Phish just returned to the Las Vegas Sphere for their first run of 2025, and as expected, the world of improvisational rock has been set ablaze by 16K visuals and 40 years of baked-in lore.

There’s a lot to be said and written about the run, but one specific moment stood out to me. I was fully prepared for the towering visual absurdity and the 30-minute exploratory jams. What I was not prepared for was my obsession with jam band setlists to violently collide with my other incredibly niche personality trait: mourning discontinued ’90s fast food.

Attending a Phish show requires a very specific headspace and hyper-vigilance. You have to lock into the microscopic details to catch the decades-deep lore and inside jokes that make Vermont’s premiere jam band the most endearing, quirky live act in American cultural history. Unpacking a Phish show requires alertness, a sort of sixth sense of being on your toes. It demands a certain musical literacy, usually acquired from years of listening, show-going, and internet forum participation. You need an innate understanding of a backstory that’s been cooking for over 40 years. Usually, it’s a sly musical tease or an obscure lyrical riff.

But at the Las Vegas Sphere, those Easter eggs are projected fifty stories high in mind-bending 16K resolution, completely surrounding you while haptic seats vibrate to the greatest sound system on earth.

I’ve clocked around 150 Phish shows over the last 26 years, so I had a pretty good idea of what to expect from this run: the completely unexpected. As the undisputed heavyweight champions of Madison Square Garden, it makes perfect sense that Phish is tight enough with MSG boss James Dolan to help pioneer this billion-dollar, wildly immersive new era of live entertainment. Sure, the self-appointed internet cool crowd loves to roll their eyes with exhausted hot takes and “cultural karenification.” But let’s be honest. These are the exact fun-sponges who actively hate amusement parks, cruises, and Medieval Times. But we know exactly what this is: a low-stakes cultural spectacle built on pure, unadulterated whimsy. We Phish fans know we’re big old dorks. We are essentially musical Renaissance Faire actors, and we completely, unapologetically own it.

When you have a $2.3 billion, 160,000-square-foot wraparound LED canvas at your disposal, you can project literally anything into the retinas of 18,000 Phish fans. And the band absolutely delivered on the mind-melting visuals. We got galaxies colliding. Fractals melting. Paint smears gradually dancing during “Bathtub Gin.” An eight-bit video game during “Suzy Greenberg.” An eagle family soaring during “Sigma Oasis.” Bubble-gum claymation during “Split, Open, and Melt.” Light shows in the woods. A trip through the human body during “Tweezer” that started at a dentist’s office. A hot dog traveling through a galaxy of snacks and space during Phish’s “2001” funk odyssey before ending up at Planet Glizzy, complete with a Shai-Hulud inspired hot dog sand worm reference.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DXOXHrCj5Mb/

But what do the magnificent, trolling bastards in Phish do? They use the most technologically advanced venue in human history to drop a visual Easter Egg for a long-ago-discontinued Taco Bell menu item from the Clinton administration.

It happened during Friday night’s first set, the second show of the nine-show 2026 Vegas run. The band launched into “Martian Monster,” a funky track born from their legendary 2014 Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House Halloween show.

The massive Las Vegas Sphere screen transformed into a massive, spooky, gargoyle-guarded mansion ripped straight from the cover of that classic vintage Disney Halloween sound effects album. As the jam locked in, the visuals panned across a digital graveyard filled with tombstones, each one acting as a hilarious final resting place for obscure band lore.

One tombstone marked the death of “six seven.” Another declared the rarely-played Phish song “Sing Monica” had finally been put in its grave.

And then, there it was on the left. I am a 40-year-old millennial ‘90s kid, but of all the deep-cut, Gen X nostalgia Trey and the boys could have etched into a fifty-foot digital headstone, they chose the Taco Bell Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito.

If you just muttered, “The what?”, you aren’t alone.

Let’s rewind to 1995. Gas was $1.15, making it quite affordable for college-age Gen Xers to follow Phish by slinging grilled cheeses on a Coleman stove in the parking lot. The internet made a dial tone sound to log setlists on Phish.net. And Taco Bell unleashed the “Sizzlin’ Bacon Menu.” Alongside forgotten relics like the B.L.T. Soft Taco and the Chicken Club Burrito, the Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito was born.

The Taco Bell Sizzlin’ Bacon Menu was exactly what it sounded like: seasoned beef, bacon, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, and one mythical, utterly crave-able “smoky sauce” acting as the pièce de résistance. All of this was beautifully wrapped in a warm flour tortilla. It was Taco Bell’s middle finger to the traditional burger joints during the peak of the mid-90s fast-food bacon arms race. While Wendy’s was hooking a generation of latchkey kids on the Junior Bacon Cheeseburger and Burger King was pumping out Bacon Double Cheeseburgers by the millions, the Bell decided to bypass the bun entirely and wrap all that greasy, artery-clogging Americana in a tortilla.

To fully grasp how hard Taco Bell was pushing this thing, you have to look at the marketing budget. The promotion for the Taco Bell Bacon Cheersburger Burrito started heavily in 1995:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPfJyzD8B2Y

Then things snowballed as its popularity soared.To fully grasp how hard Taco Bell was pushing this thing, you have to look at the marketing budget. They rolled out a national commercial in 1996 that looked like an NFL Hall of Fame gala. This was right before corporate ripped the menu from our hands forever. They had Chris Berman and Howie Long leading a high-profile crew that featured legendary Buffalo Bills coach Marv Levy, Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus, and Bubba Smith. Even Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer made the cut. All of them were in full black-tie formal wear. They were dining on Bacon Cheeseburger Burritos like they were eating beluga caviar at a white table-cloth Michelin-star restaurant.

It was peak 90s sports-meets-fast food culture absurdity… and pricing. The end card on the commercial boasted that the menu started at $.99. Of course, true fast-food high rollers knew the Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito itself set you back a steep $1.79.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYnsR-0ulPQ

So why was it removed from the Taco Bell menu?

Unlike modern fast...

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