And he was right. I mean, I guess by the time I got into the game, the scene had already changed completely from Chris’s time, but these days, no one is getting trashed before a show. Like, that’s just not really something that you can do. If Mandy came out onstage totally trashed or like, if I came out onstage totally trashed, people would just be like: WTF? You know? They’d just be like: What happened to you? But for Chris, I mean, when Chris was coming up, that was just par for the course. People were smoking—like everyone, even the singers were smoking three packs a day—and like, people were snorting coke off of toilets and shooting heroin in between sets, and like, it just would’ve been insane to imagine that twenty years later, there would be a yoga tent and a juice fridge and a meditation room. Like legitimately, at the festival we were playing, there was a tent just for the artists where, like, the festival had hired a yogi to come and lead classes every day, and Chris just thought that was the funniest shit ever. And like, even some of the harder dudes I know—like, even Scaggs or MURDER or Flip Dragon—like even those dudes are taking vitamins and drinking tea and like, resting their vocal cords before a gig. The scene’s just changed a lot—it’s become a lot healthier. And that’s not to say that people don’t still lose it a little bit. Like, there are people like KETO or like, Abbi DiFranco who just totally go off the deep end, but when they do, it’s not like some proof of how hard-core they are. Instead, it’s like, this really sad and pathetic thing that they need to go get HELP for. People are WORRIED for them, you know? And I think Chris was a little shocked by that. I think he was expecting—maybe even hoping for—a little bit of the old danger that used to follow him everywhere he went.

And so, you know, for the first time in my whole career, I found myself doing shots before gigs. It started out pretty harmless. It was sort of like this big joke: like, Chris would make fun of me and Trick and the backup singers and the road crew for being such little pussies, and he’d say shit like: Come on, it’s just one shot. I thought you were musicians. And so we’d all do it and laugh about it and it would be fine, but as the tour went on, like, one shot turned into two shots and two shots into three shots, and pretty soon the rest of us were like: Chris, we can’t keep up with you. You do whatever you want to do, but the rest of us just can’t perform like this. And I think that made Chris feel a little isolated.

It’s not like it all turned into a problem immediately. Chris is a pretty champion drinker—I mean, those aren’t virgin daiquiris at the Seaside Club—so at first, like, yeah, it was a little worrying how much he was putting away before the shows, but he was still able to make it onstage and do his thing and give a great performance and hit all the notes and be in good enough shape at the end of the night to make it back to his hotel room and call his wife and pass out. But somewhere around when we made it back to the U.S.—we started the tour in New York, and then went to Europe and Asia and then we headed back to do, like, a coast-to-coast tour before we left again to play a few more dates abroad—sometime around when we made it back on home soil, the whole flavor of the thing started to change, and Chris just really started to go off the deep end.