The death of debauchery: why the rock ’n’ roll madman has had his day

Following an evening in which he’d “had a few drinks, slapped [his] band about a bit and ended up in a canal”, on February 29 1982 Ozzy Osbourne was arrested for urinating on the Alamo. His day had begun with a couple or three hours in the company of grape and grain. Told that it was time for a photo shoot, the singer popped back to his hotel room in order to dress himself in a selection of his wife’s clothes. 

Declaring that he needed to pee, as members of his party gamely scoured Alamo Plaza for discreet locations the air was pierced by the screams of nearby tourists. Recounted in his book Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down, the British journalist Allan Jones recalls looking “around to see a man and a woman, the latter with her hands to her mouth… [while] her husband or whatever he is looks like he’s well on his way to a seizure of some kind.”

Ozzy Osbourne couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Placed under arrest by a Texas Ranger, he was told, “Mister, when you piss on the Alamo you piss on the state of Texas. That’s what all the fuss is about.”

I’ve just spent the past eight months writing a book about how the music industry makes people ill. In a text teeming with death, addiction, ruination, mental illness, sexual trespass, financial exploitation, and common-or-garden idiocy, I’ve come to see Osbourne’s misadventure as a bellwether for any aspiring rock ’n’ roll delinquent. Ozzy was arrested for urinating on the Alamo. Wearing women’s clothes. In the middle of the afternoon. What have you got? 

Not that it really matters. Boorish, culturally insensitive and lacking any semblance of decorum, the unpleasantness in San Antonio is the kind of caper that would likely to be viewed today as something close to irredeemable. Certainly, the idea that an artist’s reputation might actually benefit from the kind of write-up Allan Jones submitted to the Melody Maker is anachronistic. In 2021, it’s no longer the done thing to be seen to be going off the rails on a crazy train.

In seeking to explain the many reasons for the demise of the iconic rock ’n’ roll madman, I would rank growing unease at celebrating the instability of outlier personalities high on the list. Good. With the music industry keen to be seen to be “having a conversation” about mental health – it’s not much more than a conversation, but still – the deaths in the past 10 years of performers such as Amy Winehouse, Keith Flint, Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington and Scott Weiland struck different, and perhaps deeper, notes from those of the 20th Century. We might call this progress. 

Not that I’m averse to a good war story, mind. As winners of a local battle of the bands competition, age 17 the Boston group Gang Green used their prize money to buy so much cocaine they were able to rack out the name of their own band. They even used the accompanying picture as the cover of their first single. At the other end of the market, Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh once woke up in Paris with no idea how he got there. Despite myself, both of these stories make me smile. 

But the trouble with tales of rock ’n’ roll excess is that many of them don’t really stack up. In the pursuit of selling the sizzle, I’m reminded of a yarn that resurfaced in an obituary of Pete Way, from UFO, who died last year. “I remember one night [on tour] a guy turned up with a suitcase full of coke,” the bassist told Classic Rock magazine in 2013. “We didn’t think, ‘Right, we’ll have a bit of that now, save some for tomorrow and the rest of the week’, we just had it all. But we did it because we felt we deserved it. We made records that I was proud of, but what I’m most proud of are the shows we did.”

Leaving aside the speed with which gluttony becomes virtue – “we felt we deserved it” – the real problem with this story is that it’s not true. No matter their appetites, a band cannot consume (at least) two kilos of cocaine in a single night. All that mattered here was that Pete Way’s passage to hedonistic sainthood was made as easy as possible. Chewing my way through reams of affectionate what-is-he-like-ery, at last I found a quote that no one on earth could romanticise. Recalling the time he resided in an eight-bedroom mansion in Ohio, Way said: 

We lived in one room. We were seriously getting into the [heroin] around this time. Before then it was mainly coke and booze, heroin occasionally. Then it got more serious. We’d sit there, in one room, injecting and watching TV. I had these two fast sports cars just sitting in the garage and I never drove them. By then I wasn’t using heroin to get high, I was using it not to get ill.

The plural refers to Joanna Marie Demas-Way, the bassist’s fourth wife (of six), who died of an overdose in 2000. When her husband discovered her body, Demas-Way, a qualified doctor, had been dead for two days. “I knew she was dead, but I leaned over her and gave her the kiss of life,” Way told the journalist Lee Marlow in 2013. Better. Much better. Anyone window-shopping for rock ’n’ roll psychodrama should at least be appraised of the price tag. 

If one wishes to apportion credit, or blame, for the enduring legacy of the rock’n’roll outlaw, it probably lurks on the page. For once, it isn’t just the fault of music journalists either. In what is by now a don’t-bore-us-get-to-the-chorus cliché, esteemed autobiographies by artists such as Keith Richards and Mark Lanegan begin with their authors in drug-addled states. Never knowingly undercooked, The Dirt, by Motley Crue, opens with an acrid description of the group’s communal living quarters. 

“We couldn’t afford – or were too lazy to afford – toilet paper, so there’d be s--t-stained socks, band flyers, and pages from magazines scattered across the floor,” it reads. One of the few groups to actively monetise their own life threatening dysfunction, whatever this is, it ain’t a John Lewis nightmare. 

“It was a fun time and it’ll definitely never be like that again,” the band’s drummer, Tommy Lee, told me last year. “It was before Instagram and cell phones. I mean, we got away with murder without anybody knowing about it. We got into a whole lot of stuff. It was a time when anything went and there was no consequences and it was just a free for all… It was a time where excess seemed to be just a daily thing. It’s hard to explain music and [an] era and a scene. It was just a f-----g wild time.”

Here, Lee is surely onto something. Low-hanging fruit for a billion mobile phones, the voyeuristically revered lifestyles of Keith Moon, Phil Lynott, Shaun Ryder and Slash might not have withstood the scrutiny of being, ahem, plastered on social media. When the rapper Lil Peep died just hours after telling his Instagram followers that he’d taken six Xanax pills (along with other drugs), in 2017, the misadventure seemed close at hand, and viscerally real. 

In terms of wider public attitudes, things have been slowly changing since the 1990s. Eschewing the glamorous excess of the previous decade, certainly artists such as Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley, from Alice in Chains, made heavy-duty drug use look like anything but fun. In releasing a film in which the band’s members appear to have gone mad, 2004’s wildly applauded (and courageous) Metallica: Some Kind of Monster made a virtue of singer James Hetfield’s torturous road to mental and physical good health. 

“I’ve been in Metallica since I was 19 years old, which is a very unusual environment for someone with my personality to be in,” Hetfield told me in 2003. “It’s a very intense environment, and it’s easy to find yourself not knowing how to live your life outside of that environment. Which is what happened to me. I didn’t know anything about life. I didn’t know that I could live my life in a different way to how it was in the band since I was 19, which was very excessive and very intense… I definitely didn’t make the best choices for myself.”

It could just be me, but in the 21st century rock musicians burdened with reputations for excess seem to occupy the same terrain as tribute bands. The story of Justin Hawkins, from The Darkness, spending £150,000 on cocaine could well use a bit of the seventies novelty gloss of Aerosmith being so out of it that they couldn’t remember hiding a cassette tape of riffs in a biscuit barrel. With a magnetic energy similar to that of The Pogues, the chaotic life of Pete Doherty wasn't the only part of The Libertines’ get-up that seemed second-hand. 

“I believe that if you can do without them [drugs] then you’re better off,” Lemmy once said. Hang on, hear him out. An exception to the rule that rock ’n’ roll outlaws either get clean, wind up in a state of tragic ruination, or die by their own hand, the Motörhead kingpin made it to the foothills of his eighth decade without bothering to change his ways. The secret, a friend of his told me, was that he never allowed his love of speed and booze to gain the upper hand. He never placed himself in a position where he was forced to quit. 

“I hate to give advice because I’m 53 – I’m their parents’ age – so they think, ‘What’s that old c--t know?’” he said. “But I do know. Believe me, I f-----g know.”

I shan’t lie, for a while I honestly thought doing without drugs was exactly what the young bands were doing. I was wrong. Rooting around in the present tense, the story told to me again and again is that emerging musicians remain partial to the old tricks. Only difference is that today the action takes place under cover of darkness, and in a different spirit. Impoverished by plummeting royalty rates, out on the road for longer than is healthy a new generation is going mad as a matter of necessity. 

“Drug use is still so rampant,” the head of an American music charity told me. “It’s still such a problem. I think that it’s become a little bit more controlled… People aren’t so out there with it now, but I do think there’s a problem. There are more functioning addicts than there were before, and that’s scary. If you can still function but you’re in the throes of an addiction, that’s very damaging because it’s all going to unravel and you’ll think that it’s happened overnight…. That’s something I see happen a lot with younger bands.” 

As a singer in a popular young British rock group put it: “I saw a tweet the other day that said that the biggest surprise that young kids could find out about their favourite bands is that they’re all addicted to cocaine. I’m certainly not addicted to cocaine, but I’ve definitely abused substances numerous times in my life. And so has everyone in music that I know.”

The reason for this, he said, is that in “my experience… it all comes from coping. In a world where money is sparse now, in the music industry drugs and alcohol are always available. It’s everywhere, all the time. You can get whatever you want. It’s like having a magic ticket where you can ask for as much as you want of those things. But if you want a living wage, that’s different. We can’t do that.”

Won’t, actually. Twenty-nine years after he urinated on the Alamo, in 2011 I was granted an audience with Ozzy Osbourne. Sitting in the back garden of his sumptuous country pile in South Buckinghamshire, there was no doubt that the “Prince of Darkness” had been well remunerated for his tours of duty. But the years had not been kind. 

Apropos of nothing, he told me that he retained the ability to source drugs anywhere in the world inside of 15-minutes. Looking out toward rolling fields and grazing sheep, with what I hoped was good humour I replied, “I bet you can’t round here”. At this, the singer met my eye with a surety that I will remember for the rest of my life.

“How much do you want to bet?” he said.

Ian Winwood’s Bodies: Life & Death in Music will be published by Faber & Faber in spring 2022

Who is your favourite rock ’n’ roll madman? Let us know in the comments section below.