Jul 082011
In honor of a First Lady who knew it took more than just saying No, say Yes to rockers who’ve sobered the hell up for what seems to be the long run. (Straight-edge rockers who weren’t addicts in the first place do not count.)
In honor of a First Lady who knew it took more than just saying No, say Yes to rockers who’ve sobered the hell up for what seems to be the long run. (Straight-edge rockers who weren’t addicts in the first place do not count.)
Iggy.
Joe Perry
Ringo.
Hrundi
Betty Ford’s least favorite? Jerry Lee Lewis.
“Two days in that place were enough for me” rock’n roll wild man Jerry Lee Lewis told The Enquirer after fleeing the Betty Ford Center only two days alter he’d checked in. “I’m gonna beat booze and drugs my way – not theirs! “Jerry Lee don’t follow nobody’s orders or toe nobody else’s line. “When the counsellors told me that I’d have to make my bed and scrub the toilets just like everybody else I knew that I’d checked into the wrong place. “I’m a rock ‘n’ roll star, not a janitor. My hands fit fine on a piano keyboard – but not around a broom handle!…..Patients are supposed to clean bathrooms, take out garbage, sweep floors and pick up after people. Hey that may be fine for Suzie Homemaker but it ain’t my style. I’ve never scrubbed a toilet in my life and at 51, I am not about to start. Jerry don’t sweep the floors for nobody. I leave the kitchen chores to other people”.
http://www.kyleesplin.com/jllsb/jllsbdir/pages/75page.htm
LOL!
Clapton (after he had recovered from the co-dependent relationship with John Mayall).
David Bowie used to be pretty hardcore. In this 1977 video he does not look healthy – more like death on two legs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB7skYEv_EM
I think Jerry Lee Lewis frightened a lot of people in his early days. The young Elvis was a nice redneck – respectful, loved his mama, a little wild but still seemingly a decent homespun guy. Jerry Lee looked like a stereotypical scary redneck by comparison – a hooch-drinking, mean, egotistic, cousin-marrying, virgin-popping, minority-lynching crazy man who’d eat the lungs of any hapless traveler straying south of the Mason-Dixon line. Yee-haw! I think that’s one reason why the backlash against him was so relentless and vicious.
Quitters never win.
Steve Earle
Nick Lowe, I believe.
Jason Pierce aka J Spaceman.
Dave Gahan told a story in a documentary about how he and his girlfriend were strung out on heroin. She started talking to him about having a baby and he looked at her and said, “we’re junkies.” I guess that was his moment of realization.
Not to be a party pooper, but didn’t just about every classic rock icon have a period of heavy use to the point it could be called addiction? If they are still alive now, then that means they must have sobered up. Even after the ones listed; Neil Young with coke, Pete Townshend with booze, Ray Davies with booze, Dylan with ampheds, all of Fleetwood Mac, etc. etc.
I think when your just too old that your party-ing conflicts with your high blood pressure medicine, you stop. You sober up or you die. The list could go on forever.
Still, I’ll drop Johnny Cash. There’s no way he’s falling off the wagon.
Lou Reed.
I think “minority-lynching” is a more than a tad on the libelous side.
Hall & Oates, if that “She’s Gone” video is anything to go by….
“Stereotypical” is the operative word here, and to many northerners in the 1950s and 1950s, vicious racism in southerners was seen to be a given. In no way did I imply that Lewis was a lyncher.
“1950s and 1960s”, that is.
Jerry Lee Lewis is a rock star. He leaves the lynching to other people.
Tonyola, I’m not so sure The Killer’s media lynching was prompted by much else than his marriage and the fact that he was a Rock & Roll performer, though. A lot of the aspects of the image we have of him nowadays weren’t apparent to the general public at the time. He behaved, outside of his performance style, just as respectful and low key with the media as Elvis – he wouldn’t have gotten any exposure in the late 50s if he’d behaved otherwise. I doubt a habitual R & R mocker (of Elvis and Gene Vincent, to name two) like Steve Allen would have been such a big supporter if he’d come off as scary in public as the picture you painted. I think all that became apparent later, after he’d been pilloried for the marriage – it took him years to recover from that, career-wise, and after that I think he gave up playing nice and the wild man image we have of him now came more to the fore. In the 50s, a large segment of the mainstream media would use whatever they could to knock the rock, and for Jerry Lee, the marriage was what they latched onto. After that, the only support he got was from Alan Freed, until Freed was taken down in the trumped up “payola scandal”. His career was in the toilet until he switched to country balladeer mode in the late 60s. I don’t think the really scary Jerry Lee was apparent to most until the 70s, and by that time, the long-haired, openly drugged-out hippie freaks had become the mainstream media’s bogeymen.
Alice Cooper. But Chickenfrank is probably right; 90% of rockers on this mortal plane have probably been through it and came out sober on the other side. More unusual would be a social drinker left standing. I give you Alex Lifeson: http://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/Wine-Talk-Alex-Lifeson_3352
I’d add Lemmy to that very short list. Never, ever made any public attempt at “cleaning up”, and seems to continue on in his prodigiously (though, low key) inebriated way.