Phish.net > Charts > Narration Chart: "Mockingbird", 1996-08-07

TREY: Most of you probably know the general gist of the Colonel Forbin story of climbing .up the mountain. But, what you probably don’t know is that you are standing right now on the very spot where this story happened years and years ago. There’s a little more to it than you might know so i’m going to take you back here.

A long time ago there was no big indentation in these rocks: this used to be one entire mountain just covered with bright red rocks. This is like a thousand years ago, y’know, back when Gamehendge and all that… So, here was this big red mountain, and what happened was people used to gather on this mountain all the time. They would sit up here and look out at the -- this was before Denver and any of that out there -- you would look out and see stars and the beautiful horizon going in the distance.

People used to come here and gather all the time, but there were certain times of the year there was a gathering. All these people came from different areas. They were sitting up on the mountain, looking out at the night sky. They saw stars off in the distance and clouds floating by, maybe the moon. The thing was, this particular night, as they were sitting there, they started to feel the ground rumbling beneath them.

Something a little bit different was going on [powerful ominous sounds ala “Vibration of Life”]. As they sat there, first they thought the stars were just maybe moving around, but they looked down and felt the ground trembling. They looked at each other, just like “what the heck?” So at first they thought maybe it was some kind of earthquake or something. What they realized is they happened to be sitting there this particular night when once in a millenium the Giant Iguana came out of the ground. [crowd roars]

At first they were terrified, they saw it, over here, a mouth of a huge iguana coming up out of the ground. As he came up, he was a big red iguana, he looked like the same color of things. He had these horrible jaws opening up, opening up, and drool coming down, huge teeth. At first they were terrified, but as the iguana came toward them, he sucked all the people up, and they fell into his stomach.

As he sucked them up, he went down through and left this giant indentation between the rocks, just dragging his huge body behind him. But, once everybody got inside the iguana, the incredible thing was that it actually felt pretty good in there. It was really warm, and they were all rolling around in this inner stomach [???] inside of the iguana.

The giant iguana took off and headed up into space. They left, going up [music continues frenetically]. This giant iguana was like a thousand feet long hurtling off into space towards the moon, leaving the Earth behind them, slowly, slowly climbing up into space. As he went deeper and deeper into space, the whole iguana just started to disappear. The iguana started to fall apart, little bits just started to fall away, some skin then some bones, just peeling away, until the people just found themselves floating freely in the middle of space. [music relaxes]

Everyone is floating around out there. We didn’t go that far; we went past Mars, looked down and saw the Life on Mars. This is back when it still living back then. Floating around space, as we were floating around out there in space, these people looked off in the distance and saw a tiny green speck. As the speck got closer and closer, they realized they had come full circle, leaving the mountainside and coming to the great fields of Gamehendge that spread out before them.

There on the mountain, rising up out of Gamehendge, was this tiny little Colonel Forbin climbing up the mountain trying to find the Great and Knowledgeable Icculus, whose spirit still lives around here in the indentation left by the giant iguana a thousand years ago as it kept going up. He was trying to find the great and knowledgeable Icculus, of course, so that Icculus would help him get the Helping Friendly Book from the evil tyrant, Wilson. Icculus calls on the Famous Mockingbird, here he comes down out of the sky, the Famous Mockingbird flying down to go and retrieve the Helping Friendly Book from the castle of the evil King Wilson...