The Harder They Fall (35 page)

(musician)

I used from the time I was really young, smoking marijuana before I started drinking, started when I was eleven or twelve. I drank because everybody drank. It was the late sixties, early seventies, and there were a lot of drugs out there. There was a lot of rampant recreational drug use. Psychedelics were a very big deal. Probably the very first thing I had a problem with was LSD. I got so fascinated with it that I took it as often as I could. Heroin came along pretty early. The first time I shot dope, I didn’t get sick. Everybody else I knew threw up. That should have told me that I was in trouble. Heroin completely, totally agreed with my system. Almost everyone else I ever saw shoot up for the first time immediately vomited. I had an uncle who was five years older than me that turned me on to the first drugs that I used. His father was an alcoholic and had gotten sober in New York right after World War II. He knew Bill W. and Dr. Bob. AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] was still a relatively small program in those days. The program really kind of started in New York. So I grew up with the Serenity Prayer and the Twelve Steps on the wall. It didn’t save me, but I’m not one of those people that had to find out that the program existed.

For many years, I used what people referred to as “successfully.” Being very, very driven by art and what I do, and not concentrating on any one drug for any particular length of time. I sort of settled into drinking way, way, way, way, way too much by the time I was in my late teens, and alcohol became the core rather than heroin. I was physically addicted to heroin at several points when I was in high school and after I dropped out of high school, but I could always lay down and kick. I moved to Tennessee when
I was nineteen, and heroin was almost nonexistent there. There were a lot of Dilaudids on the street, but they were really expensive and I couldn’t afford them, so I concentrated on alcohol and smoked a lot of pot. I began having anxiety attacks when I smoked marijuana; I started getting paranoid and having full-on anxiety attacks, so I stopped smoking pot. About every nine months or a year, I would try it because it had been in my repertoire from the beginning, but I’d end up hiding my head under a pillow or going to the emergency room.

I did cocaine when I was younger, and sometimes mixed it with heroin when I was bored, but by the time I got to Nashville in the mid-seventies, the whole world was trying to have cocaine declared a vegetable. I sort of knew it wasn’t. I sort of knew that this was a really addictive, dangerous drug, but I kind of conveniently forgot. I’d use it but I never really liked it. Everybody I knew was doing it. I really couldn’t afford it. By that time I was a songwriter. I wasn’t making a lot of money. I watched as it became the drug of choice in the music industry. Drugs sort of ruined the street-level democracy in Nashville because it created a caste system. Suddenly people were hiding in bathrooms and being paranoid that people were only hanging out with them because they had drugs. All these strange things happened around that drug.

I was living with my second wife. The demise of my first marriage was because of my drug use and my attraction to the woman who turned out to be my second wife. My attraction to my second wife was totally about our mutual interest in drugs. I had found a woman that could keep up with me. I thought that would keep me from having arguments at home. We almost killed each other during the three years we were together. It was ridiculous, but it was mostly about drugs. I was probably one of the first people that freebased cocaine in Nashville. I had a brief experience freebasing one night, and I thought I was going to die, thought I was having a heart attack. It was just another anxiety attack, but it scared me bad enough that I stopped taking cocaine. So suddenly I was faced with the fact that if I wanted to hang out with my wife, I had to watch a lot of other people taking cocaine when I wasn’t taking it, which was ridiculous. It eventually led to the demise of that marriage. I stopped taking drugs altogether
because none of them were working for me. I stopped and I stayed stopped.

Cynthia and I split up, and I didn’t use for a while until I met the woman who became my third wife. She worked in a bar, so I started drinking beer. I also discovered and started taking prescription opiates, when I could get them. I had some problems with my teeth by that time, probably brought about by my drug use, so I got a few prescriptions from dentists and I remembered how much I liked opiates.

In the eighties, when I first started making records, I wasn’t having much success. I was writing for different publishing companies and sometimes working a day job. You know, I would take anything with an opiate in it. That’s what I liked. Later on I would take just about anything. I bought some of it on the street and got some of it by prescription. Tussenex cough syrup was one of my favorites. There were a couple of doctors that would give me prescriptions for it. There were also crooked pharmacists.

Then I made my first record,
Guitar Town
, and I was not getting strung out. I didn’t smoke pot. I drank some, and when I drank, I tended to get very drunk. I was never much of a keep-a-six-pack-in-the-refrigerator drinker. I was a binge drinker. I drank hard liquor when I drank. Sometimes red wine with dinner because I was starting to make a little bit of money after my record came out, and I liked a little bit of that wine. If I drank wine with dinner and nobody else was drinking, I’d drink the whole bottle of wine. I could drink a half bottle or I could drink the whole thing. I was discerning as I started to make some money. I wouldn’t drink Jack Daniel’s because anybody who knows anything about sour-mash bourbon knows it’s not very good whiskey. I didn’t drink beer except in Ireland or England or a few other places where I genuinely liked the beer. I wouldn’t drink American beer.

Around that time I started traveling, which brought me to places where there was good, cheap heroin. Suddenly I was going to New York, and I was going to L.A., and Amsterdam. I didn’t use needles during this period. I smoked heroin when I was in England. That was how almost everyone did it. If it was highly refined white heroin, I would snort it. I had a pretty steady habit going. I could lay down, however, if I was going someplace where there wasn’t any drugs. And usually before tours I would kick. I
would usually come back off a tour strung out, depending on where we played. If there was plenty of heroin, and it was easy to get, then I’d come back strung out. That went on for … My first major-label album came out in 1986. I toured pretty much nonstop in ’86, ’87. By 1988, when
Copperhead Road
came out, even making that record. I made it in Memphis. I’d stay up for days and days, drinking Tussenex. I really liked it. Before I started using needles, I probably liked Tussenex best. It’s OxyContin in timed-release form.

By the time I was halfway through the Copperhead tour, I was strung out on cough syrup. I finally ended up kicking by the end of the tour. I got strung out a couple of times as we traveled into more heroin-friendly areas. The second summer of that tour, we were asked to go out with Bob Dylan. It was a tour that never ended. I thought, “This will be my last shot to ever do this.” Dylan hadn’t toured in years and who knows if he’ll ever go out again, so we did it, but I was pretty strung out. For the first time, I was unable to lay down and kick. I could not do it! I don’t know why. I was probably just unwilling to do it. I was drinking two or three ounces of Tussenex a day, which is a lot. Most people would be flat on their ass for twenty-four hours taking that much.

I ended up in a methadone program. The one I was in was run by people who really thought they were helping people. They did encourage people to go to meetings, but they weren’t addicts, they were doctors. They didn’t understand how little good it does. Around Twelve Step programs everybody’s welcome, but it doesn’t start to work for you until you abstain. You can go, and I encourage people to go, but until you get clean, you’re not actually going to get anywhere and you’ll probably use again.

When you are on methadone, you
are
using. It’s the most powerful narcotic ever invented. The same circle of chemists synthesized methadone and benzine. The most addictive narcotic known to mankind and the most toxic nonradioactive substance known to mankind. The Germans were kicked out of northern Africa relatively early in World War II. It’s the first place they had to abandon. Mainly because of the two fronts opening up in Europe, which cut them off from their main supplies of petroleum and morphine, and you need both of those things to fight a war. So they put
their guys on it, and they came up with these two substances to replace them. It was kind of a bad karma situation in Nazi Germany. The evil that pervaded may have had something to do with these guys coming up with these two horrible substances.

By the time I made the next record, at the end of the Dylan tour, I tried to kick using methadone. I got completely clean for the first time in two years. I lasted about four days, and then I started using heroin again. Shortly after that I got married again. My wife didn’t use, but she was a pretty efficient codependent. She didn’t mean to be, but she was. We never mean to be. I had a house in L.A. because my wife was in the music business, and a house in Nashville. Around that time, she became concerned enough about my substance abuse that she and a friend of mine put together an intervention. I slipped the net on it. I kind of ran away from home. The intervention made me so angry that I left the love of my life. But we ended up getting back together.

Around this time, I made another record in really bad shape. It’s a pretty good record but kind of dark and scary. The next tour, though, was a nightmare. I played a lot of shows really sick, and I was having to take drugs before I went on stage for the first time. I had never sunk to that before. I waited until after the show. I had a habit, but I started getting sick at ten o’clock at night. We were playing mostly theaters and arenas by that time, so the shows were earlier. By ten o’clock, my body wanted to know where the dope was.