So just what is it?
Gamehendge
might best be described as a rock musical in which challenging, multipart compositions are interspersed with expository narration. The songs, eight of them on the original tape, were preceded by spoken sections that set the scene and moved the story forward.
The inspirations for
Gamehendge
ran the musical gamut. Phish made discernible nods in their early music to various prog-rock and New Wave precursors, so it’s not surprising to hear echoes of these informing
Gamehendge
and other early work. For instance, “The Squirming Coil”—from Phish’s second album,
Lawn Boy—
could have easily passed for a track from one of Genesis’s weird and whimsical albums, such as
Nursery Cryme
or
Foxtrot
.
By Anastasio’s own admission,
Gamehendge
took some cues from Genesis’s magnum opus,
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
, released in 1975, particularly the scene-setting “Chamber of 32 Doors.” Genesis’s musically ambitious and lyrically elliptical double album told of the spiritual transformation of Rael, a Puerto Rican street kid.
Gamehendge
was likewise a kind of prog-rock conception with cinematic musical passages and a fanciful libretto.
There were nonmusical points of reference, as well. Such literary and theatrical inspirations as
The Wizard of Oz
,
Alice in Wonderland
, and the aforementioned
Chronicles of Narnia
offered surreal means for its protagonists to enter other, more fantastical worlds wherein they learn life lessons. The name Icculus in
Gamehendge
closely resembles Icarus—the character from Greek mythology who flew too
close to the sun, singing his wings and falling to earth. And the name
Gamehendge
itself suggested Stonehenge, the ring of standing stones assembled in England by prehistoric Druids who were ritually bound to the earth, sun, and change in seasons.
As regards the
Gamehendge
story line, Anastasio himself offered this succinct but trenchant summary:
There are officially eight or nine songs, maybe ten songs. Colonel Forbin, the main character, is a retired army colonel out walking his dog. He finds this imaginary door or
Alice in Wonderland
kind of thing. He falls through the door and ends up in this other world, Gamehendge.
Gamehendge was originally a beautiful, serene landscape where these people were living in harmony with nature. They had this book,
The Helping Friendly Book
, that they used to guide their way of life and rituals—“The Divided Sky” and all that stuff—until this guy Wilson enters the scene. He sees how naive they are, and so he enslaves them, cuts down the trees, builds a big castle, and hides the book.
The story is basically that there’s a revolution brewing. They’re trying to get the book back and go back to their state of peace and tranquility. There are all these characters: Tela and the Unit Monster and Errand Woolf, which is actually the name of a friend of mine, Aaron Woolf. The song “Wilson,” which was the basis for a lot of this stuff, was written by him, so I characterized him and put him in
Gamehendge
.
There’s also an accountant, Mr. Palmer, who’s part of the revolution. He’s transferring money to the revolutionaries. Wilson catches him and hangs him in the public square. There’s all this stuff that goes on. Eventually they get the book back, but of course by this time they’ve been perverted by the concept of power. So you can never go back in the end, and the guy who led the revolution just becomes the next Wilson. That’s the general story.
“Wilson” was the first song written for
Gamehendge
. With its ominous two-beat low-E intro and crowd-participation chant of “Wilson . . . Wilson,” it became a concert fixture. It rises to a boil when Errand Woolfe, the hotheaded organizer behind the revolution, shouts: “Wilson, can you still have fun?”
A seemingly juvenile query, it actually suggests something deeper and more relevant to our time. That is to say, those who wield power and amass wealth but still are desperately unhappy typically do their best to make everyone else miserable and subjugate them to lives of virtual slavery, as Wilson did to the denizens of Gamehendge.
“Wilson” opened disc two of Phish’s
A Live One
, culled from their fall 1994 tour. Through the breakup, they played it 203 times, more than any other
Gamehendge
song except “The Lizards.”
Gamehendge
was never far from Phish’s minds or set lists. Anastasio even referenced the musical at Coventry, joking before the encore that the grand finale would be a complete performance of
Gamehendge
with full orchestra.
“Wilson” was obviously an important song to Phish and especially Anastasio. Its creation predated his move to Vermont. In fact, it went all the way back to the musical clique in his Princeton schooldays. “Wilson” was originally written by Tom Marshall and Aaron Woolf. “Our whole object was to make someone laugh with music,” Marshall recalled. And they wrote prolifically, drawing Anastasio into their orbit, whereupon things really got interesting.
“Aaron and I wrote ‘Wilson’ on a piece of paper in Latin class,” Marshall recalled. “It was this bizarre set of words, and we were laughing so hard. We started singing it to all of our friends, and Aaron, almost as part of the song, would go up to people afterward and ask, ‘Do you get it?’
“Everyone would smile as we sang it, but as soon as they were faced with a question like that—‘Do you get it?’—the smiles would dis - appear and they’d go, ‘Well, no, not really.’ But when we sang it for Trey, he was entranced and asked us to sing it again. And when Aaron asked the inevitable, ‘Do you get it?’ Trey went, ‘Oh yeah, I get it.’ And
sure enough, he did. Phish was built upon it and
Gamehendge
was built upon it. It was the seed of the whole thing.”
Anastasio made “Wilson” the centerpiece of the
Gamehendge
fable, which thematically boils down to the notion of paradise lost, with Wilson as the archetypal power-mad villain. He is overthrown by Errand Woolfe, who turns out not to be the beneficent savior the Gamehendge dwellers were hoping for but a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The Who’s anti-authoritarian anthem, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”—“Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss”—could serve as a capsule summary of
Gamehendge
’s resigned political denouement.
And so
Gamehendge
does not have a happy ending, and instead reveals a cynicism or realism (take your pick) that put off at least one other member of Phish. Bassist Mike Gordon found the
Gamehendge
finale too hopeless, and that and other reservations—mainly that he felt it belonged more to Anastasio than the entire band—ultimately relegated
Gamehendge
to the back burner.
“Trey was all excited about
Gamehendge
, and I remember there were discussions about taking it on tour,” recalled soundman Paul Languedoc. “I think he wanted to do something with theatrical parts in it, too. Of course, Fish would be up for anything, but I don’t think the idea went over that great with the rest of the band.
“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.