![]() I would assess the situation, after a blackout or something, and think, “Oh boy, this is getting really scary and I’ve got to do something about it.” But when you’re that far gone, you don’t know how to get help. I had some moments of clarity, once in a while. A lot of the guys that I ran with were ending up dead, and I saw myself right on schedule to do that. Keith Moon died, and I always thought that was the way he wanted to go. Soko: I was definitely having fun, and I felt like I was living life. It was more like a numbing agent, or an escape mechanism, I suppose. Or that’s what people around me were doing. I was just doing it because that’s what you do. But I didn’t know how to name any of those emotions. I was very scared and uncomfortable and sad. But, you know, there’s absolutely nothing fun about any of that.īaker: No, I was not having fun. You’re having fun until things take a turn for the worse, or possibly could. You’ve done something that you never thought you could, and you actually think that you are a super-being. Or Yahtzee, you know? You go and rock the fuck out. Of course! You have a shot of Jack Daniel’s and you play Madison Square Garden and you get offstage and you go clubbing with Jimmy Page-come on! After two encores in Madison Square Garden, you don’t go and play shuffleboard. I think people know the gist, or they can find out. I can’t change the past, but I definitely spend every day trying to live a different reality than that. ![]() Smith: I don’t know if I really want to talk about it, like, super-specific. Vodka and cocaine and Camel Light cigarettes was a great triangle for me, because the cocaine made it so you could drink more vodka, and of course the cocaine made it such that you had to have a cigarette, and of course with cigarettes you have to have a drink…and round and round you go. I would have to say that my higher power was vodka. So when I was arrested, December 15, 2006, my car was full of various opiate substances-oxycodone, Percocets, heroin. And I did it, and I remember thinking afterwards, “All my problems just went away.” I didn’t feel high or anything, it was just “Eureka!” And I went down the rabbit hole. This guy had a pill, and he crushed it up and gave me a little bit in the form of a line. And then somebody said, “Do you want to try this?” and I said, “Sure, bring it on.” I had never heard of that drug in 2000. As I often did at that time, I did a shot of tequila, and then I did another shot of tequila, because I really liked tequila. I was at a club-I was about to go onstage. And I chased that initial solution to my problems for 30 years or so.Īnastasio: Well, in the year 2000, somebody gave me an Ox圜ontin. I thought cocaine and alcohol was the combination, and it was just a kid trying to feel better. I felt like Superman onstage, and I played that way. In my early 20s, I discovered cocaine, and that was it-my problem was solved. In my teen years, I discovered alcohol, and that made me feel really good-I really relaxed and settled down and paid more attention to things. I really had trouble completing tasks-I couldn’t sit still. Attention deficit didn’t even exist back then. Walsh: I was obsessive-compulsive, and I probably had a little splash of Asperger’s in there, but in those days, in 1953, you were just a difficult kid. When I started smoking weed, in ’65, ’66, it kind of enhanced those magic feelings. It was just the silence and Mother Nature, no one around-it was an awful lot of magic there. So I grew up in the woods listening to the wind. ![]() Tyler: I was a beautiful little boy that lived in the woods of New England, New Hampshire. Some see these expectations as having played a part in what happened to them, though most ultimately see their decisions and actions as also-if not mainly-a matter of their own psychology and personality and predisposition. In the modern pop-culture tradition, being a musician has often come with a series of default lifestyle expectations, ones of indulgence and recklessness, larger-than-life living, and a diligent pursuit of altered forms of consciousness. Some see significant correlations here some don’t. Some created the work that made them first or best known before they were sober some have done so since. ![]() Some were clean before the end of their teenage years some only surfaced into sobriety much later in their lives. Some found themselves at the edge of the precipice, or worse others simply re-routed from a path or trajectory that they came to see as unwise. Some drank, some used drugs, some did more or less everything, and they did so to very different degrees. This is a story about sober musicians-about the life that has led them here, and about the life that they live now-but there is no single story here. ![]()
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