One drink before I play a show is an asset. It cuts the stage nerves and helps me get into the zone. Any more than that and I’d be impaired. And when you’re waiting backstage with a group of musicians, you’re bound to get a little contact buzz. Just sayin’
In any case, in my younger days, when I did any partying, it was always after the show. I’m one of those who believes you don’t mess with your paycheck. If you can’t get your s**t together onstage, you’re not going to get a repeat gig. Of course I was never a member of a marquee-type band. I’m sure they are forgiven a great deal because of the revenue they bring in.
I kind of suspect some of you are underestimating how well you’d do after a few drinks on things that are coordination and muscle-memory related. It sure sounds to me like the same thing that happens to me while playing video games after a few beers happens to musicians as well.
The coordination does drop, but there’s a certain relaxation/mellowing phase that really does help. It’s like your mind lets go of actually trying to direct your fingers, and your fingers do their thing without any conscious thought as you think about what you want to do, in a big-picture sense. Even with a minor decrease in coordination, your motions become more fluid.
This only works for so long- you either sober up and start thinking about it again, or you drink more, and your coordination drops to the point where you start messing up.
Upon further reflection, a lot of the big name rock star types can probably do their shows on auto-pilot. If you play the exact same songs in the exact same order night after night, in some cases for years and years, your mind can probably check out and let your muscle memory take over.
Well, I’m sure a lot of musicians have used speed to get energized for a show when booze and sedatives and extensive travel had them low. Certainly baseball players have done so.
Seem to remember a story about how Roger Daltrey would generally retire to his hotel room with a groupie and a pot of tea while his bandmates partied when on tour because the booze and drugs hurt his voice, don’t know if that’s true or not. Also remember a quote from Gene Simmons, famously clean and sober himself, marveling at how the members of Rush never partook of the party scene when on tour with Kiss, preferring to go to their hotel rooms and read. Though I recently saw Geddy Lee on That Metal Show on VH1 Classic talking about how Alex Lifeson liked to party and got along well w/Ace Frehly for that reason, so maybe it varied alot. Also, as others have pointed out, most of us could get away with alot more of that kinda stuff in our 20s, with some famous exceptions, of course.
Gene Simmons has also said, “I never went for drugs or booze. Someone told me that your dick stays limp when you’re drunk. I thought, ‘What a horrible thing!’”
He’s also said, “The stage is the place where anything goes. It’s the legal zone for flashers.”
He even said, about Rush, “One of the great things about rock’n’roll is that even an ugly bastard like me can get laid, and I just never saw ANY of them do that.” However, other members of KISS and other bands have relayed stories about the guys in Rush smoking lots of marijuana, especially Alex Lifeson, who liked to use a pillowcase as a concentrator.
In discussing their ambitious flop album “Caress of Steel,” Geddy says, “We were high a lot of the time when we were making that record. And it SOUNDS like that to me now.”
At a certain point in any addiction it becomes impossible to function without the substance, in that case I’d hate to see a band sober because just to function at baseline they need something.
I think Mick Jagger invented the concept-it was a way to keep himself and his band in the news. Of course, he actually stayed away from most of the booze and drugs.
On a tangential note, the complex things some people can do when wasted on various substances are quite wide and varied. A friend of mine used to go clubbing a lot, and one night they took some acid which was much, much stronger than they were used to. This friend, an imbecilic 18-year-old with as imbecilic friends drove home in a totally trippy state, only ‘seeing’ (consciously) the real world in small snippets and 80% of the time was in a dreamland. Fortunately the roads were clear between 5 and 7 on that Sunday morning, save for the odd car full of people probably also trying to drive very carefully in case they come to the attention of the local law enforcement.
True to say this friend still has very little memory - apart from the ‘trip’ through space and time - of operating a machine which weighed at least a tonne and was capable of speeds over 100 mph, with two of their equally incapacitated friends as cargo. It is also true to say my friend was absolutely horrified, once they had sobered up, of the danger they put their own friends and any other road-users through that morning, and never repeated that particular experience.
During my own clubbing days I heard of and saw many similar, although less extreme, examples of where people were in no fit state to do anything complex but managed to - often with some elan and skill - while others have fallen at the first fence. The first fence was usually very low and the area where they fell was mostly cushioned and safe, thankfully.
Not the same thing at all, but Glen Campbell’s family said about a year ago that Glen had almost no memory, never spoke any more, and didn’t recognize friends or family any more… but occasionally, he could still pick up a guitar and play it.
I leave it to trained neurologists explain how different types of memories reside in different parts of the brain. But if a man can still play music despite having serious brain dysfunction, mightn’t a drunk/stoned musician still have the instinctive memory of how and what to play even if much of his brain is out of kilter?
I got the impression that it came to light that Jones was murdered rather than OD’ed. Ok, so there are plenty of other drugs deaths, so might just be a bad example, or discredited story.
