Disgraceland 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 nitros 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 show that definitely wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron called Peace, Love and ice Cream MK one. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to slow Motion by Juvenile featuring Soulja Slim. But 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 fifteenth, two thousand and four, 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 Nitrous Mafia, and Fish. I'm Jake Brennan and this
is this Graceland. Earlier this year, in the spring of twenty twenty five, Phish was one of fourteen 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 in voting process because they received the largest number of fan votes in Hall of Fame history, over three hundred and twenty nine thousand votes, to be exact, and that's nearly fifty thousand 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 jo Q public to expresses a pain. And here's the thing about Fish's three hundred and twenty nine thousand votes. Many myself included, were shocked to discover that a band that has never had a single on the Billboard Hot one hundred.
A band that has only been nominated for one Grammy in their forty plus year career, A band that, frankly has always seemed a little goofy, that that band has so many Joe Q publics hiding in the woodwork. And I can explain this Fish Hall of Fame.
Phenomenon in one word. Community.
Fish's devoted fan base as a ride or die community that began assembling at Keggers on Friends Farms in the mid nineteen eighties and then evolved into record breaking multi day freak flag festivals in far flung parts of New England in the nineties, eventually staging the largest ticketed concert on Earth for the millennium, some eighty five thousand 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.
Page 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 nineteen ninety five, that community unexpectedly surged in number when Jerry Garcia died at the age of fifty three, 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 showed a 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 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 dead Heads 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 Tray'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.
Twenty seventeen, 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 Radioheads Everything in its Right Place and then encored 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 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, that 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 writing, and you keep writing 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 and 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. Now you turn and see twelve or thirteen 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 slur that you can only guess.
That that's what he's talking about.
And then the balloon people, the cellars, the pushers, they're pushing up against you, blocking you from walking down the street. One of them is yelling in your face, it is cold right off the tank. One for ten bucks or four for twenty. What do you want? He thrusts the fissful, swollen balloons in your direction, red and yellow and pink, daring.
You to try to step around it.
You know he's not gonna 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 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, and 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 car 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.
Nitrous has always been around long before Fish. The Dead themselves were huffing gas through old army surplus aspirators in the seventies, 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's documentary on Fish Bittersweet Motel, which includes this moment where a girl huffs some gas and dances around and then hundreds fans
get Buck naked for an impromptu photoshoot. That footage is from the mid nineties, and it was right around this time that for the first time, Trey Anastasia was really beginning to notice the depth of the drug culture surrounding his band. It was also at this time, roughly thirteen years after Fish began, the Tray began to participate in the drug culture as well. Listen, I know that sounds weird thirteen 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 and 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 nitros mafia's minions pedaling 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, 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. Long before nitrous oxide was known on the jam bands circuit as hippie crack, it was more commonly referred to as laughing gas. It was first synthesized in seventeen seventy two 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 dentists has you inhale when he needs to gouge away your gums with a lethal scalpel. But as early as seventeen ninety nine there was evidence of nitrous being used not for medicine but for recreation.
Seventeen ninety nine, 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 speaker 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 thirty to sixty seconds, float off into oblivion, and then it's over and all you want is another hit. But ask any dentists 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 in falling in cracking your head open. Worst
case you're suffering a seizure of brain damage. These days, hippie crack is no longer confined to shakedown steep, which is the tailgating area outside any content venue where you buy grilled cheese's, hash brownies, handmade jewelry, bumper stickers, and whatever other wearers 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 that shows. The balloon men say up in one spot, one guy filling, another handling the cash, a third on the lookout, and within ten 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 five O 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 a 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 two thousand and nine, according to one Fish fan, a parking lot of Tendant was beaten to shit by a nitrous dealer outside of show in Portland, Maine. That same year, at the gathering of the Vibes Festival, Bridgeport, Connecticut, where Fish was not performing By the Way, a twenty nine 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 nineteen eighty three, the year Fish first formed in Burlington, Vermont, the only viable connection between Nitrous and rock and roll was this one bootleg going around to 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 Allen 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 nineteen eighty three, 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 they're 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.
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 nineteen eighties
and into the nineties. 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, in nineteen ninety two, while simultaneously reissuing their first two independent releases, Junta 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 ninety five running up northern Maine all the way to Louring Air Force Base, where a Fish staged a two day festival called the Great Went in August of nineteen ninety seven. 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. 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 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 I who was with him.
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 on stage, and he did this while getting ridiculously high.
On the music.
And 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 on stage 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. But this was a long way from three sets a night at Nectar's. 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 and not just nitrous but coke and dope, and more hissing tanks and more empty balloons trampled under foot across the grounds at Mooring 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 and 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.
We'll be right back after this. We're, We're, We're.
January two thousand. Trey watched from his window seat as the 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 Should 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, Cruz worked to build what was essentially a small city that 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 seven uninterrupted hours to give her 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 him nearly seventeen years Hey Man, Fisherman 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 one hundred and fifty miles an hour and we're about to crash into a brick wall. Trey knew exactly what Fisherman 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. So at the moment that they were at their height, after performing for around eighty five five thousand people at the largest ticketed y two k 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 Bonnaroo, now one of the largest annual music festivals in the country when it's not being canceled. But I digress and in two thousand and one, federal agents along with the d C Police, arrested thirty people outside RFK Stadium, where the Dave Matthews Band were headlining
a show. The Fed seized black tar, heroin, ecstasy, wheed mushrooms, and forty tanks at nitrous oxide, each weighing between two hundred and three hundred 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 large
Nitros 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 two thousand and two. 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 thirty thousand feet with no parachute. The drugs shut him 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 it Fish didn't stop for good. This time, then it was very possible that Tray 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 two thousand and four. 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, stinky 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 got pulled off too, and 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 sixty seventy thousand people here had to endure when they decided to abandon their cars in the highway and leave most of their gear behind in march thirty
something miles just to be here. You've 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 on the hood of Avovo Sadan Royal blue and beat to shit in 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 them whole, and maybe the Mud won't
want them 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 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's 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 vogo 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 that all too good.
To be true?
All right, dudes.
A little later in this episode, I'm gonna 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 Disgraceland, which is available
only to our All Access members. Just go to disgracelandpod dot com to sign up and to hear that bonus mini episode right now, all right, We're to get back to our main story here on Fish. On December fifteenth, two thousand and six, a little over two years after Fish took what was said to be their final bow at the disastrous Coventry Festival, forty two year old Trey
Anastasio was pulled over in Whitehall, New York. It was around three thirty 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 Vikingin, percocet, and xanax, all three of which were prescribed to someone else, but also the cop found heroin traded in even weigh one hundred pounds. Now he sat alone in a cell inside the Whitehall police station, charged with criminal possession 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 asked 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 lock up 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 slow turned the dial, and then there he got.
Something and he turned it on.
You up, and the music came through the shitty headphones, one hundred percent funky and one thousand percent prophetic. It was a song Higher Ground by Stevie Wonder. Stevie's lyrics hit him like one of his transcendental jams, hit an audience of seventy thousand. 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 stock and one Stevie Wonder song was all it took. Trey pled guilty to possession, began a fourteen 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, grubbing 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 two thousand and nine, Fish made their triumphant return to the stage led by a sober Tray, 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. Now, that didn't mean that the
darkness and the scene had been completely lifted. In twenty eighteen, 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 twenty twenty five, a man was stabbed to death outside of 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 is 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 his Disgraceland. All right, thanks for
listening to this episode of Disgraceland. Question of the Week for you guys that I want you to call me six p one seven nine oh six, six six three eight, 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, hi, stoned a 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. Six one seven nine oh six six six three eight voicemail and text to let me know at disgrace lampod on the socials Disgrace lampod at gmail dot 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 disgracelampod dot com. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook at disgracelamppod and on YouTube at YouTube dot com, slash at disgracelampod rock a roller.
He's a bad man.