Hamilton: I never thought it was a dependency for me. I thought it was just what everybody was doing and I'm doing it too. As long as I could get up onstage and play a whole show and not make too many mistakes, I felt like I was in the groove. So my awareness of how drugs and alcohol really affected me negatively didn't come until after I kind of got out of it, after I got clean.
Whitford: We had expensive tastes and we were making more money, so you'd buy better drugs. And it was like every night was Saturday. That was just the way it was. That was the '70s. And when you're 20 years old, for some reason you think you can do that forever.
There were certainly enough moments where it looked awfully dangerous. It was like working around high explosives. People were starting to kind of go in their own directions, just as a survival technique. I can't be around this. This is too crazy. But what else am I gonna do? In my case, I didn't know what else to do. I wanted to be in Aerosmith but I didn't know how to fix any of the problems. As the drug use escalated it really started to become a factor in people showing up for work or being able to work. How do you deal with that? For myself It was a sense of helplessness. Most of the people I talked to were sympathetic but also had no answers.
Whitford: Things were getting pretty bad. But we realized we just lost the whole focus of why did we come here? Why did we get into this room? What got you excited about this when you were a kid? Was it beer? No, I think I was watching Ed Sullivan one night and the Beatles were on. I don't remember any beer. And you go back there. You get clear enough and you go back there and you go, "That's why I'm here."
Perry: I had a lot of fun partying and doing the things I was doing but one of the things they point out to you is that you're feeling sh--ty and sick a lot more than you're feeling good. And you're spending a lot more time chasing down the drugs and chasing down everything else than you are doing anything else. And then you put up with whatever discomfort you might have for the first time you go to a bar and you have to order soda water. It depends on how important it is to you not to wake up with a hangover. And I use the hangover as just one example, whether it's finding your car wrapped around a telephone pole for the 15th time or 10 stitches in your forehead from falling down stairs 'cause you were drunk, whatever it is that gets you to the point where you go, "I'll trade whatever discomfort I'm having now." For us it was some friends around us and our manager that said, "Look, if you clean up it'll open up a lot of doors. The worst that can happen is you can clean up, find out that your life is worse and you can always start drinking again. You can always go out and get high again. Why not give it a try?" So we figured, let's give it a try.
For artists that use [drugs], it's a shortcut. You don't need that. You're born with the talent, it doesn't give you the song. You have that inside you. And I think that what happens is you can convince yourself that you can't do it without it and that's one of the hurdles as a musician you have to get over. I didn't think I could go onstage and play unless I had a beer to loosen up. Well, if it was only one beer to loosen up I'd probably still be drinking today. But one beer always led to another to another to another and then a bottle of Jack Daniel's and then the phone would ring and it would be the dealer. But one of the things I realized was that the first time I heard rock and roll and the hair on the back of my neck stood up, I wasn't drunk. I was pretty sober. So when I put that together I realized that I'm getting off more on the music than I have in the last 10 years because I'm clean.
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