Rock Bands That Fell Apart After Members Died From Drug Use
Rock bands that fell apart after members died from drug use
Musicians have used drugs to write and to perform for as long as there have been records to buy. Some of them never got back out, and their bands went down with them.
Published April 19, 2018
Musicians have used drugs to write and to perform for as long as there have been records to buy. Marijuana, speed, ecstasy, cocaine and heroin most of all ran through whole scenes and shaped the music that came out of them. Some of the people at the center of those bands never got back out. The bands below did not survive losing them.
The Doors
Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors, died in his Paris apartment in 1971 of a heart attack that was probably caused by a heroin overdose. Surviving members have said since that there were a lot of drugs and alcohol around the band. The theories about that night differ, but substance use sits in every one of them. He was 27.Nirvana
Kurt Cobain killed himself while high on heroin, at the top of his career.
Allegedly, Kurt was living with bipolar disorder. His parents divorced when he was very young. He had health issues and tried many addictive substances in his younger days and got addicted to heroin.
He went to drug rehabilitation in 1992, but the sobriety didn’t last for long. He relapsed months later and survived an overdose. Two years later he had another overdose. He agreed to go to a detox facility after family members and friends set up an intervention for him, but he left the center shortly after the arrival. He was found dead in his apartment, with heroin and Valium in his body.
Drugs take away inhibition and impair judgment. Talent does not protect anyone from that, and neither does being smart. Without treatment, people end up where Kurt did.
Sex Pistols
In October 1978 his girlfriend Nancy Spungen was found dead of a stab wound to the abdomen in the bathroom of their hotel room. John Simon Ritchie, better known as Sid Vicious, was charged with her murder and died of a heroin overdose while on bail in February 1979, before the case reached trial. Intravenous heroin use had already put him in hospital with hepatitis during the recording of the band’s only studio album, and he went through drug rehabilitation on Rikers Island. At the party his mother threw to celebrate his release from prison, he got hold of heroin and died in his sleep.Sublime
The ska punk band formed in Long Beach in 1988 and kept the same line-up until their guitarist and singer Bradley Nowell died of a heroin overdose in 1996. He was 28. The band did not go on without him.
A friend of the band, Mike Tracy, described the partying: “It was sex, drugs and rock and roll. Then it was drugs and rock and roll. Then it was just drugs.”
Bradley’s death did not slow anyone down. Another friend, Dave Donaldson, said the people around him used whatever they could find to numb it. Jacob Nowell tried drugs himself, partly to understand his father. He is clean now.
Families carry this too. What one person does with drugs lands on everyone who loves them.
