In the viral video that became known as “What Phish Sounds Like to People Who Don’t Like Phish,” the Vermont jam band performs in front of a field of cheering fans. So far, so Phish. But when the camera points at the bassist, only random diddles are heard. The players’ parts are disconnected and small. The frontman emits gibberish. “You ate my fractal,” he sings obscurely, in a doofed voice, like a “South Park” character.

Originally titled “Phish Shreds IT,” the 2010 video was merely the latest iteration of the “shreds” meme, all of which feature images of bands performing live set to awkwardly strange audio. But the Phish video was the first time the joke had been used in this way, to explain how an oft-reviled band might sound to non-fans. Which suggested that Phish’s popularity is so bizarre, so odious, that their music is the type of nonsense that makes one’s brain throb.

The “IT” in “Phish Shreds IT” refers to their 2003 one-band mega-festival, during which Phish played seven sets over three days in front of over 60,000 fans (counting the all-jam set atop an air traffic control tower but not counting the soundcheck broadcast only heard over their on-site FM station). Typical for Phish, IT was held on a decommissioned Air Force base deep into northeastern Maine. Good, the Phish non-likers might assert, out of sight, out of mind.

But getting out of sight and out of mind are surely goals for many Phishheads, and the entire experience of escaping reality is built into the idea of their festival world. Since Phish’s Clifford Ball in 1996, on another Air Force base near the band’s Burlington, Vermont home, long-haul drives have been built into their festival aesthetic. On the eve of the millennium, they staged their furthest-fuckin’-out event, in Florida, sending 80,000 attendees down Alligator Alley in the Everglades, literally out of the boundaries of the United States—via an 18-hour zone-crossing traffic jam—and into Seminole Indian territory, where the band played an eight-hour midnight-to-sunrise set.

In all cases, what listeners found at the far end of their trips was a world where Phish’s music made complete sense. Call it Stockholm syndrome or a unified artistic vision, but there’s no denying that Phish built an audience and a platform of their own. With vast tracts for campers, playful large-scale installations designed by Vermont comrades connected to the radical Bread and Puppet Theater, unannounced late-night sets, an on-site freeform radio station, food vendors, Porta Potty (and sometimes art installations made from Porta Potty), it was a ready-to-go template that the band staged year after year in the late 1990s and sporadically since. Just as Phish’s music might seem alien, their festival strategy was marked by the reverse of normal music-biz logic: Instead of picking central locations for their events, the band picked destinations seemingly as far away as possible. It wasn’t merely live music, but a contract to enter Tent City, U.S.A., for the duration of the experience.

In the go-go indie ’90s, Phish were among the indie-est of them all, even if they weren’t exactly rock music as many wished to understand it. While they remained on a major label from 1991 until 2004, it was neither Elektra nor the band’s album sales that propelled them to sell out multiple nights at Madison Square Garden. Phish’s most popular and compelling music was distributed for free by the band’s fans, and always had been. By the time of IT in 2003, as the music industry exploded into the blogosphere, Phishheads graduated from cassettes to mp3s and CD-Rs, and soon provided the critical mass to get BitTorrent off the ground, while Phish themselves graduated to selling recordings of all of their shows online within hours of the performance.

Night after night, through improvisation and song-suites, Phish changed in ways both micro and macro, creating new content on a near-daily basis while on tour. Each time Phish plays, fans have new bits of close-listening improv to dissect, new bits of folklore to trade, new bits of themselves to actualize. While there was (and is) a jam hit parade of sorts, a different economy drives the modern live music world that Phish helped create: part drama, part novelty, part boogie, and filled with extreme levels of detail to be pored over later.

All of which is to say that Phish were pipers at the dawn of America’s 21st century festival revival, direct precursors to Bonnaroo, and early builders of an underground railway that eventually led to the collision of dance, jam, and indie subcultures in the vast common ground of the non-metaphoric concert field. While it would be an exaggeration to say that they were responsible for the endless crossovers of the festival circuit, they unquestionably nurtured an audience hungry for constantly changing live music outside the traditional mechanisms of the recording industry.