Rock music has always inspired a certain outlaw mentality, along with a healthy disrespect for authority and social norms. Since its beginnings in the mid- 1950’s, rock and roll music in particular has become synonymous with terms like ‘rebellion’ and ‘revolution‘. Rock music has been a powerful force behind actual social change as well, and the impact that rock & roll has had on modern popular culture (and my life) cannot be overstated.

Being a musician myself the innate power of the guitar, bass and drums has always viscerally appealed to me. I grew up listening to rock and Rhythm & Blues, and I must admit it still inspires me to hear the sound of a tight, pulsing rhythm section alongside a well-played guitar. That is the kind of music I still listen to, and it’s the music I still play.

Living the “sex, drugs & rock and roll” lifestyle is a dangerous proposition for the most part, however, and while some people are able to get a handle on it and survive, others all too quickly crash and burn. Given the chance, I’d probably do the same.

True artists are extremely complex and usually deeply flawed individuals, although many famous performers were just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. In both cases, it’s far too easy to succumb to the excesses of fame and fortune, whether it’s warranted or not.

There are plenty of rock stars whose alcohol and drug-fueled indiscretions could fill volumes, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary in the music business. In fact, it’s virtually a requirement of success. The crimes of people like Chuck Berry, James Brown, Tommy Lee, Jack White, or Jerry Lee Lewis are fairly minor compared to some of the real outlaws of rock.

JIM MORRISON  

First, let’s look at the relatively mild case of Jim Morrison, infamous front man for L.A. rock band The Doors. Morrison lived the rock and roll life to extremes, and the stories of his drunken debauchery are legendary – and mostly true. Poetic genius on the one hand, obnoxious, pompous lout on the other. Oliver Stone’s movie The Doors starring Val Kilmer is a fairly accurate (if slightly glamorized) depiction of his life.

Morrison’s notorious on-stage antics included miming death by firing squad and long, rambling “poetic” rants. The unpredictability of his live performances was fueled by handfuls of acid washed down with Jack Daniel’s. The band was famously fired from a very lucrative gig at the Whisky a Go Go nightclub on the Sunset Strip when Jim went missing one night and didn’t show up for the first set. He literally had to be dragged to the gig by his band mates after they found him nearly comatose, hiding next door under a table in an LSD-induced haze. Jim managed to finish the gig – barely – but he deeply offended club-owner Elmer Valentine when he inserted an impromptu monologue into the middle of a brand-new song the band was working on. Borrowing from classical poetic themes, he screamed at the top of his lungs during a musical interlude that he wanted to kill his father and fuck his mother. Repeatedly.

From that point on, the ‘oedipal section’ was the climax of the The End, which closed their show every night – but they never played at the Whisky again. Not that it mattered, considering their eponymous 1967 debut album went all the way to number 2 on the Billboard charts and stayed there for several weeks on the strength of classic songs like Light My Fire and Break On Through. Many more hits followed over the next two years, and soon The Doors were filling stadiums.

Morrison’s reputation caught up with him in 1969 at a show in Miami, Florida, when he was charged with exposing himself to a crowd of impressionable teens who’d come to see a rock concert – not a drunken, flailing idiot trying to incite the crowd into a riot. Whether he actually pulled out his dick or not is the subject of heated debate, although the rest of the band insists that it never happened.

What did happen was the state of Florida’s Attorney General wasn’t about to let some long haired degenerate rock star come to his state and corrupt the morals of Miami’s youth: Jim was charged with indecent exposure and open profanity. The specter of prison time hung over the rest of Morrison’s career, and his public image was severely tarnished by the lingering legal issues until the day he died.

While awaiting trial in Florida, he “retired” from music and escaped to France, living out his final days in Paris snorting heroin with his hopelessly addicted (needle using) girlfriend, Pamela Courson.

The story goes that he died of a heart attack while taking a bath, but recent testimony has come to light suggesting that Jim Morrison actually died in the toilet stall of a local Parisian nightclub after ingesting copious amounts of 80% pure heroin. “Friends” at the club brought his lifeless body back to his apartment to try and revive him, and that’s how he ended up in the bathtub. Former Paris nightclub manager Sam Bernett says in his French-language only book, Jim Morrison: The End, that Morrison died in a stall of the ‘Rock and Roll Circus’ nightclub after what he believed was a heroin overdose. According to Bernett, Jim visited the hip Left Bank nightclub he managed “practically every night,” where stars like Roman Polanski and Marianne Faithfull were also regulars. In fact it was Faithfull’s boyfriend at the time, a mysterious French Count named Jean de Breiteuil – who allegedly supplied the smack that killed Morrison. Rumor has it that de Breiteuil was also responsible for supplying the lethal dose that killed Janis Joplin nearly a year earlier.

Even though he’s been dead since 1971, Morrison made headlines recently when he became the first rock star to actually be pardoned of his crimes. Outgoing Florida Governor Charlie Christ signed the declaration in December 2010. It was mostly a symbolic move from an admitted Doors fan.

DAVID CROSBY 

The story of David Crosby is a long and sordid one. The privileged son of an Oscar-winning well-known Hollywood cinematographer, he began his musical career as a folk singer after dropping out of acting school. He played in coffee houses in Greenwich Village and up and down the California coast, first with his older brother Ethan as a folk duo, and later as a member of Les Baxter’s Balladeers. Crosby lived a bohemian, prototypical hippie existence until he came to the attention of rising-star producer Jim Dickson, who signed him to a management contract in 1963. He met his future band mates Chris Hillman and Jim (later Roger) McGuinn at the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard at one of their legendary Hootenanny nights (today we call them ‘open mics’) when he walked onstage uninvited and added a third harmony to a song they were performing.

The three of them formed a tentative alliance and became the core members of The Byrds – one of the most influential folk-rock bands of all time, thanks in large part to Jim Dickson‘s tutelage.

Eventually, Crosby’s arrogance and flippant attitude made him impossible to work with, and in October of 1967 he was summarily fired from the band. Crosby had felt slighted when the rest of the group initially balked at his demand that they record a song he had written about a ménage à trois, called Triad. Even though the Byrds eventually recorded it, the song wasn‘t officially released by them until many years later, though the Jefferson Airplane recorded their own version of the song for the album Crown of Creation, released in 1968. That episode led to many hard feelings within the group, but the ill feelings had been building up for a long time. At the legendary Monterey Pop Festival earlier that year, Crosby had royally pissed off the other members of the band when he decided to advocate drug-taking and publicly denounce the Warren Commission during the between-song banter. Their shoddy performance was subsequently cut from the movie, which was a world-wide hit, helping to solidify the careers of Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and Janis Joplin.

The Byrds’ split was a culmination of too much fame too soon, gripes over song royalties, and petty jealousies.

Oddly enough, Crosby’s firing from the Byrds turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened to him, because Crosby soon hooked up with Stephen Stills (whose band Buffalo Springfield had just broken up) and Graham Nash (who quit his band the Hollies back in England, divorced his wife and high-tailed it to L.A. to start a new life). Crosby, Stills and Nash became one of the first ‘Super-Groups’ and one of the most popular rock acts of all time. Their intricate 3-part harmonies and sparse musical arrangements led a trend toward musical integrity and simplicity. Later, they added Stills’ former Buffalo Springfield band mate Neil Young to the mix and became even more popular – and dysfunctional.

Inevitably, the band’s enormous egos ensured that it couldn’t last, and various members had falling outs. Stills’ and Nash’s feud centered around the alluring singer Rita Coolidge, who was then a relatively unknown back-up singer in Joe Cocker‘s band. After ending his painful romance with Judy Collins (about whom he wrote the exquisite Suite: Judy Blue Eyes), Stills romantically pursued Coolidge. Joni Mitchell had just given Graham Nash the boot, and the ever-romantic Nash cast his eyes toward Coolidge as well, eventually stealing her away from Stills. Tempers flared after Coolidge dumped Stills for Nash, and Stills later mentioned Graham Nash’s ‘backdoor romancing’ as being a contributing factor in the original break up of CSNY.

David Crosby was a master manipulator himself, and he blamed Stills for many of the ensuing power struggles, and both he and Nash blamed Stills for being an over-bearing control freak in the studio. Neil Young’s solo career was taking off without CSN, anyway, so he really didn‘t need the stress.

CSN&Y broke up and reunited several times throughout the next decade, and during that time Crosby’s drug intake – which had always been prodigious, but manageable – took a turn for the worse. He became dependent on harder and harder drugs. By the late 70’s David Crosby was freebasing so much coke he was virtually unable to function and losing touch with reality.

The term “freebasing” refers to a method of preparing (cooking) the drug so that it can be smoked in a pipe rather than injected or sniffed. The drug actually loses some of its potency when administered this way, but some addicts prefer it. It’s also much easier to become hooked using freebase. Once, in the middle of a rehearsal, Crosby unplugged his guitar and abruptly called a halt to the proceedings because his glass pipe fell off of his amp and shattered into a thousand pieces. He was hitting the freebase pipe every 30 minutes by that time. His famous friends tried interventions on more than one occasion, but he would only spend a day or two at the rehab facility before the inevitable escape and relapse.

In 1982 he suffered an addiction-related seizure while driving his Mercedes on the L.A. freeway and crashed into a median. Police found freebase pipes, coke, pot, and a loaded pistol in his car. After John Lennon’s murder in 1980 Crosby had begun carrying loaded guns with him everywhere he went, and he got busted several times on weapons and narcotics charges in California and in Texas over the ensuing two years. In July, 1985, he played at LIVE AID with Stills and Nash – looking extremely unhealthy, zombie-like and barely able to move. Later that year, Crosby and his enabling, equally addicted girlfriend, Jan Dance, finally turned themselves in to authorities after David missed a parole hearing. They seriously considered escaping to Mexico and becoming fugitives, but they were too weak and instead Crosby ended up spending nine months in the Texas prison system.

Prison actually turned out to be another blessing in disguise for Crosby because it forced him to finally get totally clean and sober for the first time in over twenty years. He describes the process of going cold-turkey in jail as essentially two weeks of writhing in agony, but in the end a new, drug-free David Crosby was released slightly early for good behavior, and his career and his personal life have thrived since then, if not his health – even though he has since been busted (in 2004, under dubious circumstances) on weapons and pot possession charges, but most of the charges were dropped and he was allowed to pay a small fine for the offence. A rare happy ending to what could have been a tragic fate. Jan Dance cleaned up while Crosby was in prison and they’ve been married for many years now. They have a son, Django. Crosby should have been dead a long time ago; besides his many years of alcohol and drug addiction, he’s had a life-long problem with obesity, is a diabetic, and was the recipient of a highly controversial liver transplant in 1995 after being diagnosed with Hepatitis C. Detractors protested that a man who purposely destroyed his liver due to so many years of drug and alcohol abuse shouldn’t be entitled to such life-saving surgery.

RICK JAMES  

Although known primarily as a funk and R&B artist, Rick James’ musical career began in the early 1960’s as Ricky James Matthews, lead singer in the Mynah Birds, an all-white band from Canada featuring a guy named Neil Young on lead guitar; the same Neil Young of later CSN&Y fame. The Mynah Birds had a MOTOWN recording contract in hand and a single ready for release, but recording for the album in Detroit was put on indefinite hold when the Military Police raided the studio and hauled James off to jail for going AWOL from the Navy.

Rick James eventually went on to worldwide super-stardom as a solo artist, writing and producing late ‘70’s funk masterpieces like Super Freak and Give It To Me Baby, but all the while he sank further and further into a drug-induced haze. His over-the-top antics were later hilariously spoofed on The Dave Chappelle show (“Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories” in 2004), but the reality at the time was no laughing matter. James became addicted to crack and coke (later admitting that he blew around $7,000 a week on drugs), and his need for more stimuli became increasingly irrational and bizarre. One night while coked to the gills, he and his girlfriend Tanya Hijazi picked up another woman to take home.

They brought her back to James’ mansion in the Hollywood Hills where they proceeded to sexually assault and torture the poor woman for up to 6 days (reports vary). They tied her up, held her hostage and forced her to perform various sex acts while they burned her legs and abdomen with the hot pipe. According to the original complaint, James forced his victim to have oral sex with Hijazi for hours at a time while he watched and directed the proceedings, crack pipe in hand. The woman, 24-year old Frances Alley, eventually managed to escape, and James was later found guilty of several offences, including kidnapping and torture. Lucky for him he was cleared of the torture charge which would have mandated a life sentence.

He also lost a 2 million dollar civil case to another woman whom he had previously assaulted.

Rick James served two years of a 5-year sentence at Folsom Prison in California for his crimes. Following his release, he suffered a stroke while making an attempted comeback, and famously tried to justify his past antics on The Dave Chappelle Show with the remark, “Cocaine is a hell of a drug!” He died of heart failure later that year. The coroner found various legal and illegal drugs in his system, including methamphetamine, anti-depressants, and cocaine.