DISGRACELAND - Phish: Community, Hippie Crack, and the Nitrous Mafia

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

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. For a full list of contributors, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠disgracelandpod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ To listen to Disgraceland ad free and hear an exclusive mini-episode that further explores Phish and the Nitrous Mafia, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed, I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Monsu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Movies can make you feel, make you dream. Sometimes they even make you appreciate architecture. Is there anybody who's been hotter in a doorway than Elizabeth Taylor? That's the kind of analysis you'll find every week on Dear Movies I Love You, the new podcast from the Exactly Right Network. Every Tuesday, we break down the films we're crushing on, from blockbusters to deep cuts. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis.

This is a story about community. About four self-described dorks from Vermont who built one of the most devoted fan bases 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 fish, which means it's a story about,

I don't know, man. Is it great music? Unlike that clip, I played a few at the top of the show. That definitely wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron 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 Soldier Slim. 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 15th, 2004. And that was the day that Fish played what was billed as their final show, when in fact 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 Nitris Mafia, and Fish. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is this Graceland. Earlier this year, in the spring of 2025, Fish 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,

and here's a thing about Fish'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 Fish Hall of Fame phenomenon in one word.

Community. Fish's devoted fan base 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 flag festivals and 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 Fish'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. 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, fish 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. That said, musically speaking at least, fish is more like a fever dream hybrid of, yes, talking heads in the live. Rocky Horror Picture Show than they are the second coming of the Grateful Dead. And even that is a reductive description. But Fish 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 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 set list And they covered Jimmy's bold as love And radio heads everything in its right place And then encoreed with Frankenstein 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 9 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. 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. 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, stone 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 slurred 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. Ice cold right off the tank. one for ten bucks or four for twenty, what do you want? He 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, 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 is crowding you suddenly vanishes. No doubt, off to another patch of real estate right around the corner. Nitris has always been around. long before fish, the dead themselves were hoving gas through old army surplus aspirators in the 70s. But that was before the nitrous racket became organized. Before it was controlled by dons 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 fish 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. There's a much more innocent view of the nitrous scene in Todd Phillips' documentary on Fish, Bitter Sweet 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,

tra Anastasia was really beginning to notice the depth of the drug culture surrounding this band. It was also at this time, roughly 13 years after Fish 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 Fish, but Trey was a self-described dork. All the guys in Fish 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 faties 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, your same. yourself or just another shadow out on the fringes. 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. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man.

A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always,

can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him. in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance like he's about

to attack me, like, making karate noises. And his entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been a sleepwalk. David O'Yello.

I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kimman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Tena, manjou, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more.

Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us. I'm Millie de Cherico. And I'm Casey O'Brien. And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast, Dear Movies I Love You from the Exactly Right Network. Can I say something about the criterion closet? Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay, that's another film, grape I got two. Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that's a store that's

sells running shoes. Or an ice cream shop with an extra pee and an E at the end. So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form. I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over, from hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 on stage, 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, unquote. 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 a 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. Worst case, you're suffering a seizure of brain damage. These days, hippie crack is no longer confined to Shakedown 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, always ready at a moment's notice to jump to another spot if 5O 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 Nitris. 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 Nitris dealers getting busted, but the mafia is highly organized, and the mafia is also cutthroat. And with the increased presence at fish shows and other music festivals, came increased tactics to dominate the market by any means necessary. In 2009, according to one fish fan,

a parking lot attended was beaten to shit by a nitrous dealer outside a show in Portland, Maine. That same year, at the Gathering of the Vives Festival in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where Fish 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. Many years earlier in 1983, the year fish 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 on stage, 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 their popular but still hyper-local ice cream. And Tray Anastasia was about to transfer from UVM to Goddard College,

where he'd compose a concept album called The Man Who Steps Into Yesterday as his senior study. And just like Bernie and Ben and Jerry, Tray, 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 Nectors 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. 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 Electra, who released their third studio album, A Picture of Nectar, in 1992, while simultaneously reissuing their first two independent releases, Hoonta and Lawnboy. 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, 70,000, 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 a fish

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 weekend, just as the members of fish were beginning to tune into a dangerous new frequency.

Trey was drooling. The saliva oozed from the side of his mouth and ran down his chin. Moore 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

slobbering 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.

Santana was laughing harder and louder now, nodding his head and approval as Trey fell deeper into oblivion. Trey then turned to look down at his own hands and realized that he'd been holding. 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 on stage, and he did this while getting ridiculously high on the music.

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. Drolling 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 on stage at the Great Went Festival and scanned the community of 70,000 fish fans gathered before. Just like he'd once tapped into something good with Santana. He was now tapping into something with each and every person out there. But this was a long way from three sets a night at nectar. This was much bigger than signing on the dotted line with Electra. 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, 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 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. In the shadow of that giant wave, began to turn the daylight into darkness. We'll be right back after this world, word, word. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl.

You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me?

The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? You'd rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb.

And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance like he's about to attack me. making karate noises. And his entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been

sleepwalking. David O'Yello I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman

broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Tena Monsu.

Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us.

I'm Millie to Cherico. And I'm Casey O'Brien. And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast, Dear Movies I Love You, from the Exactly Right Network. Can I say something about the Criterion Clause? Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay, that's another film grape I got two.

Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that sells running shoes. Or an ice cream shop with an extra P and an E at the end. So consider us your Slacker Movie Movie clerks in podcast form. I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over, from hidden gems to big-screen favorites.

New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. January 2000. Trey watched from his window seat as the point. plane climbed into the clear blue sky in 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 Cyprus 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 fish festivals, the sole performer was fish. 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. In the next seat over, Fishman nudged him, and Trey turned to look at his best friend and band-made 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 at 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 Fish were away, festival organizers drew heavily from the band's innovations to create Bonaroo. 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 Dave Matthews band were headlining a show. The Fed seized black tar heroin, ecstasy, weed, mushrooms, and 40 tanks in 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 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. In 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 fishes 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 them off from the band, shut them off from the fans, and shut them 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. And 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 can 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 their cars on the highway and leave most of their gear behind and marched 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 have been kept up all night by the symphony of hissing gas tanks.

You passed 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. 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 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's 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 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 page 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 him, 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.

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 and nitrous Sally 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? 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 in 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 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'll 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 Tray Anastasia 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, Perkisset, 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 driver's license had been suspended. The station's phone was ringing off the hook.

Reporters from all over the country were ravenous for D.D. 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. 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 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 stuff.

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 to create and build up so many years earlier. In 2009, Fish made their triumphant return to the stage, led by a sober tray, and they had never sounded better. The same fans who said that Coventry felt like a funeral

also said that this moment felt like a resurrection. That didn't mean that the darkness and scene have been completely lifted. 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 Nitris Mafia had created out on the margins. Betray 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 Disgraceland. All right, thanks for listening to this episode of Discraceland. Question of the week for you guys. And I want you to call me 617-90666-6638. Leave me a voicemail with your answer. 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 viving 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 mellow out you just want to chill you want those specific kind of vibes 617 906 636338 voicemail and text to let me know at disgraceland pod on the social's Disgracelandpod at gmail.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 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. When a group of women discover they've all dated. the same prolific con artist. They take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves.

We always say that, trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests. Like Amelia Clark.

When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yelloo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gait and Moderato from Stranger Things. Tena Monsu.

Camilla Moron. Carrie Kenny Silver and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Movies can make you feel, make you dream. Sometimes they even make you appreciate architecture. Is there anybody

who's been hotter in a doorway than Elizabeth Taylor? That's the kind of analysis you'll find every week on Dear Movies I Love You, the new podcast from the Exactly Right Network. Every Tuesday, we break down the films we're crushing on, from blockbusters to deep cuts. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.