Phish.net > Charts > Narration Chart: "Mockingbird", 1993-04-21

TREY: You guys are all standing out there. [unintelligible] Two nights of this stuff. Somewhere in the middle of this long, two night stand, strange things are starting to happen out there in the street. That’s right. Some things you don’t even know about.

That’s right, cause right now as we’re standing here, we’re in this beautiful building here, this big red brick building. What you don’t really know is that as the first few songs were going on, we’ve kind of been working on this thing on the outside here. People have been going around; these little sort of gremlin creatures have been going around with all kinds of big pieces of sandpaper.

They’re basically going to the corners of the building. They started out by just trying to sand the corners of the building down so that there weren’t any sharp edges because -- there’s these little gremlin creatures that you don’t really think about most of the time that are flying all around -- if any of them happens to bump into a sharp corner of the building, you know, it’s bad, they can hurt themselves.

So, what they’ll tend to do if you don’t watch out, if everybody comes into the building here and doesn’t pay attention to what’s going on the outside of the building, these little creatures will come with their sandpaper, and… start sanding away at the edges of the building. [sanding sound can be heard] So they’re sanding away at the edges of the building out there and they’re sanding down the corners, and they have little gremlin arms so they sand really fast [more sanding sounds]. Little pieces of brick flying off there…

We’re all in here. Everything’s cool in here, right now. So there’s no more corners, and they start to get to the edges of the building then because they think, “Ok, no corners but you still got these edges here that one of these gremlins might run into.” So, they’re sanding on the edges of the building, sanding on the edges of the building. They turn to take these big pieces of wood, kind of jab them up the bottom of the foundation of the building [sounds of moving the building].

We’re gonna get some big old sandpaper under the edge there. There we are [imitates the “O-E-O!” chant from Wizard of Oz], sanding with the paper, the little monkeys, with the things on their back. The more they sand, the more the building starts to stop looking square. It starts to look more and more round on the outside. Sanding...

They actually start to sand the red part of the brick off. It’s kind of getting silver. Slowly, they look up and they start to see that, they’ve sanded the whole building into this one enormous silver kind of metallic ball that’s sitting there, that we’re inside of right now. Sort of, one of those pixie balls, you know.

So, right now, the building is this thing. Then, slowly, they’re kind of casting this magic spell on the outside there, on the pixie ball. The whole United States starts kind of changing, all of the countryside around us here. Looking over that way, I think you see the mountains over that way, you got the Rocky mountains on one side. You got the mountains, the beautiful, beautiful mountains of Vermont, the most beautiful mountains anywhere, over there on the other side. And, the mountains are all kinda starting to square up until it looks like, you know they’re kind of turning into wood and squaring up into these little square things.

We’re still sitting here in this silver metal ball somewhere in the middle, and the whole United States starts to turn into one of those labyrinth games, that tilts from the side to side. These pixie things, you know you know, these green gremlin things, they’re now kind of working the big handles on the labyrinth game so that the whole country is starting to tilt from side to side. The ball is kind of sitting there, and we’re inside of it. So, now the ball is kind of rolling down one side, rolling over to the other side. You don’t want to fall into any of those holes, you know, so we lean up against the Rocky Mountains for a minute and kind of roll down the side of the Rocky Mountains. Stop in the corner there for a second. They all get on the big wheel and they turn the big wheel...

The whole country starts to tilt again. We go back to the Rocky Mountains, rolling across over to the White Mountains on the other side [crash vocalization] up against the other one now. We’re rolling along, and everything’s going great. We start to head down south, now. We’re heading down south towards Atlanta [crash], rolling along to the Blue Mountains down there. Now, we’re gonna be rolling along. We’re rolling along, and suddenly we see it coming up in front of us, this hole. We’re rolling up towards it, and there’s nothing, there’s nothing we can do: we’re going to fall into the hole. Rolling! [crash]

We fall through the hole, and now we’re floating, floating in the silver ball. As we float through space, little pieces of the silver ball start to fall off so now we just have this crowd of people here, floating through the space. We’re drifting along, through space. There’s nothing left of the gremlins. They are all sanding down some other building now. They forgot all about us now that they’ve had their fun with us.

We’re falling through this, this void here, watching the planets going by on the other side, planets up there and galaxies, and the Earth is getting farther and farther away. As we’re floating along, this strange sort of plane, starts to… this geometrical plane is coming off in the distance, and it floats up, floats up underneath us. As we fall down towards it, it starts to fill our entire field of view as we’re getting closer and closer to it.

We’re floating a little bit slower now and kinda coming down towards this plane. Everywhere we see now, it’s kind of got a greenish, bluish tinge to it, with sort of a green field that we see in the distance. It’s going off as far as we can see in that direction, just green, green, green stretching out. Then on the other side we see a forest kind of stretching all the way off into the distance on the other side, and out of the forest, a huge mountain going up into the, up into the sky. We’re coming down closer. We realize that, we’re back in… Gamehendge.

Floating down in space, into Gamehendge. Looking up at the mountain over there, looking up at the mountain we see a little guy. He’s climbing up the mountain. Colonel Forbin is climbing up the mountain. He’s trying to find the Great and Knowledgeable Icculus, who lives up at the top of the mountain. The Great and Knowledgeable Icculus is gonna help Colonel Forbin out by getting him back the Helping Friendly Book. He’s gonna bring the Helping Friendly Book to all the people of Gamehendge and give it to those [Lizard people] so they can live in peace and harmony forever.

So, as we’re standing there, the mountain is crumbling around, crumbling around, and Icculus’ face is coming out of the mountain. Big bloodshot eyes looking down at Colonel Forbin, he’s… Colonel Forbin is terrified, looking up at Icculus. Icculus is looking down, and he says, “I”m gonna help you, Colonel Forbin. I’m gonna help you out. I’m gonna get that Famous Mockingbird.”

The Famous Mockingbird comes, flies out. It’s still the Famous Mockingbird, lands on Icculus’ shoulder. Icculus tells the Famous Mockingbird, “Go to the castle of the Evil King Wilson and steal the Helping Friendly Book, bring it back to the people. They’ll have all the knowledge inherent in the universe, and if everything goes okay, then they’ll live in peace and harmony.” But you know, it’s a lot, it’s a lot of stuff to know, all the knowledge inherent in the universe. [unintelligible]

So, here comes now, the Famous Mockingbird, ladies and gentlemen… right there. He’s gonna come flying down now. I can hear his little mockingbird wings fluttering along...