In July of 1973, The Grateful Dead, The Band, and The Allman Brothers played a single-day concert at the massive Watkins Glen International raceway in the Finger Lakes. Promoter Bill Graham had no trouble selling out the 150,000 tickets at $10 a pop, but then another 450,000 hippies crashed the party, causing epic traffic jams and completely overwhelming the scenic lakeside town of Watkins Glen in numbers that surpassed Woodstock. And so for decades rock n roll was banished from the renowned racetrack—until this weekend, when Vermont quartet Phish drew an intimate gathering of 30,000 for three days of music, art, and jubilantly conspicuous consumption.

"We're glad you could make it to the party," frontman Trey Anastasio told those assembled for the first set of eight during the course of three days packed with cover songs. Phish has more than enough original material to fill a three day weekend on their own, but the abundance of covers seemed like a gesture of inclusiveness to the festival crowd. If any newcomers were bewildered by the death-metal pyrotechnics of Phish's "Big Black Furry Creatures from Mars" or their surprise late-night set inside a storage unit (more on that below), they didn't have to wait long for familiar songs like the Stones' "Loving Cup" or Zeppelin's "No Quarter" to sing along with. Other covers included:

  • AC/DC ("Big Balls")
  • Ween ("Roses are Free")
  • David Bowie ("Life on Mars")
  • Frank Zappa ("Peaches en Regalia")
  • Little Feat ("Time Loves a Hero")
  • Bob Dylan ("The Mighty Quinn")
  • Talking Heads ("Cities," "Crosseyed and Painless")
  • The Beatles ("A Day in the Life")
  • The Rolling Stones ("Monkey Man," "Loving Cup," "Torn and Frayed")
  • TV on the Radio ("Golden Age")

That's right, the perpetually unfashionable Phish covered a song by Williamsburg's indie hipster mascots (and not for the first time, either). Because their fanbase includes a number of burnout refugees from the Grateful Dead kingdom, Phish has often been shrugged off as derivative carriers of the Dead legacy (N.B.: not a single Dead cover all weekend—nor anything by The Band or The Allman Brothers for that matter, which is a pity because Phish used to do a blistering cover of "Whippin' Post.") As Ross Simonini puts it in his excellent interview with Anastasio in The Believer: "...while the audiences may overlap, the band’s music bears little similarity to the bluegrass rock of the Dead or the electro-psychedelic “livetronica” style that dominates the current jam-band culture."

For a band that's shared the stage with everyone from Jay-Z to Kid Rock and soaked up influences from every genre of music ranging from barber shop to Afrobeat, covering TV on the Radio is nothing radical. Phish's take on "Golden Age" sounded as groovy as a version of that song can be without Kyp Malone's distinctive vox. It also called to mind the growing backlash to the backlash against Phish: last year Pitchfork critic Rob Mitchum "outed" himself as a Phish fan, and you can even hear Phish sprinkled in on playlists at Williamsburg coffeeshops. Now The Believer is taking Phish seriously? Up next: American Apparel patch pants.

Phish - 7/2/2011 "Tube" from Phish on Vimeo.

To their credit, the four forty-something guys in Phish never seem to care about the latest styles, and neither do their infamously hard-partying fans, who are more diverse than they appear at first glance (setting aside, obviously, their near uniform whiteness). While it's true we very nearly got mauled in the campgrounds by some degenerate drug lord's pit bull, the majority of those in attendance were not the stereotypical tweaked out Trustafarians so often lampooned in the media. For every inebriated kid in a tie dye collapsing face-first on the grass (we observed over a dozen in three days), there were plenty of other ostensibly functioning members of society who simply love to rock. (There is also a large contingent of sober fans who gather together during Phish shows for support.)

Phish has never denied their role as preeminent American party band, but since they reunited two years ago after a supposedly definitive breakup, they've been playing sober, which makes Phish essentially the highest grossing straight edge rock band in history. It shows. Despite some laughably minor flubs in a few complicated transitions, the band's playing is astonishingly tight, and this weekend found them at the height of their powers. There was the goofy (a song about "taking out the meatstick," with synchronized dance moves and Japanese lyrics), the soulful ("Backwards Down the Number Line," an unabashedly heartfelt tune that was the first song written when they reunited), the sublime (the instrumental sections of some songs like "Simple" resolved into a minimalist soundscape that felt like a seance), and the raucous ("Axilla," the greatest rock song ever written about the armpit, and "Suzy Greenberg," arguably the best bitter breakup song named after an actual person—first line: "Little Suzy Greenberg with her head caved in...").

Despite the vast size of the grounds and the tens of thousands of debauched campers, the three day event was remarkably comfortable, with free showers in every campground and even modern plumbing. Fresh ice was delivered by golf cart to tents throughout the campgrounds all weekend, there were plenty of refillable water stations and recycling areas, and a healthy variety of food vendors sold everything from Philly cheesesteaks to vegan pad Thai. Hundreds participated in a morning 5K race on the famous track (the winners collected their trophies in an onstage ceremony), thousands of copies of a daily newspaper covering the festival were distributed for free each morning, there was whiffle ball and Bocce on the lawn, and every set featured sign language for the hearing impaired in a special handicapped section. The mass concert experience has come a long way since 1973, thanks largely to Phish, who blazed the trail with their first camping festival in 1996, a two-day affair at an airport in upstate New York that influenced Bonnaroo and Cochella.

Like previous Phish festivals, "Superball IX" (it was the band's ninth multi-day festival) also included surreal art installations and performances throughout the concert grounds. Sculptor Lars Fisk and Vermont builder Russ Bennett designed installations alluding to America's history as seen through a psychedelic lens, with a pregnant Abraham Lincoln, an Industrial Revolution-era factory churning out cardboard bull masks for a "Super Bull Run" performance, and a giant silver ball signifying an optimistic yet unclear future. Around 2 a.m. on Saturday night, the band played an unannounced set inside an art installation/storage center (video below). Seen only in silhouette through translucent glass, the exploratory, (mostly) instrumental set continued a tradition of surprise festival performances, such as the time Phish played on the back of a flatbed truck while driving through the campsite in the dead of night, or their jam on top of an air control tower with dancers repelling off the sides.

The whole enthralling circus was blessed with perfect weather and an exquisitely idyllic locale, which could be seen in full from atop the big Ferris Wheel Phish brought in for the occasion. In a moment that perfectly encapsulates Anastasio's wicked sense of humor, one solitary Ferris Wheel occupant became the center of attention on Friday night when Anastasio shouted a hello to "the guy by himself" sitting in the top gondola. The unidentified man waved, and 30,000 people in the crowd cheered and waved back, at which point Anastasio laughingly yelled, "Now jump!... JUMP for our entertainment!" Fortunately, the guy declined the request, proving that you don't need falling hippies to enjoy a Phish concert... maybe just to enhance it.