Times '80s Rock Stars Were Wasted On Stage

Drugs and rock 'n' roll are inexorably linked forever and for always. For its entire history, rock has served as a rebellious mouthpiece for the young, the artistic, and the outsiders, and the culture that surrounds it takes the message of the music seriously. People in bands, and people who hang out with or simply enjoy rock bands, also seem to like to party, live life to excess or on the edge, and experiment with the mind-altering possibilities of drugs, both legal and illegal. The 1980s were especially adept at perpetuating the stereotypical notion of the party-hearty rock star, with rock sub-genres like hair metal, hard rock, heavy metal, and punk — and its fan communities — encouraging and enjoying substance misuse to the fullest.

For many rock stars of the '80s, the hedonism described in their songs wasn't a hollow sentiment. Plenty of them liked to get wasted not only after their nightly shows, but before and during them, too, and well after the '80s ended at that. Here are some of the biggest names in '80s rock who took the stage when they were far too drunk to properly function.

The following article includes allegations and descriptions of addiction and death by suicide.

Los Angeles hard rock band Guns N' Roses released its first album, "Appetite for Destruction," in 1987, and it sold 18 million copies in the U.S. alone, making it the best-selling debut LP ever. By 1991, Guns N' Roses could do whatever it wanted, and so it simultaneously released two "Use Your Illusion" albums and then set out on a two-year-long promotional concert tour. Much of the band's popularity and acclaim centered around its extremely talented lead guitarist Slash, who at the time drank a lot of alcohol in his offstage time and occasionally, during shows, too.

During a stop in New York City on the "Use Your Illusion" tour, Slash was so drunk on stage that he had difficulty playing "Welcome to the Jungle," a pervasive hit off of "Appetite for Destruction." He first botched the song's introductory riff and then played in the incorrect key. It became clear that alcohol was probably a factor in Slash's off night later on, when Slash stopped the show for a minute to tell the crowd exactly why he'd taken off all of his clothing, except for his underwear. "I had to change my f***ing clothes, cause the pants I was wearing f***ing broke and my b*** were hanging out," Slash said.

While acting as Motley Crue's lead singer throughout the 1980s, Vince Neil became the definition of a rocker who partied way too hard. There are many tragic stories about Motley Crüe that revolve around its members misusing drugs or alcohol, and Neil was once responsible for a 1984 fatal drunk-driving accident. More than two decades later, Neil, having left Motley Crüe temporarily for a solo career, was still dealing with alcohol misuse and took the stage for a solo gig while very drunk.

In June 2006, Neil and fellow '80s hair metal survivors Ratt played a gig together at the Amalie Arena in Tampa, Florida. During his set, Neil struggled to recall the lyrics to the songs he'd sung hundreds of times before. He also had a hard time navigating the stage and at one point, he nearly fell off entirely. After the crowd began to boo, Neil angrily retreated backstage while his backing band continued. When he returned, John Corabi, lead singer of Ratt and at one point Neil's successor in Motley Crüe, assisted the inebriated Neil with a song. "I was pretty buzzed. I tripped, fell off — sometimes it happens," Neil later admitted to the Calgary Sun (via Blabbermouth). "One show in Tampa where I drank a little too much — whoopdie-doo."

Glam metal was huge throughout the 1980s and into the early '90s, although it didn't take long for the world to be left wondering whatever happened to all those famous hair metal bands. But when they ruled the radio and MTV during that hairspray and makeup-loaded chapter in the bizarre history of heavy metal, bands frequently celebrated partying and drinking in their songs, and that came from an authentic perspective. Those bands were well-known for their booze-soaked and drug-addled offstage and backstage antics, particularly Poison. And of the members of that group, it was bassist Bobby Dall who especially and regularly drank alcohol to excess.

In 1988, Poison's extensive tour brought the band to Green Bay, Wisconsin, for a show at the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena. The band was at its peak, and conditions were right to film the video for Poison's upcoming single "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" at the venue and in a nearby warehouse. Filmmakers got all the footage they needed, as well as clips of Dall being visibly intoxicated. "There's a scene where you see me where I'm wasted and I fall down, and I'm literally being picked up by my guy that worked for me at the time," Dall told the Green Bay Press Gazette in 2017. "That scene, I am drunk and wasted in. That's not fake."

In 1991, Poison was invited to perform at that year's MTV Video Music Awards. While it planned to play its then-recent hit, "Unskinny Bop," singer Bret Michaels confusingly asked the audience if they were willing to "talk dirty to me" (according to Tone Deaf). Guitarist C.C. DeVille took that reference to Poison's 1987 single, and churned out the opening riff to "Talk Dirty to Me." The rest of Poison quickly followed DeVille's lead, and performed "Talk Dirty to Me." As the guitarist obliviously wandered around the stage, and, according to Michaels, heavily intoxicated, he managed to unplug his instrument. Michaels kept his composure until the band was backstage. "It was an instant knock-down, drag out fistfight," Michaels said in "Nothin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored Story of '80s Hair Metal" (via People) of the altercation between himself and his "lit" bandmate.

Poison fired DeVille that evening, and while he'd rejoin the band in 1996, he'd again get on stage while drunk to perform. Satirical hair metal band Steel Panther once asked DeVille to sit in. "He didn't want to play the guitar, so he got on the drums, and he was so drunk, and he just started doing a drum solo," Steel Panther's Satchel told 97.9 X. "And we were looking back at him, and we were like, 'C.C., stop, you have to stop playing the drums.' And he wouldn't stop playing the drums, so we actually had to have security forcibly remove him."

A pioneer and proponent of the very 1980s robotic, synthesizer-driven sound, Depeche Mode transformed into a more guitar-based alternative rock band in the early 1990s. That opened up the band to playing more traditional venues like giant stadiums, and in 1993 it set out on its "Devotional Tour." Many Depeche Mode shows from that era proved fraught with peril for singer Dave Gahan. At various stops he lost his voice on stage, canceled a show after he severely cut up his hand with a beer bottle, and then he barely cheated death, and almost in front of an audience, in October 1993.

After the group finished its set at New Orleans' Lakefront Arena and headed offstage, spectators screamed for an encore, but Gahan found himself unable to move, experiencing terrible pain in his chest and feeling his legs fall out from underneath him. The other musicians in Depeche Mode, all of whom had grown tired of Gahan's attitude and medical problems, returned to the stage to play an encore, savagely choosing the song "Death's Door." Gahan, meanwhile, was too sick to sing. Paramedics arrived and took him away on a stretcher. Actively misusing multiple drugs, including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol, Gahan had experienced a small heart attack related to his substance misuse.

The now legendary and acclaimed Minnesota indie rock band The Replacements made its national television debut via a January 1986 episode of "Saturday Night Live." Booked to be the musical guest, the Replacements planned to play its sloppy, feedback-laden, super-melodic punk variant while also showing the rest of America what its fans and denizens of the Minneapolis scene already knew about the band; that its members often took the stage harrowingly drunk. That can lead to unpredictable performance behavior, and that's definitely what happened on "SNL."

Prevented from drinking by "SNL" staff, which maintained a no-alcohol rule on show days, the members of The Replacements got one of their instrument techs to sneak some into the studio for them. The musicians spent the better part of that Saturday drinking heavily, which was abundantly clear when they launched into "Bastards of Young" on live television. 

Paul Westerberg couldn't seem to keep his vocals in tune, if he even bothered to sing into the microphone at all, because he kept wandering around the stage. Bassist Tommy Stinson stumbled and lurched so much that the "SNL" camera crew struggled to keep him in frame. Sensing Bob Stinson, whose playing was audibly suffering from the guitarist's inebriation, would forget his solo, Westerberg yelled out, "Come on f***er," which didn't get caught by NBC censors. The messy, chaotic performance closed out with Bob Stinson briefly flashing his rear end after tearing his bands during an attempted somersault.

Van Halen was in the middle of a rare, three-month pause in its touring schedule in May 1983, but when Apple Computers founder Steve Wozniak offered the band the headlining slot on "Heavy Metal Day" at his Northern California-based US Festival, the musicians snapped up the $1.5 million fee, the biggest sum ever paid for just one rock show at that point in history. Nevertheless, Van Halen still showed up for its slot three hours late, and lead singer David Lee Roth sat for an interview with MTV VJ Mark Goodman, who described him in "I Want My MTV" (via Rolling Stone) as "drunk and coked up, laughing at every joke he made."

The already hammered band, with Roth particularly soused, then finally took the stage. "They were so wasted they couldn't remember the words to the songs," attendee Tami Bryan told the San Bernardino Sun in 2012. Roth slurred through his lyrics, many of which he didn't get correct if he could remember them, all while he stumbled around the stage.

A decades-long journey to sobriety is a big part of the true story of Eddie Van Halen. A self-professed alcoholic, the supernaturally talented guitarist who fueled the popularity of Van Halen in the 1980s started drinking during childhood and kept it up through Van Halen's biggest years. He quit in 1986, following the death of his father, but Van Halen gradually started up again, and it changed his personality. "Around 2004, I suppose I became a very angry drunk," he once told Billboard.

That same year, Van Halen the band embarked on a tour with former lead singer Sammy Hagar. Eddie Van Halen was reportedly difficult to be around, in part because of his excessive drinking, drinking wine straight from a bottle from sound check until the end of the night. The tour closed with a concert in Tucson, Arizona, in November 2004. "It was the worst show we'd ever done in our lives. Eddie played so bad," Hagar wrote in his memoir "Red" (via Ultimate Classic Rock). That concert closed with Eddie Van Halen suddenly experiencing an episode of extreme anger and frustration to the point where he destroyed his guitar on stage, throwing debris into the crowd. As he did so, Eddie Van Halen cried and shouted, "You don't understand." (Van Halen found sobriety in 2007.)

In 1977, Topper Headon replaced Terry Chimes, who left the Clash and went on to play with other major bands of the era. The two swapped again in 1982, when it was Headon's turn to exit the Clash. Headon's time in the band both led to and coincided with a number of personal problems. He'd just split up with his wife, then dove into rock party culture. "I went on the road and discovered booze. All I did was drink, drink, drink," Headon told The Independent in 2009. "Then [bandmate] Mick [Jones] turned me onto coke and all I did was coke."

By the early 1980s, Headon was so addicted that he snorted it during concerts after every third song. "The lights would go off and my drum roadie would be there with a mirror," he said. Other members of the Clash, who focused their substance misuse on alcohol and only after shows, grew increasingly annoyed with Headon, particularly after the band's roadies introduced the drummer to heroin. He entered a rehab program in 1982 and resumed his position in the Clash, but after he began using cocaine again, Headon earned a suspension. Then band leader Joe Strummer, while drunk, revealed to a journalist — and thus the public as well as Headon — that the suspension was actually a termination.

In the 1970s and 1980s, two guys demonstrated more than anybody that the piano could be used as a rock 'n' roll instrument: Elton John and Billy Joel. John and Joel later toured together on occasion, and they played Madison Square Garden in New York City in March 2002. After a mutual set and a segment from John, Joel came out for his solo portion. However, the audience had been told beforehand that they may not be subject to the greatest Joel concert experience that night, because the musician had a cold.

His vocals weren't particularly off-kilter, but his behavior was. In the midst of his performance, Joel went off on a tangent full of observations and jokes about American history. In short order, he made fun of the cracked Liberty Bell (a landmark in Philadelphia, not New York) and then just yelled out some names of World War II battles. "Corregidor! Midway! Guadalcanal!" Joel screamed, according to The New York Times. 

The reason for Joel's banter was likely alcohol. "When he slumped forward on his bench and slurred, "Don't, don't, don't try to save me," he sounded truly hopeless," Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New York Times. "As he wailed he banged on his keys almost at random." He continued to play poorly during a performance of "Bennie and the Jets" with Elton John, and at the end, John could be seen mouthing the words "Thank God." About three months later, Joel enrolled in a rehabilitation program.

In 1980, filmmaker Penelope Spheeris began work on her documentary about the brutal Los Angeles punk scene, "The Decline of Western Civilization." One of the primary bands featured was the Germs, led by singer Darby Crash. The front man was prominently included in the 1981 film's marketing, too. A still of Crash captured during a performance recorded expressly for the film, depicting the musician imitating a prone corpse, became the poster for "The Decline of Western Civilization." Crash had been very drunk at the time the image was taken, as he reportedly often was during Germs shows.

After he saw an early screening of the film and the first run of posters, Crash was livid and upset about how he was portrayed. "What he saw that night devastated him. Darby was kind of a sloppy, stupid drunk and that is how he appeared in the movie," friend Casey Cola recalled in the biography "Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash." "He thought the movie looked creepy and he was so upset he wanted to kick holes in the wall." Crash died by suicide in December 1980, before the public release of "The Decline of Western Civilization."

According to Metallica lore, the band adopted the nickname "Alcoholica" in Europe in the mid-1980s. Only a few years into its existence, the band was already notorious for its prodigious drinking habits. Everyone in the first iteration of Metallica drank heavily, but only guitarist Dave Mustaine turned nasty when the boozing began. "I'd be aggressive and confrontational because I was a violent drunk," he told Loudwire." "That didn't go over well in the end." For being too mean and frightening when he drank, Mustaine was fired from Metallica in 1983. 

Meanwhile, alcohol remained a major part of life for the rest of the band members, who would sometimes be drunk during concerts. In 1989, at a show in Mountain View, California, front man James Hetfield took gulps of what appeared to be alcohol from a plastic cup on stage, only to regurgitate it seconds later. Fan footage of another show caught Hetfield and bassist Jason Newstead drinking together; the singer asked for a beer and Newstead brought him one, staggering the whole way. "Drunk already?" Hetfield asked. "Drinking music, maestro!" he then commanded, taking a break to drink his beer while the bassist awkwardly plunked out some notes on his instrument.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, is struggling, or is in a crisis, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

• Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org