Best Rock Concert In The Everglades

As South Beach slowly filled with New Year's Eve revelers looking to ring in the millennium underneath a glitter ball, a far more curious spectacle was unfolding deep within the Everglades swamp. There, on a swath of semidry land inside the Seminole Indian Reservation, nearly 80,000 folks from across America...

May 11, 2000

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As South Beach slowly filled with New Year's Eve revelers looking to ring in the millennium underneath a glitter ball, a far more curious spectacle was unfolding deep within the Everglades swamp. There, on a swath of semidry land inside the Seminole Indian Reservation, nearly 80,000 folks from across America converged for an old-fashioned campout-cum-rock fest, complete with an on-site radio station to remind them not to feed the alligators. The soundtrack (and the magnetic draw that saw a virtual city appear overnight on a scrubby field) was the little cult phenomenon that could, Vermont's premier improvisatory neohippie outfit, Phish. While news choppers buzzed overhead and newspaper critics scratched their brows, Phish's devout fans gleefully settled in for two days of Little Feat-style guitar play and whimsical freeform jamming. A Porta Potti even was rolled out onto the stage to enable a midnight-to-dawn uninterrupted set, a supreme test of endurance. After all, what better way was there for a jam band to properly christen the century turnover? Pundits may have argued over the concert's cultural significance and made tiresome Woodstock references, but Phish's flock was much more concerned with boogying.

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