Dear Readers,
I’m a real sucker for rockumentaries, rock biographies, rock memoirs, etc. etc. I’ll read or watch just about anything in the genre. I once even started David Lee Roth’s autobiography, which was kind of entertaining for about a hundred pages. After that it got a little tedious. Summary: “I love martial arts, I’m in great shape, and I’m a genius!!!”
(Click on this YouTube video to get a sense of Roth’s writing style.)
This was not unlike The Storyteller by Dave Grohl, which, while much more readable and a lot less harebrained, grew tedious in its own way: “I fucking rock, and I’m a fucking amazing dad! Fuck yeah!”
In short, I’ve got a high tolerance for all things rock ‘n’ roll. And that’s why I was recently surprised by how much I’d forgotten about heroin in the world of 1990s rock.
Now, in my defense, I’ve been studying the opioid epidemic, and most things you read about the opioid epidemic begin around 1999 with rising Oxycontin deaths, followed by the rise of heroin circa 2010, and then the arrival of fentanyl a few years later. This chart is representative:
Though, as I’ve mentioned before, for various reasons (including my podcast conversation with Nancy Campbell) I had a hunch that maybe things had gotten started before Oxycontin. So I’ve been having my research assistant, Sam, go back to the newspapers of the 1990s and look into this, and the more she reads, the more stories she finds linking heroin to rock ‘n’ roll, and, really, pop culture in general (e.g. “heroin chic,” Pulp Fiction, Trainspotting, etc.).
Heroin of course was connected to rock music long before the 1990s.
But there seemed to be a resurgence after the cocaine-heavy 1980s.
My God! Look at that. Say no to cocaine, everybody!!
Mercifully, in the 90s pop music changed radically. But that change unfortunately came with a lot of heroin abuse. There was of course Kurt Cobain, whose heroin addiction seems to have played a significant role in his 1994 suicide. And there was the beloved Jerry Garcia, whose heroin habit sadly precipitated his death in August of 1995.
And the more Sam and I dig into this, the more interesting it gets.
One of the first heroin-rock stories Sam came across was a local deal. Like literally a deal, namely Kelley Deal of the Dayton, Ohio band The Breeders, who on February 7, 1995 pleaded not guilty to heroin possession. She was 33 at the time and had been taking drugs since high school. Recently she has scoffed at suggestions that rock ‘n’ roll turned her into a junkie:
I hate the misconception that I joined a band and became a heroin addict. I started shooting up when I was a teenager. I was a practising alcoholic in my day job; I was working in a computer company, I had top-secret clearance for what I was doing, and I was turning up for work in the same clothes I had worn the day before, having stayed up all night on ecstasy.
Was she working at Dayton’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, home of the great National Museum of the USAF, which is free and totally awesome?
Probably. But that’s beside the point.
The point is that Kelley Deal was hardly the only rock star out there getting into trouble with heroin. There were plenty of other prominent addicts among the new crop of rock stars, from the aforementioned Kurt Cobain to Layne Staley of Alice in Chains and Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots. And let’s not forget the otherwise brilliant John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers! Boy oh boy did heroin do a number on him.
Here’s an image of Frusciante as a fresh-faced young man before heroin (or, at worst, very early in his heroin “career”):
Here he is just a few years later after quitting the band and settling into the junkie lifestyle:
And here he is much more recently (and totally sober):
Say no to drugs kids!
Indeed, if you ever need to scare a kid off heroin, just fire up this 1994 Frusciante interview and performance. Yikes.
For those of you perhaps unfamiliar with 90s bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Frusciante is actually a tremendous musician. The above performance strongly suggests that drugs are bad, m’kay.
Meanwhile, Flaming Lips multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd almost had his arm amputated because of a horrible heroin-related abscess that he claimed was just a spider bite. Just like Jared Leto in the endlessly disturbing Requiem for a Dream (2000)!
The overriding point here is that heroin was hip. It was the “in” thing despite it ravaging the rock ‘n’ roll community.
I talked to someone recently who admitted having snorted heroin in the 90s. I asked this person how s/he got into this notoriously dangerous drug. Answer: “You know, it was the 90s.”
So I’m getting very interested in the hip-heroin 90s as a runway leading to the subsequent prescription-opioid epidemic. Is there a link? I’m not sure. But I’m amassing a bibliography and Sam’s been looking at the primary sources, so we’ll keep you up to date on this developing story.
Heroin use by rock musicians goes much farther back than the 90s. It was already pervasive when I first visited the Haight in 1968. Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, many others survived. Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison didn't.
https://whitesandstreatment.com/infographics/the-ultimate-list-of-musicians-lost-to-drugs/
And you can carry the history back before that to jazz musicians.