The Harder They Fall (2 page)

Paul Williams photo by Alan Mercer

Jim Ramstad photo by Tad Saddoris

Dock Ellis photo copyright
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, 2007, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Mac (Dr. John) Rebennack photo by Lisa Houlgrave

Pete Hamill photo by Peter Foley

Gerry Cooney photo by Supershots

Pat Day photo by Jeff Rogers

Richard Lewis photo by Karen Martinez

Steve Earle photo by Michael Garlington

Malcolm McDowell photo © Rufus F. Folkks/CORBIS

Franz Wright photo by Karen M. Peluso

Grace Slick photo by Joel Lipton

Hugh Masekela photo by Robert & LA Color Studio

Redemption Songs

T
HIS IS A BOOK OF MIRACLES:
not supernatural miracles, but superhuman ones. The people talking in this volume speak only for themselves, but they represent some of the bravest and most determined folks anyone is likely to encounter.

Some of them are back from the dead. Some are not.

I wish Elvis were in this book. If someone had only gotten to him, weaned him from the entire pharmacopoeia, he’d be the greatest gospel singer in the world today.

I wish Jimi Hendrix had a recovery narrative. Can you imagine?

If only Bob Marley had a redemption song.

If someone had intervened on Jim Morrison, he might have developed into the champion American poet and filmmaker he always wanted to be.

But Jim was on a suicide mission. Mission accomplished.

What about Lenny Bruce, brilliant social critic and gadfly, who OD’d in Los Angeles in 1966, where the cops hated him for telling the truth and gave their crime-scene photos of his tied-off corpse to the gutter press. We really could have used Lenny Bruce later on in that decade.

Same with John Belushi, that “fucking idiot” (his own brother’s words). Same with Janis Joplin and Brian Jones, both dead at twenty-seven of dope and pills. Same with John Bonham, protean drummer of Led Zeppelin, who drank himself to death. Same with Gram Parsons, who mixed country music with rock and then killed himself with a shot of smack.

Same with Kurt Cobain, the
auteur
of Nirvana, who might have used heroin as an analgesic to ease his chronic irritable bowel syndrome, and then ended it all in a martyrdom operation.

Tennessee Williams. Judy Garland. Jack Kerouac. Marilyn Monroe. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hank Williams. Bon Scott from AC/DC. Dee Dee Ramone. Shannon Hoon. Whatever your age, whatever your generation—name your poison.

The talent we have lost to drink, drugs, and plain human despair is unbelievable.

But in their defense, most of these angelic burnouts had nowhere to run. They died, in most cases, isolated by fame and too hopelessly addicted to help themselves.

“No one could save them,” Jim Morrison sang, “save the blind tiger.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone intervening on Elvis. When he died in 1977, addicted to pills, Betty Ford was the First Lady with a prescription drug problem, not a famous treatment institute. There were no well-known and widely publicized treatment centers other than the few discreet clinics that deployed systemic methods of deprogramming addicted people, usually wealthy or famous, and teaching them how to live in their own skins. Alcoholics Anonymous was there, of course, but until the eighties, this Twelve Step method was stigmatized as a program for old lushes, not for movie stars and young musicians in their prime. Prisons, mental hospitals, and indiscriminate electroshock therapy were the end of the road for the rest of us—“hopeless” alcoholics and junkies.

Anyway, interfering with someone else’s life in the existential sixties and disco seventies was totally uncool, really unforgivable. People were supposed to do their own thing, even if it was killing them. Internal freedom was an integral part of the ethos of the sixties, an era when expanded consciousness was synonymous with social change and artistic endeavor.

Most of the people whose stories of quiet heroism are told in this book came of age and into their fame during the sixties. These were the years when the massive post-war generation launched themselves into a maelstrom of spiritual crises, political unrest, new religious visions, sexual adventurism, and, most important, a rare opportunity for change and reform. For millions, the sixties ideals of reclaiming and embracing the senses were inspired by a generation’s embrace of marijuana, previously confined to the worlds of bohemia and jazz. The decade’s communitarian ideals—protest and reform, emotional intensity, the transience of nature, expansion of consciousness—often depended on marijuana and LSD for a shortcut to nirvana.

Rolling and smoking a joint was a legit anti-establishment statement.
Popping a tab of Purple Haze or Orange Sunshine was a blow against the empire.

“But I would not feel so all alone,” Bob Dylan sang to us in one of his imperative bulletins of coolness.
“Everybody must get stoned.”

Nobody, but nobody, tried to contradict Bob Dylan, the god of the sixties.

The crucial role that illegal drugs played in sixties movements like civil rights, the anti–Vietnam War movement, and the sexual revolution has yet, in my opinion, to be acknowledged and fully understood. Western culture at that time was driven by the preferred drugs of its artistic icons. Alcohol inspired the abstract expressionist painters. Heroin virtually owned jazz. LSD can’t be separated from the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead. Andy Warhol’s superstars lived and worked on amphetamines. The reggae stars regarded ganja as a sacrament and meditation, not as a means to get high. Then the drugs got harder as the old ideals faded into the disco seventies. Cocaine fueled the 4/4 beat on the dance floor. Heroin came into youth culture with the punk bands and never left. In more recent times, the rave scene depends on Ecstasy and other so-called designer drugs for its energy and trance states.

Society and its politicians responded with the unending War on Drugs and “just say no.” The joke was on us. It still is.

There are some common threads that weave through these often stirring narratives of recovery: initial success fueled by various stimulants, the inevitable crash and burn, and then somehow, often at the last possible moment, against all odds, and often having been dragged kicking and screaming into a rehabilitation program, finding redemption in the quiet, steely, disciplined, deeply personal processes of healing the self, making peace with inner demons, and finding a renewed way to live.

The experience I bring to writing this introduction devolves from my work with Aerosmith, the legendary American rock band. Twenty years ago, the five musicians in this hardest-partying group began a process that eventually resulted in long-term sobriety for them all. They would be telling you their story themselves, except they already have, both in their collective autobiography,
Walk This Way
, and in countless interviews since
1990. Today they prefer to serve by example rather than continue to trumpet their successful, long-term sobriety.

For readers unfamiliar with how improbable this outcome is, let me give you the back story.

Aerosmith began their run for the rainbow in the early seventies, part of the new blood that replaced the mass die-out of the sixties rock stars: Jones, Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison.

Inspired by the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and Led Zeppelin, the young musicians followed Arthur Rimbaud’s artistic imperative—the systematic disordering of the senses—by actually outdoing their rock idols’ Dionysian consumption of drink, dope, powders, and pills. Asked how they were able to sustain their creative energy over the course of the decade, one of the guitar players told me that as they became wealthy, they were able to afford higher-quality drugs. Everyone, especially the girls, said that Aerosmith was the stonedest, craziest, highest-risk band of them all.

Then, of course, the horror began. Junkie behavior is always the same, whatever the addiction. By the end of the seventies, the once charismatic leaders of the band were ridiculed in the press as “The Toxic Twins.” They fought each other like blind tigers. As the drugs took their toll, key members of the band dropped out, and it looked like Aerosmith was headed for the scrap heap of rock history.

Then someone did something. Someone actually helped.

His name was Tim Collins. He was a young, Boston-based talent manager with a taste for cocaine and an Irish American gift of gab. It took him a year to get the five original members of Aerosmith back together. Then he realized that there was no way this band could achieve the hardest act in show business—“The Comeback”—if the musicians were closet dope fiends. After giving up his own considerable addictions, Collins began to consult with mental health professionals in order to research new ways of saving lives jeopardized by addiction and self-destructive behavior, like those in Aerosmith. It took five years of psychic jujitsu to get everyone in the band clean and sober.

By the mid-eighties, the shameful stigma was off addictive behavior in America after both Betty Ford and Kitty Dukakis were treated for abusing
pills. And by the last of the eighties, Aerosmith was back on the radio with “Dude (Looks Like a Lady).” Even the Reverend Little Richard was praising them to the skies as the epitome of good old American filth.

Tim Collins’s underreported achievement remains one of the most successful interventions in the brief history of rehab. As of this writing, Aerosmith has been sober for almost two decades and remains one of the biggest acts of the rock movement. They’ve sold millions of records and concert tickets, and they’ve done it stone cold sober.

My chance to see this in action came a few years ago, when I was invited to accompany Aerosmith on a world tour. Rock journalists don’t usually learn much on a big tour because, in most cases, the band’s energy goes into the performances and the parties afterward. But I learned something crucial on this tour.

I had been on the road in the seventies with Led Zeppelin and other bands of the day, so I knew how weird it all could get. I wondered how Aerosmith could summon their fierce, nubile muses every night without the artificial expansion of consciousness for which this band had once been notorious.

As we began to fly around the world, I started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with members of the band. Tokyo. Frankfurt. Milan. London. At night, I marveled at the poignancy of their sober but still wild performances. The band’s old drug mystique had been replaced by an iron determination to survive at the top of their profession. They attacked their performances with a cool ferocity I’d never seen in a band before, night after night.

When they had the relapse urge, they went to meetings. In our conversations, they explained what they had learned: An addict’s relationship with the drug is the most important relationship in his or her life. Everything else slips away. Enter the callous, antisocial behavior, followed by borderline personality disorder. Nothing matters, though. Addiction is the ultimate bad relationship. The drug is reliable, constant, and never abandons the user.

Aerosmith taught me that the user has to abandon the drug.

This idea is what this book is all about: the quiet, individual acts of
personal willpower that have succeeded in maintaining long-term sobriety by some of the most interesting people in America. True, they are all celebrities or the celebrated, but within this subgroup, we have the testimony of a congressman, a boxer, a poet, a jockey, a rodeo cowboy, a baseball player, as well as writers, comedians, musicians, and actors. These stories may come from prominent people, but they definitely relate to the daily life struggles of us all. Watching them interweave with the times is unique in my experience as a reader.

Above all is the sheer immediacy of these accounts. Saw-toothed, stripped down, exposed, and gratefully alive, these people and their stories combine into one of the oldest forms of literature: the quest saga. These people have dedicated themselves to seeking new worlds—and to new ways of living in them. I hope these interviews will inspire you as they have moved and encouraged me.