-jokes and references can go deeper than “hey, remember that Dungeons & Dragons story I thought up for a college assignment?” As more and more fans come to shows with imprints of what songs should be in their minds, now they could turn to focusing on what those songs could be.

So Gamehendge — they don’t need it any more. Kinda awkward, when they just (maybe) recorded it for a live album. But seeing as it’s no longer quite as necessary to simultaneously reward the devoted and play a little joke on the rookies, perhaps it’s better to relegate the story to the occasional gag, popping up here and there in Forbin’s and Icculus and as lyrics in songs allowed to grow beyond their roles in the musical. In this form, Gamehendge has survived to this day, every year becoming a little less “are you in the know?” and a little more “hey, remember when we used to do this silly stuff?” Performing it in its entirety today, or even any time after the summer of 1994, wouldn’t accomplish much more than giving a room full of people bragging rights. Richer rewards await.