"The Lizards" is the linchpin of the Gamehendge saga. Nearly every disparate element of
The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday was made to cohere into a single, multifaceted narrative in “Lizards.” When Trey finally began to write and re-work songs into a storytelling cycle in 1987, he already had four narrative elements waiting to be used –
Tom Marshall’s poem “
McGrupp and the Watchful Hosemasters,” Tom and Aaron Woolf’s joke song “
Wilson, Can You Still Have Fun?” and Trey’s and Jeff Holdsworth’s own compositions for Phish, “
AC/DC Bag” and “
Possum,” respectively.
For his
senior study at
Goddard College, Trey constructed a musical that would cover diverse compositional ground over its continuous narrative. Sensing the potential of these four elements for an epic tale, Trey began to work on the story, extrapolating characters, ideas, and situations from the existing lyrics, trying to fit them into a cohesive storyline. The first fruit reaped from this harvest was “The Lizards.”
“The Lizards” contains a lengthy narrative that describes Colonel Forbin’s entrance into the land of Gamehendge and his encounter with Rutherford the Brave, a knight errant. Rutherford explains the sad history of the Lizards and their subjugation by the evil King Wilson, who keeps them in check by preventing them from gaining access to the
Helping Friendly Book, the sacred tome of Icculus, their god. In a state of overzealous fervor while engaging the Colonel’s promise to help, Rutherford jumps into a river and sinks, forgetting that he was encased in metal armor. As the story goes, Tela and the Unit-Monster show up just in time to save Rutherford from the watery peril, and Colonel Forbin is thus introduced to the land and inhabitants of Gamehendge.