Jim, welcome to the podcast. Welcome to Heart of the Matter. I’m a big fan of Hootie and the Blowfish, always was like everybody else, I think in the nineties. Great, great to have you here. So I want to talk to you about your journey to sobriety and how it all began. When I was reading about this, you are actually an athlete, a really gifted athlete in high school.
And it’s great to be here too. I’m honored to be talking to you today. It’s a long journey. Certainly, I didn’t find sobriety until I was 40, so I had about 25 years of experimenting, moving from a recreational sort of habit to habitual to medicinal to fully blown alcoholic. But I was 14 and very curious and a little rebellious and defiant, and I saw other kids for the first time my age when I was in the transition between a little Christian eighth grader going to a 2,000-student public school. I was very excited to get into that.
So jump I indeed did. And I liked the change. I liked the possibilities. It made life more exciting. It made me feel rebellious because I was getting away with something. I wasn’t particularly awkward as a kid. I was on sports teams. I was playing drums in my basement in a solitary manner, and I had a handful of friends, so I never felt like it was to escape something. I always felt I was charging something towards something that made life more interesting, if anything. And so I did and yeah, messed around in high school pretty quickly with lots of different chemicals, but managed to juggle playing soccer and my grades and boozing it up.
And then actually took a long journey to South Carolina from Northern Illinois to play division one college soccer. So I was simultaneously staying in a very high level of fitness while experimenting still probably wasn’t even habitual yet, but I was eager to attempt it and eager to shoot for new highs, which typically means lower lows. So off I went to college a long ways away and it took me six years to manage a piece of paper that says you’ve succeeded. It was at that same time that my soccer dream was over and I was really looking for music to be a source of inspiration as a songwriter and a drummer and somebody who wanted to be interacting with others in a band. So that’s when I met my guys.
Did your parents or your coaches know that you were trying alcohol and drugs?
I did a good job I guess managing both. So I didn’t want to get caught. I had a game going on. I wanted you to see the best possible side of me. Maybe that’s completely normal, maybe we all do that, but I was hiding a good bit of that mess around with chemicals, so I wasn’t getting in the most trouble, so I didn’t feel like I was in a bad area. I was sort of just riding that middle ground of being two-faced. I want the adults and the authorities to see that I’m okay, I’m not doing anything over here. And I wanted to be cool to my peers and I wanted to be able to be fit on a sporting field. I was playing a lot of sports, not just soccer at that time. And yeah, I just rode both rails saying, I’m going to show you one thing, but really here’s what I’m doing over here. And maybe that was the thrill that I was achieving in my mind only.
And as the parent now of young adults, what do you look for or what would you tell other parents who are wondering, is my son or daughter doing something that I don’t know about? What should they look out for?
Well, we did it a little different and I don’t even know that most parents would agree with the angle we came. From my wife, Laura and I, neither of us drink or use drugs and we hadn’t for a long time when we got married 16 years ago to blend our family of my two kids and her three, and they were young at the time, but by the time they got into middle school, which is when we know kids are either getting curious or seeing it physically around them, we wanted to take a slightly different approach and really be honest about our journey.
So we explained instead of setting a high bar of rules to say, you’re not allowed to do this, you’re never going to do this, you will be in big trouble if you do this. We said before, this is what alcohol or drugs can do to you. Here’s mom and dad’s experience with it. And we were honest. So they got to see a real picture instead of wondering or having to experiment immediately to get the effect. We said, “Hey, here’s what marijuana might do to you. Here’s what alcohol can do to you.” And we partly scared them a little bit, I suppose, but also just trying to educate them so they didn’t have to learn from kids their own age who didn’t know what the hell was going on. And so it was that education and a promise that if at any time they found themselves in front of drugs or alcohol or tempted to use it or around people that were overusing it, they could always call us.
We just wanted to be open. And I know kids aren’t always comfortable with that, but we’ve had success in several of our kids where they called us late night from a party and we didn’t care if they… Honestly, and this is the part where I think I diverged from a lot of parents, I wasn’t so concerned if they tried something because I know kids are going to try something and sometimes they’re 13, sometimes they’re 19, but hey, they’re going to try it. So let’s have an open communication possibility and say, if you try it, you don’t have to hide it. I mean, look at… You’re looking at a guy who’s abused it for a lot of years and survived. I want you to be out of danger. I want you to be satisfied because your curiosity is there. So we tried that angle and we haven’t had any big problems.
We’ve had good open communication with numerous kids. Some of our kids, mine maybe are less likely to want to have the open honest conversation. They’re either shy or just hiding it a little more. But for the most part it’s been really good. And I think it was because instead of scare them with rules that they’re just going to try and naturally loophole, because they’re kids. We as authority figures often set these high bars thinking that’s going to be the end of the story. But I think it really, in my case growing up, it made me just want to work harder to get around it, subvert it, and get the thrill from succeeding and hiding it. So we tried a different approach.
So you graduated from college and went into the music business. You and I both know my former husband, my ex-husband is in the music business … There’s a lot of drinking and drugging that goes on in that business, I imagine did that sort of feed your use of alcohol and drugs or no?
I don’t know that it ever fed it, but I’ll say there’s no better industry to camouflage abuse because it’s entertainment. So whether you’re the guy in the band or the gal in the band or perhaps you’re on screen or camera, that sort of activity in the arts and the creative spirit I think just is easier to hide. You can be a little bit out of bounds or on the wrong side of the guardrail and people are like, ah, he’s just a guy in a rock band, obviously that’s what they do. And so what I did enjoy was having a wider range that would’ve been acceptable. And in the end, that also hurt me a lot. It allowed me to stay as an abusive alcoholic drinker too long because there was nobody that cared to say, you’re out of bounds. That’s illegal or that’s unlawful… everyone.
Was the rest of the band drinking the way you were drinking?
No, I mean we loved to party. We met at the end of college. We loved a good time. We played in bars. Thank you for saying that. We got in the music business after college. It took us five years to find the music business. We were working hard to find it and have it embrace us. But you travel around, you play bars, you go from town to town, you get this geographic change three or four nights a week to leave your failures or your regrets behind, and that’s not healthy. And so I enjoyed the fact that I could not have a lot of people breathing down my neck saying I did a bad thing or a wrong thing. And the guys around me, yeah, they were drinking. We did drugs at times too, but no one when they got home off the road felt the need to use. And that was the big difference. And they didn’t find that out about me.
Oh, you did?
Yeah, I thought, I’m going home, why would I stop? And that wasn’t the entire trip. That wasn’t the entire journey. But by the year 2000, that was how I was rolling. I went home and I was excited to be home. So I partied. I was always needing or looking for an excuse to drink again. So being home was just another excuse for me.
How much were you drinking? What were you drinking?
Oh, I wasn’t picky. I’ll say that. I found that if I could… Since I worked a night job, we’re sound checking in the afternoon and we’re having a dinner and you’re preparing for a real concert and there’s 20 to 75 people whose paychecks depending on you being right. So I have a lot of self-will and it was used wisely in that I wouldn’t get drunk before shows. I would wait until we hit the stage, whether it was 7:30 or 9:30, and that was when the party started. What it did was shift my time clock, I was still going to drink for anywhere from four to 10 hours. So if I didn’t start till nine, that meant that I was continuing on at 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. And when I found drugs that would help me sustain that longer, I of course included those and I felt like it balanced out my drinking a little bit. It didn’t in reality, but so yeah. I’d wait until we started working and then let the party begin.
Yeah, I think a lot of people think, oh, alcoholics have no self-discipline. And I think it’s amazing how much self-discipline we actually have. Yes, the ultimate thing, it is very difficult to put that drink down and walk away forever or at least that day, one day at a time. But it’s incredible how long people can manage destructive drinking.
Yeah, it defies logic of course, but again, that doesn’t mean that the alcoholic is stupid or doesn’t have any will or a work ethic. It’s not a work problem. It’s not an ethic problem. It’s not a moral problem. It’s that when I start, I just can’t control the ending. So I’m smart enough to say, gosh, I know this about myself. I didn’t even know the definition, the old school sort of AA definition of what alcoholism is, but I knew that when I started, I couldn’t always turn it off like a normal person. I didn’t want to go to bed. I didn’t want to admit it was over. So I knew I had this destructive edge to it, this sort of thing that acted like a allergy or acted like this craving.
And I just wasn’t going to stop me from drinking though, because even to the last days of drinking, I liked the effect of the first drink. I craved and manipulated waiting or seizing the moment for that first drink, whether it was at noon on a day off, possibly, or six at night on a day off or on a work night once we started playing. But it becomes a big mess when that is controlling most of your thoughts. And the alcoholic who is in deep like I was for about four or five years before finding a solution, it’s messy. It just consumes you. And it again goes against logic and people around you can become as sick as you are without putting the chemical in their body. They can learn through these weird mannerisms and ways that you see life, especially the family around us can really get sucked into that vortex of insanity.
Did anybody tell you to stop? Did anybody see or identify what was going on?
I had a great chance probably in, it might’ve been 2001 or 2002, and we were playing a show where a big trailer, if you will, was our dressing room and production office. And all there was a curtain dividing it. And I walked in the dressing room side and I could hear some our crew talking behind the curtain on the other side.
And immediately I noticed a tone of drama in their voices and they were indeed talking about somebody in the organization that none of them wanted to talk to. They were worried, but they wanted to say something. And they were talking about this person’s actions being dramatic and erratic. And I kind of leaned in without them hearing me like, oh my gosh, I’m one of the four principal bosses of this big organization. I need to hear who this is so I can help them or fire them, whatever I need to do. And it turned out a few sentences later, they were talking about me and it broke my heart to think, oh my gosh, the person they’re worried about is me. And maybe a normal person in that moment would’ve whipped open that curtain and said, here I am. You got me. I’m sick. I’m out of control.
I don’t know what I’m doing. But what did I do? I tiptoed right back out of that room, down the stairs and out of there and just committed to hiding it better because I wasn’t ready to give up the fight, give up the glory. And so I went on several more years as it got darker and uglier and more out of control and they were willing to help. A couple years later, I started getting friendly interventions from my bandmates asking, am I okay? I was just about to… We were having our second child. So the timing was really bad and maybe that was part of the fear underneath it. I was bringing another human onto this earth. And they had some nice thoughts for me and asked if I was okay. My wife was I think less nice because she had to live in a home with me.
I don’t blame her for coming at me a little more strongly at the time. And she wasn’t too happy with who I had become either, but I just really wasn’t ready to hear someone else telling me what I needed to do. And finally in the end, it was a friendlier intervention and conversation from someone who was not in the band that just struck me in a different tone. They were asking me, did I value myself? Do I value my family and is the way that I’m living my life an indication of that? And they didn’t want the answers to that question. They said, you need to answer these for yourself. And that did get me thinking a little harder. And probably for about 30 or 40 more days, I drank every night. And it was eventually my 4-year-old daughter who gave me my last intervention. She unknowingly had slipped up to my remote music studio and I heard her little feet going up the stairs and I had stayed out all night by myself in my studio drinking.
And I was passed out on a couch at 10:30 in the morning on a Sunday. And she hopped on my chest with all the glee and excitement of a 4-year-old kid and just said from her own pure tone, “What are you doing? What are you doing, dad?” And she wanted to know why I wasn’t in the house eating pancakes and bacon, watching Mickey Mouse with the rest of the family, and it was much bigger and more serious to me.
It was, what am I doing? And she finally repeated a few times and ran off frustrated. I was stuck to answer that question with myself and perhaps some power that was over me. I’m not sure how that exactly worked, because usually I would tell a little fib to get her off my back just because I was hung over and I didn’t want to have to explain why I smelled the way I did, why I was wearing the same clothes that I had been wearing the night before when I was reading to her in bed. And usually I would have an excuse and this time I didn’t. So there was just some power that was kind of silencing me. And I sat there and asked myself the question and honestly answered it for the first time in my life, what am I doing? I don’t know. I’m 40, I’m successful. I think I check all the boxes off that make me successful, but intuitively I don’t know what I’m doing. And I think alcohol is running the show at this point. And that was the first day I called another person to ask for help.
Wow, how did that go? How did you stop? It is not an easy thing to stop.
Well, I had a great run for about three or four hours. I called a guy and he said he would indeed-
Your first stab at sobriety lasted four hours.
I had that great thing called a verbal commitment, right? Those go a long way. And my verbal commitment was great. And this guy said he would take me to a meeting, a twelve-step meeting that night. And I said, that’s great. And my wife was mad at me. She left with our kids and went off and slammed the door. And I was sort of left thinking about this meeting and then thinking about this commitment to go to a meeting later that day, not until 7:00. And I thought, oh my gosh, I’m scared. What if last night was the last night of drinking? What if I go to this meeting and I discover I’m an alcoholic and I can’t drink anymore?
And so what did I do? I started drinking again. I was going to soothe that fear, soothe that dis-ease that I was going through and do what I always do. And if I happened to be drinking all day, I tried cover it up. I brush my teeth, eat two sticks of gum. And indeed, I showed up at that meeting a little less than sober. I had my long blonde hair from the nineties rolled up in a baseball cap because here I was willing to go to a meeting, but I wasn’t willing to let them know who I was and probably smelled like a distill. And they kindly accepted me, let me even share. They allowed me to see part of the wonderful thing called the power of transparency.
They talked openly and honestly about their difficult past, their hangups, their hurts, and they told me a solution. Even though I was buzzed in my mind and thinking I was pulling one over on them thinking I was sober when I left there, they said, keep coming back. Try not to drink tonight and find another meeting tomorrow. I felt it was so sincere and honest and I trusted it. And so I put together from that next day, about 74 days until I decided just want one more try. And I tell you the first thing I put in my body on that 74th day when I got a little weak, I knew it was a bad idea, knew it was the wrong path.
How?
I had a feeling just deep in me and I said, this isn’t the way I’m supposed to be going. And I know that and I know better. And I guess the difference is the day that I committed to a meeting where I had no knowledge of the solution or my problem, I was naive and I wouldn’t be faulted for just drinking out of my naive ignorance. But on the day 74, when I decided I was going to try it again, I had 74 days of solutions and inspiration and encouragement under my belt, and it ruined the feeling that I was going for. And it’s funny too, within probably 10 minutes, somebody called me, it was another sober individual, and I didn’t pick it up.
And I was like, here I am hiding again, doing something, thinking you get a thrill out of it and it’s the wrong thing. And I knew that, and I think I stumbled around mad and for a few days thinking I have to go in front of that group again and I’m going to pick up a surrender chip and it’s going to make me feel small, and I don’t like that feeling. So I did. I put it off for a couple days and then I went back and did it. And it was the best thing. So from there on out, it’s been over 20 years and in my 21st year right now that I haven’t found the need to take another drink.
That’s incredible. How has your life changed? How is it different now when you are not drinking?
Well, I spent seasons on the road. I didn’t want to interrupt my paycheck or a bunch of other people’s paychecks. So I stuck in there and after a couple tours, after about two seasons and a third year and getting real honest with myself about various parts of my life, because that’s what the house cleaning part of the twelve-step model does, you get to see the truth. And I hadn’t been living in the truth. So under a microscope was my career, my marriage, my intentions, my fears, my pride. And so I was becoming a different person, or at least getting to my authentic person, if you will. I was hardly perfect, but I was not dominated by my character defects.
And I had to look at what was really right for me in my life. And we decided as a band to stop touring after three years. I wasn’t enjoying any of the big part of the big circus that continued to travel around. Nothing in my life when I recovered changed around me. And it doesn’t really, if you do the steps, you will. And I think that’s the point, but you have to reckon where you are and what life you live within. And I wasn’t ready to keep traveling. I had two little kids. I was on the way to a divorce also as sort of a result of discovering who I was and being true to my own heart, which was very difficult. I ended up divorced and I just had an intuition that I didn’t want to just be traveling again, sober and my kids are grown up and I wouldn’t be the dad I knew I could be. So we took a big dormancy from recording and touring and it was a big cut in our paychecks, but we all decided this would be a good time to do it.
And as it turns out, it was the right thing. It was the right thing for me and my kids. I ended up finding love again and a second marriage that has worked now for 16 years and it’s life today without the obsession of needing to drink alcohol is very different.
Again, not much on the outside here has changed last time I turned on the news yet because it changed my perspective, I have an idea that, hey, there’s some things in this life I was fighting to control and it wasn’t even my job to control them. And I need to stick to the things that I can control, my attitude, my actions, and really leave the rest to everybody else. And that’s a hard thing to learn at 40, right?
Are you also struck by now living sober how much more clearly you see the world? I don’t know. I think about that a lot for myself, how much time I spent sort of looking at life through a steamed glass, for lack of a better analogy, but that’s what’s so remarkable to me is how much clearer you see things and see life without the anesthesia of alcohol.
That first feeling someone recently said, everything doesn’t change immediately. It gets different immediately because you remove that chemical and that feeling and suddenly the fog is lifted and you’re facing things, you really have to start feeling in a different way at first, and I think that was my first 74 days. I liked the feeling of my body healing physically. I liked the view.
Not feeling hungover every day.
And I loved the view that was clearer because I wasn’t chasing the need to drink every day, but to be real, it didn’t fix any of my relationships. The work that is needed to change my ideas and my attitudes to go forward, which are going to lead to better decision making and better outcomes that’s I believe what the 12 spiritual steps are about, or at least the house cleaning portions were. I write down a real inventory, I write down some things of my failures, my limitations, my weaknesses, my regrets, my fears. I write them down so I can see them and organize them. And what adult really wants to have to face that, especially one that’s been drinking to an abusive level for years.
It creates a lot of carnage. So I write that out and I come up with a relationship for my concept of God, and that’s different for everybody. And then I go out and make real amends to real people around me. So I’ve gotten right with a God of my understanding, with myself and those people around me. And that’s what living a clear life is, to not have to look over your shoulder to know who you are, to know that you’re okay with those around you. You’ve either amended some ways or you’ve accepted that some of that junk isn’t even changing.
And you have an understanding and a relationship with some power. That’s what we have is a power problem anyway. And we think we’re the power, at least I did, and I really wasn’t going to be enough power. So yeah, I got right with God and myself and those around me. And then you can live that clarity. Oh my gosh, it’s so beautiful. Just I still screw up, but I know how to make an apology and if I screw up, I even know the root of what caused it because I’ve been doing this long enough and there’s nothing more empowering than that or seeing the obstacle course that we used to have in life while drinking, not knowing why things happening happen and why we were stumbling. And now you can see it. You’ve got the cheat code to it, you know your character defects, and you know what you’re prone to. So gosh, it’s a better life.
Yeah, it’s only in retrospect do you realize how much harder you made your own life by drinking. You think that you’re drinking to make it easier. And it’s only once you’re sober you realize, oh my God, I made it so much harder for myself and for those around me. Just finally, I know that the band is back. You guys are touring together. You also have a solo career. What is it like performing sober? And was that a difficult adjustment to make? For years and years and years when Hootie and the Blowfish were playing to sell out crowds and it’s a summer party band, the audience is drinking and loving what you’re playing and the band is drinking and performing. What was it like to do all that without that crutch?
It wasn’t a lot of fun at first. I really had a resentment towards just the fact that I was in this lifestyle, and I had to admit I couldn’t drink like a normal person. So I got out. But night after night, especially for those first three years when we were touring in 2005, six and seven and part of eight, I sat there with a big resentment. Look at all those people. Why can’t I party like them or look at my bandmates carrying on and drinking? And it was just me having a resentment. And I went home and talked to one of my confidants, my sponsor, and I told him all this. And he said, “Well, what it must have been sitting up there in that big high chair with your diaper on whining and having a tantrum about all around you.”
I was like, I was not happy. But that was the truth, right? I was jealous. I still had envy I was working through. I was not accepting that, hey, just because I can’t drink like a normal person, it doesn’t mean they can’t. They can do whatever they want and I have to accept that. So that’s what it was like in the beginning. But down the road, I came to a place of comfort playing in that scene as a Hootie and the Blowfish member. And then when I started writing my own music, I had to overcome some fear as a solo artist. And it wasn’t so much about drinking or not drinking because I was frankly singing to a lot of people who are seeking either some spiritual redemption or a recovery solution at the beginning. And so singing in front of those people was very comforting, and I knew that. And it was a much more modest sized audience as well.
I mean, I can’t imagine getting up in front of 10,000 people as a newly sober drummer and picking up a guitar and singing solo. That would’ve never worked. But it was still nervy. I don’t know. I respect our singer, Darius Rucker, ever since I had to do my first solo gig. I’m like, oh, this is hard. This is not like the drummer in the back of the stage goofing off. I can make a mistake and anyone can, and they’re not going to look at me. They’re going to look at him no matter who made the mistake.
So I learned some lessons. I’ve been performing on my own for a dozen years now and still getting over the jitters and that maybe singing isn’t my natural gift, but I do feel like I have a strong message to bring, and I do some corporate speaking, and I enjoy telling a story that is about thinking your life is one thing and having dreams and goals and even achieving them, but at the top realizing it’s more or it’s different, or you’ve got to be more honest. I love that story because a lot of people go through that. We all do addicts and non-addicts in some level go through that journey of life and getting to a point where you face conflict and difficulty and you’ve got to work through it. And I feel blessed that I’ve gotten to work through it, that there actually was a solution when I finally ask, because a lot of people don’t see a solution. They aren’t patient.
They’re sick in other ways, and they don’t even get to the solution. So I feel like overly blessed that I found a solution and an encouraging group around me to lift me up as a newcomer. I feel like I will forever be able to speak and give that message to anybody that wants to hear it. I do a lot of that still these days, is that, hey, I didn’t know I wanted the skill to be a recovering alcoholic who gets to talk to other people about it. I wouldn’t have thought that was a gift. I thought that was a punishment. And now years down the road, I know it’s my skill set.
Well, it’s a real gift you have. You’re clearly very good at it, and I thank you so much for sharing it with our audience. It’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you, Jim. Thank you so much for sharing your story. Thank you so much for your music and your vulnerability today. Really, really appreciate it.
Thank you. I enjoy talking about it, sharing the message, and thanks for some great questions as well.