Jake Brennan (25:59)
January 2000 Trey watched from his window seat as the plane climbed into the clear blue sky and Florida receded in the distance below. From this far up, he could still see the site below where Fish had just staged the largest ticketed concert of the millennium. Big Cypress was a three day festival on a Seminole Indian reservation outside Miami, and Big was the understatement of the year. For months, crews worked to build what was essentially a small city. They had a general store, a downtown, a boardwalk, a post office, two Ferris wheels, art installations, even a radio station. And like all Fish festivals, the sole performer was Phish. They played numerous times over numerous days, including a marathon set that went from from midnight on New Year's Eve all the way to sunrise on New Year's Day. That's seven uninterrupted hours, give or take. So naturally, Trey was exhausted. In the next seat over, Fishman nudged him and Trey turned to look at his best friend and bandmate of nearly 17 years. Hey, man, fishman said. I feel like we're on a train, you know? Trey furrowed his brow. Dude, we're on a plane right now. Yeah, I don't mean literally, fisherman said. It feels like we, the band are on this train that's going like 150 miles an hour and we're about to crash into a brick wall. Trey knew exactly what Fishman meant. He was so right. The touring, the ever expanding community, the bigness of it all, all the fame and now the drugs. Not only was it all a super annoying cliche, but it all spelled danger dead ahead. So at the moment that they were at their height after performing for around 85,000 people at the largest ticketed Y2K concert, Fish went on hiatus. But the infrastructure that Fish had spent years refining and the bad actors conducting business in the shadows of that infrastructure, none of that went anywhere. While Phish were away, festival organizers drew heavily from the band's innovations to create Bonnaroo, now one of the largest annual music festivals in the country, when it's not being canceled. But I digress. And in 2001, federal agents, along with the D.C. police, arrested 30 people outside RFK Stadium, where the the Dave Matthews Band were headlining a show. The Fed seized black tar heroin, ecstasy, weed, mushrooms, and 40 tanks of nitrous oxide, each weighing between 200 and 300 pounds. And none of the suspects charged with distribution of hippie crack were actually from D.C. by the way. They were from New Jersey, New York, and Philadelphia, the alleged hub of one of the largest nitrous mafia operations in the country. This was the one world that Fish found waiting for them when they finally returned from their hiatus on New year's Eve of 2002. Over the next year and a half, they tried to pick up where they left off. But during their break, Trey had become addicted to OxyContin following some dental surgery. And the moment he was back on the bus, back on the plane backstage, he fell back into his old habits. In his mind, these habits, cocaine, for instance, would help him do the work, help him stay up longer and later for those mega intense hours, long sets that the community craved. But the secret addictions that once threatened to send Fish's out of control train into the brick wall. And they were now about to drop Trey from a plane at 30,000ft with no parachute. The drugs shut him off from the band, shut him off from the fans, and shut him off from the community, from his friends, from his family. So it was decided if Fish didn't stop for good this time, then it was very possible that Trey was going to die. Which is ironic, because that's exactly the kind of language used to describe Coventry, the festival Fish staged in upstate Vermont in August of 2004. It was billed as their farewell show. But some fans weren't calling it a farewell. They were calling it a funeral. You wake up inside your tent to the sound of torrential rain beating down. You're soaking wet, there's so much water that it's seeping inside the tent, and everything is a sopping, stinking mess. When the rain lets up, you stumble outside and your whole world is now mud. Your feet sink into the ground, and as you pull one foot back out, the goopy Mud just pulls the sneaker right off with this gross sucking sound. And now your other sneaker just got pulled off too. And pretty soon you're like, whatever, man, fuck it. Just leave the shoes and go barefoot. So now you're walking from the campsite to where the stage is and the mud is completely caked around your feet up to your ankles. It's a long walk, but not nearly as long as the walk that some of the other 60, 70,000 people here had to endure when they decided to abandon abandon their cars on the highway and leave most of their gear behind and March 30something miles just to be here. You'd never seen traffic like that before and you've never seen this many empty balloons all over the ground. It's like a rainbow caked in shit. Someone told you that you were camping out in Nitrous Alley, and damn, that sounds about right. If not for the pouring rain, you would have been kept up all night by the symphony of hissing gas tanks. You pass by a kid doing a line off the hood of a Volvo sedan, royal blue and beat to shit. The contrast to that big white line of coke is visually arresting. It's like bolded text. You never would have seen this kind of thing way out in the open like this back in the great Wendt days. Another guy walks by you and exhales whatever they're smoking and, well, shit, man, it's not weed and it's not tobacco. And the dude smoking it looks like he's about to hit the deck. You wonder if the mud will swallow him whole and maybe the mud won't want him today. When you finally get to the stage and Fish finally comes out for one of that weekend sets, you're like, what the fuck is going on? It's obviously very emotional. Paige is up on that jumbo screen playing keyboards and trying to sing, but he keeps bursting out in tears. But then when he's not crying, he's sorta half assing it. You wonder, is he on something? Trey is definitely on something. His voice is raspy, he keeps fucking with his aunt, and then Trey is crying too. Something about the whole vibe is off. And that vibe lingers on long after Coventry is over. You go back home and every time you listen to Fish, all you can think about is the mud and the cocaine on the hood of that Volvo and Nitrous Alley and Trey looking like he's knocking on death's door. It used to be so joyous, and now the absence of that joy is the only thing you can feel and Then you wonder is this it was the whole thing. The music, the people, the community. Was it all too good to be true? All right dudes, a little later in this episode, I'm going to mention a murder that happened outside a FISH concert in Hampton, Virginia from just a few months ago this year and how that tragedy. Tragedy has been linked to the so called nitrous mafia. Unfortunately, we didn't have time in this full episode to get into the details of that particular story. But if you want to hear that whole story, and trust me, it is a wild one, you can hear it in this week's brand new mini episode of Disgraceland, which is available only to our All Access members. Just go to Disgracelandpod.com to sign up and to hear that bonus mini episode right now. All right, we're we get back to our main story here on Fish. On December 15, 2006, a little over two years after Fish took what was said to be their final bow at the Disastrous Coventry Festival, 42 year old Trey Anastasio was pulled over in Whitehall, New York. It was around 3:30 in the morning and the cop had witnessed the black Audi swerving in and out of its lane. Upon a search of the vehicle, Trey was found to be in possession of Vicodin, Percocet and Xanax, all three of which were prescribed to someone else. But also the cop found heroin. Trey didn't even weigh 100 pounds. Now he sat alone in a cell inside the Whitehall police station, charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance. Dwi, an aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle. Because his trip driver's license had been suspended, the station's phone was ringing off the hook. Reporters from all over the country were ravenous for details. They had so many questions, primary among them heroin. This guy was doing heroin? This was a self described dork. Dorks don't do junk. It's hard to know if these kinds of thoughts were floating around in Trey's head while he sat in lockup for a day or two. But. But we do know what he was listening to. His polite cooperation led to an officer handing him a transistor radio and a pair of headphones to help pass the time. Trey scanned the radio dial for a station and found mostly fuzz since the village of Whitehall is kind of in the middle of nowhere. His thumb slowly turned the dial and then there he got something. And he turned the volume up and the music came through the shitty headphones. 100% funky and 1000% prophetic. It was the song Higher Ground by Stevie Wonder. Stevie's lyrics hit him like one of his transcendental jams hit an audience of 70,000. Yes, his last time on earth, he lived a whole lot of sin. And yes, he was so glad that he knew more now than he knew then. And fuck yes, he was so damn glad that he was going to get to try it all again. One traffic stop and one Stevie Wonder song was all it took. Trey pled guilty to possession, began a 14 month court mandated recovery program, and then got back to the reason he did it all in the first place. The community first. That looked like hundreds of hours of community service, scrubbing toilets and picking up trash. Once that was done, Trey's focus became the community, the one he'd helped create and build up so many years earlier. In 2009, Fish made their triumphant return to the stage, led by a sober Trey. And they had never sounded better. The same fans who said the Coventry felt like a funeral also said that this moment felt like a resurrection. That didn't mean that the darkness of the scene had been completely lifted. Indeed, in 2018, almost a decade into Fish's renaissance, two fans were violently attacked at a show at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington State. And again just earlier this year, in 2025, a man was stabbed to death outside a Fish show in Hampton, Virginia. Many online looked to pin these acts of violence on the culture that the nitrous mafia had created out on the margins. The Tray and Fish had taken back the center because their story wasn't one of mud and defeat and coke and nitrous. It was a story of community and how being a part of that community can keep you out of the clutches of disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgrace. All right, thanks for listening to this episode of Disgraceland. Question of the week for you guys that I want you to call me. 617-906-6638 Leave me a voicemail with your answer. Send me a text with your answer. Is this what music do you like listening to most when you are, well, you know, high stoned, little under the influence? What are you listening to? What are you vibing on? Is it Fish? Is it the Grateful Dead? Is it someone else? You don't have to be stoned to do it. Just, you know what I mean? That thing where you just listen, you just want to mellow out, you just want to chill, you want those specific kind of vibes. 690-66638 Voicemail and text to let me know at Disgracelandpod on the socials disgracelandpodgmail.com Email Here comes some credits Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page@gracelandpod.com rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook Disgracelandpod and on YouTube at YouTube.com Disgracelandpod Rocka Rolla he's a bad, bad man.