The Harder They Fall (46 page)

So when I went on this quest to become a better musician and a better person, and I was drug and alcohol free, I reverted back to being afraid of people and very, very introverted.

Sometime during that period, I met my great music writing partner, Bernard Edwards, and we formed a band called Chic that changed my life and, if you read
Rolling Stone
, changed the life of many people: “One of the
fifty moments that changed rock ’n’ roll.” In the mid-seventies we had our first hit.
Dance, Dance, Dance
, the first record we ever recorded under our name, was also a big hit. And from that moment on, we never looked back. The second record we recorded was also a big hit. And the third and the fourth and the fifth. We just had this huge run of success. The interesting thing was that after our first hit, before there was video, you had to go on the road to support it. You actually had to go on the road and play live concerts. And I was fundamentally very shy, even though I had done all sorts of gigs before then. I was always in the band, off to the side. I wasn’t the star. But now I’ve got a hit record, and I’m the boss. I got to go carry a show.

The first show we did was in Atlantic City. A big disco called Casanova’s, and there were thousands of people. The very next day, we played for 75,000 people at Oakland Baseball Stadium, and I walked out and saw that sea of people and I was petrified. I panicked. I couldn’t go out on stage. And my roadie came over to me and said, “Hey, boss man, try a swig of this.” He had a Styrofoam cup with Heineken’s in it, and I just sort of swigged it down almost like cough medicine. Heineken is definitely an acquired taste, if you haven’t had a beer in years, and I swigged it down. In one instant this warm glow sort of came down my body, tracing the path of the liquid. I turned around to 75,000 people, put my hands over my head, and screamed “OAKLAND!” And the crowd yelled, “CHIC!” And I went, “This is fantastic,” and I played the show. Afterwards I said to my roadie, “Before we do every show, can you always have one of those cups of Heineken ready?” And to show you how quickly the disease of alcoholism progresses, by the end of that tour, I went from starting out each show with one Heineken to having the entire drum riser covered in white Styrofoam cups. Thirty or forty cups worth of beer all the way around the riser, and because the alcohol dehydrates you—it’s liquid and water, you think you’re quenching your thirst. Drinkin’ and drinkin’, and the lights are hot. Liquid evaporating. You’re just getting drunk. At least for the day. But it’s also giving me confidence that I’m putting on a good show. I’m a natural. Playing big baseball stadiums like I belong out there. It was great.

I carried on like that for many years quite successfully. My shrink used to call it “falling
forward through life.” That even though you’re falling, you’re spiraling down, you’re going forward. You’re functioning. You’re doing great. I was really doing great. Writing songs like “We Are Family,” “Freak Out,” and “Good Times.” Producing David Bowie, Madonna, Duran Duran, Steve Winwood, and Eric Clapton. Fantastic! I couldn’t do anything wrong. I can’t even mention all the people I’ve done. Hit after hit after hit. And it went great for a long time, but now I can clearly see where I crossed the line. I crossed the line on that first tour. I was young and could take it, but … ten years of this. I’m still glamorous. I can hang with it. But there’s a big difference. Now records are costing a million, two million a record. I’m doing more coke than you can imagine. Drinking more booze than a human being should be able to drink.

I suffered many, many attacks of acute alcohol poisoning, especially on long flights. I remember once I flew from Honolulu to Los Angeles, which isn’t really that long. At the end of the trip, the flight attendant came over to me and said, “Wow, you just set some kind of record!” I didn’t know what she was talking about. She said, “Well, whenever we get on the plane”—this was a 747—“we carry forty of each type of drink, and you drank every whiskey sour we had on this flight.” She said, “Well, you actually only drank thirty-seven, ’cause one other guy drank three. Thirty-seven whiskey sours in six hours!” I remember her words perfectly. “That’s got to be some kind of record.” And of course, when I got in the limo and went to my hotel, I felt very sick. I went to the hospital and was told I had acute alcohol poisoning. First time that had happened.

After that, I subsequently had two bouts of pancreatitis. The first time I had it, the doctor said, “You can never drink again.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because right now you should be dead. Pancreatitis is quite often fatal. You don’t usually survive this. You die. You don’t leave the hospital.” So I was like, “Wow, I don’t feel
that
bad.”

And I recuperated after a few days, and went back to drinking. He had told me, “Never drink again. Alcohol always attacks some organ. Usually the liver, but in your case, it went after your pancreas.” He explained to me that pancreatitis is just like cirrhosis of the liver. I didn’t get it. I kept drinking.

I had a second bout of pancreatitis maybe a couple of years later. The doctors were like, “Wow, you’re killing yourself. You’re killing your pancreatic
tissue.” And I didn’t quite get it ’cause it didn’t sound that dangerous. Or I just wanted to keep going. Who knows? The second bout of pancreatitis didn’t make me stop drinking either. Then one night I came home from an after-hours club. It was probably ten or eleven the next morning. Maybe earlier than that. The handyman was putting out the garbage, so it was probably eight in the morning. This was in New York. I lived on the twentieth floor at the time, and I got in the elevator, and somehow I pushed thirteen. When the door opened, I passed out and fell into the thirteenth-floor hallway, and a janitor happened to be there. He called 911, and the ambulance came and revived me.

It was a typical alcoholic incident. You pass out, you throw up, you choke on your own vomit, your heart stops, and there you go. I had done coke and whatever else, and that’s what happened. Nothing glamorous, just a typical alcoholic death. They were able to revive me. Because of the amount of coke in my system, though, my heart kept stopping. Finally, after they tried to revive me the seventh or eighth time, they gave up. The doctor was filling out the death certificate, and my heart just started beating again. As quickly as it stopped, it started going again. And I only know this because the doctor told me. I certainly wasn’t conscious of it; I was really lit. Anyway, the doctor was on staff, and he stayed around the next day until I came to, and explained to me how hard they worked to save my life, and maybe I was the kind of person who cared about other people. If I knew how hard they worked, I might have enough respect for their effort to go on living, because they saved my life. If I can’t do it for me, I could do it for them.

And I went, “Man, is this guy laying a guilt trip on me.” But you know, I thought it was really incredible for him to say that. Of course, I didn’t listen to him. In fact, I don’t think I waited even five days before I went back to drinking. I couldn’t drink right away because I felt so bad. My chest was killing me because of everything they had to do to get my heart going. They had brought me back from the dead, and I didn’t care.

I kept going for some time until ten years ago. I was down in Miami Beach at Madonna’s birthday party, and I was living the life. I had a gorgeous Hollywood movie star as my date. I picked her up in some stupid
grandiose car I rented. She was down there doing a movie, and I had just finished doing the music for a big film that she was in, and somehow our paths crossed. Wow, I get to date these gorgeous girls! All my life I thought I was ugly, and now I’m dating movie stars. This is fantastic. And she likes me. She said, “Nile, you’re the greatest guy!”

Funny, but that was the last time I ever saw this woman. She couldn’t even make it through the date. I just went nuts. I was there with a bunch of very famous people who were all my buddies. We were all in the bathroom doing as much coke as we could. I was the last person to leave Madonna’s house the next day. I had to be carried home by friends. They deposited me in my hotel room in Miami. It was the first and last time I ever suffered from cocaine psychosis.

I got to my hotel room, the phone rang, and I answered it. It was a Mafia hit man telling me I only had a little while to live. He hoped that the last time I was up in New York partying with his girlfriend that I had a good time because I was going to pay for that good time with my life. I called some heavyweight detectives in New York to come down and protect me. Another grandiose gesture! A private jet. The whole bit. These detectives had to take this threat as real. They didn’t know that I was just imagining this shit. So they’re trying to find out who this “killer” is. In the meantime, I hid in the closet of my hotel room with a gun and a samurai sword waiting for this hit man to come and get me.

I had this wise-guy friend who took this threat very seriously. He started calling around town to try and figure out who put this contract out on me. Probably about an hour or two later, he called me on the phone—and I’ll never forget this—he said to me, “Hey Nile, I got to ask you a question. Are you doing coke?” I said, “Yeah, but what’s that got to do with anything?” He said to me, “You fucking moron, the coke is talking to you!”

I never heard the phrase before. I mean, I’ve been doing drugs all my life, and no one said that to me: “The coke is talking to you.” Sounded like Greek or hieroglyphics. What is this guy saying? And then I reached out to a number of my friends who loved and cared about me, and they all said the same thing: “Hey Nile, don’t worry. That’s just the coke talking to you.”

What did they mean? Finally, one of these tough guys said to me, “Nile,
there’s no fucking contract out on you. But I’m going to tell you something. If you don’t stop doing that coke, I’m going to come down there and kill you.” I knew he wasn’t playing, and I took his shit seriously.

For some reason I couldn’t hear all of my friends that were trying to help me, but this guy I could hear. For some reason, his words resonated. I still didn’t understand cocaine psychosis, but I did understand “Motherfucker, I’ll come down there and kill you if you don’t stop doing coke.” So I somehow, reluctantly, threw two half-ounces of coke down the toilet, and I sat there trying to sober up.

In those days, I believed the thing that made a person an alcoholic was brown liquor. You couldn’t be an alcoholic if you drank vodka or champagne or gin—although gin was pretty hard-core for me, I didn’t like gin. Even though I drank like a fish and almost died and all that stuff, I still didn’t think of myself as an alcoholic. And then two things happened to me in that hotel room, by myself. One, my friend said he was going to come out and kill me, so I threw the coke away. And two, I realized I had finished all the white liquor, all the clear liquor, and had to now drink something brown. I opened the liquor cabinet and saw that the only thing left was Scotch. I’ll never forget it ’cause it was the only time I did it in my life. I said, “This tastes fantastic! What have I been missing all these years?” And for some reason, that rang as if I had crossed the line. Now I’m an alcoholic. I can drink brown liquor straight and it tastes great to me. It tasted wonderful. I said to myself, “Damn, all these years I could have been doing
this
?”

For some reason, that dose of reality resonated and sent me a big message, like, “Hey pal, you’re an alcoholic. And you’re a drug addict. And your life is changing.” I felt my music deteriorating. This whole trip to Miami was very revealing. I was down there commissioned to do a record, and went and played live at this club one night. I thought I was doing a great job. The crowd was cheering and going nuts. The artist I was working with, who happens to be the most anal artist I’ve ever known, recorded every single note of music that night. The next day I went to his house and he said, “You want to hear what you played last night? You thought it was great, right? Well, check this out.” He played it, and it was the worst thing I ever heard. I was so embarrassed. So what brought me to my knees was realization and
embarrassment. Not me being destitute, not me being poor and losing all my money, or any of that stuff. It was pride. I had worked so hard to develop a sense of belonging and accomplishment and achievement, and it was all going to be taken away from me because I couldn’t even play guitar anymore. And here’s the proof. This is what I play like. But meanwhile, I thought it was great. I realized all at once that I could think one thing, but it not be true. That people were after me, and it not be true. I could think I’m a great musician, and it’s not true.

I realized that I was deluded, and that dose of reality started me on a quest to find what was real and what wasn’t. I called my shrink, whom I’d been seeing for many years, and he convinced me to check into a hospital called Silver Hill. And I did. And for some reason, maybe because I believed I was going to lose what I worked so hard to achieve, my problem became real to me. I got a new focus and sense of purpose when I realized that drinking and drugging was as natural to me as breathing. So to not do it required a huge amount of discipline. My music teacher used to always say to me, “What do you consider the working definition of discipline?” I would think about it, and he’d say, “Discipline is the ability to delay gratification.” He says, “You practice now to be on the stage later. One day you’re going to be gratified.”

And when I crossed over, that’s what I kept thinking. A lot of alcoholics have a tough time dealing with time. “Hey, you made it to thirty days, now you got to get to ninety.” For me I thought, “All I have to do is be disciplined.” So now I had to take that discipline and not drink for one day, one day, and the next thing you know, I’ll have ten years. Then twenty, or whatever. That’s my take on sobriety.

I remember once I worked on that big charity project Live Aid. You know, “We Are the World.” Lionel Richie told me and Clapton and all these people, “When we go on stage, no one can grab the microphone, because the sound-mixing guy is so far back he won’t be able to tell which microphone you’re on, and he might turn up the wrong one and get feedback.”