This is how it felt to be Phish, onstage for the first time in four and a half years, as they hit the twisted riffing and shout–along chorus of "Fluffhead" just before 8 p.m. on March 6th, at Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia: "The crowd was so loud I could not hear myself," keyboard player Page McConnell said later, still awestruck. "It was incredible." Bassist Mike Gordon confessed that he was nervous before showtime, mostly about "the 18,000 notes I had to memorize." Drummer Jon Fishman was "prepared, but I felt we had something to prove," he said the next day, riding to soundcheck for the second show. "Our band had driven itself into a ditch. We had to establish credibility with people again."

Phish's leader, singer–guitarist Trey Anastasio, just "felt grateful" that night. "I've been doing a lot of thinking and changing over the years," he explains over coffee at his hotel before the March 8th show. He is referring to his arrest in December 2006 in Washington County, New York, for criminal possession of drugs and his subsequent 14–month period of drug treatment and community service there, completed last year. "I do a little prayer before I go onstage," says Anastasio, who is sober now. "I hope I can be of service to someone out there who is having a bad day. When I hear everyone so happy, I feel great, that for those three hours, people are just going to float."

The three Hampton concerts marked yet another beginning for the band, which formed in Burlington, Vermont, in 1983, returned from a two–year hiatus at the end of 2002, then officially broke up in 2004, exhausted by touring and the strain of Anastasio's substance abuse. Phish start recording a new album in April with U2 producer Steve Lillywhite (he worked on Phish's 1996 album, Billy Breathes), and they resume touring in June, including two headlining nights at Bonnaroo. But the nearly 12 hours of music and 84 different songs they played in Hampton — after five weeks' rehearsal that started last fall — also confirmed Phish's return to the performing stamina and improvising empathy that made them jam–band kings in the mid–Nineties.