![]() And you guys, my readers, are saving my life. Writing The Eccentrics is saving my life. For me, it’s writing, creativity, and listening to music. When you get sober, one of the most amazing feelings is to reconnect with your passions. I barely listened to music, which had been my greatest passion. ![]() ![]() When I was drinking every day, all I did was drink, sleep, and watch TV. When I’m able to write a riff, write some lyrics, that’s the way that I connect with the world.” “Playing music saves my life,” he continues. “Afraid to take on responsibility, new sponsees or something, or allowing myself to stand up and shine… I’ve got new tools, I’ve got new hope, new love, new respect for myself.” “And that’s what it’s like for me in recovery at times,” Hetfield tells Road Recovery. While in recovery, Hetfield concluded that the root of his problems is fear. Obviously I’m not straight edge - a true, hardcore straight edge has never had any of it in his or her whole life. “And I don’t need drink or drugs,” he continued. It’s like when you go into the clubs, they put an X on your hand ,” he tells the Metallica fanzine So What. “The old straight-edge tattoo, it’s just like a big X on your hand: No drinking - and I don’t drink. Hetfield bears a straight-razor blade X tattooed on his wrist. Members of the straight-edge movement identify themselves by tattooing Xs on their hands. hardcore-punk band Minor Threat, which contains the following lyrics: The straight-edge designation comes from a song title by1980s D.C. Other ones I’ve picked up on my own and then created… Shame’s a big thing for me.”Ĭoming out of rehab, Hetfield went straight edge, meaning he doesn’t put anything chemical into his body. Other ones, I’ve been able to drop some of that. Some of it is things I’ve taken from my parents and carried it a little further. “I’m coming to grips with that, ’cause I have groups of people that I’m able to share all my horrible stuff with - shameful, extremely shameful, dark stuff. “You wouldn’t really like me if you knew my story, if you knew what horrible things I’ve done,” he tells Road Recovery. ![]() Now, with 13 years sober, Hetfield recently opened up in an interview with Road Recovery, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating young people about addiction. He had a problem, and he finally admitted it in December 2001, when he went to rehab, an event documented in the 2002 documentary Some Kind of Monster. But while his bandmates cooled off with the drinking as the years went on, Hetfield never slowed. While drummer Lars Ulrich had a cocaine problem until 2008, frontman James Hetfield never touched coke or heroin. The band’s reputation for drinking earned it the nickname Alcoholica. People would know when we were coming into town to stock their bars and make sure there was always a lot of booze for us to drink. I would start drinking about twelve in the afternoon, we would arrive at the club and go straight to the bar and see how much booze we could consume for free, and by the time we went out onstage we were almost always sauced. When I first met these guys, they were drinking vodka like it was water. In a 2003 interview with MTV, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett described the band’s drinking days: Metallica is notorious for playing hard and partying harder. (Unless you count Led Zeppelin as a metal band, in which case they play second fiddle). They’re arguably the greatest metal band of all time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |