Free Fall: Two Decades of Rock 'n' Roll and Addiction, 1979-1999

First of a two-book series, Free Fall is a true-life musical memoir; not about how one gets better, but how one gets sick and doesn't notice. The astonishing account of escaping addiction and rebuilding a life is shared in the second book of this series, Falling Up. In Free Fall, a grieving child becomes a legally emancipated teenage runaway and pursues a rock and roll dream – and gets close. Ideas of meaning and identity, formed by a bewildered boy soothed only by books, an AM/FM radio, a flimsy record player, and a guitar would ultimately lead a grown man into brokenness. It would just take 20 years of rock 'n' roll adventure; one that was frequently brave. And doomed from the start. Free Fall is driven by a piece of bad luck: There were reasons to believe. Included with the audio book are 22 original songs, all written and recorded during the same time period, and each with its own writer's note. All produced by an intermittently homeless man hurtling towards end-stage addiction. By broadening the reader to listener, the music conspires with the book to reveal the unsaid. The music spans from lush ballads to wall-of-sound rockers, to a movie soundtrack pitch, a Christmas song, and a "lost demo" from a dusty cassette. There is no need to listen to the book in order. The chapters in Free Fall are short, with the introductory sections seeking to illuminate some of the cultural, biological, psychological, and philosophical intersections that can conspire to propel addiction. Simple, bullet point suggestions to help those who suffer are included; often containing sensible metaphors to help untangle addiction's maddening complexities. Chapter One, "Living for a Song" opens the story. Hard questions drive: How does an innocent child end up in a box on the streets? When does one "decide" to become a songwriter - or a painter, dancer, actor, or poet? What cultural and historical conditions shape this call? What beliefs sustain such perilous allegiance to this identity? How can songs this good go nowhere? Why was the near-lethal use of alcohol and drugs logical and defensible? Questions like these center Free Fall within a larger ether, and the story no longer seems so reckless. Similar intersections confound the seekers, the dare-to-dreamers, the wounded, and the disconnected everywhere. People are meaning-making creatures; all of us are compelled to make sense of our experience, to seek connection and pursue vague longings, and when we falter, to seek again, to learn as we go how to soothe our wounds and apprehensions. In the absence of connection, we create surrogate relationships, however harmful or illusory. These substitutes are a rational response to barrenness: anything but nothing again. While a cautionary account of the extraordinary risks to literally living for a song, Free Fall is also an inadvertent love letter to the songs of the late-Sixties and Seventies, to vinyl records and their precious liner notes, and to the pre-internet era of broadcast radio's last golden age, when deejays were the arbiters of cool. When the sparse, transient lifestyle of a musical troubadour still held a shred of dignity within a larger, fading myth. Free Fall introduces a nine-year-old boy and his first drink – at the funeral of his beloved mother, dead at 33. Nobody noticed the drunk child. Well-meaning adults, distracted by their own disarrays, could not see. The boy began to seek something specific: a way to become so valuable he could never be abandoned again. At 17, the teenage runaway was a daily drinker and well on his way to a rock 'n' roll disaster. Free Fall closes with a crushing brokenness and a murmur of the divine. Listen until you find a section that interests you, or a lyric that strikes your muse. Scroll through the songs until a melody touches. However you begin, consider the sheer audacity of it all. A man can cover a lot of airspace in freefall.