I’ve known and played with a coupla guys who drank themselves to death. In 2001 I did an album (Moontan) with Evan Johns, recorded in Atlanta, Georgia. We (his band on the album) checked into the hotel a day after Evan had arrived, and the next morning we passed his room on the way to the studio, and outside his door were two empty 18-packs of Budweiser cans. I had heard about his drinking, but that’s a lotta damn beer! Evan drank Budweiser non-stop the entire week, eating a meal only once.
One day on a break between songs, Evan and I retired to the dirt lot behind the studio (to share a Jazz cigarette), and he said to me "Drinking’s not a problem, as long as you stay away from the hard stuff." Well, as the album was being mixed and a USA tour was being set up, Evan was one day not feeling well. He went to the emergency room in British Vancouver (where he was living), and after being admitted fell into a coma. The docs told his woman to start making funeral arrangements, Evan was in the final stage of liver failure.
Evan fooled them again! We learned this was the third time it had happened, and after a few weeks he just sat up one day and asked where his guitar was. He fully recovered, but made it to only sixty years of age, dying in Austin Texas in 2017. A maniac Telecaster player!
The other guy was also a talented guitarist (you wouldn’t recognize his name), from the Santa Cruz, California area. When his bassist (a member of Los Straitjackets for the past quarter Century) and I shared a house with him in North Hollywood in late-1978, I witnessed him start his days with a few Vodka’s-on-the-rocks for breakfast. At night it was the same for dinner. He made it to only his late-30’s. He was the orneriest SOB I’ve ever known, a real mean drunk.
