Phish.net > Charts > Narration Chart: "Harpua", 1995-10-31

TREY: It's Halloween night in Gamehendge. Somewhere on the outskirts, somewhere on the outskirts on this Halloween night in Gamehendge, there's this old man. An old man, right now as we speak, is walking down this hill. He's walking down the hill towards the town, and it's late, late at night. People are pretty much snug asleep in their beds. This old man is walking down the hill, and he's walking down next to this dog that I was just singing about of course. You guys know this story, it's the famous Harpua, yes...

Anyway, it's Halloween night, and on Halloween night, Harpua sometimes takes on some of the most evil shapes of all, his fangs growing longer, ugly mucous coming off his face, and turning into an awful killing machine. So, these two people are walking down into town and as they walk into town the people in town are all asleep. They don't know what's coming. But, these two people, the evil people are coming towards them as they sleep. They're all dreaming together, and, if you can picture this, as they sleep they're all having this terrible nightmare. As they're having this terrible nightmare, the eeriest thing about it is that they're all dreaming the same dream simultaneously. Here comes the man walk into town, and the people are dreaming the same simultaneous dream.

MIKE: I'm in my parent's house. I'm downstairs. I start walking upstairs. One step at a time. I am upstairs at my parent's old house. All of the rooms are empty. I walk down a hallway. I see something scurry! So I walk towards the bathroom. I walk in the bathroom, and it's a raccoon. I say... "WATCH IT ROCKY!" I push the raccoon into the bathtub, quickly, and walk back towards the bathroom door, closing it, and turn around, heading towards the bedrooms.

Suddenly, I see motion in the bedrooms. I walk towards that motion, and I can start to see many raccoons in the bedroom! Hundreds of raccoons in the bedroom coming at me! So, I walk toward those bedroom doors. Trying to push what would be the raccoons backwards into the bedroom, one raccoon at a time, but it seems like there are many many too many raccoons. They start coming towards me, and I start coming towards them. I start to notice that they're TINY raccoons! BABY RACCOONS!!!

TREY: Everyone was dreaming this dream at the same time, just as you will all dream this dream when you go home tonight. One person wasn't dreaming the dream, and that one person was Jimmy. Jimmy wasn't dreaming the dream because Jimmy wasn't asleep. Jimmy was actually sitting on the couch with his little pussy cat, Poster Nutbag. Jimmy was sitting with Poster Nutbag and playing his favorite album.

Which, lo', was the very same album that Phish was playing as their Halloween album at Rosemont Horizon that night… [Band teases “Beat It”, building on previous teases and rumors throughout the tour] When suddenly, Poster Nutbag runs outside, encounters Harpua. They battle.

Look, the storm’s gone...

[“Harpua” is played to the traditional conclusion, with the exception of Trey saying “a racoon” instead of “a dog” during the next verse]