.png)
4 months ago
9
Drug addiction and alcoholism are not afflictions unique to the music industry. The CDC reported over 72,000 drug-related overdoses in 2017, an uptick of 5 percent over the year prior. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), 21.5 million American adults battled substance abuse in 2014, costing Americans close to $200 billion in healthcare, criminal justice, legal fees, and lost workplace production and participation throughout the fiscal year.
There’s no way to determine how many addicts make their living in the music industry, but few would question the assertion that there’s something culturally unique in the relationship between the musician and the bottle or the needle.
In other walks of life, it’s taboo to have a substance abuse problem. In the music industry, it’s expected.
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune that ran in 1992, Waylon Jennings explained what he dubbed “Hank Williams Syndrome” — the expectation that performers should be “be crazy and wild and die young.”
The expectation undoubtedly affected Elijah Jones.
“Honestly, I had the idea that art was suffering and it was all one in the same,” he tells me. Jones confessed that from the first time he drank at age 12, he had an abusive relationship with alcohol. By 16, the same year his band released their first album with Virgin Records, he was addicted to heroin. Collaborations with CeeLo and Asher Roth soon followed his record release. Meanwhile, Jones was spinning out of control.
“I used the music as an excuse to self-perpetuate the lifestyle,” he says. “And when the label told me that they liked that party-animal aspect of the music, it kind of gave me free rein to be a hopeless drug addict.”
By the time of his overdose in March of 2013 — his second in six months — Jones was using over a dozen different substances, including heroin, cocaine, meth, prescription drugs, alcohol, and barbiturates.
“To me, the biggest temptation is the wear, tear, and loneliness of the road,” says the legendary American singer-songwriter John Hiatt. Hiatt drank from the time he was 11 to the age of 32. “I started doing drugs in the Summer of Love. I was on the bandwagon. LSD. Pot. Whatever we could get our hands on. ‘More’ was my motto.” And Hiatt’s excessive use of drugs and alcohol kept getting in the way of his own career.
“I managed to mess up most deals,” he says. “Really, by the end, I felt like I couldn’t get drunk, but I couldn’t get sober. I couldn’t get high, but I couldn’t stop taking drugs.” Hiatt hit a tipping point in 1983 when he went to see a psychiatrist who told him he would have to check into a drug-treatment facility. The next year, he checked into Las Encinas, a 30-day treatment center in Pasadena, California.
“The artist’s lifestyle is a lot of late nights. They get off stage and are in different cities with different people coming at them,” says Ken Levitan, the co-founder and president of Vector Management, which manages Hiatt, among many other artists. “Many of them are charged up with energy. They drink a few to calm down and adapt. You see it with a lot of young artists who are prone to partying anyway. They get off stage at 11:30 or midnight, and it seems like their night is just beginning. They’re worked up, and they’re exposed to people who want to give them things, to help them blow off energy. It’s fun at first, but it becomes dangerous.”
