Elton John on His Days Of Drugs and Despair

Elton John on His Days Of Drugs and Despair

by: Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times

Page 4 (E) CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 1992

http://web.archive.org/web/20081230072336/http://www.whizzo.ca/elton/articles/19920830_cst.html

ATLANTA -- In the late-night world of rock 'n' roll, noon is as likely to mark the time for a wake-up call as it is for lunch. But an energetic Elton John already has been up for almost five hours as he leads a guest on a tour of the lavish 6,000-square- foot condo that is now his home base in America.

It's only two days before John's first U.S. tour in three years -- his first "sober" American tour in more than a decade. "I get up at 6:30 now, which is kind of funny because there was a time when I'd be going to bed at 6:30 or more likely, I'd still be going strong," he says in his first newspaper interview in almost three years. "I used to stay up sometimes for days at a time, concerts three nights in a row once without any sleep."

"It really was Elvis Presley time again. [Rock] isn't a normal life. You get cut off from people, isolated. It's easy to lose your values and self-respect. I got to where I didn't know how to speak to someone unless I had a nose full of cocaine. Nothing could satisfy me. I used to complain about everything, right down to the color of the private jet."

For anyone exposed to the joy and good-time spirit of his music and concerts in the '70s and '80s, it is sobering to listen to John, 45, detail for almost two hours the despair in his life during most of those years. Although he is one of the most beloved figures of the modern pop era, the singer-composer went through a private hell of drugs and other problems, including the eating disorder bulimia.

The reference to Presley is especially poignant because it was hearing Presley's Heartbreak Hotel as a child in England that made John fall in love with rock 'n' roll.

So, it is easy to understand why he walked away in tears after his first meeting with a bloated and self destructive Presley in the '70s.

But John's own condition became so desperate in the '80s that friends and associates now speak about the times they themselves came away in tears after seeing him in such bad shape.

"I had to change because I was frightened," he explains of his decision to enter a Chicago treatment center in l990. "I didn't want to die angry and bitter and sad, and that's what I had become, physically ugly, spiritually ugly, a slob, a pig." It has been widely assumed that John decided to seek help for cocaine and other addictions because of his emotional involvement with Ryan White, the Indiana teenager whose battle against AIDS made headlines around the world.

A Striking Contrast
John jumps up and races into a nearby room, returning with a photo of him apparently taken .around the time of the White meetings. The contrast between John then and now is striking.

In the photo, John looks like a sad old man -- overweight, with gray hair and expressionless eyes. In the room, however, he is trim and upbeat. Even without the recent hair weave, which cost a reported $25,000, he looks 20 years younger than in the photo.

"When I saw the footage of the funeral, I thought, 'My God'," John says. "I was 90, fat, so old."

Still, he didn't begin the turnaround in his life. It wasn't until shortly afterward, when John's lover told him that he was checking into a detox center.

The singer's first reaction: anger. "I thought, 'God, can't you sort your own problems out?' " he says, sounding like a scolding parent to emphasize his arrogance at the time. "But that's the way I was. I thought anybody who couldn't sort out their own problems was weak."

A Turning Point
Still, John visited his friend at a clinic in Arizona. The meeting, however, didn't go well and he returned to London, thinking the relationship was over.

"I stayed in my room and I cried, and I used off and on for two weeks," he says, without a trace of self-consciousness. "But eventually I realized how much I cared about this person and how much I admired him."

"I thought, 'This person tried to do something for himself, and here you are, just sitting here, fat, vomit all over your dressing gown.' "

Resolved, John returned to Arizona where he and his friend went to a counselor to discuss their relationship. During the meeting, they drew up a list of complaints about each other.

"He wrote out this list about me first, and it nailed me for drugs, drink, sexual activity, and bulimia which I didn't even know that he knew about.

"I was shaking and he was shaking because he thought I was just going to walk out the door. But I stayed and showed him the list I had made for him, and it had things on it like 'He does not put his compact discs away neatly.' "

John rolls his eyes to underscore the degree of difference in the lists -- how he was still unable to look honestly at his own failings. That's when he decided to seek help himself

John has been speaking in even tones, in almost documentary fashion. But he suddenly laughs when recalling the irony of what happened next.

He couldn't find a clinic or hospital in Los Angeles that would take him, because the places wouldn't accept patients who need help for both drugs and bulimia (a continuous hunger that leads to eating and then vomiting enormous amounts of food). "I couldn't believe it," he says, referring to his frustration and helplessness. "I was thinking, 'You mean, I finally decide to seek help and they're telling me no one will accept me?' "

With the help of doctors, he found a hospital in Chicago that would take him, and he checked in on July 29, 1990. He wanted his dignity back.

The experience was humbling - he almost checked out. "I tried to run away twice because of authority figures telling me what to do. I didn't like that, but it was one of the things I had to learn," John says. "I packed my suitcase on the first two Saturdays, and I sat on the sidewalk and cried. I asked myself where I was going to run: 'Do you go back and take more drugs and kill yourself, or do you go to another center because you don't quite like the way someone spoke to you here?' In the end, I knew there was really no choice. I realized this was my last chance."

He pauses - as if trying to find the words to summarize the torment. "Despite all the success, I think I just wanted to be loved," he says finally. "I wanted someone to love me." John took his stay in the Chicago hospital seriously enough to declare a one-year moratorium on his career, no touring or recording.

"I did what I was told," he says now about the months after the treatment program. "I went to lots of meetings, met new friends, did what my sponsor told me to do, kept in touch on a daily basis. I started to enjoy things I had never done before. I bought a dog and spent most of that first year in London. I lived alone for the first time, and I've just built upon all that.

"Since I've been sober, I've been through deaths, been through the end of a relationship, things that I could never cope with before. I am so much more confident, so much easier to be around. It is still hard for me to say no, but I have to learn."

The First Major Test
The first major test for John, in terms of reentering the pop world, was recording his new album, The One, in Paris last year.

"He had had a lot of fear going in to make the album because he hadn't made an album sober in some time," says John Reid, who has managed John since the early '70s. "We went into the studio the first day, and he lasted about 20 minutes, and he said he couldn't do it. He just wasn't ready, but we went back the next day, and eventually it was fine. The album just flowed."

The album is John's strongest and most confident work in years.

The tour is expected to run through early November in this country and then continue around the world through the first half of 1993. John says that he also feels good about the European leg of the current tour.

"I actually remember what I sang," he says with a quick smile. "I am really looking forward to playing in America. I haven't been at my best in America for so long, at least, I haven't felt at my best."

Robert Hilburn is the pop music critic of the Los Angeles Times.