A fiery plane crash, an addiction to painkillers, and bouts with severe illness — Travis Barker
has been through a lot.
The Blink-182 drummer was hospitalized with pancreatitis in June 2022, jeopardizing his
mobility and prompting calls for prayers.
But it's hardly the first time he's faced a major crisis.
This is the tragic real-life story of Travis Barker.
A few major losses would fracture Travis Barker's family life for good, and he suffered them
throughout his childhood.
According to his memoir "Can I Say," when Barker was three years old, his paternal uncle
died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 62.
He'd contracted the condition after acquiring hepatitis C via transfusion of infected blood.
During the summer before he started high school, Barker's mother, Gloria, suspected that her
husband Randy was having an extramarital affair.
A private investigator found evidence, and the young Barker recalled listening to them
fight all night long.
Not long after Barker's parents' marriage fell apart, Gloria sought medical attention
for neck pain, extreme fatigue, and a mouth so dry it made it hard for her to speak.
Doctors diagnosed her with Sjogren's syndrome, a serious autoimmune disorder.
At the end of the summer, when Barker was 13, his mother died on the day before the
start of high school.
He'd later commemorate Gloria Barker's memory with a large tattoo of her face on his back.
Travis Barker has been married a few times, and the final two relationships have been
well-documented by reality television camera crews.
The MTV show "Meet the Barkers" chronicled the drummer's life with actor and model Shanna
Moakler, while his relationship with Kourtney Kardashian provided plenty of material for
Hulu's "The Kardashians."
"Have you been practicing, babe?"
"No."
Not counting brief, ill-fated flings with model Tara Conner, singer Rita Ora, and professional
celebrity Paris Hilton, Barker's other major relationship was with a woman named Melissa
Kennedy, whom he married in 2001.
She kept a low profile during and after her marriage to Barker, although she made brief
appearances in two Blink-182 documentaries.
The marriage fizzled out quickly, and the pair filed for divorce less than a year after
their wedding.
Early in his adulthood, Travis Barker had a substance use disorder.
According to Vice, he tried PCP and various strong prescription painkillers, which had
some serious effects on him.
He told the outlet,
"I got so good at taking them.
I ended up building a tolerance where they would keep me wide awake and numb.
I wasn't sleeping."
At the lowest point of his dependency during an Australian tour in 2004, Barker assigned
a security guard to watch over him while he slept to make sure he didn't stop breathing,
according to Billboard.
Barker added,
"My bones were so brittle from so much painkiller use.
I had this moment when I got to Europe for that tour where I really identified myself
as a dumpster."
With suicidal feelings setting in, he reports, he told Blink-182 frontman Mark Hoppus that
he needed to leave the tour.
Barker said he kicked narcotics around 2007, and stopped smoking marijuana in 2011.
In his young adulthood, Travis Barker was haunted by the notion that he'd one day die
in a plane crash.
He lived with a fear of flying, and he'd sometimes skip a flight if anxiety compelled him to
do so.
"Uh, I hated flying."
Before he boarded a flight out of Columbia, South Carolina, after performing at a college-sponsored
event in September 2008, he felt uneasy.
He later told Billboard,
"I called my dad.
I don't know what it was, but I said, 'Pops, I have a really strange feeling about this
one.'"
Barker got on the small Learjet aircraft, and immediately after takeoff, the plane crashed
and four people onboard died: pilots Sarah Lemmon and James Bland, and Barker's friends
and employees Chris Baker and Charles Still.
Barker left the plane via an emergency exit.
"I jumped right into the jet, which is full of fuel.
So my whole body lit up."
Barker and the other survivor, musician Adam Goldstein, aka DJ AM, were transported to
a burn center in Georgia; both were initially listed in critical but stable condition.
Barker was treated for severe burns; the jet fuel had burnt two-thirds of his body.
Recovering from third-degree burns that cover the majority of one's skin is an intensely
painful and timely process.
According to Men's Health, Travis Barker was hospitalized for three months after his tragic
plane crash in September 2008.
After 26 surgeries and many skin graft procedures, Barker was on the road to recovery, but he
still had to undergo therapy and re-learn both how to walk and how to play the drums.
After his discharge, according to Salon, Barker refused the heavy-duty pain medications doctors
had prescribed, so as to maintain his sobriety.
Barker told the outlet,
"I couldn't imagine putting another one of those pills in my body, but they had me on
other prescriptions.
At some point, I flushed all those down the toilet because I didn't like what they were
doing."
Those pills, per Billboard: bipolar medications, to help curb suicidal thoughts and impulses,
because his burn recovery was so agonizing.
Barker told Vice,
"I was waking up during surgeries and overhearing doctors talking about amputating my foot."
He asked his Transplants bandmate Rob Aston to arrange his death, telling Vice,
"I would call Skinhead Rob all the time and tell him, 'Rob, get one of the homies I don't
know to get in here and smoke me, I can't do this anymore."
While Travis Barker's physical recovery from the small plane accident was difficult and
painful, it was a less-visible health issue that nearly undid him.
Per Men's Health, Barker suffered a multitude of mental health problems after the traumatic
event.
He reports that after his hospital discharge, he had trouble sleeping for three weeks, generally
dozing for an hour a night and only after going into his kids' bedroom for the comfort
that proximity to loved ones can provide.
Barker was also diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
He told Men's Health,
"I couldn't walk down the street.
If I saw a plane, I was determined it was going to crash, and I just didn't want to
see it."
During subsequent tours with his band, Barker believed an accident was a foregone conclusion,
and he'd mentally prepare himself for such a thing happening.
It took Barker three months of therapy to reach a reasonably calm stasis in his mental
health to address his PTSD and the aftermath, as two of Barker's friends died in the accident.
He told Salon,
"I had massive survivor's guilt for a while.
I had to bury two of my best friends."
Apart from Travis Barker, another musician survived the September 2008 Learjet crash
in South Carolina that killed four people: the drummer's best friend, Adam Goldstein,
a.k.a.
DJ AM, an electronic musician who performed with Barker.
In the aftermath of the accident, Goldstein struggled mightily and publicly with survivor's
guilt.
He said at the Television Critics Association summer press tour in July 2009,
"There's no reason why I lived and they didn't.
It's something that I struggle with every day, you know, kind of wondering."
On August 28, 2009, Goldstein was discovered dead in his New York City argument, after
police responded to a wellness check request after the musician hadn't been heard from
in days.
According to the New York medical examiner, Goldstein died from an overdose of a combination
of prescription drugs and cocaine.
Barker told Salon,
"It destroyed me when Adam overdosed.
He was such a positive person; anyone who knew him would say so.
He helped keep me sober.
He was always helping me sober up."
"One of the last things he said to me was, 'I feel like doing a bunch of drugs and saying
f--k it."
Travis Barker and Shanna Moakler seemed to have the makings of a picture-perfect, reality
TV-ready celebrity marriage.
The Blink-182 drummer and the former Miss USA welcomed their son Landon in 2003, got
married in 2004, and had daughter Alabama in 2005, the same year they debuted "Meet
the Barkers" on MTV.
That series ended its run in 2006, the same year that the marriage did, too, with Barker
filing for divorce.
The estranged couple aired their grievances and tossed accusations at one another in public
settings.
Via his MySpace page, Barker alleged infidelity and called his soon-to-be-ex-wife a laze-about;
Moakler said to TMZ that Barker needed therapy and reportedly approached the women with whom
Barker was possibly seeing on the side.
Barker and Moakler reunited after the plane crash, but wound up calling each other out
for cheating again, finalizing the divorce in 2008 but living in the same household to
more effectively parent their kids.
In 2014, Barker told a custody court that Moakler was a negligent, disinterested mother,
and she brought up her former husband's threats, labeling their relationship in court documents,
quote, "a very sick cycle."
In 2018, Blink-182 rescheduled a number of dates of "Kings of the Weekend," its ongoing
Las Vegas residency show at The Palms.
The reason, according to a statement issued via the band's Twitter page: Travis Barker
was severely ill, suffering from blood clots in both of his arms.
According to Healthline, blood clots can manifest in swelling and cramping, and dislodge and
enter the lung in the form of a potentially fatal pulmonary embolism.
Barker told E! News at the time,
"I have blood clots.
I have, I think, like 30 in my right hand and arm, and I have about 10 in my left so
I'm just waiting for them to clear up.
I'm on blood thinners."
Barker was treated for his medical emergency in a Los Angeles area hospital and was released
after a few days, according to TMZ, only to be quickly readmitted.
While recovering with the blood clots and the treatment for them, he developed a staph
infection as well as cellulitis, a skin infection.
Barker was hospitalized once more, and was closely monitored to ensure that blood thinners
didn't break off any parts of the clot and head for his lungs or heart.
Just a few weeks after he was hospitalized for a series of serious blood clots, a staph
infection, and cellulitis in the summer of 2018, Travis Barker was released from the
hospital to recover at home.
One evening, he was driving his son and a friend of his son's, in Calabasas, California.
That's when a school bus (free of passengers and with only the driver on board) ran right
into Barker's Mercedes SUV.
According to E! News, the bus sped through a red light, then collided with Barker's vehicle.
He said of the traffic mishap, in which no one in either vehicle was reported to be injured,
"My car is totaled but I pretty much walked away okay.
I have a really big 4x4 G-Wagon and if I wasn't in that, it might have been different but
it held up pretty well."
"Yesterday I was in a pretty bad car accident, but I came out unscathed, which is pretty
awesome."
The community of elite, mega-successful alternative rockers drummers is a small one, and tight-knit
at that.
Thus, when one of their own dies, it hits hard.
In March 2022, Foo Fighters announced via its Twitter account the death of its long-time
drummer, Taylor Hawkins.
Authorities later revealed the cause of death to be cardiovascular collapse of an enlarged
heart, brought on by drug use.
Travis Barker posted a remembrance of Hawkins on his Instagram page, writing,
"I don't have the words.
Sad to write this or to never see you again.
I'll never forget Laguna Beach days when I was a trash man playing in a punk rock band
and you were playing with Alanis [Morissette].
You'd come watch me play in dive bars and be like, 'kid you're a star.'"
A few weeks later, Barker got a new tattoo above his foot: hawk wings, in honor of Hawkins.
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text
Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI
(6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.