![]() The singer was a pallbearer at White’s funeral and performed “Skyline Pigeon” at the service before 1,500 gathered mourners. He visited with White and became close with his family, and was at the hospital bedside when the teen died on April 8, 1990. John first became aware of White in 1985. Within six months I became sober, and clean, and have been for 27 years.” Ryan was the spark that helped me to recover from my addictions and start the AIDS foundation. “I wanted to help them, but they ended up helping me much more. “I had the luck to meet Ryan White and his family,” he said during a Harvard University talk in 2017. The singer credits meeting Ryan White, the American teenage hemophiliac who contracted HIV through a contaminated blood transfusion, with providing the impetus for his start on the path to sobriety. “When you take a drug and you take a drink and you mix those two together, you think you’re invincible. And yet I didn’t stop the life that I had, which is the terrible thing about addiction,” he said. “You know, I was having people die right, left and center around me, friends. In an interview to publicize his 2012 memoir Love Is the Cure: On Life, Loss and the End of AIDS, John talked about his denial. “And I can just imagine him putting his hand over the receiver and going, ‘God, he’s finally lost the plot.’” Meeting AIDS patient Ryan White helped John get soberĭuring the 1980s the AIDS epidemic surfaced, but growing fear over the then unknown illness failed to curb his drug use. Can you do something about it?’” he remembered demanding. Out of touch with reality, John recalled to TV host James Corden about the time he telephoned his management office to complain about the weather conditions outside the London hotel he was staying at. “But then it became the drug that closed me down, because the last two weeks of my use of cocaine I spent in a room in London, using it and not coming out … So, it started out by making me talk to everyone and then ended up by me isolating myself alone with it, which is the end of the world, really.” “I always said cocaine was the drug that made me open up. In the beginning, he said cocaine was the drug that helped him overcome his shyness. Very early in his career, John says he was naïve about drugs and didn’t try cocaine until his manager brought it into the recording studio in the early 70s. “I mean, I would have an epileptic seizure and turn blue, and people would find me on the floor and put me to bed, and then 40 minutes later I’d be snorting another line.”Įlton John, Neil Sedaka and Bernie Taupin partying in London, England in 1975 Photo: Michael Putland/Getty Images “Very close,” he said of how near to death he became. So bleak had his existence become, John admits his substance abuse almost ended his life. “And I’m not being flippant when I say that, when I look back I shudder at the behavior and what I was doing to myself.” “This is how bleak it was: I’d stay up, I’d smoke joints, I’d drink a bottle of Johnnie Walker and then I’d stay up for three days and then I’d go to sleep for a day and half, get up, and because I was so hungry, because I hadn’t eaten anything, I’d binge and have like three bacon sandwiches, a pot of ice cream and then I’d throw it up, because I became bulimic and then go and do the whole thing all over again,” John said in a 2010 TV interview with Piers Morgan. Over 16 years throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s he experienced life through a drug-fueled haze, and his addiction during the earlier decade will be represented onscreen in the biopic Rocketman, starring Taron Egerton as John and Jamie Bell as his longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin.īut cocaine wasn’t John’s only drug of choice. Offstage he was reserved and says he was shy, so he turned to cocaine in an effort to overcome what he thought he lacked. Onstage in the early 1970s, John was a rock legend, a flamboyant performer who could hold the attention of an entire arena. “And it’s very vivid and it’s very upsetting, but at least it’s a wake-up call.” John turned to drugs to combat his shyness and substance abuse almost killed him “I still dream, twice a week at least, that I’ve taken cocaine and I have it up my nose,” the performer told NPR in 2012. He took to Instagram in 2015 to announce the 25th anniversary of his being dry with a picture of a cake topped by the number and the phrase “One day at a time.”īut his past addictions still have a hold on him. Almost three decades clean, Elton John wears his badge of sobriety proudly.
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