Five influential musicians who overcame homelessness
You’d be hard-pressed to find a culturally significant musician who hasn’t lived an extraordinary life in one way or another. From The Beatles’ formative exploits in Hamburg to Jimi Hendrix’s many careers before finding fame—including a stint with Little Richard—it’s no wonder that such remarkable experiences have fuelled groundbreaking music. In many cases, these extraordinary lives have also provided ample material for compelling biopics.
While biopics are undoubtedly a divisive subject, when it comes to musical efforts, the stories behind them are always incredible to the everyday viewer. Often, these are underpinned by the classic sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll trope, with Keith Richards’s many brushes with death and the madcap, and at times genuinely shocking, life of Ozzy Osborne coming to typify this outlandish nature. Yet, hellraising is just the tip of the iceberg, and influential musicians have lived a life outside the standard in other ways.
One common feature of a musician’s life is the struggle. They are often people not cut out for the normal life, a boring 9-5 job and a nuclear family, with them constantly toiling to find their place in the world and kick back against expectations. This usually leads to them being on the fringes of society for a time as they make sense of life from the outside and hone their crafts. This has actually led to several famous artists battling homelessness, freezing and hungry on the streets while they incubate their art, waiting for their big break.
Homelessness is something that has happened to many influential musicians for an array of reasons apart from being broke nonconformists or hopeful chancers. Drug addiction, unscrupulous management and even ill-intentioned bandmates have also led to homelessness for a handful of legends, leading to a lifestyle far removed from the ones they once enjoyed, or on the other hand, providing a miserable chapter which fuels their desire to never return to it.
Find five musicians who experienced homelessness below.
Five musicians who overcame homelessness:
Sly Stone
Sly Stone is an undisputed music icon. Best known as the frontman of Sly and the Family Stone, he was a pioneer in bringing funk to global prominence by blending it with rock, soul, and psychedelia. His timeless classics include Dance to the Music, Everyday People, and Family Affair. Stone’s influence is so profound that Stevie Nicks famously wrote a Fleetwood Mac staple in his bed. However, like many creative powerhouses, his personal life has been marked by extreme highs and lows, contributing to a prolonged absence from the music scene.
Willem Alkema’s 2009 documentary Coming Back for More charted Stone’s life and sought to find out what happened to him. It delved into the hardships he had experienced for years and alleged that they were caused by his former manager, Jerry Goldstein. The documentary stated that Stone was homeless at the time and living off welfare while dividing his time between a camper van and cheap hotels.
The documentary alleged that Goldstein had cut off Stone’s access to royalties due to a dispute over a “debt agreement”, meaning Stone had no option but to live off welfare. Later, in a 2011 article in the New York Post, Alkema claimed Stone was still homeless, living in his white van in Crenshaw, the rough neighbourhood where Boyz n the Hood. He said: “A retired couple makes sure he eats once a day, and Stone showers at their house.”
In 2010, Stone filed a suit against Goldstein for $50million, accusing him of cheating him out of royalties for his songs between 1989 and 2009. The suit further claimed that the former manager had used fraudulent practices to dupe Stone into giving up the rights to his music and the Sly and the Family Stone trademark.
In January 2015, despite Goldstein filing a slander countersuit after Stone’s rant at the Coachella Festival, a Los Angeles court ruled in favour of Stone, awarding him $5m. Ultimately, though, the ruling was overturned after it emerged Stone had assigned his royalties to a production company in exchange for a 50% ownership stake.
Marianne Faithfull
Following the hit release of ‘As Tears Go By’ in 1964, Marianne Faithfull quickly became one of the era’s queens of cool, a position that was bolstered by a series of hits and a high-profile relationship with Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger.
For a while, everything Faithfull touched turned to gold. However, as the decade wore on, her drug use and hard living started to take their toll. By the dawn of the 1970s, her light had been majorly dimmed, with her tumultuous relationship with Jagger ending and her lifestyle seriously damaging her voice. Demonstrating how swift fortunes can change, during the early 1970s, she ended up homeless on the streets of London’s Soho for a couple of years.
While there are many questions about how this could happen to such a cultural icon, it did. Faithfull wandered Soho’s streets for two years with a crippling heroin addiction and a battle with anorexia nervosa engulfing her. In a real success story, thanks to her grit and help from friends, she eventually re-emerged in 1979 with her masterpiece, Broken English.
Her experience on the streets wasn’t all bad, though, and when speaking to The Guardian in 2013, Faithfull reflected on the positive lesson this period taught her. She said: “Oh, I don’t know what they’d do now. I was lucky. People looked after me, the meths drinkers, junkies. I learned that human beings are really all right. I didn’t know that from my posh life in the 60s. It was very bitchy and people were cruel to each other. I was on the street for two years, but it was better than staying at my mother’s and being under her thumb.”
Kurt Cobain
The story of Kurt Cobain being homeless is one of rock’s ultimate legends. It was brought to life following the Nirvana frontman discussing living under the bridge in his hometown of Aberdeen in the incredibly dark ‘Something in the Way’ from 1991’s Nevermind, wherein the lyrics describe trapping rats and eating fish.
It was once believed that the track, written by the frontman in 1990, was inspired by the time he was homeless and slept under the Young Street Bridge in Aberdeen. However, Cobain’s sister Kim and Nirvana bassist Krist Novolseic have since refuted this claim, saying it was impossible to sleep under that particular structure due to the tide and muddy banks.
It seems that Cobain was homeless at other points, though. In Heavier than Heaven, his biographer Charles R Cross writes that the grunge star was homeless for around four months. Reportedly, it started with him sleeping in a cardboard box on Melvins drummer Dale Crover’s porch. Later, he slept in the hallways of apartment blocks with central heating and would leave before the residents awoke for work. Elsewhere, he and a friend stayed in the waiting room of Grays Harbor Hospital, where they would get food from the canteen and put it on the tabs of rooms there.
Beck
Beck has long been an influential, genre-defying artist, with his commercial breakthrough coming in 1993 with Loser. However, before becoming one of Los Angeles’ definitive contemporary musicians, his fortunes were far less glamorous. In 1989, a hopeful Beck boarded a bus from the West Coast to New York City with little more than $8.00 in his pocket and a guitar slung over his shoulder.
He struggled to find a job or a place to live. While it would be an instrumental time artistically, with him befriending a group of acoustic musicians, including Pale Face, Roger Manning and Cindy Lee Berryhill, who collectively helped him refine his craft, he was homeless most of the time in the city. It was the prospect of facing another freezing winter in the Big Apple that underpinned his return to his native Los Angeles in early 1991.
“I was tired of being cold, tired of getting beat up,” Beck recalled later. “It was hard to be in New York with no money, no place … I kinda used up all the friends I had. Everyone on the scene got sick of me.”
Rim Kwaku Obeng
The name Rim Kwaku Obeng might not be known to many Western listeners, but he’s had a big impact on music. In the early 1970s, he was a pioneer of Afro-disco with the Ghanaian highlife group Uhuru Dance Band, and every release of theirs during this period successfully built on the triumphant stylings of what came before. However, things started to go awry after they travelled to Los Angeles to record.
The 1973 sessions were tumultuous, to say the least, with Rim’s bandmate Duke Oketa failing to book charts for the session despite hiring an extensive backing act. Obeng, with his back against the wall, managed to turn it around and earned praise from the likes of Quincy Jones. Yet, his moment in the sun was soon eclipsed by Oketa’s jealousy.
Oketa threatened Obeng with legal action if he left the group to work with the legendary producer Jones. While it certainly scared off Jones, it triggered a series of events throughout the year that made things much worse for him. After Obeng and Oketa travelled to London to further their careers, one day, when the former returned to their hotel, the percussionist found that Oketa had disappeared, taking his belongings and passports, too.
Obeng was stranded, with no money, no passport, nothing. For six months, he was homeless, living day to day, sleeping under bridges and in phone boxers. It wasn’t until a chance meeting with a young Joan Armatrading that his life started to get back on track. He eventually travelled to San Francisco to record two classics of Afro-disco, 1980’s Rim Arrives and 1982’s Too Tough.
