Pod Insights DISGRACELAND Phish: Community, Hippie Crack, and the Nitrous Mafia About this episode A parking lot ruled by shady nitrous oxide dealers. And a bandleader whose addiction nearly killed him. This is the story of Trey Anastasio and Phish – and their improbable comeback.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 This is exactly right.
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1:13 Jake Brennan? I like a story with a twist as much as anyone, but some of the best traditions don't have one. They just started and kept going. That's something that's great about Chateau St. Michelle. They've been leading Washington wine since 1967 with wines that are balanced, expressive, and easy to enjoy. Choosing the right bottle shouldn't feel complicated. It should be something you open with confidence every time. So for once, here's a story with no twist, just a good bottle. Redefine your rituals with Chateau St. Michelle. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis.
1:59 Jake Brennan? This is a story about community, about four self-described dorks from Vermont who built one of the most devoted fanbases in rock history. It's a story about making music with your friends and about musical euphoria. But it's also about the shadows darkening the margins, about hippie crack, hissing tanks, and the nitrous mafia. And it's about how a seemingly idyllic scene could be infiltrated by hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. This is a story about Phish, which means it's a story about, I don't know, man, is it great music?
2:41 Jake Brennan? Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show, that definitely wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Mellotron called "Peace, Love, and Ice Cream, MK1." I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to "Slow Motion" by Juvenile featuring Soulja Slim. Now, why would I play you that specific slice of ass successfully backed up cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on August 15, 2004. And that was the day that Phish played what was billed as their final show, when in fact
3:21 Jake Brennan? no one, not even the band, knew that their story was far from over. On this episode, four dorks, musical euphoria, shadows on the margins, hippie crack, the nitrous mafia, and Phish. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is This Graceland.
4:04 Jake Brennan? Earlier this year, in the spring of 2025, Phish was one of 14 musical acts nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And though they didn't get in, they dominated the discourse surrounding the nomination and voting process because they received the largest number of fan votes in Hall of Fame history. Over 329,000 votes, to be exact, and that's nearly 50,000 more votes than the runner-up Bad Company received. Now, the fan vote isn't part of the official vote, so that doesn't count toward getting you inducted. But it does offer an outlet for Joe Q. Public to express his opinion.
4:44 Jake Brennan? And here's the thing about Phish's 329,000 votes. Many, myself included, were shocked to discover that a band that has never had a single on the Billboard Hot 100, a band that has only been nominated for one Grammy in their 40-plus-year career, a band that, frankly, has always seemed a little goofy, but that band has so many Joe Q. Publix hiding in the woodwork. And I can explain this Phish Hall of Fame phenomenon in one word: community. Phish's devoted fanbase is a ride-or-die community that began assembling at keggers on Friends Farms in the mid-1980s, and then evolved into record-breaking multi-day freak
5:25 Jake Brennan? flag festivals in far-flung parts of New England in the 90s, eventually staging the largest ticketed concert on Earth for the millennium, some 85,000 people strong, on and on through unpredictable Halloween shows, marathon New Year's Eve sets, and record-breaking runs at Madison Square Garden. And so, when Phish's guitarist and primary songwriter, Trey Anastasio, first received the call from his manager that he and his three bandmates, bassist Mike Gordon, keyboardist Paige McConnell, and drummer John Fishman, have been nominated for the Hall of Fame, his initial reaction wasn't that it was a win for the four of them. He said it was a win for the community.
6:11 Jake Brennan? Years earlier, in 1995, that community unexpectedly surged in number when Jerry Garcia died at the age of 53, and thousands of Deadheads were left looking for another band that they could pour their energy into. Like the Grateful Dead, Phish was just as much a movement as it was a musical experience, with fans following them from town to town and show to show like a movable village. This is one of many comparisons that have been made of the two groups for decades. And yes, both bands love to improvise, and both are better known for their live shows and their studio albums.
6:50 Jake Brennan? That said, musically speaking at least, Phish is more like a fever dream hybrid of, yes, Talking Heads and the Rocky Horror Picture Show than they are the second coming of the Grateful Dead. And even that is a reductive description. But Phish fans welcome the incoming wave of Deadheads with open arms, because one of the things that both bands do share is their love of community. It's designed as an idyllic circle of fellow travelers, one that hangs on every note and chases the euphoric high at the center of an extended jam, perhaps aided in part by the high of some weed or mushrooms. You can get caught up in that high, and caught up in the music, in the swirl of people dancing
7:33 Jake Brennan? around in ecstasy, the lights flashing from the stage, the band reaching the next rung, the next precipice, the sustain and Trey's guitar ringing out for what feels like an eternity, and suddenly, the seeming idyllic community becomes the perfect mark for the darkness loitering there in the margins. 2017, Madison Square Garden. The house lights come on, and you're still reeling over that setlist. And they covered Jimmy's "Bold as Love" and Radiohead's "Everything" in its right place, and then encoreed with Frankenstein?
8:11 Jake Brennan? Some dude next to you is bitching that they didn't play fuck your face. There's always a dude complaining that they didn't do this or didn't do that. You don't care, though. You're on cloud nine. The gummy you took kicked in early in the second set and it didn't matter if they didn't play fuck your face because fish literally fucked your face. Okay, not literally, but it really felt like they did. As ridiculous as that sounds, and you don't even care if someone hears you say that because it's the truth. It's all part of this wave you've been riding. And you keep riding it as you push your way toward the exit with the rest of the crowd. And you pass through the door and out onto the street. And now you're hit in that fucked face of yours with clouds of weed and cigarette smoke.
8:55 Jake Brennan? They both smell sweet in the summer heat and though you don't smoke personally, the scent and the aroma coated in humid air, it's all wrapped up in the experience. And so is the hissing.
9:10 Jake Brennan? It's like that Joni Mitchell record. But instead of the hissing of summer lawns, this is the hissing of nitrous tanks on asphalt. You hear them whistling as soon as you're outside. You turn and see 12 or 13 tank rats sitting on the sidewalk, slouched against the wall, balloons in their hands, stoned to the gills on gas. One of them falls over and hits his head on the pavement. And another says that he thinks his head is floating away, but he says it with speech that's so slur that you can only guess that that's what he's talking about. And then the balloon people, the sellers, the pushers. They're pushing up against you, blocking you from walking down the street. One of them is yelling in your face.
9:54 Jake Brennan? Ice cold, right off the tank, one for 10 bucks or four for 20, what do you want? Keith thrusts a fistful of swollen balloons in your direction, red and yellow and pink, daring you to try to step around him. You know he's not going to let you get away that easily because that's what these guys do. They intimidate, they're overbearing, and they do it all while keeping their heads on a swivel. The cops rarely come down on these guys, but still, they run around like animals that have just been released from a cage, and they're always aware that one wrong move will send them back there. God, you can't stand these fucking balloon people. They're a trashy blemish on an otherwise chill scene, and it's not just the gas, like, whatever,
10:35 Jake Brennan? man, no shame in how one gets one's rocks off, it's more about how they block the exits and gum up the works. And right then, a cop siren whoops nearby, and the dealer who was crowding you suddenly vanishes, no doubt off to another patch of real estate right around the corner.
10:54 Jake Brennan? Nitrous has always been around. Long before Phish, the Dead themselves were huffing gas through old Army surplus aspirators in the 70s. But that was before the nitrous racket became organized, before it was controlled by dawns and bosses and kingpins who were pulling the levers and calling the shots behind closed doors. It was before the balloon people were bringing more than tanks full of gas to Phish shows. They were bringing guns and knives in order to scare off the competition. And it was long before they were known not only as balloon people, but by a far more menacing name: the Nitrous Mafia.
11:33 Jake Brennan? There's a much more innocent view of the nitrous scene in Todd Phillips's documentary on Phish, Bittersweet Motel, which includes this moment where a girl huffs some gas and dances around, and then hundreds of fans get buck naked for an impromptu photo shoot. That footage is from the mid 90s, and it was right around this time that, for the first time, Trey Anastasio was really beginning to notice the depth of the drug culture surrounding his band. It was also at this time, roughly 13 years after Phish began, that Trey began to participate in the drug culture as well. Listen, I know that sounds weird, 13 years in to first get into drugs when you're in the band Phish, but Trey was a self-described
12:17 Jake Brennan? dork. All the guys in Phish were dorks. Many in their crew, though, were doing harder drugs, but Trey had no idea. He had his head down, his nose to the grindstone, completely immersed in the music he was creating. But just like the nitrous mafia's minions peddling fatties to every warm body passing by, that harder stuff was out there. Coke, heroin, and the kind of drugs that trick you into thinking that you're making the community stronger by doing them, when in fact, they are separating you from the pack, so that the drugs have you to themselves. And then they bleed you dry, until you yourself are just another shadow out on the fringes.
12:59 Jake Brennan? And maybe even worse, maybe dead. And Trey himself was about to find out some of these truths the only way you can sometimes: the hard way.
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14:05 Jake Brennan? I like a story with a twist as much as anyone, but some of the best traditions don't have one. They just started and kept going. That's something that's great about Chateau St. Michelle. They've been leading Washington wine since 1967 with wines that are balanced, expressive, and easy to enjoy. Choosing the right bottle shouldn't feel complicated. It should be something you open with confidence every time. So for once, here's a story with no twist, just a good bottle. Redefine your rituals with Chateau St. Michelle.
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15:12 Jake Brennan? Long before nitrous oxide was known on the jam band circuit as hippie crack, it was more commonly referred to as laughing gas. It was first synthesized in 1772 by the English chemist and philosopher Joseph Priestley. And some of its initial applications were to treat patients with lung diseases and other illnesses. These days, you know it as the stuff your dentist has you inhale when he needs to gouge away your gums with a lethal scalpel. But as early as 1799, there was evidence of nitrous being used not for medicine, but for recreation. 1799! In England and in America, an entertainer would pretend to be a doctor, pick someone from the audience, bring them onstage,
15:57 Jake Brennan? have them huff some gas, and then, for the amusement of the paying crowd, the audience member high on nitrous would quote, "Laugh, sing, dance, speak, or fight." And that's according to a poster advertising one such event from way back when. The allure of a nitrous high is that it's fast and cheap. You disconnect from your body for 30 to 60 seconds, float off into oblivion, and then it's over and all you want is another hit. But ask any dentist who's not Steve Martin in Little Shop of Horrors, and they'll tell you that the danger of even one hit of nitrous is that it starves your brain of oxygen. And then, best-case scenario, you're fainting and falling and cracking your head open.
16:40 Jake Brennan? Worst-case, you're suffering a seizure of brain damage. These days hippie crack is no longer confined to Shake Down Street, which is the tailgating area outside any concert venue where you buy grilled cheeses, hash brownies, handmade jewelry, bumper stickers, and whatever other wares the vendors are hustling that day. These days, it's big business, pulling down big money. Nitrous mafia crews out of hubs like Philly have little overhead, often employing dealers straight out of the pen on the cheap to sling gas at shows. The balloon men set up in one spot, one guy filling, another handling the cash, a third on the lookout, and within 10 minutes, they've sold hundreds of balloons and pocketed thousands of dollars,
17:23 Jake Brennan? always ready at a moment's notice to jump to another spot if 5-0 is moving in. Because there's only an issue if you're caught selling. The DEA doesn't regulate it. It's not classified as a controlled substance. It's legal to own nitrous, it's just illegal to purchase or sell it for the purpose of getting high. You'd think, however, that you'd hear more about nitrous dealers getting busted, but the mafia is highly organized, and the mafia is also cutthroat. And with the increased presence at Phish shows and other music festivals, came increased tactics to dominate the market by any means necessary. In 2009, according to one Phish fan, a parking lot attendant was beaten to shit by a nitrous dealer
18:08 Jake Brennan? outside a show in Portland, Maine. That same year, at the Gathering of the Vibes Festival in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where Phish was not performing, by the way. A 29-year-old man was found dead of an apparent drug overdose, but fans online were quick to point fingers at the nitrous mafia, saying that they'd beaten him with a tank prior to his death.
18:31 Jake Brennan? Many years earlier, in 1983, the year Phish first formed in Burlington, Vermont, the only viable connection between nitrous and rock and roll was this one bootleg going around at the Grateful Dead show in Baltimore from the year prior. The one where Jerry and Phil Lesh were allegedly taking hits from a nitrous tank onstage while Phil did a psychotic reading of Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven." But this was a more naive time. The nitrous thing was a real if you know, you know, kind of deal. In 1983, Bernie Sanders was in his second term as Burlington's mayor. And Ben and Jerry had just created that cow design that would become so ubiquitous with
19:14 Jake Brennan? their popular, but still hyper local ice cream. And Trey Anastasio was about to transfer from UVM to Goddard College, where he composed a concept album called "The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday" as his senior study. And just like Bernie and Ben and Jerry, Trey, along with Mike Page and Fishman, was interested in something completely different than what was being offered. So that's what Fish delivered. Their regular performances at a local bar called Nectar's were marathon affairs. Three sets per night, each set, increasingly less traditional and more abstract. And they tried to not repeat themselves, not just in how they played a song, but in what songs they chose to play.
19:56 Jake Brennan? So from very early on, the promise of a Fish show was a promise of something unexpected, which included their improvisations, where moments of great transcendence would frequently emerge from even greater moments of absurdity. And experiencing that transcendence, well, it's like watching a movie in a crowded theater. It just hits different when you're surrounded by a community. That community grew on grassroots DIY level through the 1980s and into the 90s, when major labels flush with cash could not corral enough new bands. Fish signed to Elektra, who released their third studio album, A Picture of Nectar,
20:36 Jake Brennan? in 1992, while simultaneously reissuing their first two independent releases, Hunta and Lawn Boy. All three records were marked by a signature combination of goofiness and virtuosity, but A Picture of Nectar boasted the single "Chalk Dust Torture," which endeared them to the likes of David Letterman. More albums followed, more fans too. And before long, tens of thousands of devotees, seventy thousand to be precise, were shutting down the two-lane stretch of I-95 running up northern Maine all the way to Loring Air Force Base where Phish staged a two-day festival called "The Great Went" in August of 1997. They turned the tiny town of Limestone into the biggest city in the state of Maine that
21:21 Jake Brennan? weekend, just as the members of Phish were beginning to tune into a dangerous new frequency.
21:31 Jake Brennan? Trey was drooling. The saliva oozed from the side of his mouth and ran down his chin. More followed, glistening in the red hairs of his beard. He was totally out of it. His mouth hung open, his eyes were rolling into the back of his head, and his mind was just...gone. He heard someone laughing by his side. He slowly turned his head, only now having the slightest realization that he was a slumbering mess. Only the slightest, though. He was so fucked up. And that's when he saw the big, black mustache. Oh yeah, that's right. Carlos Santana was there. He'd forgotten where he was for a minute there, and never mind who was with him.
22:16 Jake Brennan? Santana was laughing harder and louder now, nodding his head in approval as Trey fell deeper into oblivion. Trey then turned to look down at his own hands and realized that he'd been holding a single sustained note on his guitar this entire time. There was an audience of thousands out there watching as his epic solo came to its conclusion. Trey had gone into a trance state, drooling all over himself onstage, and he did this while getting ridiculously high...on the music.
22:49 Jake Brennan? When the song ended, the crowd roared. And Trey leaned over to Santana, who had graciously sat in with Fish for a few songs, and apologized for making such a fool of himself. Drooling in front of Carlos, it was embarrassing. And Santana shook his head. "Nothing to apologize for," he said. "You were tapped into something special. You know you've gone somewhere good when you start drooling like that." This was the recent memory replaying in Trey's head as he stood onstage at the Great Went Festival and scanned the community of seventy thousand Fish fans gathered before him. Just like he'd once tapped into something good with Santana, he was now tapping into something with each and every person out there.
23:32 Jake Brennan? But this was a long way from three sets a night at Nektars. This was much bigger than signing on the dotted line with Elektra. This had gone bigger than he could have ever imagined it to be. It was scary big. The kind of big that changes you, whether you wanted to or not. And things were changing out there. More people meant more drugs. And not just nitrous, but coke and dope. And more hissing tanks, and more empty balloons trampled underfoot across the grounds at Loring Air Force Base when the weekend was finally over. Trey was oblivious to most of these things. He just saw a sea of people, and he could sense that as the sea grew in size, so did
24:14 Jake Brennan? the potential for a giant wave to build up and come crashing down on everything. In fact, he was so wrapped up in playing, in the music, and cultivating one of the biggest communities in rock and roll history, that he couldn't see that not only was that wave indeed incoming, but it was already hovering over the backstage scene. Cocaine and heroin weren't just new mainstays out in the parking lot and on Shakedown. The crew had been doing them too, but just hiding them. Once Trey's eyes were really opened, and once he himself began to partake, all of those substances were suddenly now out in the open. And the shadow of that giant wave began to turn the daylight into darkness.
25:05 Speaker 00 We'll be right back after this.
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25:41 Jake Brennan? I like a story with a twist as much as anyone, but some of the best traditions don't have one. They just started and kept going. That's something that's great about Chateau St. Michelle. They've been leading Washington wine since 1967 with wines that are balanced, expressive, and easy to enjoy. Choosing the right bottle shouldn't feel complicated. It should be something you open with confidence every time. So for once, here's a story with no twist, just a good bottle. Redefine your rituals with Chateau St. Michelle.
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27:42 Jake Brennan? January 2000. Trey watched from his window seat as the plane climbed into the clear blue sky and Florida receded into the distance below. From this far up, he could still see the site below where Phish 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. It had a general store, a downtown, a boardwalk, a post office, two Ferris wheels, art installations, even a radio station. And like all Phish festivals,
28:25 Jake Brennan? the sole performer was Phish. They played numerous times over numerous days, including a marathon set that went 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.
28:47 Jake Brennan? 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," Fishman 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, the fame, and now, the drugs. Not only was it all a super annoying cliche, but it all spelled danger dead ahead.
29:37 Jake Brennan? So at the moment that they were at their height after performing for around 85,000 people at the largest ticketed Y2K concert, Phish went on hiatus. But the infrastructure that Phish 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 DC police, arrested 30 people outside RFK Stadium where the Dave Matthews Band were headlining a show.
30:21 Jake Brennan? The feds 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 DC, 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 world that Phish 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.
31:03 Jake Brennan? 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 Phish's out-of-control train into the brick wall, and they were now about to drop Trey from a plane at 30,000 feet 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 Phish didn't stop for good this time, then it was very possible
31:47 Jake Brennan? 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.
32:11 Jake Brennan? 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, fuck, 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.
32:52 Jake Brennan? 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 their cars on the highway and leave most of their gear behind and march 30-something 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 and 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've been kept up all night by the symphony of hissing gas tanks. You pass by a kid doing a line out the hood of a Volvo sedan, royal blue and beat to shit. The contrast to that big, white line of coke is visually arresting.
33:36 Jake Brennan? It's like bolded text. You never would've seen this kind of thing way out in the open like this back in the great Went 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.
34:02 Jake Brennan? And 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 sort of half-assing it. You wonder, is he on something? Trey is definitely on something. His voice is raspy and 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.
34:43 Jake Brennan? But 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 in 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 could 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?
35:26 Jake Brennan? All right dudes, a little later in this episode, I'm going to mention a murder that happened outside of Fish concert in Hampton, Virginia from just a few months ago this year and how that 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 Disgrace Land, 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'll get back to our main story here on Fish.
36:09 Jake Brennan? On December 15th, 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
36:51 Jake Brennan? of a controlled substance (DWI) and aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle because his 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 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.
37:33 Jake Brennan? Trey scanned the radio dial for a station and found mostly fuzz, since the village of Whitehall is kinda 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 1,000% 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 gonna get to try it all again.
38:17 Jake Brennan? 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. And once that was done, Trey's focus became "the community," the one he'd helped to create and build up so many years earlier. In 2009, Phish made their triumphant return to the stage, led by a sober Trey, and they had never sounded better. The same fans who said that Coventry felt like a funeral
38:57 Jake Brennan? also said that this moment felt like a resurrection. But that didn't mean that the darkness in the scene had been completely lifted. In 2018, almost a decade into Phish'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 Phish 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 Trey and Phish had taken back the center. Because their story wasn't one of mud and defeat and coke and nitrous. It was a story of
39:42 Jake Brennan? 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 Land.
40:16 Jake Brennan? All right, thanks for listening to this episode of Disgrace Land. Question of the week for you guys, and 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, a little under the influence? What are you listening to? What are you vibing on? Is it Phish? 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. 617-906-6638. Voicemail and text to let me know at disgracelandpod on the socials. [email protected] . Email. Here comes some credits.
41:00 Jake Brennan? Disgrace Land 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 at disgracelandpod.com. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at disgracelandpod and on YouTube at youtube.com slash at disgracelandpod. Rockerola.
41:25 Speaker 07 He's a bad, bad man.
41:28 Jake Brennan? Hey, guys. Time to dust off your detective skills while unwinding in the Caribbean on Virgin Voyages' second true crime voyages. Back by popular demand, this five night, adults only escape sets sail March 20th, 2027 to Grand Turk in the beach club at Bimini. The difference between this year and last will be that I will be on the cruise this year along with Zeph, and he and I will be taping a live version of Disgrace Land along with podcast hosts from exactly right's buried bones, podcast of the year award winners, wisecrack and other fan favorites. Get on this cruise with us, guys, and enjoy live podcast recordings, behind the scenes, storytelling, exclusive meet and greets, and immersive true crime programming throughout this one of a kind voyage.
42:13 Jake Brennan? Head over to www.virginvoyages.com/truecrime to secure your spot.
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Previous Bonus: The Next Incel Killer Already Has A Playlist Next Bonus: From the Nitrous Mafia to the Italian Mafia, the Criminal Enterprises That Infiltrate Music Culture Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated