The second lesson: “Bobby is Mr. Slow Down,” Anastasio goes on. “He is patient, comfortable—no rush. Sometimes I’d be like, ‘You really want to play this song that slow?’” When Anastasio played the entrance lick in “Deal,” the last song of the first set on July 4, it was “at a Jerry Garcia Band tempo from 1982.” It was also “a little too fast.” When the song was over, Anastasio walked over to Weir. “I said, ‘That was too fast, wasn’t it?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ But he was totally cool. He played it anyway.”

Something else Anastasio discovered about Weir: “He’s a rock singer. Sometimes the music would get loose, a little floundering—no one knows where it’s going to go. Then Bobby would step up, like in ‘Samson And Delilah’”—in the first set on July 5. “When he started singing like that, boom, 80,000 people came together. It didn’t matter if it was in tune. That wasn’t the point. I could feel him unifying that stadium.”

Anastasio’s fourth revelation at Dead Camp: Forget the clock. “I love to jam,” Anastasio says brightly. “I love to jam long. But even for me, the time would come when I’d think, ‘This is too noodle-y. Let’s play the next song.’ I would do something, a lick, that gently alluded to it. Then Phil would look over at me and put his hand up, like, ‘What’s your rush, dude?’

“They weren’t done,” Anastasio concedes cheerfully. “That thing from the Acid Tests”—the 1965 and ‘66 LSD communions in San Francisco that were among the Dead’s first gigs—“was still there. ‘We’re not here to entertain you.’”

Anastasio pauses for a breath and some coffee. “All I wanted was for them to be happy,” he says of his duty in Fare Thee Well: filling, for a few nights, the large, deep hole left in the Dead and their road-trip nation by Garcia’s passing. “It was terrifying for me in that nobody can stand where he stood. But I was there in order for everyone to be together again, one more time, singing these songs.”

The guitarist has already moved on from Dead Camp. A week after the Chicago shows, Anastasio was rehearsing with his Phish bandmates—drummer Jon Fishman, bassist Mike Gordon and keyboard player Page McConnell—for their recent summer tour, a run distinguished by nine song debuts and Anastasio’s afterburn from Fare Thee Well.

“He came out of that ready to go, ready to play,” says McConnell, who saw all three shows in Chicago. “And when Trey is leading on guitar, that is when we are at our best.”