The Robbin Williams thing. Well, you have to consider what an intense experience it is to have to get up in front of an audience or a camera or a microphone each night and perform and then go back to the hotel and shut it off. Get some sleep. then next day you have to do it again. And to do it days and weeks, go on tours... whether youre Robin Williams or Michael Jackson or Phillip Seymour Hoffmann or Heath Ledger, you know, you got to get up the next day and do it again. So they all need help. Pills I mean. And the pills work for a while and eventually they let you down - so you need more and on and on and its just a matter of time. You spin out. I was/am a creative person and I was lucky. I didnt have the schedule or a tour. I just did it. Of course eventually I spun out some too, but i never went through what they went through - like 200 or 300 play dates a year. Fame eats you alive. Mark those words. Sure I got to the point where three valliums and 14 hard drinks wouldnt even make me drowsy but I was lucky, if if I couldnt create, Id lay out for a while. thats it. I could get up and walk away. for a day or a decade. whatever it took. To this day I can look at my books from the mid 80s to the early 90s and see where I was hung over (or even hammered) for a few panels or pages. And then see where I got back up and got it going on again. I wish there was an answer, but being a top performer like those guys, has to be like being a sumo wrestler and thus knowing you really wont live that long. One of my better sayings: He who does not learn form history deserves to repeat its mistakes - but he who is on the verge of history cannot resist it. Same thing applies to FAME and SUCCESS I think. All the same, there are a lot of great performers who never get out of the starting gate and wind up playing at the Holiday in bar out on State Route 338 every friday and saturday nights and live a long and normal life. we will miss all the songs that Amy Winehouse never wrote, all the paintings van Gogh didnt get to. But Im glad I will not have to miss sitting in a hotel room alone, the only person awake in the building, flipping channels endlessly, and being so alone its like youre the only person in the world that night. we all have a few of those, but 200 or 300 a year? Just my thoughts on all this.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 05:18:36 +0000
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