On the first day of Mondegreen, Phish‘s 11th festival, I was put to work. While putzing around the festival grounds on Thursday afternoon, myself and my editor were reeled into the ongoing construction of French visual artist Olivier Grossetête‘s Cardboard City Hall, an eventually 82-foot-tall edifice on the concert field constructed out of more than 1.5 tons of cardboard and duct tape. We weren’t the only ones.
The Cardboard City Hall was built, somewhat counterintuitively, from the top down: Row by row, the construction team would assemble the next-lowest section of building blocks, then rally whoever happened to be around to lift the whole structure skyward, allowing them to slip the new layer of brown bricks underneath it. While we only laid hands on one section—a beam near the base of the building’s domed tower—it was hard not to feel a personal connection to the structure as it loomed over the concert field for two days. We all built this thing together, and it was a thing of beauty.
Of course, City Hall was never meant to last. While it was surely more durable in practice than the “house of cards” aphorisms the concept invited, it was a cardboard installation for a four-day event. It was initially due to come down at the end of the weekend. Thanks to Sunday’s cardboard-averse (read: wet) forecast, its communal decommissioning came a day early. On Saturday afternoon, the same wires that supported Cardboard City Hall were used to tear it down.
On one hand, it was hard not to feel wistful watching the thing we’d built together turn back into a pile of recycling. On the other, it completed a deeply satisfying arc: Through the collective engagement of the community we made something that stood proudly for just a blink of an eye but will live on forever in memory, its legend only fortified by its initial impermanence.
In many ways, Mondegreen embodied a central quality of the Phish experience: active, communal participation in a fleeting moment.
Don’t You See Anything That You’d Like To Try?
Hours after Trey Anastasio, Jon Fishman, Mike Gordon, and Page McConnell took their final bows on the first night of Mondegreen, hundreds of fans limbered up on the hot asphalt in the Dover Motor Speedway parking lot.
While Phish fans are accustomed to spending prolonged periods in parking lots, this was no leisurely sashay down Shakedown Street. It was 9 a.m. on Friday in Dover and the 103rd Running of the First Annual Runaway Jim Marathon—a.k.a. the Mondegreen 5k—was about to begin.
This would mark the third Phish festival 5k, following races at IT in 2003 and Super Ball IX in 2011. Magnaball in 2015 did not host a run as the racetrack at Watkins Glen International was under repair and as for 2018’s Curveball… well, you know.
To me, the obvious question was, “Why the hell would you run a 5k at 9 in the morning after (and before) a Phish show?” But while many of the participants may have just wanted to run (good on you for exercising), more than a few seemed more interested in adding to the spectacle than notching a fast finish. Among the throngs of runners were fans dressed as Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump (run, Forrest!), Tom Hanks in Cast Away (greeted with a hearty “Wilson!” by spectators), a banana, Mario, and two Jon Fishmans, both with vacuums—one who carried his machinery and another who lugged his behind him.
While Dover Motor Speedway is hailed in racing circles as the World’s Fastest One-Mile Oval, runner Sam Catterson told Live For Live Music that his smartwatch clocked the 5k route at 3.45 miles, not the regulation 3.1. But it didn’t matter that this running route around the South GA campgrounds was longer than a typical 5k.
What was more important, it seemed, was making sure that this eye-popping horde could start at the base of one of Mondegreen’s most notable landmarks—Miles the Monster, the speedway’s towering colossus of a mascot, sporting a lime-green Fishman-style muumuu custom-made by Lisa Simpson—and parade past South GA camping before returning to the monster’s other side. This giant stone monster is only going to be wearing a Jon Fishman dress for a few days, after all. If hundreds of people are going to get up and run around it and dress like Tom Hanks and take it upon themselves to make it as memorable as possible, that actually does sound like something worth trying.
“I just try to raise the vibe,” runner and longtime Phish fan Michelle Greenfield said of her contributions to the experience once the race was finished. “I just come here with joy and an attitude of fun, and this festival is like a city that just became planted here and there’s all these different things to do, and 5ks are part of city life, you know?”
Scenes from The 103rd Running of the First Annual Runaway Jim 5k!
pic.twitter.com/zKK1zWqm4b
— Mondegreen: A 4-Day Festival (@phishmondegreen) August 16, 2024
I’ve Got The Time If You’ve Got The Installation
In the bustling metropolis surrounding Mondegreen City Hall, tens of thousands of fans flocked hither and yon throughout the day to partake in a smorgasbord of limited-time delights. The cardboard civic centerpiece was only slightly upstaged by the Heliograph, the most striking Mondegreen installation and the one that will be forever associated with this festival.
Defined as “a signaling device by which sunlight is reflected in flashes from a movable mirror,” heliograph was another word added to the Phish fan lexicon over the weekend alongside “mondegreen.” The structure literally and figuratively served as a platform for DJs Flying Mojito Bros and Nick Sanborn (Sylvan Esso) to spin post-show—and in Questlove‘s case, pre-show—tracks. For fans, it presented yet another opportunity for communal participation as they climbed the stairs of the sci-fi art-adorned base to a viewing area that became Mondegreen’s hottest club when the sun went down.
The view from atop the Heliograph was filled with ways for fans to interact with Mondegreen. The Bizare Bazaar in a stable-like structure housed various worthy groups like The WaterWheel Foundation and the Phellowship recovery community along with pop-ups by poster artist Jim Pollock, photographer Rene Huemer, Fishman dress designer Lisa Simpson, and JEMP Records. Next to that sat the air-conditioned oasis of Leigh Fordham Hall where fans could become part of the show by competing in Phish trivia contests or get zinged by headlining comedians Gianmarco Soresi, Jordan Jenson, Rory Scovel, and Dave Hill. The Phish community can be insular as it is. When we’re allowed to inhabit our own temporary city, it’s important to have some outsiders come in to remind us how weird we are.
The pinnacle of impermanent interactivity on the festival grounds could be found in the wooded area between the concert field and South GA camping at The Cerealist Bowl. This immersive alcove dropped fans into a surrealist bar scene straight out of Twin Peaks (complete with red curtains). Costumed actors made visitors part of the action: A maid might dust your shoes upon entry. A trumpet-playing reptile might run you down to advise you to convert your assets to Lizard Coin. A golden-crowned Time Keeper might entice you with a mission and reward you with access to her exclusive speakeasy for a sake. Ostensibly, The Cearlist Bowl was a functioning cocktail lounge, though when ordering a Phish-themed “Pitcher of Nectar” beside a man dressed as a swan, it wasn’t certain that your drink would arrive before you awoke from this fever dream.
Though not the most high-tech or high-concept installation, the art piece that stood out most to this writer was the Museum of the Moon. British artist Luke Jerram‘s 2016 piece is a 1:500,000-scale replica of the moon measuring almost 23 feet in diameter. Unlike the Heliograph, there was nothing to climb here, and unlike The Cearlist Bowl, there were no characters or objects to interact with. Instead, passersby were left to marvel at the calming glow of the moon while small dots made the overhanging leaves look like stars and pre-recorded audio played what space sounds like. Without any instruction and acting on pure instinct, the crowd of shuffling gawkers would periodically erupt into animalistic howling—compelled into communal action by the novel wonder in front of them. Nobody asked us to do it. We just did.
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If You Hold The Cardboard & You Turn It To One Side
Constructed at the back of the concert area between the Heliograph and the Bizarre Bazaar, Cardboard City Hall was perhaps the most literal example of Phish fans serving as crucial players in the Mondegreen moment. The project was the brainchild of Olivier Grossetête, whose lifelong interest in the beauty of impermanence (by way of cardboard architecture) squarely overlaps with the ethos of Mondegreen and Phish as a whole.
“It’s not so much the result that’s important as the road to get there,” Grossetête told Mondegreen’s daily newspaper The Daily Greens. “The beauty of human beings lies in their inventiveness and perseverance in making dreams come true…not in what they do with them afterwards! And it’s partly for this reason that my work is ephemeral and that we destroy it afterwards!”
Impermanence is at the core of the jam band experience; the idea that this setlist or that jam will never happen again has driven generations of fans to follow generations of bands across the country. But the allure of being “at that show” isn’t just about bearing witness—it’s about knowing that on some level, however small, you helped give life to the story of something wonderful that happened in the moment and will never happen quite the same way again.
The same could be said for Mondegreen—which, if estimates were correct, became Delaware’s second-largest city overnight with an attendance of around 45,000. Over the course of a week, fans from all over the country and around the globe collectively made a grassy field, some slabs of asphalt, and a highway overpass into a bustling community. We had food, water, a newspaper, a city hall, a 5k, public art, and even a functioning post office. Then, in a matter of days, the city came apart piece by piece like cardboard architecture.
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Take Off Your Mask(ing Tape)
As approaching storms threatened the final day of Mondegreen, organizers elected to tear down City Hall early out of an abundance of caution. At 1 p.m. on Saturday, City Hall was pulled down in a cathartic display of destruction. As it happened before our eyes, the melancholy was unavoidable (and would only become more acute when Phish’s last-minute Sunday matinee proved to be a single-set affair).
In a matter of hours, Mondegreen would be over, the concert area cleared before nightfall in advance of the alleged “storm of the century” which amounted to nothing more than some intermittent showers.
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What goes up must come down #Mondegreen pic.twitter.com/QH5RCZkyz7
— David Stray Ney (@strayney) August 17, 2024
By Monday afternoon, the last stragglers were politely but firmly being shooed from the campgrounds. Phish was long gone, the art installations disassembled, the vendors packed up and readied for the traveling circus’ next stop. While Mondegreen still exists on Google Maps and rumors are already swirling of another festival next year, Mondegreen the physical entity is no longer. It came down, just like City Hall.
But while the walls and halls are all gone, the shared experience we all created still looms large in our group consciousness, where it will long remain. The fact that the whole story of its existence is contained within the blink of a weekend only adds to that significance.
That ephemeral nature has been at the heart of the Phish tradition for the past 40 years, and it has been present through all 11 of the band’s festivals. Each one, from The Clifford Ball through Mondegreen, was something momentary, something that would only happen in that place and at that time. But year after year, Phish and its fans have practiced the process of meeting those moments, actively making them greater than the sum of their parts, and graciously letting them slip away in a flash—all without recycling their defining focal points (well, Cardboard City Hall will be recycled, but in a different way).
Each person who partook in the shared impermanence of Mondegreen—whether you were building City Hall or running in the 5k or climbing the Heliograph or howling at the moon—was as integral to Mondegreen’s magic as each of those cardboard bricks we lifted was to City Hall.
All in all, we were all just bricks in the hall.
Check out a gallery of atmospheric photos from the Mondegreen festival courtesy of photographer Peter Wallace.
The post Sharin’ In The Mondegroove: Thoughts On Active Impermanence At Phish’s Mondegreen Festival [Photos/Videos] appeared first on L4LM.
