Animals have always played a significant part in the Phish repertoire, whether the jam titans are singing about a dog ("Runaway Jim," "Dog Log"), an antelope ("Run Like an Antelope"), a lizard ("The Lizards") or even a pig ("Guyute").
So it should come as no surprise that for their farewell shows next weekend in Coventry, Vermont, the band is looking to a bunny.
Promoters of the massive two-day Phish festival, taking place Aug. 14 and 15 and expected to draw more than 70,000 devoted Phishheads, are renting out a local radio station, which they plan to transform into "The Bunny"--an all-Phish, all the time station.
The station, currently WMOO at 92.1 on the FM dial, will launch under its new, more Phishy moniker next Thursday. It will operate 24 hours a day throughout the weekend.
The Bunny will air the group's complete sets on Saturday and Sunday. In between it will broadcast eclectic, Phish-sanctioned music, as well as traffic reports, event information, interviews with fans and festival crew and From the Archives, a program by band archivist Kevin Shapiro.
This isn't the first time the Burlington, Vermont-based quartet of Trey Anastasio, Jon Fishman, Mike Gordon and Page McConnell has taken over the airwaves.
The tradition of renting their own radio station began at the inaugural Phish multiday bash, 1996's Clifford Ball at Plattsburgh Air Force Base in upstate New York, which was attended by more than 100,000 Phish heads. The band continued the radio broadcasts with subsequent festivals, including the Great Went and Lemonwheel, where the station was called "The Badger," and the millennium show at Big Cypress Indian reservation in the Florida Everglades, where it was named "Thin Air."
The Bunny moniker first surfaced at last summer's It festival.
After the Phab Phour announced that next weekend's show at the Newport State Airport would be its final show, demand sky-rocketed and the two-day fest quickly sold out all 70,000 tickets.
Now, organizers and local officials are worried that upwards of 10,000 more ticketless fans will try to crash the party, potentially wreaking havoc on the small town.
To ease such concerns and satisfy those who couldn't get tickets, Great Northeast Productions, the company behind all of Phish's large-scale gatherings, has clinched a deal with XM Satellite to carry the Bunny and Phish's performances.
There will also be a big-screen version. Regal Theaters, which simulcast the band's June 17 concert at Coney Island to multiplexes across the country, will beam both days' shows to select theaters nationwide. More than 50,000 movie tickets went on sale last month and many of the screenings have already sold out.
Additionally, all four band members issued a statement on Phish.com asking those without concert tickets to stay away out of respect for the "unspoiled rural beauty and small, tight-knit communities" of their home state.
"IF YOU DON'T HAVE A TICKET, PLEASE DON'T COME TO COVENTRY," read the post.
The band, which has been together for 21 years, is also asking concertgoers to help clean up after the swan song ends.
"The most important thing to us about Coventry is that this thing comes off well and everybody respects that area," Fishman told the Burlington Free Press. "Of all the gigs that we would ever do in our whole lives, and of all the places to end on a positive note, this is the one that's most meaningful to us."
The band recently agreed to donate $100,000 of the proceeds from the final concert to various Vermont nonprofit groups, including Bread and Puppet Theater, Dairy Farmers of Vermont and the Vermont Foodbank.
Phish also added another pre-fest concert date to calendar. The band will play a show Monday at Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia. The band also has a date Tuesday at the Tweeter Center in Mansfield, Massachusetts, before heading home.
Meanwhile, for those who can't get enough of the Phishy stuff, IT, a 90-minute concert special/documentary, premiered last Sunday on PBS; a DVD version, featuring 150 minutes of bonus jams, hits stores Oct. 12.