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explained Trey Anastasio, Phish’s guitarist and nominal leader. “I wanted us to be able to play at all different times of the day at one concert to capture all those different moods.”
    He likened Phish’s Saturday afternoon opening set to his daily wake-up ritual of putting on a pot of coffee and a bluegrass record. And so, on Saturday, the members of Phish got up, drank their coffee, and began picking a bluegrass tune, “The Old Home Place.” A happy, howling crowd fanned outward from the stage to the distant campground as far as the eye could see.
    Over the course of the weekend, Phish performed for roughly nine hours without repeating a song. As if that weren’t enough, Phish literally
went the extra mile and played an unannounced jam at 4 A.M. on Saturday. For this, they were drawn through the campground on a flatbed truck. Astonished Phishheads bolted out of their tents and wordlessly joined the swelling, Pied Piper-like procession. This side trip was the musical highlight of the Clifford Ball for Gordon, who felt he’d approach his goal of “bridging the gap between playing music and dreaming.”
    The festival was named after Clifford Ball, the man who pioneered the idea of air-mail delivery. While passing through the Pittsburgh airport some years earlier, Phish had noticed a commemorative plaque describing Ball as “A Beacon of Light in the World of Flight.” They first used the phrase on A Live One , their 1994 double-disc concert compendium, which bore the notation “Recorded live at the Clifford Ball.” Phish even suggested Clifford Ball as a festival name to Blues Traveler’s John Popper, who instead went with H.O.R.D.E. (“Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere”) for the jam-band tour he organized. So the Clifford Ball went from A Live One ’s make-believe ballroom to Phish’s (sur)real-life festival, the first of a eight weekend campouts they have hosted in isolated places.
    As befits an event named for an aviation pioneer and held on an Air Force base, planes and aeronautics were a recurring motif. During the festival Phish arranged for flybys from F-14s, biplanes, and stunt planes. Prop planes trailed banners like those you’d see at the beach or ballpark, but the messages ran to Dadaist philosophy (“Hopeless Has Exceptions”) and bizarro-world humor (“Running Low on Fuel—No Joke,” with a stunt pilot sputtering his plane in the sky).
    There was even more to see in the sky at the Clifford Ball. An acrobat did gymnastic flips and twirled on circus ropes while Phish played “Run Like an Antelope.” On Friday, they launched into “The Divided Sky” as the setting late-summer sun colored half the sky a rosy orange and the other a darkening indigo. They dusted off a faithful version of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars”—a timely nod to headline-making revelations from NASA’s Mariner spacecraft that there might indeed
be life on the red planet. A fireworks display painted the heavens as Phish played “Harpua” at the close of Friday night’s set.
    Leaving no stone unturned, Phish even invited a relative of Clifford Ball—a grandson of the old gent—to attend as their guest. I spoke to him for a while, and he professed awe both at the event and his invitation to participate. Ben and Jerry—who are to ice cream as Phish is to music, with both entities calling Burlington, Vermont, home—made a cameo appearance onstage. “Phish Food” would soon be introduced as Ben and Jerry’s newest flavor, joining Cherry Garcia in the realm of frozen musical tributes.
    The only other musical act that appeared onstage at the Clifford Ball was the Plattsburgh Community Orchestra. They played soothing, impressionistic works by Debussy and Ravel late Saturday afternoon. While the orchestra cooled the crowd with Debussy’s “Nocturnes,” a glider accompanied the orchestra with an aerial ballet.
    Phish even operated a completely licensed, fully functioning, FCCLICENSED radio station