Too bad the hold drugs get over people and that nobody around her could help.
Posted on 07/27/2011 10:25:39 PM PDT by bad company
Edited on 07/27/2011 11:27:09 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
When you love someone who suffers from the disease of addiction you await the phone call. There will be a phone call. The sincere hope is that the call will be from the addict themselves, telling you they’ve had enough, that they’re ready to stop, ready to try something new. Of course though, you fear the other call, the sad nocturnal chime from a friend or relative telling you it’s too late, she’s gone.
Frustratingly it’s not a call you can ever make it must be received. It is impossible to intervene.
I’ve known Amy Winehouse for years. When I first met her around Camden she was just some twit in a pink satin jacket shuffling round bars with mutual friends, most of whom were in cool Indie bands or peripheral Camden figures Withnail-ing their way through life on impotent charisma. Carl Barrat told me that “Winehouse” (which I usually called her and got a kick out of cos it’s kind of funny to call a girl by her surname) was a jazz singer, which struck me as bizarrely anomalous in that crowd. To me with my limited musical knowledge this information placed Amy beyond an invisible boundary of relevance; “Jazz singer? She must be some kind of eccentric” I thought. I chatted to her anyway though, she was after all, a girl, and she was sweet and peculiar but most of all vulnerable.
I was myself at that time barely out of rehab and was thirstily seeking less complicated women so I barely reflected on the now glaringly obvious fact that Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction. All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but un-ignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his “speedboat” there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.
From time to time I’d bump into Amy she had good banter so we could chat a bit and have a laugh, she was “a character” but that world was riddled with half cut, doped up chancers, I was one of them, even in early recovery I was kept afloat only by clinging to the bodies of strangers so Winehouse, but for her gentle quirks didn’t especially register.
Then she became massively famous and I was pleased to see her acknowledged but mostly baffled because I’d not experienced her work and this not being the 1950’s I wondered how a “jazz singer” had achieved such cultural prominence. I wasn’t curious enough to do anything so extreme as listen to her music or go to one of her gigs, I was becoming famous myself at the time and that was an all consuming experience. It was only by chance that I attended a Paul Weller gig at the Roundhouse that I ever saw her live.
I arrived late and as I made my way to the audience through the plastic smiles and plastic cups I heard the rolling, wondrous resonance of a female vocal. Entering the space I saw Amy on stage with Weller and his band; and then the awe. The awe that envelops when witnessing a genius. From her oddly dainty presence that voice, a voice that seemed not to come from her but from somewhere beyond even Billie and Ella, from the font of all greatness. A voice that was filled with such power and pain that it was at once entirely human yet laced with the divine. My ears, my mouth, my heart and mind all instantly opened. Winehouse. Winehouse? Winehouse! That twerp, all eyeliner and lager dithering up Chalk Farm Road under a back-combed barnet, the lips that I’d only seen clenching a fishwife fag and dribbling curses now a portal for this holy sound. So now I knew. She wasn’t just some hapless wannabe, yet another pissed up nit who was never gonna make it, nor was she even a ten-a-penny-chanteuse enjoying her fifteen minutes. She was a...genius.
Shallow fool that I am I now regarded her in a different light, the light that blazed down from heaven when she sang. That lit her up now and a new phase in our friendship began. She came on a few of my TV and radio shows, I still saw her about but now attended to her with a little more interest. Publicly though, Amy increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that youtube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death. I was 27 years old when through the friendship and help of Chip Somers of the treatment centre, Focus12 I found recovery, through Focus I was introduced to support fellowships for alcoholics and drug addicts which are very easy to find and open to anybody with a desire to stop drinking and without which I would not be alive.
Now Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticised, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease. Not all addicts have Amy’s incredible talent. Or Kurt’s or Jimi’s or Janis’s, some people just get the affliction. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn’t even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call.
“It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn’t even make economic sense.”
Ah, but it keeps so many jack booted thugs employed (and here in California a lot of them are unionized Prison Guards).
RIP Amy, the 27 club was already too damn big.
>>RIP Amy, the 27 club was already too damn big.<<
I read an article (here on FR but I can’t find it) that many rockers with addiction problems died at 27. Hendrix, Morrison, Janice, and others...
God, 27 is so young! I knew so much at 27 and knew so little at 30. And that pattern repeated by decade until I hit 50 and realized I knew so little and will know so little forever...
Poor tortured child.
I don’t think she was all that talented but she was popular. She could have done a lot with that.
I really do pray for her soul and her family and friends.
I was thinking that the one artist whose life most closely paralleled Amy’s was Hank Williams Sr. And in the end, it may very well have been the alcohol that did the most damage.
Too bad the hold drugs get over people and that nobody around her could help.
Lohan is next up for the 27 Club. She’s eligible on July 2, 2013. Mark your dead pool in the fall of 2012.
She looked considerably better in the last photos taken of her, it’s usually the first binge after not using for awhile that winds up killing you.
Addiction as a “romantic disease” is today’s equivalent of “consumption” (tuberculosis). But back then, living was hard enough.
My Nephew was an addict. He started doing drugs at age 19. He had a very high IQ but by the age of 26 his brain was burned out. He took his own life by breaking a Natural Gas pipe line in the apartment he was renting. In his suicide note, the line, “I’m not smart anymore” stood out. His mother and father still grieve after 7 years and still blame themselves. They had 4 kids, 3 of them are fine, one failure but not their fault IMO.
An incredibly talented individual.
R.I.P.
Still sad what and how it happens. Don’t think there is anything you can do for someone that is hooked until they decide themselves. Lost a few friends. Either dead or ruined their lives. Sad.
It was not their fault.
Sad. Some of that damage would have been reversible had he asked the right people.
A body, believed to be that of singer singer Amy Winehouse, is removed from her home following her death, in north London, Saturday, July 23, 2011.
Well said.
“It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn’t even make economic sense.”
part of rehabilitation is hitting bottom. For many folks, this means several trips to jail, prison, hospital or what not. I’m not talking about confinement on YOUR terms, like these stars who “check in”, I’m talking about losing everything, and doing some real time.
further, as a society member, I’m not too concerned about rehabing a person, unless they want to be rehab’d, I’m concerned with getting drug addicts off the street where they can cause harm to me or my family, or themselves and their families (often their own children).
As someone who put the cork in the bottle many 24 hours ago, I will tell you, that you cannot force anyone to rehab. Those that try are beating their heads against a wall. I have never in my sober career seen anyone really rehab, that didn’t want to. I’ve seen plenty go through the motions, and get released by the courts, but they were right back again, using, until they either hit the morgue, or hit bottom hard enough to want to sober up.
It makes no economic sense to send people to rehab who don’t want to be there. It just don’t work.
(but let me be clear, the feds have no business in the drug war, it is a states right and power)
Recovery isn't for those that need it, but for those that want it. She didn't want it bad enough.
The addict has to decide to take the risk that life will be either more livable or just plain better without the drugs and/or alcohol. Sometimes it may seem to take awhile to comprehend that it is not only much better but life (as opposed to the distorted reality of the drunk or drug addict.) I have been where your nephew was at more than once and God intervened both times to save my life. May your family find peace. It has to be so painful.
No great loss in my book.
That’s why I’m not quick to blame parents. I know way too many families that have raised two or three great kids, and one bad one. It seems to happen with great regularity.
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