. . . And Lead Me through This World of Self

374. PINK, "Just Like a Pill"
Produced and written by Dallas Austin & Pink
BMG International 95965 2002 Billboard #: 8

375. ROLLING STONES, "One Hit (to the Body)"
Produced by "The Glimmer Twins"; written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, & Ron Wood
Rolling Stones 05906 1986 Billboard # 28

376. RIHANNA, "Rehab"
Produced by Evan Rogers & Carl Sturken; written by S. Carter, S. Smith, & S. Taylor
2007 Did not make pop charts

377. AMY WINEHOUSE, "Rehab"
Produced by Mark Ronson; written by Amy Winehouse
Universal 1717823 2007 Billboard # 9

378. WARREN ZEVON, "Detox Mansion"
Produced by Niko Bolas, Richard Wachtel, and Warren Zevon; written by Jorge Calderon & Warren Zevon
1987 Did not make pop charts

379. WARREN ZEVON, "Splendid Isolation"
Produced by Duncan Aldrich, Andrew Slater, and Warren Zevon; written by Warren Zevon
1989 Did not make pop charts

In the early twentieth century, they called it "drying out." By the end of the century, it had somehow become "rehab." That's short for "rehabilitation," of course--which is funny in a sick sort of way, because by the time they started calling this "rehabilitation," most of the programs that had formerly sponsored social "rehabilitation" in wayward Americans had declined almost to the point of obsolescence. We don't "rehabilitate" prisoners anymore, for example--we just incarcerate them for a maximum/minimum sentence. All prisoners are considered irrevocably unredeemable, but somehow substance-abusing celebrities always deserve yet another chance.

In practice, the best word for what happens to celebrities at Betty Ford or Promises may be "detox": 30 days (or 70, if you're Amy Winehouse) to get your chosen poison out of your bloodstream. Then you're back to Malibu or Tribeca or wherever. There's supposed to be a behavior modification component involved, a commitment to staying away from the sorts of friends and activities that lead to bad decisions, but anyone who even casually follows the tabloids knows how well that usually works out.

The truth is that the last half of the twentieth century turned the Western world into a society of addicts. It may not have been that more addictive substances were available than ever before (do you have any idea how much alcohol the average American consumed during the 1830s?), but rather that the therapeutic language of addiction seeped into our wider culture. Even people who had never been in therapy or counseling started talking like psychiatrists or social workers. As usually happens when any specialized discourse comes into general usage, the language of addiction studies became omnipresent. Addiction became a common explanation for all sorts of personal failings, not to mention an inevitable metaphor.

Pink, the Rolling Stones, and Rihanna, to choose just three instances, all see love and desire as addiction: Pink hooked after a first use like a proverbial young person experimenting with crack (yes, I know crack doesn't come in pills, but the metaphor still fits); the Stones deep into a bad habit, probably heroin, that is punishing them physically and yet requiring greater and greater doses for even the most rudimentary of highs (and at least one of the Stones obviously knows something about that); and Rihanna, understanding the same cycle of bliss and masochism that the Stones sing about but seeking treatment to "wean myself off of you." Writers use metaphors to make the unfamiliar familiar, and it is striking that all three of these songs assume that the listener understands drug addiction but may not really understand love or desire, at least not in the sense that the singer does. Cab Calloway may have fetishized marijuana in "Reefer Man" and Cole Porter may have slyly alluded to cocaine in the original lyric of "I Get a Kick out of You," but neither assumed the familiarity with controlled substances that these songwriters assume. The pop world really has changed since the 1960s.

For Amy Winehouse, of course, rehab is not a metaphor but a pending social engagement. Her single broke globally in early 2007--the Year of Rehab, if you will--and much of the rest of the year felt like a process of waiting for the other shoe to drop. No, as a matter of fact, your daddy doesn't say you're fine. Now will you go? As Bonnie Raitt discovered for herself shortly before Winehouse's birth, listening to blues records isn't necessarily the best way of kicking booze and drugs. You can do group therapy, counseling, etc., and come back writing and performing maybe better than you ever did before.

Even more than Raitt, though, the person Winehouse should really seek advice from is unfortunately dead, but much of his wisdom about life, love, and addiction is there in his songs. Warren Zevon was a great many things to the history of rock and roll--wit, satirist, legendary partyer, brilliant lyricist, underappreciated pianist--but maybe more than any of those, he was the greatest recovering alcoholic that American songwriting has ever seen. That is to say, the songs he wrote after his recovery in the late 1980s may be even better than the more widely circulated songs on his three great albums from the 1970s. I'll have much more to say about Zevon and his songwriting in later entries, but for the purposes of this one, let me focus on his two greatest songs about his alcoholism, one obviously so, the other not so much.

In the 80s, Zevon very publicly entered Betty Ford, and everyone knew that his next album would have some commentary on it. Those of us who considered ourselves his fans were all hoping that recovery wouldn't turn him into a weepy wuss the way it had with so many other rockers--and it didn't. "Detox Mansion" is every bit the Betty Ford satire we wanted it to be, naming names and giving out the daily schedule, making recovering celebrities an object of spectacle if not outright ridicule. And it rocks.

I've often thought, though, that "Splendid Isolation" never got the attention it deserved, possibly because the track was on Transverse City, an album that only aficionados got into. The word "addiction" is never used once in the song, but the ideas and scenes in this lyric could be right out of a celeb-studded AA meeting. The alienation and lack of connection Zevon details here are exactly the sort of self-pitying anomie that addicts and celebrities often have in common. Bruce Springsteen once told a reporter that you don't need to be a millionaire to isolate yourself like Elvis, all you need is a sixpack, but certainly the disconnected life of a celebrity, without the daily functions that keep so many of the rest of us grounded, makes it easier to give in to tendencies they might have anyway. Hence Winehouse, Richards, Raitt et al.

I wish anyone struggling with addiction well, whether they're widely known or otherwise obscure. I pray that, in the end, they may all find themselves as redeemed and rehabilitated as my favorite pop trickster, St. Warren.