Welcome to the 482nd edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the second puzzle of November. The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of both mystery clips, which are connected by a theme. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Stay safe!

Reminder: For the first MJM of each month, only folks who have never won an MJM are allowed to answer on the blog before the hint. If you have never won an MJM, please answer as a comment below. If you have previously won an MJM, but you'd like to submit a guess before the hint, you may do so by PMing me; once the hint has been posted, everyone should answer on the blog. If that's confusing to you, check out the handy decision tree that I threw together for you. If you're not sure if you've won before, check in the MJM Results spreadsheet linked below.

Welcome to the 481st edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the first of November - shout out to @Zands for the clip! The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Stay safe!

Halloween! It's the 5th most played date in Phish history, trailing just 12/28-31, and perhaps the second most sacred. We go into every show hoping for something unique that we will remember for the rest of our lives, but Halloween and New Years are the only nights where we are promised that something weird will happen.

While one of those nights revolves around midnight and whatever stunt might happen then, All Hallows Eve's focus is on an entire set. It started out straightforward enough. Phish would play an album of a band they loved. During the third one, they decided to create an ode to the release, something to explain why exactly they chose it.

But Phish evolve endlessly. They tried variants of it. We've gone from Phish covering an existing album to debuting a new one to turning a sound effects release into a series of songs to creating an entire fake band complete with back story, and playing as them. The Phishbills morphed from explaining the importance of the album to rock history to surreal flights of fancy. Would they find a way of topping that, or would we see the return of the already beloved tradition of covering a currently existing album? There are still many people would love.

Who could have predicted a show that was made entirely of songs about animals? Many people did, and with last night's show, we finally uncovered the complex equation that reveals Phish's Halloween plans, once and for all. The answer is: they're fucking with us. They are always fucking with us.

If you can believe it, I actually didn't realize that the set was all animal songs until deep into the first set. My excuse is that I was just really into the music, man. But with "The Dogs" opener, clocking in at about nine minutes, we knew we were being subjected to another elaborate plan. The "Ocelot" brought us further into the animal kingdom, and "Turtle in the Clouds" gave us some much needed on-stage choreographed dancing.

By this point in the set, we were wondering if we were going to get another thematic show, with serious improv, like 10/28/21. But on this night, the service was to the bit, the bit led the music, and although we didn't see the levels of improv we saw on the other nights, it gave us a show with 25 songs and 201 minutes of music, and the kind of show you're not likely to see again. And you can always tell, when the band is doing a bit, when they know what's in store and we don't, they absolutely love it. They were relishing it. All night.

The crowd went into night two of the four-night Vegas Halloween run with high expectations. After night one of the run, where the setlist literally went “backwards down the number line," the rumors swirled that there would be another theme---colors? Animals? Fans were caught up in a Lost-like mythology trying to decipher the number 4680, the total of the numbers from the prior night's song selection, in hopes that the band was leaving a trail of breadcrumbs leading to the Halloween surprise. Fitting, since hordes of fans descended on the nearby Meow Wolf, which itself is an augmented reality mystery within a a psychedelic playground.

[Thank you to Phish.net contributor Dianna (@Dianna_2Ns) for this recap. -Ed.]

Last night, Phish treated fans to an absolute delight of a show as they literally went backwards down the number line to kick off their first night of four at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. The band opened the show with some discordant sounds and eventually dropped into “Also Sprach Zarathustra” which was met with massive crowd cheers. This is the first time the band has opened a show with that tune since 9/22/99 at the Pan American Center in Las Cruces, NM. The patience, focus and synergy that would be present throughout the rest of the show was really on display throughout this song, as Trey brought back “LA Woman” teases from last Saturday’s Forum show in addition to throwing in a few “Manteca” teases, as well. This jam starts dirty and stays that way, with Mike heavy in the mix, Fishman driving relentlessly and Page supporting Trey’s wailing with massive synth swells before the drop back into the song. After an impressive sixteen and a half minutes, the band comes to a stop before Trey takes the mic to assure everyone that, “We're not gonna hurt you... We just wanna have some fun…” before an absolutely epic drop into a cover of Prince’s “1999”—only the third time this song has ever been played live and 130 shows since the last time it was played (7/26/17 at Madison Square Garden during the Baker’s Dozen). Similar to 2001, this jam was lengthy and went Type II, with Page taking the reins for a good deal of it backed by fantastic interplay between Mike & Trey. Towards the end of this almost 15 minute spacey jam, Trey just lets loose, sustaining soaring extended notes before the band moves on to “555.”

[Thank you to Phish.net contributor Landon (@nomidwestlove) for this recap. -Ed.]

On Tuesday, October 26^th, 2021 The Phish from Vermont brought their own unique brand of trans-dimensional, intergalactic space funk to the quaint central coastal community of Santa Barbara. The bowl itself, with its dramatic backdrop of the Santa Ynez mountains to the east and a view of the pacific ocean from our seats to the west, seemed to serve as a beacon, perhaps attracting unexplained aerial phenomenon and other sentient extra-terrestrial beings to use their state-of-the-art propulsion systems to hover in the void between the sea and stars.

This band has had plenty of peaks and valleys in their triple decade plus career, but I think they’ve proved with these past few shows, that the ceiling expands far higher into the stratosphere than one could have ever guessed. Yes, way up out there in the cosmos, Phish is providing the soundtrack for this donut-shaped universe.