A substantial refrain
story by Ben Wolford
Photograph of Justin Townes Earle, courtesy of Joshua Black Wilkins
Justin Townes Earle died in Nashville, he says on the phone from Manhattan. But his polite, country voice is anything but Big Apple. He gets to the point as old friends do, as Southerners do. He’s got a charm that’s unmistakably Dixie. No, despite what he says, Justin hasn’t died in Nashville any more than Nashville’s died in him.
He just killed his drug addiction there.
“I’d been smoking pot since I was 10,” he says in that deep drawl that impressed crowds at the 2008 Kent Folk Festival. “I was strung out by the time I was 15.”
He says it in a storyteller’s cadence that’s befitting of his type of music. Justin’s music isn’t like his dad’s. Steve Earle leans more toward Bruce Springsteen than Hank Williams. That’s not so for Justin, the eldest of two boys. Justin sings country.
When it comes to drugs, though, Steve and Justin were both Hank Williams at some point in their lives. Father and son, doing whatever it took to get high. They didn’t do it together, though. Steve cleaned up first. But Justin was fading away. He would’ve died one night if a friend hadn’t dragged his doped and dying body off the floor and into a hospital. But that’s rock ‘n’ roll. It’s nothing new. Hendrix and Morrison simply didn’t have a friend there to call an ambulance.
Justin has since gotten off drugs and is into better things. More rockers, it seems, are doing that now. Or maybe it’s just that they’re less visible and don’t have time to get stoned.
Anastasia Pantsios works for Cleveland Scene, and she used to take photos at rock shows in the ’80s. At a Guns N’ Roses show, the band’s manager told Pantsios that former lead guitarist Slash had cleaned up — only two bottles of Jack Daniels a day now. In an unrelated incident, Slash puked on her friend.
“I’d like to think everybody’s cleaner than they used to be, but I don’t know if that’s really the case,” Pantsios says. “I still see enough stories going by about, ‘Oh, you know, our drummer died, and it turned out to be an overdose.’ I think it’s still happening but maybe on a less high-profile level.”
Drugs won’t ever leave the rock music scene. They’re too ingrained in it. Sex, yoga and rock ‘n’ roll doesn’t sound right. Kenneth Bindas is the chair of Kent State’s History Department, and he’s studied jazz and rock musicians. “With the development of popular music and with the rise of it as an industry, the demands on a musician were extreme. They had to perform every night,” he says.
Musicians starting out performed in dark, smoky nightclubs, he says. There weren’t gratifying hordes of fans. They had to be in a different city in 24 hours to play the same songs again. It was easy to pound shots or shoot up after a set, before getting in a van to drive all night. “You drank a lot to take the edge off,” Bindas says.
1975 Photograph of Eric Clapton, courtesy of Stephanie Saniga
Or to keep you going, as Eric Clapton explains in his autobiography. He’s been sober for years now, but around 1970, he spent a lot of time jamming and recording — musicians and drugs were all around him at his home at Hurtwood Edge.
“We kept ourselves going with fry-ups and a cocktail of drink and drugs, mostly cocaine and Mandrax,” he writes. “‘Mandies’ were quite strong sleeping pills, but instead of letting them put us to sleep, we would ride the effect, staying awake by snorting some coke or drinking some brandy or vodka, and this would create a unique kind of high … God knows how our bodies stood it.”
Pick a rock band in the 1960s or 1970s. They probably did something to ruin their bodies. Lynyrd Skynyrd. The Doors. The Rolling Stones. The Beatles. Aerosmith. Led Zeppelin. The Who. For a time, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll were indivisible.
They’ll never totally part ways. But pick a rock band in 2009. It’s not as easy to find a “VH1’s Behind the Music” tale of addiction and abuse. The White Stripes. Coldplay. Green Day. John Mayer. Ben Folds. The Black Keys. None of them have garnered the kind of reputation for heavy drug use that Steve Earle (jailed for drugs) or Townes Van Zandt (drank himself to death) or Hank Williams (drug-related heart failure) did.
Drug use was built into Justin Townes Earle’s name and into the music he listened to. “My dad wasn’t always around, but he did a lot of drugs when I was around him, and my mom’s boyfriends were no strangers to various substances,” he says. “I also grew up a son being raised by a single mother in the inner-city in Nashville, and my mom didn’t make very much money at all.”
Drugs were easy to find in Nashville. But he made sacrifices for them. A 1943 Martin 000-18 acoustic guitar can go for $11,500. He sold his for $80 worth of crack cocaine and Dilaudid. “That’s one thing about, especially drugs like heroin and cocaine — it doesn’t matter what you love,” he says. “You’re gonna hurt it on those drugs. You’re gonna fuck it up.”
It happened to the best of them. Ozzy Osbourne was fired from Black Sabbath because of his addiction. Drugs strained Johnny Cash’s relationship with his wife, June Carter. And just look at Courtney Love.
“I wasn’t the cleanest person on the face of the earth. I carried a pistol with me everywhere,” Justin says, thinking of his teenage self, a kid with a mean demeanor (“Look at me wrong, and it’s time to fight.”) who was always getting high. “I came out of it like a really fucked-up and overgrown child.”
Steve Earle didn’t say much to him about getting clean. He couldn’t, really. Justin says his dad hadn’t ever been there before, and, besides, by the time Steve was finally cleaning himself up, Justin was already plummeting toward bottom with a severe cocaine addiction. Steve didn’t want an addict coming around, son or not.
Justin’s 27 years old, and it looks now as though he’ll make it to 28. Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison and Cobain didn’t.
But Justin almost didn’t make it to 23. At 22, he says, his liver was “damn near cirrhosis.”
“I ended up in a hospital bed unconscious for about seven days after being scooped up off the floor at a friend of mine’s house where I’d literally dropped dead in her living room,” he says. “After I kind of woke up and I got high — I had somebody bring me some dope as soon as I woke up — for some reason, that’s when the supposed moment of clarity came.”
After that, he got his act together. He stopped going to bars. He’s since started eating healthier on the road. “I don’t do the Waffle House thing anymore. I did that for years, too. It’ll kill you just as fast as cocaine will.” He gets full nights of sleep. And he does stretches.
“Most of the people I hung out with back then are dead or in jail,” he says, though some are still there and still addicted. “And that’s why I left Nashville, Tennessee. I was tired of watching all the same motherfuckers sitting at the same bar drinking fucking Pabst Blue Ribbon until they started talking shit about shit that they don’t have any business talking shit about. That shit gets old.
“I lived an entire life’s worth of existence and died on the streets of Nashville, Tennessee,” he says. “And I don’t think it’s good luck to die somewhere twice.”
Kenneth Bindas doesn’t respond directly to the question about whether he sees hardcore drug use in the Kent/Akron music scene. His band, the House Popes, in which he plays guitar alongside a group of University of Akron professors, was formed about nine years ago. They’ve put out two CDs. “As a professor, I’m not ingrained into that life.”
But he doesn’t doubt it’s there. “Back in the day when I started my first band — I was a punk rocker — you start a band because you want, if you’re a boy — and this is from rock lore — because you want to get girls and because you’re interested in the night life. And night life is in a bar.”
And drugs and alcohol are in bars.
Bindas says he finds different kinds of drugs in bars, though.
“This is from a musician: Music is like a heroin.”
The way this article starts, it sounds like you’re saying Justin is strung out and hospitalized for marijuana, which makes this writer sound very ignorant. The omission of the other drugs that he used really hurts this article.