It wouldn't be hard to slag the nearly 30-year-old Phish for its overstretched jams, banal lyrics, or noodling and often soulless guitar playing (and nasal croon) of tacit bandleader Trey Anastasio.

But considering the band's exuberant do-no-wrong attitude, it's hard to hold back a smile and take Phish too seriously.

That was the attitude at the Post-Gazette Pavilion Thursday night: a childlike expectation of a carefree, good time. The sun came out for Phish "phans" as the band's Pittsburgh stop was one of only eight on its summer reunion tour. The band jammed 23 songs over three hours to a crowd brimming with more than 21,000 in both attendance and a spirit of participation.

There was a strange communal sense that this wasn't a mere rock show, but a happening. After all, Phish has millions of fans worldwide, and thousands of devotees following their trail to note the minute differences between sets and, of course, to party.

Phish's first tune, "Golgi Apparatus," took off with steaming downhill momentum as seas of heads stood up in waves, launching hundreds of colored balloons and beach balls into the air where they stayed, still bouncing some time after.

Not a walkway could be found without an ecstatic fanatic reveling in a dance, and although there were no flood-bearing clouds overhead, the entire amphitheater effused a haze slightly reminiscent of Woodstock in 1969.

While the band's primary sonic and cultural antecedent lies in the Grateful Dead, Phish is known for its wild shifts in genre and style, shifting not just by song, but from one improvisational idea to the next, all in a string of drawn-out,and sometimes distracting, steps toward each grandiose finale.

Taking risks paid off during songs like "The Divided Sky," which sailed between wispy arpeggiated synthesizer and Yanni's Acropolis-inspired schlock, but was saved after a moment of Santana riffing, which the band whipped into a jam worthy of its 15 minutes.

Unfortunately, the band is at its best when skillfully aping bygone legends and at its worst when the jam slips below rip-off territory into embarrassingly idiomatic blues or when a song buckles under the weight of its own kitsch.

In "When the Circus Comes," the irony was a little too much to bear: a band from Burlington, Vt. playing heavily unnatural, digitally processed reggae into sharp jazz chords and Latin punch, then back into a drowsy ballad -- a trite elegy of life on the road -- all of which repeats another four times. "Circus' " possible redemption came from Anastasio's hint of being repulsed like Frankenstein by his band's notoriously monstrous fan base, not least of all in the lyric about "the day [he] burned the whole place down."

In the second act, much of the crowd's tenacity gave way to the spectacular laser light show, and a highlight was the heavily psychedelic tune "Down with Disease" with its furious Hendrix wails. At one climactic point, the lawn crowd began throwing glow sticks that had been passed out during intermission, and their glorious parabolic hail of plastic continued for 10 minutes, though it never trickled out completely.

During the encore, the band addressed the crowd for the first time, introducing the "trainwreck segment" of the concert wherein Anastasio switched places with drummer Jon Fishman who sang, dressed in a Fred Flintstone toga.

Phish closed the night with a suite of a cappella covers, starting with the old-timey "Hello My Baby" (yes, the song immortalized by the Singing Looney Tunes Frog) followed by a mangled lounge rendition of Pink Floyd's "Bike," "Hold Your Head Up" by Argent, and a by-the-book cover of the Stones' "Loving Cup," which seemingly was chosen solely to recite the line "what a beautiful buzz" ad nauseam.

I don't know if Phish truly has something for everyone, and I'm not sure that whatever they have for everyone is the best "something" available.

But as the morass of muddy feet pushed back on the parking lots, I counted a whole lot of smiles -- including the one on my own face.

Keith DeVries is a freelance writer.

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