First and foremost I want to thank everyone for reading along as I worked my way through the Fall 1996 Tour. While a lot of this was a personal journey in reconnecting with an important time in my life with Phish it was nice to see that folks were enjoying the reminisce themselves. Over the years this band has given us seemingly countless moments of eternal joy and splendor and it is often rewarding to go back and touch that feeling by recollecting what we can of those times. I have yet to decide what tour I might tackle next but I am enjoying this here three tours in and want to continue. So read along if you so choose; I’ll be here slinging bad prose and questionable takes on this wonderfully strange band that we cannot seem to stop following.

Now on to the puzzle!

I had never built my own crossword puzzle before but as a person who completes them at an unhealthy level of obsession I felt like it would be a fun thing to try and a neat way to kind of recap this tour review. There are some websites out there that help you build a puzzle without too much heavy lifting, mainly relying on you for the clues/answers with the format and structure being constructed by their program. So as I went along the tour I kept track of things that might make good crossword clues/answers and by the end of it I had a pretty healthy list of stuff to work with in putting it all together. I checked these clues more than once yet somehow seemed to miss a couple of things but based on the submissions I received it appears that my minor mistakes didn’t derail people too much in getting this figured out. Here now I post for you the answer key with the following notes regarding the ones that have been found to be not completely correct or somewhat misleading in some way:

34 Down – Clue says the answer was an encore in 4/5 times played but it was actually only two of the five (Johnny B Good, “JBG” in crossword)

50 Down – The clue is stated correctly but I misspelled the answer as “LEE” when it should be “LEIGH” as the then Lighting Tech’s name is Leigh Fordham which we would all become a lot more familiar with once the song 46 Days was written and performed

76 Across – Clue says the answer was played thrice but it was actually performed eight times (ACDC Bag, “BAG” in crossword)

Clearly, I need to hire a new proofreader because the one I have (me) kinda stinks at it…

The Answers!

So how did you do? Admittedly, there are more than a few clues here that aren’t ones you might know off the top of your head without having either read my posts pretty closely or by using outside resources like PhishStats or all of the tracking information on phish.net but that’s totally fine by me as i think that is a part of how we digest Phish in this day and age.

I ended up getting seven complete or mostly complete entries for the contest and after checking them all I had three that were complete and 100% correct. From there I used the randomizing services of my in house accounting firm “Twin Two Year Olds, Ltd.” who monitored the proceedings and helped with the picking out of the hat for our winner. And that winner is…

Ari Metz! 

Congratulations, Ari, you will be receiving an email shortly from LivePhish with the Gift Certificate code for you to use in getting yourself a download.

Thanks again for all who submitted entries and for all of you who have been reading along. Let’s enjoy the weekend at Dick’s and then maybe y’all can help me figure out which tour to dive into as we head into the Fall…