My story begins with two Summer vacations, the first when i was four and helping my older brother chop wood for the fire pit with him swinging the ax and me clearing away the logs, you can guess the rest but i ended the vacation with only 9 fingers.
The following year's vacation i watched my dad get washed away when he slipped whilst fishing and i was sent away to be raised by my grandparents in California and that was where i discovered weed, a little old chemical called lysergic acid diethylamide and the electric guitar.
I started playing small gigs with a couple of pals with a band we called Grateful Dead at a coffeehouse at the back of a bookstore and it was the the era of free love, and when it came to romantic partners, people were pretty generous.
As the saying goes, if you remember the iconic Woodstock ’69 music festival, then you probably weren’t there. However, if you were there, you’d remember our disastrous performance.
Heavy rains flooded the stage, causing dangerous electrical issues and outages, which caused huge delays while the band’s sound technician desperately tried to rewire everything as the band members were getting shocked by the wet equipment.
As the 60s ended, so did the vibe of freedom and fun, at least for our keyboardist who drank himself to death one night.
Instead of using it as a wake up call i hit the drugs even harder and got into refined opium which would have me drooling on the microphone and forget where i was during songs to the point where i had to resort to humming but as shambolic as we were, the fans loved us because they were just as whacked out as us, especially the biker gang, the Hell's Angels who came to our shows.
Having a $700-a-day drug habit ain't cheap and i had to keep gigging as a solo artist to fund it but at some point i decided to go into rehab unfortunately, a funny thing happened on the way to the clinic…
I took a detour along the way and stopped to have a smoke and was stopped the law with an an insane amount of substances in my car.
My housekeeper, of all people, was the one to help me taper off substances, but to say that I was out-of-shape was an understatement and after i fell into a diabetic coma for five days, i shocked everyone by still being alive.
Back on tour, I made a valiant effort to stay clean, moved to Hawaii, took up scuba diving, became a vegetarian, and even cut back on the cigs and gave rehab another try and it there that I suffered a fatal heart attack in my sleep.
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