COVENTRY, Vt. – State police and organizers of this weekend’s Phish concerts tried to put the best face on the bad weather Friday as rain pounded the area for the second day in a row, while fans of the jam band navigated a venue that had become a muddy bog.

“The show will go on, and the show will go on on time,” said Adam Lewis, a spokesman for the concert promoter, Great Northeast Productions.

Lewis’ comments at a news conference Friday morning came as workers were putting the finishing touches on a concert stage across the road from the Newport State Airport, where thousands of fans were gathering on waterlogged fields to wait for Phish’s final performances this weekend.

The band is scheduled to hit the stage tonight, and play three shows a day until the band’s farewell gig late Sunday night. The gates for the show opened Thursday, and Vermont State Police Sgt. Bruce Melendy said Friday afternoon that 23,000 fans had already congregated inside the airport as of midmorning Friday. An additional 38,000 were stuck in traffic on local roads, and cars were backed up between 12 and 15 miles on nearby Interstate 91, Melendy said.

“The weather sure can get you down, but there’s nothing you can do about it,” he said.

That seemed to be the prevailing attitude among fans inside the state airport, already drenched from heavy rains on Thursday.

Heavy pedestrian and vehicle traffic and continued downpours during parts of the day Friday turned whatever drying mud there was into a liquidy brown mess, forcing fans and festival employees to devise various ways of navigating the sloppy interior of the airport.

Doing without shoes and walking barefoot seemed to be a popular choice.

Her feet hidden beneath the squishy surface, a woman who identified herself only as Rachel said things could be worse.

“If it was really cold to go barefoot would suck even more,” she said, just moments before another heavy rain.

To make the going smoother concert employees built makeshift sidewalks from wooden planks and used mulch to absorb some of the water from the mud. The latter tactic yielded mixed results – a gritty mix of mud and mulch.

By day’s end, Phish fans got a sight of something they hadn’t seen in a while: sunshine. A few rays were visible on the horizon beyond a tent city of campers and their cars, lending a little promise for clearer skies on Saturday.