Blues Traveler, the Spin Doctors, Big Head Todd, Widespread Panic, the Aquarium Rescue Unit ... They were all on the ground floor of the H.O.R.D.E. movement, the neo-hippie answer to Lollapalooza in the early '90s.

Many of those bands, and others, can now be found playing a small venue somewhere, maybe even for free, or in the middle of the pack at a weekend campground festival.

And there's Phish and the Dave Matthews Band, two acts that rose from that scene to become juggernauts and, by coincidence, play back-to-back-to-back nights at the Post-Gazette Pavilion this weekend.

Vermont quartet Phish played the maiden voyage of H.O.R.D.E. with Blues Traveler and the Spin Doctors in 1992 (there was no Pittsburgh date), arriving as a known quantity with several albums already under its belt. The DMB -- an unlikely combo of jazz heavies backing a white South African singer-songwriter -- hit H.O.R.D.E. two years later as a buzz band on the bottom of the bill.

When it came to Star Lake, the PG review stated: "The afternoon started auspiciously enough with the stunning debut of the Dave Matthews Band, a Virginia-based quintet that smoked the main stage with a dizzying array of rock and jazz chops. The band's press release boasts that they're the group that everyone is talking about on the H.O.R.D.E. tour, and there may be something to that judging by the enthusiasm the band generated."

While there may have been some crossover audience, there's no mistaking the two bands sonically. They both incorporate jazzy elements and leave spaces in the songs to jam, but the DMB is more solidly built around the sensuous songwriting of Matthews, a former bartender, while Phish is a loose-limbed unit that goes on for much longer stretches before singer Trey Anastasio steps to the mike.

Regardless, Phish and the DMB rose from the heap to become H.O.R.D.E.'s success stories. Phish was headlining Station Square-sized amphitheaters by 1993, mostly swimming under the industry radar, and when Jam Nation lost its leader, Jerry Garcia, the Vermont band attracted caravans of Dead fans. As the T-shirt said, "Red Fish. Blue Fish. Dead Fish. New Phish."

While the DMB certainly won people over on H.O.R.D.E., its meteoric rise also was more album-oriented. The 1994 major label debut, "Under the Table and Dreaming," stunned the industry by selling 4 million copies, and the follow-up, "Crash," debuted at No. 2.

This was at a time when the charts were dominated by angst-ridden grunge bands and gangster rappers.

"I want to play music that's going to move people," Matthews told the PG in 1996, "and move them in a positive way, because there's enough crap in the world without adding to it. It's obvious what the crap is. I do feel almost a bitterness about politics, about media, about entertainment, so I almost feel like a mission to play something that is personal and that is heartfelt. I want to go to a place and share joy with people and have people share it back. I don't have an urge to go and get a clique of people to get really mad and do nothing about it."

The DMB headlined the Post-Gazette Pavilion for the first time in 1996, while Phish played the Mellon Arena that year and made its Post-Gazette Pavilion debut in 1997, drawing Phishheads from across the country.

"Phish was always well-organized," says Lance Jones, former director of the Pavilion. "Great production people on the tour. They had conference calls about what the audience was like, what to expect. They were really respectful of their audience. They had their [stuff] together internally from the beginning."

In 1999, the DMB took it up a notch with two-night stands, attracting a total of 47,646 fans in June. The next year, the DMB, joined by Ben Harper, became the first rock band to headline Three Rivers Stadium since U2 three years earlier (and the last, if you don't count 'N Sync, as it was torn down the next February). DMB fans danced in the rain or huddled under plastic on that soggy July night.

While the DMB continued to be steady road warriors and release records with slicker production and tighter pop singles, Phish bailed out early in the '00s. The band played its last Pittsburgh show in July 2003, then did a limited tour in '04, ending its run with emotional farewell shows at Coventry in Vermont.

Both bands return now in transitional mode. For the DMB, it's the first summer tour without beloved saxophonist and founding member LeRoi Moore, who died last August and is memorialized on the acclaimed new album "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King."

As for Phish, the band is getting reacquainted after a hiatus filled with modest solo ventures. The seed of the reunion began last Fourth of July at the Rothbury Festival in Michigan where Jon Fishman, on hand with the Yonder Mountain String Band, jumped onstage with Anastasio and Mike Gordon for a cover of the Beatles' "She Said She Said."

In September, Phish met again at the wedding of its former tour road manager Brad Sands, leading to the announcement of three reunion shows in March at the Hampton Coliseum in Virginia and then a summer tour that started May 31 at Fenway Park in Boston, just hit Bonnaroo in Tennessee and now makes its way to Burgettstown.

The news for Phishheads keeps getting better. The first Phish album in five years, which the band started recording in March with producer Steve Lillywhite, is finished and will be released on July 29. It features a new Phish epic -- the 13:29 "Time Turns Elastic."

"I began writing this little tune for Phish," Anastasio said recently, "and it just kept growing and growing."

No one will be expecting Phish to debut at the top of the charts, as the DMB just did, but as long as Trey and the band are playing, you can count on a packed lawn of ecstatic revelers.