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 do
wn, 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.
Introduction by Gary Stromberg
* * *
THEY STARTED ARRIVING AT MY Malibu Canyon home not long after sunrise that bright spring morning. The early birds were there to have first crack at the “good stuff.” It was listed as an estate sale, but what it was essentially was a last ditch effort at raising some cash to finance my exit. Since the bank had already foreclosed on my house, there seemed little sense in trying to keep its contents. Items big and small, valuable and not so valuable, were on display throughout the three Spanish colonial–type buildings that comprised my self-styled hacienda. A plush new pool table, a thousand or so record albums, items from a well-outfitted kitchen, gold records commemorating my association with hit music and film projects, paintings of varying value including my prized original by Jonathan Winters, all kinds of velvet- and leather-covered furniture right out of the hippie culture I grew up in—everything I had acquired in my years of aggressive consumption was on display and for sale. I even got a friend to remove the original stained-glass windows from many of the rooms and replace them with clear panes. I thought these might bring a pretty penny, but the bank, which sent a representative to observe this fire sale, had other ideas. Unless I replaced the stained glass immediately, they were going to lock me out of the house, nullifying the thirty days they gave me to vacate.
Two years earlier, I had purchased this beautiful villa on two-plus acres of prime coastal foothill land at the suggestion of my business manager. I was riding high at the time, having finished producing my second major-studio feature movie. Who had any inkling that twelve years of nonstop drug use was about to take me down?
When things were going good, I had a sense of being invincible. The Midas touch. I had helped build a hugely successful public relations firm, Gibson & Stromberg, representing a virtual who’s who of contemporary music talent in the sixties and seventies. Touring the world with the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. Helping launch the careers of Elton John, the gnome-like Marc Bolan of T-Rex, Cat Stevens, The Doors, Earth, Wind & Fire, Steely Dan, James Taylor, Steppenwolf, Three Dog Night, Jethro Tull. The list went on.
Life was a ball, an exhilarating wild ride. In 1974, I was asked to do the publicity for the music festival that was to precede the Muhammad Ali–George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle,” which was the subject of the Academy Award–winning documentary When We Were Kings. Two hundred and fifty American and African musicians assembled in Kinshasa, Zaire, for an unbelievable musical event. Being a huge fight fan, I immediately headed for the Ali training camp and eventually was introduced to Drew “Bundini” Brown, Ali’s inimitable corner man. One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, Bundini and I were riding with our guide into neighboring Swaziland, a postage stamp–sized country where we heard that the German pharmaceutical giant, Merck, had a factory producing pharmaceutical cocaine. Talk about kids in a candy store!
Even when my drug use escalated to the point where I lost touch with my business and watched it disintegrate, I still didn’t recognize that I had a problem. Another career was what I thought would fix it.
Because of the success of my public relations firm, I was given a chance at producing a movie. Universal Studios decided that a concept for a film I had come up with called Car Wash was worth a shot. Two years of hard work, ever-increasing drug use, and more than my share of good fortune found me riding high once again. The movie was a pretty big hit, and I was believing all the bullshit.
Before long I was producing my second movie, a little confection entitled The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, a loony comedy about basketball and astrology, with a strong dose of R & B music, that was conceived and written in one rollicking night of gluttonous coke snorting. It was during the filming of Fish that things really began to take a turn for the worse. By now I was using with complete abandon, ingesting dangerous amounts of cocaine and heroin. I was on location in Pittsburgh, ostensibly in charge of the production of the movie, but things were out of control. Costs for the filming were skyrocketing, and no one was running the show. The studio bosses, needless to say, were losing patience, and several phone calls to me expressing their concern did little good. Finally they took matters into their own hands and sent a pair of representatives to our location and physically removed me from command. The next thing I remember was waking up in some fancy hotel room and looking around, trying to figure out what was going on. Merritt Island, Florida, is where they forced me to detox and come to my senses before I was allowed back on the film set.
The movie was a financial disaster, as was my career. Word began to spread that my drug use was out of control and that my work was erratic, at best. I was quickly becoming unemployable, and it wasn’t long till the roof fell in.
In the summer of 1980, after losing my house, my woman, and my career to the excesses of wild living and drug abuse, I took the suggestion of one of my last remaining friends, Shep Gordon, and moved to Kihei, Hawaii, on the sun-baked island of Maui. Shep, Alice Cooper’s manager and a real maven in the music business, had a sprawling beachfront home there and thought getting away from Los Angeles would do me some good. Nothing like carefree island life to get one’s shit together.
My game plan was simple. Try to stop using drugs, excluding the ubiquitous Maui Wowie pot everyone over there smokes, and the five, six, or ten daily beers you need to keep hydrated under the powerful tropical sun.
On Maui I had nothing to do but be with me, and that didn’t seem like such a great gig. True, the islands are spectacular and the living was easy and grand, but alone at night, I had plenty of time to contemplate the mess I had created. I also had some physical healing to do. Years of abuse had left me worn down, and I took this opportunity to repair some of the damage. Having kicked my heroin addiction for the third or fourth time and knowing that coke use in Hawaii was absurd—why would anyone want to be jacked up in such a laid-back place—I started on a mission of wellness. I attacked it like most things in my life, with blind resolve to accomplish something. Hawaii is a mecca of health, so this was a relatively easy task. I took up running in 1980, a discipline I have continued to this day, and saw benefits right away. I also joined a “seniors” six-man Hawaiian outrigger canoe team, made up of six guys over the age of thirty-five. We trained at sunrise each morning, and on weekends we paddled in long-distance races on the open ocean. I started eating with some consciousness, even took to occasional fasts and began to embrace vegetarianism. Restoring my body was easy, but my mind and soul would require greater effort.
A year later I was back in Los Angeles trying to pick up the pieces. Virtually broke, I moved back into the house I was raised in. A forty-year-old failed big shot living with his parents. Feelings of utter defeat were creeping back. I was trying to stay clean, but life without hope was impossible. Once again drugs got the better of me, and I began chipping again. I remember one night my great friend Joel Dorn, a brilliant, underappreciated record producer, was visiting from New York. It was my mother’s birthday, and she suggested I bring him over for dinner. The rest of the story is what Joel remembers. Apparently I was high when he arrived, and midway through dinner I nodded out … right into a full plate of Mom’s brisket and mashed potatoes. Joel pulled me up by my hair and made some excuse about how “tired” I was, but the hurt and shock showed all over my parents’ faces. Joel never lets me forget that night.
Not long after this, a miracle occurred in my life. I was browsing the newspaper on a quiet Sunday morning when I happened across an article about a new Twelve Step program that had recently begun in my area. Without knowing why, I picked up the phone and made a call. That very same day I was attending my first meeting, and soon after, I began my journey into sobriety.
> Strength came where weakness was not known to be,
at least not felt; and restoration came
Like an intruder knocking at the door
of unacknowledged weariness.
—William Wordsworth, “The Prelude”
That was a little over twenty-two years ago, and it’s been quite a trip. Looking back over the years and my history of substance abuse, here is what I can say is true for me: It started out as great fun. For someone shy like me, drugs made me bigger and bolder. Eventually drugs and alcohol got the best of me. The fun became depravity. I was without purpose, wrestling with my demons, and lost. The facade fell. I crashed and burned, but the will to survive took over. I was given the greatest gift I’ve ever received: sobriety. And with it came a new life.
Jane notes that pain, growth, and spiritual evolution don’t belong only to those with an addiction. In my view, it is all a means to an end. Through grace, people shuck off the bark of all kinds of sickness and despair. We believe that you don’t have to have gone through addiction to identify with the days of doubt and nights of sorrow, the enlightenments and transformations of the recovering addict. What we can see as particularly characteristic of many in recovery is their candor about their struggles and their humor about themselves.
Jane and I became running companions long ago, and runners talk. She encouraged me to tell 1001 stories, morning after morning, while she responded on the uphill. For instance, she found delightful the camaraderie I took for granted from the shakers and movers in the entertainment world. The land of carefree living seemed exotic to her. She would shake her head at the wretched misery that some of the jeunesse dorée fell into. She wanted to record these incidences of human spirit, and as we ran, this became the genesis of our book.
In the following chapters you are going to meet some remarkable people. I hope their stories will touch your heart, and if you have issues with substance abuse, perhaps they will inspire you to seek help.
The Harder They Fall Page 2
