Which rock legends sent Rick James to rehab?
We tend to think of rock stars as characters, right? They’re not just people; they’re above us, mere mortals, gracing us with their presence and blowing our minds with musical majesty. That’s all well and good, but it also means that we tend to make jokes about their hardships. Case in point, when I think of Rick James and his myriad problems with addiction, I can’t help but think of that Chappelle’s Show bit with him saying, “Cocaine’s a helluva drug!” To be clear, that’s not entirely a bad thing.
James does give the interview himself, and he’s clearly making a joke out of it in the show, which is how some humans actually cope with their traumas. However, the actual story of James’ struggle with addiction is that it’s a miracle he was alive even to give that interview. The fact that he died the same year it aired is as tragic as it was expected. Yes, the stories are wild, but it’s always worth remembering that there’s a human being at the centre of them and not a caricature.
In fact, the people who most clearly understand this fact are often musicians themselves. It’s slightly surreal when you get stories of fellow rock legends swooping in to take care of their own, but it’s a lot more common than you think. Which makes sense, after all, what people at rock bottom are often looking for is someone to actually understand what they’re going through. If you’re a chart-topping rock star, there’s going to be few people who understand that feeling, who haven’t gone through it themselves.
Elton John was notorious for reaching out to musicians going through addiction problems, as he was well familiar with them. Michael Stipe was trying desperately to get through to Kurt Cobain before the Nirvana frontman’s passing. In an interview with Marc Allen, James himself spoke of the two rock legends who helped him out greatly when he was at his lowest, spending literally millions of dollars on cocaine and isolating himself from everyone else in his life.
According to James, “I knew something was terribly, terribly wrong. But I didn’t know how to fix it. So, my accountant and lawyer sent me to a couple rehabs. Even Ringo from The Beatles sent me to one rehab. Ringo and David Crosby, from Crosby, Stills & Nash. They sent me to a rehab once that did them a lot of good.” A touching moment but one that, at the time, didn’t have the intended effect.
James continued, “I had gone to about three rehabs, and none of that seemed to do any good. No, I didn’t see that I had a problem, and I didn’t really know until it was really too late.” Too late, in his case, was a prison sentence, but that doesn’t mean the support was in vain. Quite the opposite, in fact. The support he got provided a jumping point once he was released from prison, and at the time of the interview, he seemed in a truly good place.
He also said, “Right now, I got my family. I have my five-year-old son I’m raising, my old lady, we got a new house. I’m excited about life, man. I’m excited about this. I wanna leave… some kind of epitaph that’s good and so I don’t leave out of this planet with ‘Rick James was a son of a bitch’ you know?” That’s the kind of epitaph we don’t get without the support of others, whether that’s rock legends or the people we love.
