Phish's New Year's Eve Festival Attracts 80,000 Fans

Phish drew a largely trouble-free crowd of about 80,000 people--many of whom endured 12 hours or more in a horrendous traffic back-up on Interstate 75--to Florida's Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation over the holiday weekend for the band's fourth concert/campout event in four years.

According to reports from Big Cypress, Phish opened the two-day festival with three sets on Dec. 30, then played an afternoon set on Dec. 31. The band capped the event with a performance that opened as the new year began at midnight and ended with the sunrise more than seven hours later. In all, the Phish reportedly clocked in with about 14 hours onstage.

After each set, the band made selected songs available as MP3 downloads via its official website. The six tracks, priced at $1 each, will be available for download through Jan. 10.

Like the band's previous camping events, the New Year's show required the construction of a temporary ''village,'' featuring food and merchandise vendors. A crew of about 1,000 was required to build and staff the site for the five days that it operated. The carnival-like setting included Ferris wheels and hot air balloons.

The $175 tickets to the event were sold out before the gates opened, according to event organizer Great Northeast Productions. Though organizers said that tickets wouldn't be sold at the site, a spokesperson told the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel that tickets were sold to a handful of fans who braved the traffic without tickets.

Motorists, including many unsuspecting residents of the region, became ensnared in a 10-mile back-up on the portion of I-75 known as Alligator Alley on Wednesday and Thursday as fans made their way from the four-lane highway to the two-lane road which took them to the Indian reservation. One man was killed on his way to the concert when he fell off of the side doorstep of a mobile home and was run over. The Naples Daily News reported that there were no traffic jams as fans exited the concert site on Saturday afternoon, and that the roads were back to normal by Sunday.

There were only a few reports of problems from reservation police and concert staff: one event employee suffered minor injuries when a group beat him up while stealing his golf cart; about 1,200 people were treated for minor injuries like dehydration, asthma, cuts and blisters; a dozen people were treated and released after suffering drug overdoses.

The Florida event marked the fourth consecutive year that Phish has hosted a multi-day festival, a tradition that started with The Clifford Ball in 1996. That event, held on a former Air Force base in Plattsburgh, N.Y., drew an estimated 75,000 fans.

In 1997 and 1998, similar massive events called ''The Great Went'' and ''Lemonwheel'' took place in Limestone, Maine. The positive impact of those events on the state's economy was applauded by economists, neighbors of the event site and politicians. The band and its management produced all of the events with Massachusetts-based Great Northeast Productions.