The Lizards
By Trey Anastasio
As performed by Phish
Transcribed by Paul Murin

Whew...this one ended up being harder to tab out than I thought it would be. Actually, this isn't necessarily the most difficult Phish song to play, but it's still one of my all time favorites. It was on the very first live Phish tape I ever owned (Aspen, '91), and the guitar melody toward the end absolutely hooked me. The song is an essential piece of Trey's Gamehendge saga, and is always a phan favorite.

Performance Notes

The verse has a really cool descending chord progression--you can see the bass notes (on the D string) moving down chromatically. Trey used a lot of this kind of thing in his earlier compositions. I didn't notate the rhythm, just the chord voicing--he basically arpeggiates the chords, similar to the intro. Listen to a few versions of the tune to hear exactly how it's played.

The piano solo at section D is open to interpretation--there are a million different ways you could play through the chord progression. I included a bunch of suggestions for chord voicings--they are toward the bottom of the page. I wrote out four groups of four voicings that sound good together, but you can mix and match any way you want. I can make two suggestions that work for me: first, keep your voicings grouped together in the same vicinity on the neck of the guitar, and move your voicings upward gradually as the energy of the solo builds up. Second, experiment with some common tones through all four chords--C natural, D natural, and G natural all work in all four of the chords, so if you can find a way to work one of these notes into all four chords right in a row, you can come up with some interesting stuff.

The guitar lick that comes in at the end of the piano solo is one of my all-time favorite "signature Trey licks". It is the same technique he uses in the guitar solo in "Rift", and he sometimes uses it at the end of the "Antelope" jam (when it double-times), and elsewhere too. It is a pattern that consistes of a note picked twice on one string (first note picked downward, second note picked upward), a pull-off, and a noted picked with an upstroke on the string below. With practice you can get this going pretty fast.

As this lick climbs up, there is a clear pattern that emerges. It's hard to describe the pattern; just play through it and hopefully you'll see what I mean. It's actually pretty strange, not to mention really freakin' cool, how this pattern corresponds to the chord progression. It's worth noting that the pattern always stays the same when the chord switches from Gm7 to Bbmaj7--and it's no coincidence that these chords are relative minor/major.

The guitar melody at section E, as I said before, is one of the first things I heard by Phish that really caught my ear. It's actually pretty easy, you can do about 90% of it all in one position. It's a good study of the things that make up a good melody--lots of rhythmic subtelty and freedom (triplets, dotted notes), and a variety of intervals (not just going up and down a scale).