Phish gets in on the summer festival fun…and no, we aren’t talking about Bonnaroo?
Update: According to the fine folks over at Hidden Track, while it still remains to be seen whether Phish will have its own festival this summer, it appears the rumors below are no more than the result of an elaborate message board hoax. More as it comes…
Just when you thought Phish’s upcoming summer-reunion-tour-of-epic-Bonnaroo-featuring-proportions couldn’t get any better (see: last week’s new dates), comes news that the best may be yet to come. Thanks to some fine due diligence, stellar Google Earth skills, and a couple phone calls by The Butter Room, it’s now could be time to get excited for…brace yourself…a summer end Phish shindig in the form of a late September music festival in Georgetown, Texas.
The Butter Room points to the cryptic flash animation and accompanying photo on the Phish ticketing website as the basis of the evidence. The image, which features a very green farming area, is reportedly the
location of a small, family owned farm in Georgetown, Texas outside of Austin. We’ll let The Butter Room take it from here…
Calls to Georgetown’s Public Information Office did not verify that Phish will be throwing a festival, but do indicate that a touring band with a substantial following has indicated interest in using the location for a festival in late September. While it certainly is far from confirmed that Phish is playing a season-ending festival, there’s no doubt that the band has always had a playful, humorous nature with their fans when it comes to revealing tour information.
If all this proves to be true, the event would mark the the first Phish festival since Coventry in 2004, which the band recently admitted to the New York Times was “sub par.”
And if this rumor isn’t enough to get Phishnatics all excited inside, there is also speculation that the band will kick of its upcoming summer tour with a performance at Boston’s Fenway Park on May 31st. According to the Boston Globe, “Neither Live Nation nor the band’s rep would confirm” the news. They didn’t deny it either.












That Fenway rumor is stupid. Bring on the festival!
told ya so
all my x’s live in texas
that show at fenway is supposed to be may 31 not march 31 as what the article says
to clarify, it is specifically this sentence that is false: “Calls to Georgetown’s Public Information Office did not verify that Phish will be throwing a festival, but do indicate that a touring band with a substantial following has indicated interest in using the location for a festival in late September.”
that phone call never took place. also, this has been discussed ad nauseum both on PT and in the butterroom’s comment section for the quoted article.
in brighter news, fenway is looking totally legit!
this is not on - or at least there is no reason to think it is.
the phone call referenced in the butter room article never actually happened. user slick76 on phantasytour posted that he had called and spoken to a dept of public info in georgetown, tx, but later came back to renege and admit that he was joking. he never made the call and no public officials commented about a “touring band.”
that phone call was the only reason to think that there is actually anything going on here. take away the phone call and all you’ve got is phish hiring a company with access to a satellite to shoot some amazing video of a giant 09.
the fact that said company uses a satellite positioned over texas, or suggested texas because of clear skies or whatever, has nothing to do with a festival. remember the skywriting in SoCal before the first leg of tour was announced? did it matter that it was in done over anaheim or was that purely logistical?
furthermore, phone calls actually WERE made to the owner of the farm, and all he had to say was that there was definitely not going to be a festival on his land.
sorry to be a spoilsport, but those are the facts.
I looked at this last week when someone brought it up on Jambase and thought it was pretty interesting. Why else would they show this part of Texas? However looking over the surrounding area with Google Earth one must wonder how it could be possible to support that many fans. How could the surrounding roads supports all of the traffic? The piece of land that contains the 09 is not big enough, its bordered by a road on one side and a creek/river on the other. Also Texas in September in HOT as Hell!!
This sounds so legit…except for that whole “Texas” thing.
This will happen.
there is a god
Jun 29th, 2009 at 9:22 am
[...] couple months back rumors popped that Phish would look to cap off this year’s reunion with its very own end-of-summer music festival in Texas. Ultimately, however, they proved to be nothing more than an internet hoax. Fast forward to today, [...]
May 27th, 2009 at 9:05 am
[...] Anastasio, Mike Gordon, Jon Fishman, and Page McConnell be stopping everywhere under the sun, well, aside from the green fields of Texas, in the coming months, but the quartet will also be celebrating a new release, and not just any new [...]