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(“Clifford Ball Radio,” 88.9 FM) twenty-four hours a day during the festival. Deejays played everything from hip-hop to Iggy Pop and conducted off-the-wall interviews with characters like Fred Tuttler, a retired dairy farmer from Vermont. (Q: “Which is better, Jersey milk or Holstein milk?”) Anastasio dropped by to cue up favorite discs by Pavement and bands that had influenced them. Kevin Shapiro delved into Phish’s live vault for his “From the Archives” radio show.
    The massive audience for Phish’s sets fanned outward toward the runway. They throbbed to the music like a single organism. Onstage, Phish was arrayed in a straight line—from left to right, McConnell, Anastasio, Gordon, and Fishman—the customary formation for much of their existence. From a platform on the scaffolding to the side of the stage, I could clearly see the expressions on the musicians’ faces, somewhere between concentration and rapture. Anastasio flashed smiles at the others as he counted off each number with rhythmic downstrokes on his guitar.

    The Clifford Ball represented a mid-career peak for Phish. At the end of what had been an atypically abbreviated summer tour of the States—owing to the fact they had been touring in Europe—attendance at their first festival was twice the size of the largest audience for whom they’d previously played. That prior milestone had occurred barely a week earlier, when 35,000 turned out to see Phish at Wisconsin’s Alpine Valley outdoor venue on August 10, 1996. According to Pollstar , the Clifford Ball was the largest concert in North America in 1996.
    More than a triumph of numbers, the Clifford Ball stood as a feat of imagination and logistics, driven by a desire to entertain and inspire fans that almost seemed antiquarian in its total indifference to the bottom line. In fact, the idea was to provide an experience that money couldn’t buy. The band members themselves emerged from the event as agog as the audience. That was because the denizens of Phish Nation, much like the throng at the original Woodstock Festival, behaved as a relaxed, peaceable, and self-regulating body. There was one wedding, one death (by drug overdose), and just a handful of arrests among the blissed-out crowd. The only complaints weren’t about brown acid but green grasshoppers, which infested the campground.
    “It felt like so much more than just a big concert with 70,000 people,” Anastasio reflected a few weeks later. “It felt like some kind of exciting new thing. We did as much of it as we could, but most of the feeling came from the way people were. That’s the part I couldn’t have anticipated and that just kept blowing me away.”
    It was all about peaceful coexistence and phenomenal music, and it was Phish that imagined it into being. Those three days at the Clifford Ball were unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was as close to an Edenic scene of peace, love, and musical bliss as I’ve ever experienced, and many who were on hand echo that sentiment. The memory of that weekend remains as hopeful evidence that even in this politically muddied, corporately hog-tied, culturally degraded, and violence-wracked world, something approaching utopia still is possible.
    No one who was there will ever forget it.

IV
August 2004: Bottoming Out in Coventry
    This was surreal, too, albeit for very different reasons than the Clifford Ball.
    For one thing, this was the end. Phish’s last hurrah. They’d announced that they were breaking up, and the village of Coventry, Vermont, was the site of their final concerts.
    It had been raining for days. Rain fell in relentless sheets that turned the land in and around the sylvan village of Coventry into the world’s biggest mud puddle. In Vermont, they call this time of year “mud season.” The timing couldn’t have been worse, as an army of Phishheads—estimated with remarkable imprecision between 25,000 and 70,000—were descending upon a small state airport