Trey Anastasio joined The Small Bow Podcast to discuss sobriety and his Divided Sky Foundation addiction recovery center, offering insight into how he is working to advance a community that he credits with saving his life 19 years ago. Though the Phish guitarist gives a peek under his musical (harry) hood, the bulk of the hour-and-a-half conversation with host A.J. Daulerio provides Anastasio a platform to talk about getting clean with a level of depth he’s rarely shown publicly.
The name A.J. Daulerio may not ring a bell, but the former Gawker editor gained infamy in 2012 for publishing a sex tape of Hulk Hogan with another man’s wife. The late wrestler, born Terry Bollea, successfully sued the tabloid news site for $115 million with a defense team partially financed by billionaire Facebook and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, bankrupting Gawker in 2016 and becoming a landmark privacy case for the digital age. In the years since, Daulerio launched The Small Bow Podcast after going to rehab, hoping to amplify stories of recovery “he couldn’t easily find on the internet.”
Trey uses the appearance to openly unpack his recovery, a departure from his usual interview fodder of practice routines, guitar gear, and love of MJ Lenderman. While the trope of musicians fatally struck down by addiction has become as intertwined with rock music as Les Pauls or the kayfabe of an encore break, Anastasio defies the live fast, die young cliche and shares his story of a life saved in the 11th hour by sobriety.
The Divided Sky
Anastasio helped open The Divided Sky Residential Recovery Program alongside Melanie Gulde, the drug court officer who was part of Trey’s probation in 2006, with proceeds raised from the series of fanless Beacon Jams livestreams from the Beacon Theatre in 2020. The fifth anniversary, three-night run begins Friday, and the podcast served as a promotional opportunity more for the work of Gulde and her staff than the sold-out NYC homecoming. Thirty-one people are currently housed at the facility, receiving full-time treatment at a fraction of the cost of the typical treatment center ($7,500 all-in, according to Anastasio).
“It’s up on a mountain,” Anastasio described the center. “These things are important, you know? It’s in nature. It’s beautiful. You’ve got this incredible staff. There’s sunlight going through the windows and there’s dogs all over the place and they go out and go hiking every day. A lot of these places [other rehabs] are in strip malls, you know.”
Clean Feelings
Whether or not you or someone in your life has suffered from substance abuse issues, Anastasio’s story is universal because he still manages an affliction that affects us all: being a human being with human emotions. He is still working on emotional sobriety, the process of being at peace with your true feelings.
He and A.J. discuss how the hope is for “nothing that anyone ever says or does you take personally” and living in the moment without the emotional weight of our perceptions. Weekly men’s group meetings are now just as much a part of the guitarist’s routine as practicing Aeolion scales. But he’s still working on it, joking, “I’m not there yet.” Yeah, man, we’re with you.
“I live a pretty busy life,” Anastasio explained. “So, sometimes people will ask me, ‘Are you going to come to X, Y, and Z?’ And a lot of times I have to say no. And whenever I say no because I’m doing a lot of things, I always feel horrible and sick and like I’m an awful person and they’re gonna hate me, you know, and that every text response is like loaded.”
Call it whatever you want—peace of mind, emotional sobriety, self-awareness—Anasatio is actively working toward it, to the inevitable benefit of his friends, family, and bandmates.
Vermont Sober
While the rise of “Cali Sober” has led some fans (typically of the clinically online variety) to speculate about Anastasio’s use of THC, the guitarist put those wonders to rest as he clarified his 19 years of sobriety have been “without a puff.” He even incidentally put his disconnect with modern weed culture comically on display as he hiply referred to a dispensary as a “cannabis store.”
Returning to Anastasio’s day job, Daulerio asks a nicer version of the frequent phanboard critique that the guitarist’s recovery has led to an influx of songs that fall under the ugly umbrella known as “love and light.” The question ultimately boils down to whether Anastasio’s sobriety has eclipsed his identity, which he disputes from a personal level, countering that he can be around his daughters having a glass or two of wine, and mentions having no problem being around a bandmate smoking a joint.
Related: Billy Strings Unpacks A Lifetime of Trauma & Resilience On ‘Dopey Podcast’ [Listen]
New Trey On New Year’s
Trey shared that he still has the same dopamine rollercoaster rides, many music-related, only now with a keen sense of wonder, once dulled by drinking and drugging. He wakes up at 4 or 5 in the morning, once considered an early bedtime, brain racing, chemical-free. The morning of the podcast, he’d barely slept. The annual New Year’s Eve “gag” had been scrapped the day before, and the band’s leader had a few things to figure out.
“We had a New Year’s plan going for a few months and it just like imploded a couple days ago,” Anastasio shared with a rueful giggle in his voice. “They’re tricky to get in there and there’s all these reasons, not for anybody’s fault or anything like that, but you’re going on a thing that the laws of physics don’t apply. Like you can’t get that thing in there. It’s happened before.”
Trey gave nothing away about this year’s New Year’s…whatever you call what this band does on New Year’s Eve—raining golf balls in Madison Square Garden, flying hot dogs, the guitar player stuck on a floating platform. Whatever recipe the band is cooking up for its hungry fanbase is now the consumer of Anastasio’s restless mind, surely a good sign for the 61-year-old’s creative longevity.
Themes From The Bottom
Trey Anastasio has spoken often about the successes along his road to recovery, but he has been far less forthcoming about his early 2000s spiral into opioid addiction.
He speaks of his early naivete around cocaine, assuming that it was just something that went away in the ’70s. Looking back on the downward spiral of drugs in and around the band, Anastasio recalls asking longtime lighting designer Chris Kuroda, “What the hell happened?” The man affectionately known as CK5 simply responded, “As soon as you did it, it’s legal now. Because you’re Trey, and this is Phish.”
“I did a line of cocaine [in 1996 or ’97] and it seemed like, boom, from that to these parties backstage where there’s just mountains of cocaine in every room and everybody was drinking and doing all kinds of other drugs,” Anastasio recalled of how fast things spiraled.
One traffic stop and seven felonies later, the man who created an entire universe known as Gamehendge and helped pull off a six-hour concert at the turn of the millennium was getting a call from his mom after entering rehab on New Year’s Day 2007. He was looking at jail time.
He shares that he’d lost everything: Phish, Trey Anastasio Band—and in a particularly sweet moment, “my best friend—Jon Fishman,” but the first thing he wrote down as part of a therapy activity about what drugs had cost him was humor. Drugs had killed off the laughter for the man who toured the country, at times playing songs where laughter was written into the lyrics.
These days, Anastasio punctuates every sentence with a big grin or chuckle.
Back On The Train
Trey also discussed his first live performance following his arrest, a surprise sit-in with the Dave Matthews Band on August 14th, 2007 at Saratoga Performing Arts Center in New York. Anastasio joined his longtime friend Matthews for “Life in Our Graves”, which he said was the first note he’d played in sobriety. Though, given his background and condition, Anastasio’s drug court supervisors almost didn’t let him go.
“Finally [they’re] like, okay, we’re going to let you do this,” Anastasio rememberd, before citing the lengthy list of requirements. “You’re going to have to go into jail at 8 in the morning the next morning or seven and take a urine test and cut your hair and do a hair test, and it was a whole thing. They didn’t want me to go to…a concert. So you can go in the back, and you’re going to have an escort, and you’re allowed to play one song with the Dave Matthews Band.”
As Trey takes himself back to that night, the anxiety is still palpable in his voice—playing before tens of thousands of people without his usual crutches—but so is the relief. “I talk to Dave about that sometimes,” Anastasio shared, with his trademark smile, “it really meant a lot to me. That was the first time I ever played in sobriety. And then I was at the jail the next morning, pissing in a cup with a guy looking at me.”
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Dave Matthews Band, Trey Anastasio — “Lie In Our Graves” — Saratoga Springs, NY — 8/14/07
[Video: ChesterCopperpot5]
Happy Happy, Oh My Friend
January 5th will be 19 years of sobriety for Trey, “assuming I don’t walk out of here into a crack den,” he jokes. He is helped by his sponsor, whom he’s known since they were 5th-grade classmates. And he watched his daughter get married the week after the podcast. Not a bad life.
Now if he can just figure out what the hell the band is going to do at MSG for New Year’s…
Watch the full Trey Anastasio interview on The Small Bow addiction and recovery podcast. If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, help is available. Recovery is available in many forms, and The Divided Sky Foundation and its hotline (802-735-7890) is just one of them.
The Wind Blows High w/ Trey Anastasio | The Small Bow Podcast