There's a reason why rock stars are synonymous with excess in everything — a lot of rock
idols really lived that life.
Their exploits became the stuff of legend and coroners' reports — because the danger
in partying is the temptation to party too hard.
Here are some rockers who partied way too hard.
British rocker Billy Idol took punk mainstream in the early 1980s.
Well, he had a punk background and his pop-rock had a punk flair to it.
But he really embodied the quintessential punk look with his spiked and bleached hair,
constant sneer, and torn up shirts.
Idol may have dressed like a young punk, but he partied like a classic rock star.
While the likes of Led Zeppelin and The Who famously trashed hotel rooms, Idol absolutely
destroyed the penthouse suite of a hotel in Bangkok, Thailand.
"No way."
He took residence in the palatial quarters in 1989, staying for three weeks and refusing
to leave.
The entire time was a non-stop party full of booze, drugs, and women.
It got so bad that the hotel's management ordered him to leave…but he wouldn't go.
So, they were forced to call in the local military who shot him with a tranquilizer
dart and carried him out.
When it was all said and done, Idol received a bill for the damages...which added up to
250 thousand dollars.
"NO WAY!"
Ozzy Osbourne is responsible for some of the most unbelievable rock legends of all time,
but most of them happen to be true.
For example, he really did take a bite out of a bat on stage during a concert, and was
so drunk and annoyed during a record label meeting that he bit the head off of a live
dove.
And that's just what Ozzy does at work.
When he was enjoying his personal time during his 1984 concert tour with Mötley Crüe as
his opening act, he performed some especially depraved and disgusting acts.
According to Mötley Crüe memoir The Dirt and later dramatized in the Netflix bio-pic
of the same name, the band members and Ozzy were hanging out at a hotel pool in Lakeland,
Florida.
After asking for some cocaine and not receiving any, Osbourne took a straw, got on the ground
and snorted a line of ants.
One gross act deserves another, and for Osbourne's next trick, in full view of women and families,
he urinated all over the pool deck.
It gets worse.
Osbourne then went back down to the ground and licked it up.
In the end, it was just one more infamous substance for Osbourne to add to his list.
"It was fun at the time, but then we all sort of thought it isn't a good idea anymore."
"So you don't have a more stable life now?"
"No."
The Who's Keith Moon is one of the greatest rock drummers of all time.
Yet Moon is arguably more memorable for another rock n' roll achievement: He's the guy who
made "trashing a hotel room" a quintessential part of the rock star experience.
Moon celebrated his 21st birthday in 1967 during a tour stop in Flint, Michigan.
By the time he hit the stage that night, he'd been drinking all day, but he was just getting
started.
Back at the local Holiday Inn, The Who threw a birthday party.
Moon started a food fight, and then, while running around without pants or underwear,
he tripped and knocked out half of a tooth.
He was so drunk that the emergency dentist wouldn't give him any anesthetic for the repair
surgery.
Meanwhile, the party had descended into a riot, and The Who received a bill for the
damages in the tens of thousands.
Moon also enjoyed personally ruining smaller rooms of other hotels.
It was a tour habit of the drummer's to use cherry bombs and other small explosives to
blow up bathroom toilets.
That is...when he wasn't busy blowing up his drum sets.
In 1978, and after a few hospitalizations, Moon attempted to quit drinking.
A doctor prescribed him medication to help him deal with withdrawal symptoms.
In a sad twist, Moon overdosed on the drug and died.
He was only 32 years old.
Led Zeppelin generated a huge sound out of just four musicians, only three of whom played
instruments.
A big part of Zep's extremely influential, heavy sound is the thundering yet precise
drum work of John "Bonzo" Bonham, who charged the band along as he pounded away on classics
like "Immigrant Song" and "Rock and Roll."
Bonham was just as hard-charging in some of the non-musical parts of his life — particularly
when it came to alcohol.
Like Keith Moon and many of music's other heavy hitters, it was tough for Bonham to
live the life of a rock drummer and still stay in control.
"Control control control! In control."
Bonham was a serious drinker, and not just in party or social situations.
In late September 1980, Led Zeppelin convened at guitarist Jimmy Page's home for rehearsals.
While working, Bonham helped himself to quadruple vodka shots.
The drummer imbibed somewhere in the area of 40 servings of alcohol, and ultimately
blacked out.
Bonham was so intoxicated that when his body tried to throw up all that toxic alcohol,
he couldn't wake up.
Bonham choked on his own vomit and passed away.
For decades, the Playboy Mansion was literally party central.
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner lived in the sprawling Los Angeles estate with any number of "Playmates."
High-profile guests came around most every night of the week to enjoy wine, women, and
song.
It was essentially a fancy flophouse, a comfortable place where celebrities could enjoy themselves
without judgement and freely engage in whatever debauchery they could imagine.
And yet the legendary Dave Navarro, guitarist for Jane's Addiction and the Red Hot Chili
Peppers, found some things that were too much for even the Playboy Mansion's unofficial
"anything goes" policy.
In 2004, the guitarist published Don't Try This at Home: A Year in the Life of Dave Navarro,
recounting his exploits from 1998 to 1999.
In the book, Navarro wrote about a visit with multiple women to a room in the Playboy Mansion.
When the women started undressing, Navarro busied himself preparing and injecting a dose
of heroin.
With the blood that ran back into the syringe, Navarro tried to write on the wall.
While Navarro notes that he "cleaned it off," it still got him kicked out — and forever
banned — from the mansion.
Which is pretty rough...because once anyone or anything has had a taste of the Playboy
Mansion, they cling on to it for dear life.
“Uhhh, why don't I just keep him here for a little while until he calms down?"
Most tales of rock n' roll debauchery end with a rock star passed out, more often than
not in a destroyed hotel room.
However, the events of December 8th, 1984, are among the darkest days in rock history,
and certainly the worst in the life of hard rock band Mötley Crüe — a time when the
partying got so intense that it left a body count.
Crüe lead singer Vince Neil had been drinking at a beach house for a few days almost totally
uninterrupted.
Late on the night of December 8th, he decided to make a liquor store run to acquire more
booze.
However, he was already very intoxicated, and he took Hanoi Rocks drummer Razzle along
for the ride.
While driving down a winding road, Neil lost control of the vehicle and smashed into another
car.
While all parties were injured, Razzle got the worst of it — the 24-year-old was declared
dead on arrival and Neil was arrested for drunk driving.
While the intoxicant of choice for Mötley Crüe's Vince Neil was alcohol, bandmate Nikki
Sixx enjoyed harder pursuits.
In 1983, Sixx crashed his Porsche and damaged his shoulder.
He got really into the painkillers doctors prescribed, but those didn't do the trick
for long.
Sixx wrote in Mötley Crüe's memoir The Dirt,
"Heroin began to consume me, first to kill the pain of the shoulder then later to kill
the pain of life, which is the pain of not being on heroin."
By 1986, Sixx's heroin use was an open secret in the band's orbit, and his management team
put him in a rehab center…which he bailed on by jumping out of a second-story window.
On December 23rd, 1987, Sixx enjoyed a night of cocaine with members of Guns N' Roses,
Megadeth, and Ratt before retiring to a room at the Franklin Plaza Hotel, where Sixx was
injected by his drug dealer with a lethal dose of heroin.
Yes...lethal.
Sixx lost consciousness, and a friend called an ambulance.
After being actually, clinically dead for two minutes, Sixx sprang back to life thanks
to two adrenaline injections administered by a paramedic.
Rod Stewart apparently faced a conundrum during his 1970s peak.
He wanted to keep his signature, just-raspy-enough voice exactly as it was…but he also wanted
to enjoy the spoils of the success that his voice brought him.
In other words, how could Rod Stewart both sing his heart out every night but also ingest
a small mountain of cocaine during the after-party?
If he took it the old fashioned way, snorting lines of the stuff up his nose, that would
damage nasal passages, and in turn, his throat, and subsequently, his famous voice.
Fortunately for Stewart, he devised other ways to get cocaine into his bloodstream.
“And I for one still don't understand the chemistry of it.
And I never will, for as long as I live."
Stewart wrote in Rod: The Autobiography,
"We started buying anti-cold capsules from the chemist's [and] separating the two halves
of the capsules, replacing their contents with a pinch of cocaine."
Then that pill would go up...well, where most people don't want to put pills.
According to Stewart,
"They would dissolve effortlessly into the system."
That's right — Rod Stewart made and used homemade cocaine suppositories.
Although this method worked for Stewart, his suppository solution is a much trickier procedure
for many people.
"You know cuz sometimes you have it, sometimes it escapes
Some people never find it in their entire lives."
Maybe the most infamous hard partying hard rocker of all time, Keith Richards has defied
modern medicine by still being alive despite his well-documented and copious drug use.
Chasing a high has nearly killed the Rolling Stones guitarist a couple of times.
He got heavy into heroin in the early '70s, A few years later, he claimed to have been
poisoned with strychnine-laced heroin.
"I was totally comatose, but I was totally awake.
I could listen to everyone, and they were like, 'He's dead, he's dead!'
[...] I was thinking, 'I'm not dead!'"
Now, it's hard to pinpoint the craziest thing Keith Richards did, but it's probably the
time he inhaled his father's ashes up his nose.
Richards told the NME,
"I snorted my father.
He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow.
[...] It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."
While we'll never know the spiritual benefits of ingesting a parent, Richards did notice
one interesting side effect.
"Well, it got me off."
Most of the stories about Guns n' Roses concern the band's iconic, notorious singer Axl Rose
and lead guitarist Slash.
But plugging away alongside them for years, both onstage and in the sordid halls of rock
n' roll legend, was Duff McKagan.
The bassist celebrated and dealt with the pressures of his success with a one-two punch
of alcohol and cocaine.
McKagan routinely consumed a half-gallon of vodka daily — put another way, that's more
than 40 shots of the stuff.
At one point, McKagan realized that drinking so much vodka everyday probably wasn't so
good for his health, so he traded out spirits for wine.
In the long run, that wasn't so good for him either, because in 1994, McKagan's pancreas
burst.
Doctors told him that if he were to have just one more drink, he'd die.
McKagan told The Independent,
"My mom had Parkinson's and I saw her come in crying, seeing her youngest son on tubes
[...] That turned me around."
"And that was like all the rehab I needed."
Due to their love of illicit substances, particularly heroin and cocaine, Aerosmith's Steven Tyler
and Joe Perry earned the nickname the Toxic Twins.
The cred to back up that nickname was confirmed by no less than arguably the most drug-addled
rock star of all time.
Tyler told Rolling Stone in 1990 that
"Jerry Garcia says that we were the druggiest bunch of guys the Grateful Dead ever saw.
[...] So that gives you some idea of how f---ed and crazy we were."
Tyler claims that he and some of his bandmates were so into that one rock n' roll excess
that they didn't have the energy to indulge in the other.
And that's something he regretted.
Tyler said,
"I'm still bummed out I didn't get all the sex I could have had in the Seventies.
[...] We were more interested in the finer blends of cocaine.
Which, by the way, was laced with opium."
At some point during his journey to sobriety, Tyler must have taken a good look at himself
and had some seriously profound thoughts.
"That is E to the Z ooh tweedly-dee-sgusting!"
"You haven't heard me sing diddley-ding yet."
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