It’s no secret that famous musicians party hard – buying
into the myth of the indestructible, hotel-room trashing, fast-living
celebrity. But when the music stops and
the fans go home, the result is usually a path of destruction, harm to loved
ones, and often overdose or even death.
When the music star realizes that they’re just human and mortal like the
rest of us it can be ugly – and probably time to get some help. Visits to drug and alcohol rehabilitation
facilities are so ubiquitous with celebrities that the tabloids are filled with
the biggest offenders and most tragic users.
But there are still some musical stars that slipped our attention as
substance abusers and rehab attendees. Whether
they were out of the public eye at the time, lived in an era without as much
media attention, or were from a musical genre (like country) or had an image we
don’t normally equate with partying, they escaped our scrutiny. So here are 10 musicians you may not know
went to rehab.
Emboldened by his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, Bowie released
plenty of psychedelic spaceman albums in the 1970s but fell victim to his own experimentation. Ironically around 1975, the same time he hit
it big in the U.S. market with the song, “Fame,” he developed a cocaine habit so
derailing that critics noticed the “choppy” influence on his music. He was sent to rehab for a short stint and
went on to make great music for many more decades.
2. Eric Clapton
Clapton may have a clean image as a guitar God now, but he
suffered through an epic addiction problem in the 1970s. His cocaine and heroin use was so prevalent
that he almost lost his life on several occasions before entering rehab a few
times. Sadly, he replaced one addiction
for another and started drinking heavily instead of abusing harder drugs.
3. Ray Charles
We know that Ray Charles had an addiction to heroin, well
documented because of the movie about his life, but not everyone knows that the
blind blues singer voluntarily committed himself to the St. Francis Hospital in
California to get clean.
Don’t discriminate – country music stars -who sing about white picket fences and apple
pie - can be as messed up as everyone else, and Urban certainly had his
time. In 1998, the popular country
singer went to rehab for drug and alcohol abuse. He fell off the wagon in 2006, when he went
back to reach sobriety, once again.
Urban is now a spokesperson for alcohol treatment.
5. George Jones
Speaking of country music icons, the man, the myth, the
legend himself – George Jones – danced with the devil far too many times. Throughout his career, Jones was checked in
to rehab centers many times for his alcohol and cocaine addiction.
6. Billie Joel
The folksy and clean-imaged Joel has long battled alcohol
addiction, checking himself into the same Silver Light Hospital for rehab that
Michael Jackson visited in 2002 and 2005.
He’s on record that he overindulged in alcohol to self-treat his
lifelong depression, which got markedly worse after 9/11.
The legendary blues singer lived a short, sad life – dying
at the age of 44 after battling addiction her whole life. Her obsessive and dangerous heroin and
alcohol escalated to suicidal levels, to the point where she was cooking up her
heroin doses in a tuna can, not a teaspoon, because that’s how much she’d
shoot. She did enter a rehab clinic in
1947 after her arrest for heroin possession but she never conquered her demons.
8. Johnny Cash
The man in black with the voice like a runaway train had a
lot of problems with alcohol, cocaine, and amphetamines for most of his
career. However, it’s little known that
he checked himself into the Betty Ford clinic for the latter in 1983, only to
relapse and return to rehab in 1992.
The mega-popular rapper was known for having plenty of personal problems with his ex-wife and anger issues when he was young, but not many people know that Marshall Mathers had a drug addiction problem that landed him in rehab. In 2005, Eminem took a puzzling two-year hiatus from the rap game right at the height of his success. It turns out that he was in and out of rehab during that time as he cleaned up from an Ambien and prescription drug addiction.
10. Michael Jackson
The King of Pop had many skeletons in his closet, but it’s
not widely known that drug addiction was one of them. As the decades transmogrified our favorite
singer from the Jackson 5 to a troubled and embattled adult with a disturbing
appearance, Jackson fell victim to prescription drugs. After an accident during his Dangerous Tour,
he began taking Valium and Ativan for pain and got hooked. In 1993, he secretly checked into the Silver
Hill Hospital and went through the 12-step program.
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