In celebration of Phish's 13-show run at Madison Square Garden, the Mockingbird Foundation is announcing 13 unsolicited "miracle grants" supporting music programs across the country. Each board member identified their favorite Phish show, and we found a worthy music education program nearby, part of the Foundation's long-standing Tour Grants program. We're presenting these 13 special grants chronologically, based on the dates of those favorited shows. Following #1, #2, and #3, here's #4...

Ah, 1994 - a truly joyous time to be a Phish fan! The band was bursting at the seams with inspiration, innovation and raw talent...touring incessantly while blowing minds and melting faces on a daily basis. And the fan base was expanding exponentially, many of us sharing our amazement, excitement, tales and friendship with each other via the developing Internet - r.m.p., IRC, post-show run to the pay phone to call Ellis with the setlist, sign up for the tape trees to get last month’s tapes (always saving the MaxPoints!).

As a university student in Santa Cruz I did what I could to get to as many shows as possible, mainly on the West Coast. For my summer tour, that meant seven shows in May, wrapping up with five straight days of Phish - three at the Warfield, followed by two headlining shows in Monterey at the incredible Laguna Seca Daze festival. What a run - the Warfield curtain opening to a monster "Curtain"...a screaming debut of "Simple" melting into a Puccini opera...thousands of boxes of mac and cheese (“shake shake shake when you hear the drum break!”)...Les Claypool dropping hands and jaw as Fish rips on the Electrolux...then a final show under the Monterey sun - my first up close on the rail - with the band so amped to just keep on playing that they dropped a six-song double encore. Nobody wanted to stop, and I knew I needed more more more!

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