Phish’s Trey Anastasio Discusses Dark Days Battling Drug Addiction On ‘WTF With Marc Maron’ Podcast

An interview with Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio is featured on the latest episode of WTF Podcast. Anastasio’s two-hour chat with host Marc Maron included an extensive discussion of the dark path the guitarist traveled that led up to his 2006 arrest, subsequent sobriety and Phish reuniting after a five-year breakup.

Trey Anastasio has been one of the guests Maron fans have most requested he have on the podcast. The comedian/actor turned down past offers because he thought it would be “disrespectful” as he was unfamiliar with Phish’s music. He decided to finally do it when Trey was pitched again thinking the pair’s road to sobriety would be “a through line.” Anastasio and Maron spent lots of time talking about their struggles with addiction and how they came out the other side.

Marc Maron finally dug into Phish’s music before Anastasio stopped by his garage and was surprised by what he heard. “I gotta be honest with you, they were nothing like what I expected. It’s not hippie music. It’s actually very rich and musically expansive in terms of virtuosity, but also style. It’s probably closer to prog than it is to hippie music,” Maron explained. “So I was sort of like, oh my God, I had no idea. So heading into this interview, You know I’m a guy that just discovered Phish. Now whether or not, this isn’t stuff that every Phish fan knows, right?”

Anastasio was not shocked to hear Maron wasn’t “a Phish guy.” Trey has had similar experiences with many other people. “[Phish has] always been the strange uncle at the barbecue standing in the corner,” Anastasio quipped.

The episode was released three days after the new Phish album, Evolve, came out. Yet the pair spent very little time discussing the record. Instead, they dove into Trey’s musical influences, how Anastasio feels about his 60th birthday approaching, the guitarist’s family, Phish’s rise to fame, the “dark” period of the New Jersey native’s career, the Grateful Dead, Billy Strings and much more.

Anastasio points to the late 1990s as when hard drugs infiltrated the backstage scene. “Coke and dope,” Trey specified. “As soon as that stuff started to get … it’s bullshit, it’s awful … that’s been my life from Big Cypress to sobriety was not that long of a period of time. We pretty quickly started taking breaks, ‘we gotta get away from this,’ we tried two or three times,” the guitarist added.

Trey shared a story of drummer Jon Fishman telling him, “we are about to crash into a brick wall” as they were flying home from the band’s Big Cypress millennium festival in Florida. Anastasio revealed that before Phish started their first post-hiatus show on December 31, 2002 at MSG he told his team, “If the hard drugs show up again, somebody grab me and throw me in rehab.” He noted it took 10 minutes after the band left stage for the drugs to return.

Another interesting anecdote Trey told was about a discussion he had with LD Chris Kuroda when they were at a party in front of a pile of cocaine. “How did this [the drug use start] … there was none of this?,” Anastasio said to Kuroda. “YOU started doing it. People were doing this. But as long as you weren’t doing it — which was for quite some time — we all thought that we had to hide it. It’s in everyone’s interest — Chris Kuroda told me this — it’s in everyone’s interest for you to do it. Because when you do it, being the center of the thing, we can all do it openly,” Trey recalled of what Kuroda said.

Anastasio detailed how he returned to drugs following Phish’s 2004 breakup. He then spoke about his 2006 arrest in Whitehall, New York and how a judge’s decision to send him to drug court saved his life. Anastasio had to move to the area and got himself straight. Eventually, the other members of Phish visited him and they started writing music together. “It’s just been a dream,” Trey said of the period since Phish returned in March of 2009 in Hampton, Virginia.

Listen to Trey Anastasio’s appearance on WTF Podcast with Marc Maron below: