The Yellow Balloon Movement
Within jam band fandoms often dominated by substance use, clean and sober fans are building their own communities
by Maria Temming
Clean and sober fans at the music festival Lollapalooza find community and support at the Soberside yellow balloon station. (Photo courtesy of Patrick Whelan)
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A Phish concert at Madison Square Garden is a riot of joy. Fans embrace the friends they only ever see at Phish shows and befriend the strangers sitting beside them. Dancers diffuse into the aisles, and fistfuls of glow sticks rain like sparks from the upper landings into the sea of sequins and beanies below.
The fans of this jam band have a lot of love to give—to the music and each other. Over the past four decades, Phish has amassed a famously devoted fanbase, full of people who follow the band from show to show, city to city. But Phish fans are also known for pairing their musical experiences with a variety of drugs and alcohol, and when the air is sour with the scent of weed and beer and a good portion of fans are high on psychedelics or other substances, a Phish show can be an isolating or even triggering place for those in addiction recovery. Luckily for those fans, there is somewhere to go—and it’s right here in the arena.
At this particular show, that place is a table in the arena concourse with a tablecloth reading “Phellowship” in bold yellow letters, a bouquet of yellow balloons taped high on the wall behind it. The Phellowship is the Phish fandom’s yellow balloon group, a cohort of clean and sober fans united by their desire to enjoy concerts drug- and alcohol-free. (This story uses “clean,” “sober,” and other descriptors for fans according to how they self-identify.)
In typical yellow-balloon fashion, two fan volunteers are staffing the Phellowship table tonight, doling out candy and stickers that read “one show at a time”—a riff on the common recovery mantra “one day at a time.” One of them, Eric Jacklin, has been a Phish fan since high school. “Their music is just really energetic and fun,” says Jacklin, a 52 year old from New Hartford, Connecticut. “Sometimes it’s weird. It kind of has a personality.” Jacklin had been clean for about eight years when he started volunteering at yellow balloon tables around seven years ago—not only for the Phellowship, but similar groups in other music fandoms, too. “It’s like the best of both worlds, music and recovery,” he says. “It’s really unique.”
Fans stop by the Phellowship table throughout the night, but the group’s main gathering happens at the mid-show set break. As other concertgoers pour into the concourse to queue for beer and food, several dozen flock to the Phellowship table for a meeting. The format is similar to a 12-step setup—but assembling in an arena rather than a church basement requires adaptation.
As a torrent of fans flows around the Phellowship circle like river water around a rock, Jacklin kicks off the meeting by shouting out the ground rules. The gist is this: like other yellow balloon groups, the Phellowship preaches no specific program for recovery to alcoholics and addicts. It doesn’t preach just-say-no to other concertgoers, either. Its sole purpose is offering camaraderie to fans in recovery who want it.
Eric (left) and Barbara (right) host the Phellowship table at a Phish concert at Madison Square Garden. (Photo courtesy of Eric and Barbara)
That camaraderie is palpable as fans bop a yellow balloon around the circle; each person who catches it yells their name and a bit about their clean and sober concert experiences. The group is a mix of first-timers and old-timers, with stints of sobriety ranging from days to decades. Some revel in the unexpected pleasure of vibing to live music with a clear head. Others mention really struggling to get through shows without drinking or using. But everyone is pretty much brimming with love and gratitude for the other Phellowship members, or Phells, around them.
“Once I found out about the yellow balloon groups, it was just like magic for me, like I found my people,” says tonight’s other table host, Barbara, a 64-year-old New Yorker who’s been sober about 16 years and has been hosting yellow-balloon tables across a spread of fandoms for nearly as long. It’s clear that other fans feel the same, as several of them hang around the table after the meeting, chatting with old friends and making new ones.
It’s a glimpse of the vast network of Phells that sprawls far beyond the meeting circle at any given concert—and it’s just one node in an even larger network of yellow balloon groups across the jam band world. These fellowships have played an important role in many jam band devotees’ fannish lives, helping people hold onto fandoms they feared losing in sobriety, and at times even deepening their connections to the music. Some people report that having fandom-centric support systems has played a unique role in shoring up their sobriety in general—and these fandoms-within-fandoms have helped others get into recovery in the first place.
There are, of course, clean and sober fans in all kinds of music spaces—but jam band fandom has given rise to collectives of these fans over the decades for a few reasons.
“It’s kind of a perfect storm for something like that,” says Ross Brillhart. An ethnomusicologist and sober jam band fan in his 30s, Brillhart works at a recovery facility in Ludlow, Vermont, established by Phish frontman Trey Anastasio’s Divided Sky Foundation. “The jam band scene is a fanbase that is largely constructed around the historical consciousness of the Grateful Dead and their fans, the Deadheads,” Brillhart says, and he explains that there are two defining features of Deadhead culture that prime the scene for yellow ballooning.
First, the drugs. “Psychedelics have always been at the root of the jam band music scene, and they continue to be,” Brillhart says. But jam band fans indulge a broad menu of other substances, too, inspiring one fan in a 2019 documentary to describe the scene as “Disneyland for drunks and addicts.” To be clear, getting drunk or high at a show does not make someone an addict. But “where there are drugs, there are sober people,” Brillhart says, creating potential demand for something like a yellow balloon group.
The second key feature of the jam band scene positions it well to meet that demand: its in-person, communal nature. More than radio plays, album purchases, or online streams, live music is the heart of the jam band scene—particularly live music with fluid setlists full of freewheeling improvisation, enticing fans to attend lots of concerts. Like, dozens. Sometimes hundreds. Fans run into each other repeatedly at shows across the country and eagerly invite newcomers into the fold, creating concert audiences that can feel more like communities than crowds.
That heady combination of a drug-heavy and tight-knit culture led to the first yellow balloon group, a gathering of Deadheads, in the mid-1980s. As Deadhead Don Bryant tells it, the whole thing started in 1984 when he found a bag of mushrooms on the ground outside a Grateful Dead show. At that point, Bryant had seven years of sobriety under his belt, but he also had a secret: if he ever were going to get high again, he knew that he wanted it to be on mushrooms at a Dead show. In that light, his psilocybin find seemed almost fateful.
But back in his hotel room, Bryant felt conflicted. “I knew if I ate those shrooms that I would want to smoke some pot, and that I’d want to drink some wine, and I’d be off and running again,” Bryant recalled on the 2022 podcast America’s Dead. “So I got rid of them.” The next day, Bryant sought out an AA meeting where he met another sober Deadhead named Tony. The pair started going to shows together and collecting the names of other Deadheads in recovery.
In 1986, their ragtag bunch of recovering addicts—who dubbed themselves the Wharf Rats after a Grateful Dead song about an alcoholic—started following the Dead on tour together. At first, their set break hangouts were informal. But as the group grew, the Wharf Rats caught the band’s attention, and they were given a table to use as their home base, marked by yellow balloons.
“Wharf Rats have become a fixture on the tour,” Scripps Howard News Service proclaimed in 1993. “When the Dead are not touring, Wharf Rats keep their network alive, gathering at other concerts by U2 and even (gulp) the heavy metal band Metallica.” After Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia died in 1995, the members of the band spun off into other groups, starting with The Other Ones in 1998; as Deadheads followed these new groups, so did the Wharf Rats, replicating the format of their gatherings at those shows.
Various yellow balloon stickers decorate this recovery Big Book. (Photo courtesy of Meggan Knodel)
By that point, the yellow balloon idea was spreading to additional jam band fandoms. Inspired by the Wharf Rats, Phish fan Paige Clem had posted a Phish fansite by 1995 looking to connect with other fans in recovery. “We formed a little bitty teeny tiny group,” Clem recounted on the Phish podcast Undermine in 2021. That small seed of the Phellowship ultimately got the band’s blessing to host tables at shows and, like the Wharf Rats, bloomed into the thousands-strong legion it is today.
Over the years, other jam band fanbases have followed suit, creating their own yellow balloon groups, often with names taken from song titles. Clean and sober fans of the String Cheese Incident unite under the banner of the Jellyfish. For Widespread Panic fans, there’s the Gateway. Fans of moe. have the Happy Hour Heroes. Umphrey’s McGee, the Disco Biscuits, and Goose have Much Obliged, the Digital Buddhas, and the Hot Tea Party, respectively.
Besides meeting at concerts, yellow ballooners now keep in touch and coordinate through Facebook groups and other social media. Some even have regular in-person or virtual gatherings outside shows. One weekly Zoom call where members of a medley of yellow balloon groups share their stories is now broadcast as the One Show at a Time podcast. Such inter-fan connections have helped multiple generations of jam band enthusiasts hold onto fannish ways of life they feared—or had been told—they’d have to give up in recovery.
Spencer, a 26-year-old Wharf Rat, was pretty nervous about getting sober. “One of my biggest things was how I was going to be able to attend live music,” they say. “I had been going to shows for so long and always using…I thought the psychedelics or weed or alcohol or anything like that was enhancing the experience so much that I wouldn’t have as good of a time.”
Other yellow ballooners have shared similar concerns—either that sobriety would sap the fun out of shows, or that going to concerts would tempt them into relapse. Sometimes, other people in their recovery communities had even warned them off concerts. “I’ve heard it more in NA, but you hear it in AA, too, ‘Oh no, you can’t go to those concerts, you can’t be in that environment,’” says Bill Concilus, a 72 year old from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “I think you have to have some solid ground under you. Like, I wouldn’t get sober today and go to a festival tomorrow, you know? I’d want some traction. But with the support of the yellow balloon groups, you don’t have to give up live music.”
At first, running into people they used to see at shows and getting offered drugs could be triggering, Spencer says. But seeing live music with other sober people has “made a huge difference.” The meetings are a part of that—whether people are discussing highs or lows of sober concert-going, “being able to share those things with another addict during the show is definitely helpful,” Spencer says. They’re also just comforted seeing other Wharf Rats in the crowd. “If you’re not having the best time, or feeling a little bit antsy or anything like that, it’s nice being able to spot those stickers or the yellow balloons and have someone you know you can talk to.”
Now that they’ve attended multiple shows sober, Spencer isn’t so worried about live music losing its appeal. “I am able to be more present and enjoy the music more and actually remember the songs,” they say. “Which is, in my opinion, a lot nicer.” Other fans say that joining yellow balloon groups has made live music more fun because it’s given them a whole bunch of new friends to jam with, or that listening to their favorite songs unfiltered by drugs or alcohol has peeled back a new layer in their appreciation for the music.
But not every fan feels like the concert lawn is greener in sobriety. Rita Buccieri, a 24-year-old Phish fan based in Virginia, finds a lot of inspiration in Phish’s Trey Anastasio being sober—but substance-free shows have been rough for her, even with the Phellowship on hand. “It seems like a lot of people, after having gotten sober, enjoy the shows a lot more, and the truth is that I don’t,” she says. “Sometimes going to the Phellowship, I feel bad voicing my concerns, because everyone is just so grateful, and so it feels like I shouldn’t even really express, ‘Eh, this is OK.’”
It's true that yellow balloon gatherings can be overflowing fonts of positivity. Benji Rosenzweig wishes more people felt comfortable expressing when they’re having a hard time, even if it brings a meeting down. “We’re there to provide community for the people who are struggling,” says Rosenzweig, a 42 year old from Detroit, Michigan who co-hosts the One Show at a Time podcast. He vividly remembers being one of those struggling people when he first approached a Phellowship table in 2004.
Since his introduction to the yellow ballooniverse, Rosenzweig’s own live music life has gotten a lot more joyful, and a lot less stressful. “Going to a show when I was using revolved around making sure that I had what I need, drug- and alcohol-wise, and if I ran out of drugs, I was running around looking for drugs,” he says. “There was this constant fear and anxiety that revolved around attending the show, and I might have had fun during the music itself, but before and after was often miserable.” Now, Rosenzweig spends the time before and after shows hanging out with clean and sober friends. “The show experience is about community and friendship and love,” he says, “which is pretty awesome.”
Despite being a lifelong live music buff and a Deadhead since the ’70s, Bill Concilus wasn’t really aware of yellow balloon groups until around 2010, when a friend asked him to host either a Much Obliged or Happy Hour Heroes table (he can’t now recall which).
At the time, Concilus was 17 years sober, but “I had gotten stagnant in my recovery,” he says. “I was still going to my [recovery] home group, but I really wasn’t very involved. I wasn’t sponsoring many people, you know, I wasn’t reading the literature.” When Concilus got introduced to yellow balloon groups and started meeting sober music fans from around the world, he felt revitalized in his own sobriety. “I got more active in recovery, and my love for live music blossomed,” he says. “The whole was so much greater than the parts.”
Being in community with other clean and sober people is a cornerstone of recovery for many, and Concilus isn’t alone in feeling like yellow balloons have offered him something special in that regard. “It’s a different kind of connection when you are sitting in a meeting with a group of sober Phish fans, versus sitting in a meeting with a group of regular folks in AA,” says Lauryn S., a 38-year-old Phell based in Alabama who co-hosts One Show at a Time. “The level of camaraderie is so powerful and it’s so relieving and nurturing, because it’s like, ‘You’re like me. We’re all the same.’” Sharing that common fannish background can help people feel more comfortable making connections and asking for help—similar to the way 12-steppers might seek community in meetings designated for specific genders, age ranges, or sexual identities.
Many yellow balloon gatherings take place at designated tables during mid-show set breaks. They can range in size from intimate handfuls of fans to crowds of dozens. (Photo courtesy of Lauryn S.)
Sharing the same fannish lineage can also give yellow ballooners unique insights into each other’s recovery needs—especially when someone’s lifestyle centers around music, the way it does for nomads who follow jam bands on tour. “When I had sponsors who were not Deadheads, they just kind of… could never understand it,” says Alex, a 20 year old in Richmond, Virginia, who attended a dozen Dead & Company shows last summer alone. “Once I got a sponsor who was a Wharf Rat and in a yellow balloon group the way I was, it was like, ‘Oh, well, yeah, I understand why you would do that,’ or, ‘I understand why you would think like that.’”
Another common cornerstone of recovery is being of service to other alcoholics and addicts, and Concilus explains that volunteering with yellow balloon groups offers clean and sober fans one more way to do that—though the work isn’t always easy or fun. “You get drunks or people that are really high that sometimes want to debate or get into conversation, maybe antagonize a little,” Concilus says. But he’s also seen drunk or high antagonists of concerts past return to yellow balloon tables freshly clean or sober. “You see them at a circle a year later, and they’ll say, ‘You know, I was such a mess, and I had no idea, but you planted the seed.’”
Yellow balloon tables might be particularly fertile ground for that seed-planting because of the groups’ general no-judgment attitude toward the other fans at a show. “If you are using drugs or drinking that night, you can still come over,” says Meggan Knodel, a 43-year-old sober Phish and Goose fan based in Virginia who’s hosted and coordinated volunteers for yellow balloon tables. “We might ask you to not talk [during the meeting], because other people want to hear experience, strength, and hope on challenges or victories or positive or negative experiences of being sober at shows,” she says. “But we’ll talk to you after the meeting, please stay!”
Yellow balloon groups aren’t always harmonious. Internal disagreements mirror conversations in other recovery spaces, like whether being “California sober” (typically substance-free except for weed) counts as sobriety, or the merits of abstinence versus harm reduction. “That’s really the biggest drama,” Knodel says, “‘What is sober?’” While some fans see the yellow balloon sphere as a big tent that can fit people in all types of addiction recovery and treatment, others apply strict definitions, which can occasionally stoke discord both online and in-person.
But on the whole, Knodel’s yellow balloon experience has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s given her lifelong friends and a support network that spans every state. She thought she’d found her people when she became a Phish fan as a teenager. But joining the Phellowship and extended yellow balloon family in her thirties? “I had no idea that there was so much more,” she says. “I had no idea … how cool it was gonna be, and that it was gonna be such a big part of my life.”
The yellow balloon movement started spreading into the broader festival scene early in its history. The first Bonnaroo, in 2002, had a lineup stacked with jam bands, drawing a crowd of yellow ballooners that included Patrick Whelan, a 58 year old from Louisville, Kentucky. Even as the festival pivoted to feature more mainstream acts, Whelan explains, some clean and sober jam fans kept going back. Each year, they’d drape one corner of a local coffee shop in Wharf Rat and Phellowship banners and hold meetings–until they caught the attention of festival management, and were given an official yellow balloon station.
The non-profit Harmonium coordinates yellow balloon volunteers for music festivals across the country, including the Soberville station at Welcome to Rockville in Daytona Beach, Florida. (Photo courtesy of Patrick Whelan)
The same festival organizers later asked Whelan and his fellow yellow ballooners to appear at other events. Today, Whelan’s non-profit, Harmonium, dispatches volunteers to events across the United States. “This past year, we did 32 music festivals,” he says, in genres as diverse as country, EDM, hip-hop, and metal. Unlike folks in the jam band scene, who may have seen yellow balloons floating around for decades, fans of these other genres typically aren’t familiar with such groups, Whelan says. “Most of the people stumble upon us and are like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve gotta call my sponsor. I can’t believe I just went to a meeting in the middle of this event!’”
Other jam band fans are busy bringing yellow balloons to the fandoms of specific artists. A few years ago, Meggan Knodel and some of her friends launched a yellow balloon group for bluegrass musician Billy Strings. Like the Wharf Rats and others before them, the newly minted Dusty Baggies got their start with a sort of guerilla sobriety, posting online where they’d be at shows and coming to the venue with stickers. Since the group got approval from band management to host tables in 2022, Knodel has helped organize volunteers and hosted tables herself–where, like Whelan, she’s introduced yellow balloon groups to a largely unfamiliar audience.
The yellow balloon group for bluegrass artist Billy Strings, the Dusty Baggies, got permission to host tables at shows in 2022. (Photo courtesy of Lauryn S.)
Other newborn groups have apparently been long-awaited in their fandoms. Take the dedicated cult following of the rock band Ween. “It’s a pretty wastey crowd, even in a scene of wastey crowds,” says clean fan Peter R,, a 49 year old based in Metuchen, New Jersey. Ween fans in recovery started meeting online as the Sunny Bunnies in the fall of 2020, and had their first in-person meeting before a show in Las Vegas a year later.
Peter especially remembers one fan who flew to Vegas specifically for that meeting: the man had never come to a Zoom session, but he’d somehow heard about the Sunny Bunnies’ in-person gathering. “He was like, ‘This is my favorite band, and there’s no possible way I could see them clean without a group of people in recovery. And I’ve been waiting for this to happen, so that I could come see this band again,’” Peter says. “I didn’t stop crying for, like, half an hour.”
Benji Rosenzweig sees a lot of potential for fans to loft yellow balloons in other genres of music, too. “Think about everybody who’s gone to a Snoop Dogg concert and is sober and says, ‘Shit, it’s really hard to go to a Snoop Dogg show,’” he says. “Wouldn’t it be cool if Snoop Dogg had a sober group?”
Beyond music, there may also be potential for yellow ballooning in other fan spaces infused with heavy drug and alcohol use–like NFL games and tailgates, for example. In 2019, Grateful Dead and Phish fan John Plageman decided to bring the yellow balloon idea to the Green Bay Packers fandom. He helped launch Section Yellow, a table at Green Bay’s Lambeau Field staffed by volunteers who offer support and “one game at a time” stickers.
It remains to be seen what other corners of fandom might find the yellow balloon model useful. But even if drug-free countercultures remain largely a fixture of the jam band world, their influence will continue to expand as younger, newer, and newly sober fans arrive on the scene. “It gives me this combination of recovery and music, which are two things that I need to stay alive,” says Jmac, a Sunny Bunny as well as a second-generation Wharf Rat—his mom is also a Deadhead in recovery. “I’m just so incredibly grateful that there’s other people also like me,” he says, “and that there were people way before me who had this idea and started it all up.”
Thanks to Dusty Baggies co-founder and Phell Caroline Cooley for her sensitivity read of this article.
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Maria Temming is a science journalist and fan of fandom based in Washington, D.C.