via Getty images / Taco Bell
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.
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:
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.
So why was it removed from the Taco Bell menu?
Unlike modern fast food items that get canceled because of supply chain issues or viral TikTok boycotts, the Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito was simply a victim of its era. In the ’90s, a Limited Time Offer (LTO) actually meant limited time. It was a promotional stunt meant to burn bright and fade away. There was no social media for Taco Bell loyalists to express their unhinged outrage over a menu rug-pull. We didn’t have the digital infrastructure to bully a multi-billion-dollar corporation into submission like the modern Mexican Pizza resistance did, which ultimately forced the restaurant to cave. Instead, the BCBB quietly disappeared, and Taco Bell permanently removed all pork products from the menu, building a 30-year groundswell of agonizing, latent demand.
Plus, fast-food historians will quietly tell you that maintaining the structural integrity of crispy bacon inside a soggy burrito matrix back in ’95 was a culinary nightmare. It flew too close to the sun, broke the boundaries of ’90s fast-food physics, and vanished.
Some excellent Phish Sphere visuals trolling here. Of *all* the discontinued menu items the Gen Xers in Phish could think of, they choose the Taco Bell Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito from… 1995! pic.twitter.com/LLT6enMA7v
— brandon wenerd (@brandonwenerd) April 18, 2026
But Phish knows the exact same truth the internet always proves. Nothing truly dies.
There is a thriving, desperate, and fiercely loyal Facebook group called “Bring back the Bacon-Cheeseburger Burrito TACO BELL!!” boasting over 1.1K followers who treat this discontinued wrap like the Holy Grail. It operates less like a fan club and more like a revolutionary militia. That vibe skyrocketed after they suffered a devastating blow last year.
When Taco Bell rolled out its highly anticipated nostalgic “Y2K Menu” in 2025, the BCBB Army thought their time had finally come. Instead, they were completely snubbed. The betrayal ran deep. As one group member named Doug noted, “At this point, their refusal to put it back on the menu seems like spite.”
This isn’t their first failed rodeo with Taco Bell corporate, either. Back in 2022, when Taco Bell launched a fan vote between the Enchirito and the Double Decker Taco, the group attempted a full-blown guerrilla write-in campaign for the BCBB. They flooded the app. As member Nicole flawlessly argued against the Enchirito: “there are more members for the bacon cheeseburger than the stupid enchurrito why is that even a contender? you cant even eat it in a car while driving 80mph on the freeway.” When the write-in failed, desperation set in, with one member frantically asking, “Do we need to get Dolly Parton involved???”
The nostalgia and Internet hype for the Taco Bell Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito doesn’t stop on the Zuckerberg apps. There is an active Change.org petition with over 500 signatures filled with patriots like Jennifer, who openly admits to harassing local managers about the burrito and asks if corporate is “scared to keep making money from the sales.”
And if you venture into the grease-stained battlegrounds of Reddit’s r/TacoBell and other associated sub-Reddits, you will find no less than a dozen separate threads acting as impromptu support groups. One user perfectly captured the tragic devotion of the movement with a hauntingly poetic vow: “I’ll wait until stars burn out.” But the absolute pinnacle of BCBB worship came from a Reddit thread seven years ago, where user latentprophecy penned an absolute masterpiece of fast-food fan fiction. After praising the “sweet n’ smoky sauce,” they described their ultimate afterlife scenario: “When I do die, I hope to walk into heaven’s kitchen and see Jesus standing there. He’s just finished wrapping up a bacon cheeseburger burrito just for me… I bite in, and sauce gushes into my mouth. My pupils dilate, and suddenly all knowledge is available to me.”
Yes, we are talking about a burrito, and yes, this person believes a single bite of it will unlock the secrets of the universe. To be fair, that is exactly what I believe happens when a 25-minute jam devolves into abstract alien beeps, as Phish’s heavy-hitting 23-minute “Light” jam at the Sphere did. Toss in some dissonant ambient noise and weird synthesizer boops that sound like a blender with a fork stuck in it fighting a J.J. Abrams-inspired cartoon spaceship, and you get the exact same spiritual awakening.
The discourse on these pages is nothing short of spectacular, literally causing a fast-food Mandela Effect. Some people admit to facing marital strife over it: “It’s been so long my wife doesn’t remember it to the point where she’s accused me of making it up!” Others are willing to completely abandon their morals for a taste of the 90s. One woman named Amy confessed, “I don’t even eat meat anymore but I would if they brought back the BCBB!”
That’s how much people loved the Taco Bell Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito.
The worlds have officially collided. Just days ago, a group member ironically named Jerome G. dropped a photo of the Phish Sphere visual directly into the Facebook feed. This caused a massive collective “OMG… my people” realization among the members.
via Jerome Garcia
By projecting this hyper-niche 1995 artifact onto the Las Vegas Sphere, Phish blew the dog whistle for a 30-year-old fast-food resistance movement.
The ball is entirely in Taco Bell’s court now.
A legendary band just gave your most obscure discontinued item free real estate on a $2.3 billion screen.
I will reach out to Taco Bell’s PR for an official comment. The people and Phish both demand to know: Is it time for the Sizzlin’ Bacon Menu to ride again, much like the Taco Bell Beefy Crunch Burrito? Or is it really in it’s grave forever-ever?
I honestly have no idea how corporate will respond. Maybe we’ll get a canned PR non-answer about “always exploring new menu innovations,” or maybe they’ll actually take the hint. Who knows?
How to Hack The Taco Bell Menu and Make Your Own Bacon Cheeseburger Burrito
But until the Bell officially answers our prayers, we don’t have to sit around and wait. Because corporate hasn’t commercially bottled the nectar of the gods quite yet, we must take matters into our own hands.
Thanks to BCBB Army culinary hacker Brian, the code for the legendary “smoky sauce” has finally been cracked.
Here is the official bootleg recipe to recreate the 1995 magic today:
- Step 1, The Sauce: Mix Kraft Original BBQ Sauce and Kraft Ranch with Bacon Dressing. Start with heavy BBQ and mix in the ranch until the concoction turns a radioactive 90s orange.
- Step 2, The Base: Go to Taco Bell and order a Burrito Supreme. Tell them to remove the sour cream, beans, and red sauce.
- Step 3, The Bacon: You can fry up your own chopped bacon at home, or, if you’re a true drive-thru degenerate, hit Taco Bell exactly as breakfast transitions to lunch and beg them to throw some leftover breakfast bacon inside your wrap.
- Step 4, The Assembly: Take it home, unfold the burrito, generously apply the bootleg orange sauce, add your bacon, wrap it back up, and welcome back to 1995.
I can’t wait to try it myself.