The Needle And The Damage Done: Addiction And The Music Business

Illustration by Mackenzie Moore

Polly Parsons grew up with  a lot of questions.

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Why did her famous father, the country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons, die from a big dose of liquid morphine on top of multiple tequila shots at Joshua Tree National Park in 1973 when she was six years old? Were her own subsequent teenage drug problems inevitable given her family history of suicide, mental breakdowns and addiction? How much does genetic make-up contribute to substance abuse? How much does the environment? Are musicians more susceptible than most people? Are drugs and creativity somehow linked? And what was the father she barely knew really like?

Such questions are as old as the music business, but they are being asked again today, more loudly than ever, after the recent high-profile opioid overdoses by Prince, Tom Petty and Avicii. Looking for answers led Polly Parsons to open the Hickory Wind Ranch, a detox/rehab center named after her father’s best known song, outside Austin.

“Every Friday night at the ranch,” says Parsons, now 50, “I’d have all the boys and girls come over to my living room and bring a new song or a new poem to share. That’s when I had my first ‘Aha!’ moment. I realized just how young 25-26 is. These musicians are so sensitive, so masculine/feminine, so unable to make life decisions for themselves, so tender most of all. Many of them had never written anything in their lives when they weren’t high, and now they had. They were so proud to play those songs for me, and we would cry.”

Gram Parsons had died when he was 26, and as her young clients played guitar in her living room, it was as if she were getting a glimpse of her father at that age.

“I was able to witness what a 26-year-old heroin addict looked like,” she says. “It was so heart-wrenching to see how fragile each moment was for them. I was able to have conversations with these young men about what it felt like. That helped me to stand as my father’s daughter in a more visceral way. Before that, all I had were books. I had had to find a way to get in the middle of it and make a difference at the same time.”

There’s a lot more help today for musicians struggling with substance abuse than there was in 1973. Austin is especially well equipped. Not only is Hickory Wind Ranch based there, but so are the SIMS Foundation, which connects musicians in trouble with a network of caregivers, and the Sober Jam, which provides musicians with a place to play without being surrounded by intoxicants.

The MusiCares Foundation, sponsored by the Grammy Awards’ National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, provides everything from emergency financial aid and addiction treatment to senior housing for musicians in crisis. The foundation has a major presence in Nashville and Los Angeles but provides services all over the country. Nuci’s Space in Athens, Georgia, focuses on the mental health issues that often underly drug and alcohol problems. The New Orleans Musicians Clinic has found a place within Louisiana State University’s Healthcare System to offer outpatient and residential treatment for musicians in need.

“We’re in the business of teaching our clients how to support themselves,” says SIMS Foundation director Heather Alden, “how to take themselves out of situations that might test their sobriety. They may have gone through detox and some kind of treatment; they’ve typically lived in a sober home for three-to-six months. We help them to reenter their work place with support in the form of AA meetings and a therapist. This is a disease of separation; when people are experiencing trauma in their lives, they’re feeling alone without support from the community around them. We try to provide that community connection.”

All the people working in this field agree that it’s not enough to just get a person sober; you have to address the issues that caused them to turn to drugs in the first place — issues that will lead the clients right back there if left unchanged. Some of those issues are the same for musicians as they are for cashiers and insurance adjustors — dysfunctional families, undiagnosed mental illness, physical or psychological abuse. But some issues are unique to musicians.

“If you’re kid looking through music magazines,” says Scott Nelson, bassist for Kenny Wayne Shepard and Gary Clark Jr., “every guitar player you see has a Jack Daniels bottle on top of the amp, and you assume this must be part of the deal. If you’re in a young band making a lot of money and you say, ‘I need this to go out there and make more money for you,’ people are likely to get it for you and often for free.”

“Your workplace is a bar,” says Alden, “which is very difficult if you’re trying to recover. That’s different from a plumber, say. It’s a place to relax, so there’s real temptation. Your patrons are buying you drinks and offering you drugs in a way they wouldn’t for a fireman. Musicians have unstable income. They’re putting themselves out there in front of an audience to be judged every night of the year.”

“Even when you’re playing locally,” recalls Nelson, “someone will say, ‘Let me buy you a shot’ or ‘Hey, do you want to go out and smoke a joint?’ They wouldn’t offer that to the insurance adjustor; there wouldn’t be magazine pictures of the insurance adjustor with a martini at his desk, and he wouldn’t go to work every day at a bar.”

“My problems predated my music career,” says blues singer Janiva Magness, the 2009 B.B. King Entertainer of the Year, “but the music business was more accepting of my problems than, say, the insurance business might have. People in the music business don’t blink an eye at these problems. ‘Gee,’ they say, ‘another drunk musician, another messed-up roadie at noon. Ho hum.’ Fortunately, things are changing. Recovery is spoken about much more openly in the music community, and addiction is less demonized. That makes it possible for more people to find recovery.”

It’s easier to abuse drugs and alcohol when they’re glamorized but also when they’re demonized. Getting high has been celebrated in hundreds of songs, from Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” to The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face” to Merle Haggard’s “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here And Drink.” And hundreds of magazine stories have lionized the buzzed life as lived by everyone from Keith Richards to Snoop Dogg.

Both the songs and the interviews showcase the initial flush of pleasure that comes with getting high and ignore the morning after — or the year after — when the vomiting, crashed cars, lost lovers and lost gigs come along. What teenage kid wouldn’t be attracted to such a picture of kicks without cost?

Some anti-addiction advocates try to flip this picture by portraying only the cost without the kicks, and that’s just as dangerous a distortion. Because that same teenage kid can see how much fun it is to get high in the beginning but finds it hard to imagine the aftermath. So he or she dismisses the warning and plunges into trouble.

“No one goes back to anything because they had such a horrible first experience with it,” Nelson points out. “People say, ‘I’m not an alcoholic because the first drink was so horrible, but because the first drink was so good.’ There’s a honeymoon period with drugs — different for every person — and the honeymoon is so good. But it never lasts.”

“It can be fun in the beginning,” acknowledges Magness. “I had a lot of fun, but it was fun with awful consequences. Because I always screwed up when I was high — screwed up my career, my relationships, everything. To be honest about drinking and using, you have to be honest about both the fun and the consequences.”

Nothing is more dishonest, these survivors claim, than the myth that getting high helps your creativity. The chemicals may shield you from the fear of criticism and rejection, but they befuddle the work of mental invention.

“Drugs cloud the creative process,” Magness adds; “they get in the way. The idea that they help is bullshit; it’s delusional. I understand why people would like a drink to loosen up, but we’re not talking about one drink; we’re talking about addiction. I’d tell young people that needing to be high to do the creative thing is just for lightweights, that’s just for people who don’t have it.”

When I interviewed Jason Isbell in 2014 about the shift from writing songs non-sober and writing them sober, he said the biggest difference was the consistency of the work. You might come up with a good line or a good lick while high, but it was too hard to follow through and make the most of it.

On his first completely sober album, Southeastern, he says, “I tried to make every song a good one. And that was possible because I wasn’t out in the bars getting drunk or lying in bed getting over being drunk. I was able to sit at the table for more hours and do more work. It’s that simple.”

Isbell was famously saved by the intervention of his fiancée and manager, who got him into a treatment program. For every musician with an out-of-control habit, there comes a moment when they have to confront the problem. That moment can be sparked by wrecking a car, losing a gig, being abandoned by a lover, losing a home or just losing that last shred of self-respect. That moment is commonly called “hitting bottom.”

Polly Parsons of Hickory Wind Ranch.

“Sometimes it’s a physical thing,” Magness says; “sometimes you wreck a car and kill someone else. I’ve known people who have had that great misfortune. Sometimes it’s internal, a disgust when you find yourself again in an alley or in bed with an unknown person and you don’t know how you got there or who it is. Everybody’s bottom is a little different. I had to hit bottom several times pretty hard. The third time, when I finally got clean 27 years ago, it wasn’t getting fired from a job, attempting suicide, or getting beat up, as it had been in the past. This time it was the screaming from the inside.”

“Some people reach the end of the rope and they have a million dollars in the bank,” observes Nelson; “some people reach it and they don’t have a home to live in, they don’t even have a car to sleep in. Your mind is so messed up, and you feel decrepit. I look back and wonder what kept me from ending it all. I quit heroin, which is a horrifying experience, but I felt I could still buy booze on the airplane or get blitzed at a bar. I just drank to the point where I could only sleep and get up.”

When hitting rock bottom occurs and the desire for changing one’s life takes hold, it’s critical that help be readily available. That’s the big change from Gram Parsons’ day; today there are 12-step programs everywhere and more comprehensive treatments as well.

“I checked myself into a hospital,” Nelson recalls, “just because I knew there was no way I could stop drinking if it was accessible. When I got out after a few days of detoxing, I called up the SIMS Foundation and said, ‘I’m sober and I’m determined not to drink, but I have no idea what the next step is.’ The first thing they told me was, ‘Just hang in there for a few days; we’ve got a spot opening up in a sober house.’

“Somehow with the help of some friends I got through those three or four days. The house was a place where I could not take drugs or alcohol, finally I could take a deep breath and go to 12-step meetings, and all I had to do was stay sober. I didn’t have to worry, ‘Can I crash on this person’s sofa?’ It wasn’t the first time I tried to get sober, but it’s the first time it worked.”

Many addicts and alcoholics relapse after getting clean, because getting clean is just the first step. After years of non-sober living, they have to learn how to live sober, which is an entirely different way of life. To do that, they have to deal with the underlying reasons for getting high, which are often mental-health problems. They have to form new connections with people to prevent the isolation that fosters addiction. Often they do that by becoming apostles for the gospel of sobriety.

“Part of our work here is to put messages of prevention out there,” says SIMS’ Alden, “to destigmatize asking for help, so you don’t have to hit rock bottom before you seek help. We haven’t done that in the past, but now we want people to come see us when they’re feeling bad, not when they’re at rock bottom. We want them to come in when they’re having trouble with their partners, not after they’ve lost their partners.”

“Given the information he had available, I’m not surprised at the decisions my father made,” adds Parsons. “But now the culture is hip to the whole set-up and starting to see things differently. There’s a slow change coming on. We’re starting to communicate with each other. We’re starting to reach out. We’re starting to realize that X and Y equals Z. If a musician starts showing these behaviors, we know to intervene before it’s too late. I try to show up every day, and if I fail, I try again. But I have people I can reach out to for help, and I don’t think my father did.”