Answer Addiction

Tag: rock stars and sobriety

  • Slash Reflects On Hitting Rock Bottom, Getting Sober

    Slash Reflects On Hitting Rock Bottom, Getting Sober

    The legendary guitarist has been sober since 2005. 

    Like many hard-partying rock stars, Slash is lucky to still be alive today. His use of alcohol and heroin is well documented, and now at the age of 53, he’s reflecting on why he finally cleaned up his act in 2005.

    Slash first left Guns N’ Roses (GNR) in 1996. As the legendary guitarist explained to Belfast Live, once he no longer had the “security” of being in a rock band, “I drank myself through it. I did drugs through it and it was like, textbook almost… I’d left my band, I was getting divorced, I was going through all this s—t. I had record company issues. It was really classic rock ’n’ roll life—the bad side.”

    As Slash was trying to launch himself as a solo artist, he explains, “I was drinking myself to death… I was out playing all over the place, I had no real direction I was going or any real concrete idea as to what I was going to be doing for any predetermined amount of time. It was very excessive.”

    This period carried over “through the early millennium, up through 2005,” and into Velvet Revolver, his post-GNR band featuring the late Scott Weiland.

    “Just because of the nature of the band—and it’s my own fault—but it was easy to do. I got completely strung out again and at that point I realized there was nothing about being strung out that reminded me of anything like when I first started using drugs. It was pretty miserable… Nothing was doing it for me and I decided I had to stop.”

    The guitarist also knew he had to clean up for his family. As he told Loudwire, “I had two kids and I was living in a hotel because I couldn’t be around them. It all sort of came to a head and I thought I needed to go to some sort of facility and just get away from everybody for a month and I’ll clean up.”

    Slash knows he’s lucky to have a second chance in GNR. “To have the opportunity to go back with Guns and that being such an amazing experience and such a positive experience, at this point in time, right now, to be in these two bands is probably one of the best professional periods I’ve ever been in.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Everclear's Art Alexakis, Nearly 30 Years Sober, Talks Addiction & Recovery

    Everclear's Art Alexakis, Nearly 30 Years Sober, Talks Addiction & Recovery

    “I spent most of my teens trying new drugs, and learning how to lie about them. My priorities in my teens and early 20s were drugs, alcohol and sex,” Alexakis revealed.

    The lead singer of the band Everclear, Art Alexakis, has been sober since June 15, 1989, which is one of his proudest accomplishments.

    As My Horry News reports, Alexakis spoke about his long-term recovery at an addiction and recovery event at Horry-Georgetown Technical College.

    For Alexakis, June 15 is a remarkable date because it was the date his older brother died of an overdose in 1974. On the same date in 1984, Alexakis himself almost died from an overdose. And finally, on the same date, he was ready to clean up his life in 1989.

    Alexakis told the audience, “People like to tell me their war stories and ask, ‘What was your drug of choice?’ I tell them, ‘Whatddaya got?’”

    In addition to the trauma of losing his brother, Alexakis also confessed that he was sexually abused when he was eight years old. He smoked his first joint when he was 9, and took LSD at a concert at 11.

    Then Alexakis discovered that a local ice cream man was a heroin dealer, and Alexakis’s brother helped him sell drugs as well.

    “I spent most of my teens trying new drugs, and learning how to lie about them,” Alexakis continued. “My priorities in my teens and early 20s were drugs, alcohol and sex.”

    One night, Alexakis suffered a near fatal overdose after injecting cocaine. His heart stopped, and thankfully a next-door neighbor who was an EMT saved his life with a defibrillator.

    Six months later, Alexakis stopped the drugs, but he kept drinking heavily. Finally, a record store clerk called him out by saying, “You know, you have a problem,” and offered to take him to a meeting.

    After going on a bender, Alexakis decided he was ready to get sober. He went to two meetings in a day, which cemented his desire to get sober.

    Before hitting the road in early recovery, where temptation is everywhere, Alexakis would hit up meetings to prepare himself.

    “It’s all about choices,” Alexakis added. “Don’t put yourself in places you don’t want to be. If you can’t make good choices in those places, don’t go to those places. You have to find that desire to be clean and sober and to be in recovery.” 

    Without getting sober, Alexakis says, “I’d be dead. It’s not even a maybe. I’d have been dead.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Alice In Chains' Jerry Cantrell Reflects On Sobriety

    Alice In Chains' Jerry Cantrell Reflects On Sobriety

    “Getting f–ked up is fun, and that’s why people do it. Especially when you’re young. It’s a part of life…But it comes with a price,” Cantrell said in a new interview.

    When Nirvana’s Nevermind album exploded in the early nineties, Seattle immediately became a hotbed for great music, and bands like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains all became wildly successful. But with that success also came tragedy with the deaths of Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell and Alice in Chains lead singer Layne Staley, who died at the age of 34 after struggling with heroin addiction for years.

    Now Alice In Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell is reflecting on his own sobriety, and the myth that drugs make rock stars more creative.

    As Cantrell told Grammy.com, “Getting f–ked up is fun, and that’s why people do it. Especially when you’re young. It’s a part of life. It’s a part of a lot of people’s experience. But it comes with a price. It generally doesn’t end good.”

    Cantrell continues, “I’ve been super-creative fucked up. I’ve been super-creative not fucked up. It’s been so many years for me that I just don’t really think about that anymore. I think, at some point it becomes an impediment. It works until it doesn’t. Let’s put it that way.”

    Cantrell added that “it worked for a while. And I think that’s the case probably for most people. Maybe [it] takes you and puts you in a different mind space, and kind of maybe opens your perception to some stuff, but the costs are so fucking high. You know what I mean.”

    Cantrell has been sober for years, and he told Blabbermouth, “I don’t miss [drugs] at all. But I’m also not ashamed of it. Nobody’s perfect, and I certainly am not. You just kind of figure it out as you go.”

    Cantrell told Billboard that when he recorded one of his darkest albums, his solo work Degradation Trip, he was “just really fucked up back then, and you can totally hear it on that record. It was done right before I got sober, and it was also done right when I was dealing with the death of my band, and then the unhappy coincidence of Layne passing away right after I released that record. So it was not a good time in my life, and it totally comes across on that record.”

    Cantrell said he got sober a year after Layne died, and he wishes that the legendary singer would have a different epitaph without the focus on his drug problems. As Cantrell said on The Pulse of Radio, “It’s unfortunate that that seems to be the only headline that gets equated with him, because there was so much more to him than that. Not taking away the fact of the reality of what that is, and how it ended, everybody knows that too. But there’s a whole lot more to the story.”

    View the original article at thefix.com