The Harder They Fall (22 page)

I always loved the chance to perform and create music, from the very first, when we—Danny Hutton, Cory Wells, and I—got together. We were really very lucky young guys. We kind of tweaked the interest of Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, and he wanted to make us the first act that he produced on Brother Records, and we go in, and he writes two songs for us. Brian brings in the L.A. Philharmonic Orchestra. Huge tracks, and he’s going to make it happen. And we’ll be on our way. Unfortunately, the other brothers were feeling Brian was moving away from them. Doing his projects. It put in a lot of fear, and they really kind of bullied him into coming back to the fold and doing their thing. So it didn’t work out.

We moved on, and about a year later, we had put our own band together. And all this time Danny and I are hanging, doing drugs recreationally. It was basically downers and some psychedelics and pot. I had found two trees in my yard. They were about six feet tall and had already fallen over. There was a female and a male plant of marijuana. I gave it away
as Christmas presents. I gave kilos of marijuana away to about twenty people—that’s how much this female tree produced. I smoked pot until I couldn’t smoke any more pot, because I was getting paranoid. I was standing in the line of a movie theater once, and the next thing I know I was in the front, and the ticket seller said, “Can I help you?” and I said to her, “Whaat, whaat?” It had been so long I walked away, and the girl I was with said, “Why did you wait in line so long if you weren’t going to the movie?” and I said, “I don’t know, bad vibes or something.” So I gave all my pot away because I realized it wasn’t making me into who I wanted to be.

So anyway, I now have this manager, and he wants me to be a movie actor. He wants me to change my name to Charles Overon, so I’d have a Latin name. I tried to tell him Negron
is
Latin. So Danny, Cory, and I go to my manager. He wants the band. He puts a ton of money into us, and we get ourselves a record deal with ABC Dunhill, whose big act is Steppenwolf. They are also managed by my manager. So we became Three Dog Night, and recorded our first album, and went out on the road. From our very first show until the end in around 1975, we never did a show that wasn’t frantic, standing ovations, and drove the audience nuts. There was something wonderful about the seven of us that captured the hearts and souls of young America. We turned ’em loose. I remember how once in Japan the promoter told us, “The audience will love you, but you won’t feel it like in America, because they are very polite.” We took it as a challenge, and we got them crazy, and they were frantic. There was something momentous about being able to excite people in that way with our music. It was something I had never experienced. I was a shy guy, a New Yorker whose concept of “cool” was very laid back, very subtle, so it was foreign for me to be the way I was on stage.

The drug element was always there, but when we went on stage, we were pretty together because the drugs hadn’t consumed my life yet. Then, all of a sudden, we crossed this line where cocaine took over. I broke my nose in Germany. I hit a glass extension in the dressing room and shattered my nose. You could actually see my sinuses. It was very bad. So anyway, cocaine was introduced to us, lots of cocaine. Everyone in the band used cocaine except Cory. Cory was a different kind of guy. He had a family:
two daughters. We were all bachelors. So I exclude Cory when it comes to drug talk, because he really didn’t participate.

So we were out there, getting a reputation of “don’t follow this band.” We go to the Miami Pop Festival and the Denver Pop Festival. Jim Hendrix headlining. Joe Cocker. Everyone who was anyone was there. All of a sudden we’re getting bumped to go on later and later, and we found out that the other acts didn’t want to go on after us. Of course Hendrix didn’t care! Then we had our first hit record, “One,” and it all started to change.

Money came into the picture. Mercedes-Benzes and big homes. The other guys had these things long before I did. I was busy working in the studio, and I still played basketball with my buddies. I had a full life. So one day our photographer showed up in a Mercedes to take some group pictures. He bought it with all the money he was making off of us. He said, “You ought to drive this, Chuck.” And I did and said, “Oh, man.” I was still driving a Volkswagen. So anyway, I went and bought three Mercedes.

The reason I bought three was that the salesman was rude to me. I found out years later from the same guy that “The reason I didn’t help you was because you pulled up in an old beat-up Volkswagen, and you parked in the
bus stop
. You were in a bus stop, Chuck, and you got out of your car wearing cutoffs and a tank top, and you looked like you couldn’t see. I wasn’t being rude to you; I was afraid of you!” So I showed them; I bought three!

The drugs hadn’t really hurt me yet except in my relationships. After seeing each other for a while, Paula and I got married in 1970 and had a baby, but she just couldn’t take it anymore. On our honeymoon, I was stoned and fell asleep. Paula spent her honeymoon abandoned in a Palm Springs hotel suite. When I woke up, I got high and cheated on her. Then she thought I was going to kill myself or hurt the baby. And I’m totally oblivious to this. She ended up having an affair with one of our road managers, and she leaves me.

My next wife, Julia, and I started our marriage with a heroin honeymoon in 1976. We turned into recluses and had all our food delivered from Greenblatt’s Delicatessen on Sunset Boulevard. Our day consisted of scoring heroin from dealers, going to the bank for more cash, and snorting until
it knocked us out. It took me years to understand that if you’re going to be with someone, it’s give-and-take, a two-way street. I was being a young rock star and not being faithful. That marriage ended. Secretly I was scared. I felt alone and beyond help.

Drugs led to all kinds of problems. Some dealers once shot through the walls of my house in Los Angeles when I was inside. They wanted me to pay my drug debts. I remember terrible fights—one with Janis Joplin where I called her an ugly slut. She was a nice, sweet person and was one of many musicians I knew who died defeated, tortured deaths.

I don’t know why I stayed alive. I used dirty needles. Four people were beaten to death with baseball bats at an upscale heroin shooting gallery in Laurel Canyon. Centering on porn-film legend John Holmes it became known as the Wonderland Murders. The carnage happened in the very place I was spending most of my evenings at the time—except that murderous one. Once I almost drove my whole family into the canyon as we headed down Mulholland Drive in our little red Volkswagen. I had popped some downers before we left home and blacked out. At the last minute, Julia slammed on the brakes. I almost bled to death after demolishing my car on a Sunset Boulevard streetlamp. I cracked my head open, collapsed a lung, and mangled my body. The firefighters had to cut me out from that automobile.

With musicians I knew toppling like ten pins, death was very close up, and I thought about suicide and attempted it as well. Once I hung myself with a belt in the closet of a shabby motel room, only a rusty overhead pipe collapsed and saved me. Another time I walked directly in front of a moving bus on purpose. Compared to facing my probation officer with another dirty drug test, it seemed like a good alternative. I overdosed routinely. Other druggies had to beat me back to life after one overdose, subsequent to which my body was black-and-blue from the neck down.

One time I remember I went to see my business manager, who had connections with some doctors. When I walked in, I didn’t even realize it, but I weighed 142 pounds—and I’m well over six feet tall. He took me directly to this therapist, this high-end guy in Beverly Hills, who said, “Hey, we’re putting him in the hospital, a lockdown nut ward.” I was falling apart!
The wear and tear of the drugs and the emotional give-and-take was getting to me. I was feeling all the feelings, but I wasn’t caring. Kind of a drug-induced depression. I felt my feelings but my response was “I don’t give a shit.”

When I started seeing the people that were in the hospital with me, that really had problems—young people my age, old people who had real mental problems—I had a moment of clarity and said, “This isn’t the way to live, Chuck. Straighten yourself out.” My father came to pick me up and said, “I want you to live with me,” which I did. Paula had taken all the cars, so I went and bought another Mercedes.

Now I started going out every night. I really wasn’t a club guy, but I became one. The Rainbow, the Roxy—I became one of those guys. I found that I drank more than normal guys, so I was drunk every night. I started getting arrested. The police were actually quite nice to me. I became the town drunk, but the town was Los Angeles! They’d see me pull out of the Rainbow and they’d have a cop right there. The cop would say, “Chuck”—he’d know my name—“don’t turn left, go right.” And I’d turn left, and they’d take me in.

Eventually I lost everything and ended up living in a cardboard box near skid row in L.A., shunned and a goner. When I was forty-nine, I was cornered by circumstance. I needed a way to be sprung from jail, and all the rehabs refused me. My only option was another detox. Dr. Michael Myers, who had detoxed me many times, devised a new plan. “Forget detoxing,” he said. He said I needed long-term care, and he got me into a last-chance drug rehab facility called Cri-Help in North Hollywood. I didn’t believe I could quit. The desire to die and end it ate away at my soul.

I needed a supportive friend and found one in Mike Finnigan, who had been a professional musician his entire life, having done studio work with Jimi Hendrix, Rod Stewart, and many others. He toured with Crosby, Stills & Nash for twenty years. A recovering alcoholic himself, Mike came to visit me often at Cri-Help. I told him I couldn’t take my life anymore and asked him what I should do.

His advice was simple: “Chuck, I’ve never seen anyone but God help a junkie like you. Maybe you should try prayer.”

A few days after he said that, I got down on my knees in my room. What I prayed was for God to either let me die or to give me one minute of peace from the obsession and sickness that was tearing me apart body and soul. That’s when the agony broke inside me. I was able to get a good night’s sleep for the first time after weeks of sheer misery, and when I woke up, I knew I had been given a gift. I had a chance, some window had opened, because I felt willing to go through that day before me. I surrendered my soul. I remember the clear thought I had: “If I am so willing to die, why not be willing to live?”

Once I surrendered, I was so drained I couldn’t lift myself off the bed. Yet I felt free from all the fear, anger, and rage that had beset me. I saw that the demons chasing me were nothing compared to the heroin hell I had chosen for more than twenty years. I went from feeling weak, desperate, and dying to saved. That’s the only way I can explain the beginning of what was for me a miracle. I got a fresh start on life. It was an epiphany, and it was set in motion by the act of prayer.

I try to help others overcome their habits today. After receiving the gift of sobriety, I want to share it with others. I wanted to share it with Mark, who had lived with me in an abandoned building. I helped get him cleaned up and found him a billeting at a recovery center in L.A. He lasted five months before he went back to jail on a heroin possession charge. I know that even a few years clean and sober at the end would be better than a die-hard junkie could imagine. It can be that way for Mark and others like him. I think of Mark as me. I cannot give up on any addict, because I know you can make it if you are willing to go the distance. It may sound simpleminded, but if you are willing to change everything, everything changes. That reality has penetrated my soul.

Now I spend much of my time working with recovery programs. I also perform at ten benefits a year to raise money for recovery and sober-living houses. Sometimes a rock-and-roll manager offers to pay me to go out on the road and watch over a druggie singer. Most of the time I try to help but don’t want to be paid. Helping others who suffer from this terrible disease is my favorite work. I’m not a Holy Roller or selling anything. I’m on a spiritual quest to be the best person I can be, knowing that peace in
this life will come to me as I strive towards that goal.

As someone who had a lifetime of abuse, I can only see my success with my struggle today as a long, long process. Considering how long I used drugs, you could say I am a recovery baby. I’ve taken ugly shortcuts and wrong paths so much in my life that it’s a fight to keep the proper focus. I still need treatment on a daily basis.

To be in recovery is to participate in a living miracle. Rarely does anyone address the fact that addicts really pay the consequences of their actions. We are often dismissed for having made a choice to do something bad. And we are not asking you to forget what we did or for a break. We change our whole lives—from top to bottom—more than most people do or even consider. I think addicts are taking more abuse than anyone could wreak on them for their mistakes—I’m thinking of people who claim that alcoholics get off easy in the moral dilemma by crying,
“Mea culpa.”
I would like to silence these people and get them to see the facts, because the alcoholic or drug addict does pay a huge price.