Phish.net > Charts > Narration Chart: "Mockingbird", 1993-03-08

TREY: As we are standing here right now in this room singing about this Colonel Forbin person, strange things are starting to happen. As some of you know, those strange things are already happening tonight. It’s definitely a strange night. And, uh, as a matter of fact, just before the gig here, as we were walking on stage, we looked over at Fish’s arm. And Fish has a strange, strange growth coming out of the side of his arm, this is true.

It’s a strange kind of red, circular thing that he woke up and he doesn’t know what exactly what it was, but personally, I know what it is, so I’m going to explain to you right now. What’s happening right now, without you even knowing it, is just little vibrations going through this room in the whole universe and our whole solar system, something’s happening right now. It all has to do with Fish’s little arm mark, and as he’s sitting there right now Fish is kind of slowly, without you even noticing it, slowly starting to grow a little bit taller and a little bit thinner. And he’s kind of pulling and stretching out as he’s sitting there in his chair.

Pulling up and stretching out and getting just a little bit taller and a little bit thinner and a little bit more stretched out in front of your face as he sits over on the drum stool. And as he sits there, he gets stretched a little bit higher and a little bit higher until he’s coming all the way up to the front of the ceiling. And his head is pushing up on the ceiling of the building [groans]... stretching out... little pieces of the ceiling coming apart and Fish’s head kind of breaking through.

And then as he’s stretching the bottom half, his body is becoming elastic, and the bottom half of his feet slowly start to come up in the air out of it. But luckily this guy standing over here right at the last second sees what’s happening, reaches out, grabs Fish’s ankle and starts getting pulled up with him through the ceiling. So now everybody’s kind of going up through the ceiling, and then the next person next to him sees that and he grabs that guy’s ankle, and then he grabs that guy’s ankle, and slowly everyone is grabbing each other’s ankles. So we’re all grabbing each other‘s ankles and Fish’s head is stretching out through the roof, getting pulled, sucked by some kind of gravitational force or something.

It’s pulling him out and slowly the whole room ends up into a big line. And now we’re all stretching out through the ceiling and going up into the, going up into the sky and Fish is leading the way. One by one we’re making a huge chain of people underneath Fish’s ankle, and he’s going up and he looks down, and he sees Santa Fe all beneath him. He sees the mountains off in the distance, and he’s stretching higher and higher and higher and higher up into the air until finally we’re all hanging on.

We are all hanging on except the last person who is sitting all the way back there at the last second grabs onto something, grabs onto the stage. So now we’ve got this huge line of people connected by ankles and hands stretching out. Fish’s head pulling out. Everyone’s holding on one person to each other’s ankle, the next person to the next person’s ankle up into the air. And suddenly you realize that the earth is spinning and Fish is up there in the air, way up in the air and the earth is spinning and as the earth is spinning around you think this whole line of people is spinning around getting flung around on the outside of the earth.

Now normally this would be OK, but this is a special day and unfortunately the moon is so much closer to the earth today than it’s ever been before in a long time, that this one time Fish comes swinging around and suddenly... BOOM! smashes into the moon and he’s hanging onto the moon now. So Fish is hanging onto the moon and you guys are hanging onto his ankles. The last person is hanging onto the stage and we’re all connected and hanging onto the moon and swinging around hanging onto this ow moon, kind of sucking off the energy from it and slowly, Fish starts pulling on the chain [grunting] until we’re all standing on the moon looking down at the earth and we’re looking down [band starts playing “How High The Moon”]. That’s right and that’s why I say, “How high is the moon?”

So, we’re all sitting up on the moon now, you guys can keep playing that if you want, and we’re all kind of humming “How High The Moon” and the moon is kind of low today so that’s how high the moon is, and we’re looking down and we’re thinking well, we’re a lot closer than we normally are. Anyway, we all are sitting there, and we’re wondering what the hell we’re gonna do here stuck up on the moon. So we all kind of confer and get into a little huddle here and have a conference and we decide it’s time to take the plunge.

So we all stand on the edge of the moon, we’re looking down, and we get ready and then... WAH! We dive off the moon. We’re floating down, we’re floating down into space towards the earth but something goes wrong and suddenly we’re not going towards the earth anymore. We see the earth start to float off into the distance. And now we’re just, we’re hurtling through space aimlessly. Luckily, we’re all kind of hanging onto each other so that we don’t get lost and we’re hurtling through space aimlessly.

We don’t know what’s going to happen and we’re going through space and suddenly we feel ourselves sort of picking up speed in one direction getting sucked over one way and we see this tiny little speck off in the distance that is coming closer and closer and closer. As we get closer, it’s going faster and it’s getting bigger and bigger until it fills our whole plane of view. We’re coming down, we’re flying down onto this thing, and we feel ourselves dropping down. As we fall down, we’re floating down and we look down and we see a vast green field stretching off into the distance below us as far as the eye can see stretching off in that direction. And, on the other side we see a big forest going off as far as the eye can see in that direction. And, out of the forest we see a huge, huge mountain bigger than any mountain we’ve seen before stretching up, and we realize that we’ve floated into... Gamehendge.

So we’re floating down and we’re floating down into Gamehenge and we look over at the mountain, and we see a little guy climbing up the side of the mountain. We are looking at him, and it’s Colonel Forbin. He’s climbing up the mountain, and he’s grabbing onto this root, hanging by one hand from a root, climbing up the mountain, climbing up the mountain, rocks tumbling all around, and the mountain starts to vibrate, and he’s trying to find the Great and Knowledgeable Icculus. As he climbs up the mountain, he looks up and the mountain starts to crumble, starts to turn into the face of the Great and Knowledgeable Icculus.

Colonel Forbin looks up and he says, “Icculus you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to help me Icculus. I’ve got to get The Helping Friendly Book.” So Icculus says , “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to call on my friend The Famous Mockingbird.” So, The Famous Mockingbird comes flying out of the sky and Icculus tells The Famous Mockingbird to go and steal The Helping Friendly Book from the evil King Wilson and bring it back to the people of Gamehendge. We’re all in here now, and The Helping Friendly Book is going to teach them to live in peace and harmony and tranquility, tranquility with nature forever and ever.

And so here he comes now, saving the day, The Famous Mockingbird...