Phish.net > Charts > Narration Chart: "Mockingbird", 2011-07-03

TREY: It’s so strange to be singing this song right in this spot, at this very [pause] time. I do have to take a very brief moment to tell you why. When we first went on tour, it was like 1988, and we went to Colorado, we drove right through here because we were coming from Vermont. We used to drive in a Plymouth Voyager, at that point in time. The four of us and our dog, Marley, who you’ve seen pictures of who’s [pause] in doggie Heaven now. Anyway, we were driving through this area, on our way out West and somewhere -- I can’t remember the exact name of the town but right nearby here -- our car broke down. It was a very old Plymouth Voyager, and what we did was we took the back seat out of the of this Plymouth Voyager -- it was like a minivan -- and two of us would sleep while two of us drove.

By the way, best driver? Page. Long-distance driver who could cover the most hours and I’ve seen this guy drain two tanks of gas? Fish. Too busy playing with the radio and screwing around so, therefore, was not allowed to drive very much? That’d be me.Worst driver? Mike. Writing in his journal, while driving the car, I’m not making that up.

Anyway, what happened was the car broke down. It was kind of a rainy day, and so we had no choice but to try to get to go to some kind of garage or something. There was nothing around, but we happened to be standing outside of this storage area. We went in and we asked the manager if he would mind if we stuck our car in one of the bays for a second. This is all completely true and will explain a few things that happened at this very festival. So we, this guy let us. It had all our gear in it, and we didn’t want it to get stolen while we went to get a garage or something. So, we pushed the Plymouth Voyager into a storage area, and when we got in there, the door shut behind us [noise of door shutting] and we were trapped, inside of a self-storage unit.

By the way, this is all completely true, this if fact. So, we’re in this storage area, and the only thing that we had to occupy ourselves for our time would be when we took out our instruments. We’re trying to wait for someone to come get us out of this storage area so we would play. We started playing. And, when we played, we realized that despite the discomfort of being trapped in a small, you know, tin storage unit, our minds would kind of wander, and we would drift off. We would basically be able to free ourselves from the trap of this little metal box through music.

So, we played more, and we played more, but whenever we stopped playing, we’d get back to the fact that we didn’t have any food, we didn’t have any water, we were waiting to escape. What happened was the jams would get longer and weirder and weirder and weirder, and we started having a problem connecting reality with these mental, kind of freedom-through-music journeys that we were going on. Over time, the mental journeys with the music became a little bit more realistic, and then our awful experience inside of this metal box got worse and worse and worse until we realized that we could control reality through music.

So we started working on little, you know, melodic incantations, and we found one that used to be able to summon the rain. We realized we could create rain. We drilled a little hole in the roof so that the water would drip down. This is all going on; in the meantime, we’re just waiting for somebody to get us out of this storage space.

Anyway, what’s really bizarre, is that [pause] we got so good at this, that [pause] what you’re in right now is actually a mental projection, through music, that we started in 1988 inside of a storage unit. So, when we end this whole thing, it’s gonna vaporize, none of you will have any memory of it whatsoever, and we’ll be trapped back inside this storage unit.

So, we figured there’s only one way out of here, and that’s this: If you look what’s gone on over the last twenty or thirty years, there’s so much crappy merchandise being produced, that you have to keep building more and more storage spaces, and they’re covering the whole American landscape right now. So, it’s very perfect that this is happening on the Fourth of July. Independence Day, we’ve discovered through graphs that today is the day when the rate of product creation is going to surpass the rate at which more storage spaces to put this junk can be made, at which point every single storage space in America will be full, and somebody’s gonna have to come open the door to our storage space and let us out.

Incredibly, the Famous Mockingbird during all of this time, has gotten a new job, and he is now a postage delivery bird. I see him flying out of the distance right now, with the ultimate product to deliver to our storage space, set us free, and then be able to bring materialities back into one hole, and we’ll see what happens when that happens.

And here he comes now, the Famous Mockingbird...