Financial analyst Dan Greenhaus’s hits on CNBC, couched in jargon, typically attract little more than the bored stares of traders looking up from their monitors. But two seemingly routine appearances of his have been uploaded to YouTube, receiving thousands of views and earning a New York Times blog post. In one, discussing the Federal Reserve, Greenhaus tells three other panelists, “I look back on secular bull markets—you know, the days when my life was a haze, and you could just buy and call it a day.” In the other, arguing heatedly on Lawrence Kudlow’s show, he says, “Inflation as what the Fed cares about has been going backwards down the number line for the better part of two years now,” and, “We quote unquote tightened in the summer and the fall of 2008—I feel the feeling I forgot from that time.”

Why the attention to such banal quotes? Because they, and a couple others from those appearances, contain lyrical allusions from five different songs by Phish (“when my life was a haze,” for example, comes from the song “NICU”). The nearly 30-year-old Vermont jam band will play Long Island’s Jones Beach Theater Friday night and two shows this weekend at Merriweather Post Pavilion outside Washington, D.C. On sports broadcasts, on “Community,” and on innumerable Twitter feeds, Phish fans have sent out little bits of code that let other likeminded aficionados know they are one of them. (Ideally, the lyrics are double entendres that reveal nothing to outsiders, like a thin veil of clouds that keeps stars out of sight.) “When you watch a morning show, ‘Today,’ or on MSNBC, and they use ‘Tweezer Reprise’ as an outro, there’s always a chuckle,” observes National Review’s Robert Costa, who has been going to Phish shows for a decade and can easily recognize these subtle sounds.

Phish’s community is disparate, stretching across geographic and professional boundaries; it rewards obsessiveness, whether it is knowing concert callbacks or recognizing lyrics in tweets; and it is small, though not as small as you think, and deeply committed—as the Pricenomics blog has noted, this is an act with zero hit songs but a quarter billion dollars in ticket sales. Social media has only emboldened the soft cult of Phish: Even as the band’s quirks—both in their music and their appearance—have precluded mainstream success , Twitter and Facebook have allowed fans to find and communicate with each other more easily than ever. A Phish fan will see a reference in a tweet, and shrug, “We are everywhere” (or type “#weareeverywhere”)—a standard saying that, like many of Phish’s cultural cues, originates with the Grateful Dead.

About two years ago, Jake Beckman, an assignment editor for Bloomberg Television , noticed his peers tweeting, openly and covertly, about Phish, and decided to bring them all together on one of the media world’s most exclusive and least juicy private email discussion groups. Its name, “Journophish,” is a pun on JournoList, the defunct liberal listserv turned conservative bête noire, though it is doubtful any of Journophish’s members would be pressured to resign from a job should any of their emails leak, as occurred with JournoList. (Full disclosure: I am not a member of Journophish, but wish I were. Which is to say: I will be attending my 27th Phish show Friday night. And yes, I can hear you when you sigh.)

“The idea of Journophish was, how do we—in a digital way—bring these people together?” Beckman says. Like any Phish forum, they discuss upcoming shows, trade tickets, and compare “Reba” jams from 1994. But it's also escapism for a group of people whose lives are usually open books, whose day-to-day existence is controlled by the phone, TV, and Internet, and whose jobs in the political media-industrial complex are liable to make them a target for ridicule and disdain. Of course, being Phishheads makes them a target for ridicule and disdain, too.