re: Sun Ra – his belief in his extraterrestial origins never interfered with his creative production or his everyday functioning, at least as far as I’ve heard. The more cynical among us could suggest that it was all for show. In any case, it seems a little harsh to paint him as pathological based upon this single (possibly) delusional belief. He produced a hell of a lot of excellent music over the course of his career.
I mean, who knows. He could have been from elsewhere in the universe…
I have doubts about this whole topic. Mental health, in my experience, is a continuum. Lots of folks don’t go around behaving in a patently bizarre manner or spouting off strange conspiracy theories. Does that make them sane? Look at the number of musicians who die very young as a result of how they’ve chosen to live. Was Keith Moon entirely sane? How about Jim Morrison? Or Kurt Cobain? Or, dare I suggest it… Elvis?
By nuts, do you just mean acting more weird than is normally socially acceptable? Does engaging in pathologically self-destructive behavior count? If so, I would submit that there are many, many more rockers who qualify. In fact, in that case it may be easier to count the sane ones…
RealityChuck, Harry Lime, and Persephone, I thought I was the only hard-core Fleetwood Mac fan around here!
More about Peter Green and that bad drug trip can be seen on the recently released “Two Sticks and a Drum” the Mick Fleetwood Story. John Mcvie talks about these rich German teenagers getting Peter to go ff with them after a show. They said that one Peter Green left, and a quite another one returned after a few days. John McVie says that if he ever gets ahold of those folks he will kill them.
And yes, all of the FM guitarists have gone insane. It is quite jinxed position, I think. Jeremy Spencer, Danny Kirwan, and my favortie, Lindsey Buckingham all acted bizarre. Lindsey really ruined his career with the personality problems he developed. Nobody wanted to work with him because of his wierd and controlling behavior. One night in New Zealand in 1980, he layed most of the show out of tune on purpose, flipped his jacket over his head and mocked Stevie Nicks during Rhiannon, and then topped it off by going over and kicking her twice.
The guitar player from my old band is currently doing a project with Jaz Coleman, staying with him at his ranch in NZ. They met in Prague, where Jaz just won a Czech Grammy for some orchestral work. He’s composing symphonies nowadays, apparently. Never met the guy myself, but from everything I hear about him he seems to have it together.
Fishbone’s guitarist Kendall Jones had a nervous breakdown and then left the band to join a religious cult in 1993. Fishbone’s bassist Norwood Fisher tried to get him out of the cult, and was charged with attempted kidnapping. He was later acquitted. When Jones went off the deep end, he denounced Fishbone’s music as satanic. As far as I know, Jones hasn’t performed onstage since leaving Fishbone.
Trombonist Don Drummond, one of the founding members of the Jamaican ska band the Skatalites, was deemed insane and committed to Bellevue Hospital in 1965 after he stabbed his girlfriend to death. He had a history of mental illness prior to the stabbing, and was nicknamed Don Cosmic due to his eccentricities. He never left the hospital, dying a few years later. The circumstances of his death are a mystery, as the hospital said it was suicide, but others have claimed he was murdered.
Bad Brains vocalist H.R. has been pretty nutty for a long time, leaving and returning to the band several times over the past two decades. He has had run-ins with the law, including getting busted at the Canadian border for drugs and splitting open a fan’s skull with his microphone stand during a concert. Bad Brains then changed their name to Soul Brains, and when I last saw them perform a couple years ago, H.R. was placidly crooning their hardcore punk set, whereas back in the old days, he was a bundle of furious energy. Very strange person indeed. While H.R.'s strangeness didn’t end his career, he had a knack for breaking up the band (whenever he left the band his brother and drummer Earl left too) whenever they seemed to be on the verge of commercial success.
Really? Why is that? Haven’t hear anything of the sort.
Oh, and to be the picky Dutchman: it’s Eddy van Halen, with a small “v”. However, if you use the last name alone, the “v” is capitalised. Then again, it’s entirely possible Eddy Americanised his last name, in which case I’d say he’s losing his mind indeed.
“Really? Why is that? Haven’t hear anything of the sort.”
I saw him on the Howard Stern show a couple years back and he just seemed to be completely “out of it”. He just wanderd around the studio ingnoring Howard and everyone else. It was bizzare.
I idolized him growing up and he’s the reason I’ve been playing guitar for the past 15 years, but whenever I see him in an interview and he’s asked about the past, the way he talks about DLR and Sammy has caused me to lose a lot of respect for him.
So, maybe he’s not losing his mind and I’m just pissed because I’ve realized that my childhood hero has no class.
We’ll all know more when VH finally get’s around to realeasing another album and will hopefully get a “Behind the Music” episode on VH1.
After reading Tony Fletcher’s biography on Keith Moon, I would have to say that the drummer was teetering on the very edge of sanity. The incidents that occurred during the final years of his life were truly harrowing. There is a suggestion that he took drugs to quiet the voices in his head
I just wrote a term paper for school about him two weeks ago. Currently, he’s in a hospital in England, nearly blind, bald, diabetic and about as unrecovered as you can get. He has three solo albums, and a “Best Of” that was released not that long ago; the solos are Opel, Barrett, and The Madcap Laughs, in that order, IIRC.
