Buddy Guy, one of the patriarchs of Chicago blues, remembers touring Europe with the Rolling Stones in the early 1970s and laughs as though he considers himself fortunate to have any memory left at all.
“People talk about blues guys drinking and partying,” he says, “but the Rolling Stones were about the strongest people I ever met when it came to doing drugs. It didn’t seem to affect them. I didn’t go to bed for three days trying to keep up with them and I”m like, `Look at me, I’m not a Rolling Stone.”
“If I did what they did, I couldn’t play. It’d be like not being able to swim and being dropped off in Lake Michigan.”
But Guy probably wouldn’t need a life jacket to hang with the Stones during their current Chicago stay as they prepare for sold-out concerts Tuesday and Thursday at Soldier Field. With Mick Jagger at 54 and Keith Richards at 53, the Stones have remained a vital band well into middle age by refusing to live out the sex-drugs-rock `n’ roll cliche. Jagger still outdances and outhustles most rock front men for the most mundane of reasons: He watches his diet and gets plenty of exercise.
“Most people do too much-I go to the gym and people are on these treadmills for two hours and … why would you want to do that?” Jagger says, but adds he has been working out since 1969. “I don’t run very far, because you have to train for the event. I’m not up there (on stage) running a marathon but doing short bursts, so I train for that. I also do dancing and bicycling. I keep it varied so I don’t get bored. Because I don’t enjoy it, to be perfectly honest.”
Jagger is more than a little sheepish about discussing his health routine. In an art form that makes celebrities of the young and reckless, healthy middle-aged singers may lack glamor. But if there’s one thing Jagger understands as much as celebrity, it’s money, and he has prolonged his career and prospered from it by staying fit. Richards, on the other hand, is downright dismissive about what he must do to gear up for a year-long international tour.
“My workout? I play with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones–that’s what I work out, baby,” Richards says with a nicotine-scarred laugh. “I become a hypochondriac just watching people exercise.”
But Richards, notorious for his decade-long affair with heroin in the ’70s, acknowledges that common sense prevails more often than it once did.
“There’s this idea that I drink a lot,” he says in mock disgust. “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks: `Bow-wow-wow, give me my treat.’ But I never drink that much to impair anything I do. And I do five or six miles a day standing up, walking around in rehearsal with a five-pound plate (guitar) strapped to my neck. I lost 10 pounds making our new album, which is a lot for me.”
Like Richards, and like most people milling about in the adult world after dabbling or diving into mind-altering substances in their youth, rockers in it for the long haul eventually discover that they can’t guzzle, snort, inhale or gulp like they once did without paying increasingly rigorous professional consequences.
Rock excess has killed off many an icon, from Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin to Kurt Cobain and Jerry Garcia, and these sudden departures perpetuate the myth. But the reality, says Bob Weir, Garcia’s longtime band mate in the Grateful Dead, is far less spectacular. In the Dead, he says, “you’d find four of five of us in the gym on any given day. We had complicated arrangements and we had to have our wits to catch a theme as it was introduced, so we could play off it, and pay attention to what register one of us went into so we would avoid clashing. If we were all buzzed out, we couldn’t have done what we did.”
Buzz Osbourne, founding member of decade-old Seattle grunge pioneers the Melvins, says rock bands die out for three basic reasons: “They’re not very original in the first place, they run out of ideas, or they start using massive amounts of alcohol, heroin and cocaine. Guns N’ Roses, for example. What are they doing? Nothing. Because they are not able to do anything else.
“It’s very simple: Don’t get strung out, don’t get drunk and you have a chance at some longevity. If I were partying since I started, I’d be done. We’re one of the few bands that boast of having no chemically dependent members.”
Aerosmith also now makes that claim, though once quite the opposite was true. The group cracked in the early ’80s as drugs took over, but on recent tours the band was spending its time between shows pumping iron in the weight rooms of posh hotels.
“I have no regrets,” says Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler of his hard-partying past. “I had a great time. I also nearly died a few times. There’s too much wrong in our society for me to be telling people, `Don’t do drugs.’ More than anyone, I can appreciate why someone would want to do drugs.
“But I’ve got information about what it’s like to be high all the time, and I can say this: Getting straight is the best thing that ever happened to me, or the band.”
Aerosmith has been on a commercial role ever since cleaning up in the mid-’80s, with a string of multimillion-selling releases. At a recent performance at the New World Music Theatre, the band members–showing off chiseled physiques, with Tyler popping pirouettes and hand springs–played with a precision and power that was beyond their shaky grasp 15 years ago.
It’s no coincidence that Bonnie Raitt began a mid-life comeback after swearing off booze, and she says the same was true of her friend, blues legend John Lee Hooker, who returned to the pop charts in 1989 shortly after turning 70. “One of the reasons he’s so vital and alive is that he gave up drinking,” says Raitt of Hooker. “The blues lends itself to a partying lifestyle–believe me, I know all about it. But to go up with John Lee to that podium (to receive a Grammy award in 1990) without having to get trashed beforehand, both of us sober enough to enjoy the moment, was the greatest feeling.”
Not just rock and blues musicians have had to work off associations with drug and alcohol dependency. Beginning in the 1940s, the use of hard drugs (particularly heroin) became popular among jazz musicians because they wanted to sound like the ultimate bebop god, Charlie Parker, an addict for virtually all his adult life. Parker implored musicians not to imitate his habit, but to no avail, as Sonny Rollins, Art Pepper, Anita O’Day, Red Rodney, Jackie McLean and dozens more got hooked and served prison time.
Miles Davis remained an addict to the end. Most musicians either got clean (Rollins, McLean) or died prematurely (Pepper). Today, the rules have turned around. Most young jazz musicians spend their time guzzling Evian water onstage and working out in the gym during off hours. Though some of the young stars still do heroin, most are far too careerist to touch the stuff.
Drugs remain a part of the pop culture landscape. “Trainspotting” and sallow-eyed models have revived “heroin chic,” while drug overdoses have claimed rockers such as Sublime’s Brad Nowell and Smashing Pumpkins touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin. But those who have been there, done that and are still ticking, such as the Rolling Stones, have found a different route.
As Keith Richards says, “I’m no Puritan, but I listen to my body–I’m in pretty close contact with the carcass–and I know when I’m overdoing or not doing enough.” And sometimes that’s enough to make the difference between a long, vital career and a short, tragic one.
