Gamehendge is a fictional setting for a number of songs by the rock band Phish. The main set of songs can be traced back to The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday (or TMWSIY), the senior project of guitarist and primary vocalist Trey Anastasio, written while he attended Goddard College. The musical was recorded to a cassette tape and submitted along with Anastasio's Senior thesis in July 1988. Many copies of TMWSIY were circulated among fans as Phish's popularity grew but the album was never officially released by the band. Still, the band would frequently perform songs from the album live and, on a few occasions, performed the entire album live, though differently every time. New songs were added to the Gamehendge mythos in the years following the recording of the original 1988 tape.
The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday tells the story of Colonel Forbin, a retired colonel from Long Island, New York, who enters the land of Gamehendge and rescues a document called the Helping Friendly Book from an evil dictator named Wilson. The story was based on a nonsense poem written by Tom Marshall. Trey Anastasio used the poem as lyrics for a children's song he wrote with his mother called "Skippy the Wondermouse". With the new lyrics, the song was retitled "McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters". He then wrote a separate set of songs that would make sense of the poem and turn it into a narrative driven musical for his senior project. These were the songs that made up TMWSIY:
All songs written by Trey Anastasio except where noted.
In the thesis that Trey submitted, he goes into more detail about the characters of Forbin and Tela:
"I decided that Colonel Forbin would fall in love with Tela the instant that he saw her. I view these characters as alter-egos. Everything that Tela is, Forbin isn't. Forbin is a naïve, love-stricken man, and Tela is a streetwise experienced woman who understands the ways of the world better than most others in the play, save Icculus, the author of the Helping Friendly Book. Forbin is entranced with the look in Tela's eyes, a look that speaks of knowledge of something more. She seems to have total control over the situation; he falls in love. Tela, on the other hand, couldn't care less about this bozo, and the B section of the song changes its point of view and we see inside Tela's head. We see her past, her life under Wilson's rule, and her growing hatred for the tyrant over the years." [1]
And later in the thesis he explains the ending and Icculus:
"The main point I wanted to get across about Icculus was his ability to see beyond triviality. I saw Forbin as the most trivial thinker, Tela as the least trivial, except Icculus. "Your end is the road" is supposed to mean that something that seems important at the moment is all part of a greater flow of things, and that to be happy, one must just realize the inevitability of things. Tela realized that Wilson would just be replaced by another tyrant, so she began to respect him for taking advantage of an inevitable situation. Icculus says in the first song, "the trick is to surrender to the flow" and that is the key to the whole musical. I think that I had a very cynical view when I wrote this, because I really view Wilson, Tela, and Errand Woolfe as the ones who surrendered to the flow. By "surrender to the flow," I meant that they saw that no matter what action we take, the world remains filled with evil, and that it is a wise person who realizes this and subsequently takes advantage of the situation. I think of Forbin as a naïve and ignorant man, who just wouldn't admit to the way that the world really worked. Maybe it's just a stage, and maybe I'll learn someday that the world really is black and white, good vs. evil, a simple place to live and make choices."[2]
It's possible Trey did indeed change his mind on the dark and cynical turn the story takes at the end as Possum was dropped from live performances of TMWSIY after 1990. Instead the band would end the story with "McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters" which would serve as a summary of the events that took place from the point of view of a Shepherd who had lived on the outskirts of Gamehendge and had adopted McGrupp.
In the 1994 performances of Gamehendge they would follow it up with "Divided Sky" which was a chant that was part of an ancient ritual that involved eating sacred root that contained the spirit of Icculus and then climbing a large black rhombus to pay homage to the gods of the night sky. These endings are a bit more optimistic than the original, even though Errand still winds up replacing Wilson as the new dictator and the cycle of war continues.
But the December 31, 2023 performance altered the story even more significantly. In that version, Wilson is not killed, Errand Woolfe (known simply as "The Wolf" in this version) doesn't become the new dictator and the Helping Friendly Book is returned to the Lizards who realize they had the knowledge they needed all along. This seems like the happiest ending of them all until it is revealed that Icculus's mountain is an active volcano and it erupts underneath the Lizards just as they are celebrating their victory.
In the years after the original The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday tape was recorded other songs were written that were connected to the Gamehendge story in some way. Here is a list of the songs that are confirmed to be a part of Gamehendge, though fans have speculated that there may be more and indeed some songs that were originally not part of Gamehendge have been retroactively connected to it.
The songs from Gamehendge have been played many times throughout the career of Phish, sometimes with Anastasio narrating parts of the story to the audience. The earliest known performance of a Gamehendge song was "McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters" on April 6, 1985, in Burlington, Vermont. On the following occasions in the band's history, Phish performed a complete (or near complete) Gamehendge with narration. Each performance tells the story differently, with a different set of songs each time:
Until December 31, 2023, the July 8, 1994 concert was the only complete Gamehendge performance to have been issued by the band as an official live release. It was first featured as part of their Dinner and a Movie webcast series in July 2020, and was made available on their LivePhish website the next month.[3] The July 1994 concert had been recorded by Boston public television station WGBH.[4]
The 1994 shows were recorded in 24-track digital for, it is assumed, a CD-ROM project that was mentioned in a 1994 Doniac Schvice. The project has long since been shelved.
Another common sequence at shows from 1988 to 1995, and less frequently after, was to play Colonel Forbin's Ascent segueing into Fly Famous Mockingbird, often with an Anastasio monologue sandwiched in between.
When songs from the project are performed live, accompanying narration often details the transportation of the audience to Gamehendge. Some fans speak of "going to Gamehendge" with reference to attending a Phish concert. Some songs and narratives explain how to get to Gamehendge, as evident in live versions of "Kung," "Harpua," "N02," and "It's Ice."[1]
Phish performed the first complete Gamehendge cycle in 29 years during their New Year's Eve show at Madison Square Garden on December 31, 2023. The performance included all of the songs from The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday with different narrations. In addition, there were many other associated Gamehendge songs that weren't on the original 1988 recording incorporated into the musical. The performance featured live actors, dancers and puppets portraying the characters from the songs. The song order and story was altered from the original TMWSIY. In this version Wilson is never killed and the story ends with a volcano eruption soon after The Famous Mockingbird retrieves the Helping Friendly Book. Despite the changes, this is the most complete version of Gamehendge to date and the narrator claims it is the "real" story.[5][6]
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