Sure, Lindsay and Britney get all the glory these days for their "wild and crazy" ways. But they are bush league compared to the pros of the past. In the music business? This is like comparing analog sound to digital. Old time rehabbers have a warmth, an epic grandeur to them that today's kids can never hope to achieve. Not that there aren't advantages to being a modern day rehabber. With all the age-preserving technology out there, they won't ever have to worry about looking like Keith Richards. While we walk solemnly down the checkout aisle reading about these rehab princesses, let us remember those who 12-stepped before them.
Eric Clapton: You see him now as a well-tailored gentleman who makes dull blues albums. And he spends enough time on exotic islands that who knows what he's really up to, but Clapton apparently once was quite the indulger. And he once made albums that were very, very loud.
Marianne Faithfull: Before Brit, before Lyn, before Valerie Bertinelli got chubby, Marianne Faithfull watched her teenaged beauty and mutual infatuation with the Rolling Stones (they liked her as much as she liked them) turn into an infatuation with heroin that left her homeless. Then she started making music again. And she was never homeless again.
Metallica: Let's hear it for James Hetfield. He turned alcoholism into a movie, as Some Kind of Monster bears out. And how amazing that Metallica ever get anything done if he's got to end the recording session at 4 in the afternoon. What's he got soccer practice?
David Crosby: Before he started making babies for Melissa Etheridge, David Crosby used to do a lot of drugs. You can read all about it in one of his many books about how he used to do a lot of drugs. Or you can read books about the many people he played with from Stills, Nash and Young to the Byrds to the Grateful Dead, who also seemed to notice that he did a lot of drugs.
Aerosmith: These guys didn't have a career. They were washed up. They knew drugs were an essential part of the creative process. And that's why their career suddenly took off once they got clean in the mid-'80s? Say what? These guys obviously didn't read the script close enough. I mean, all those bands on Behind The Music who sober up say they're in the best shape of their lives and couldn't be happier with their fortune today, but if that were really true, they wouldn't be doing a Behind The Music now, would they?