Glenn Hughes (Australian Guitar #72)
Drugs are always going to be part of the rock’n’roll story; and if at times they seem to be just the sort of fuel to which creative types respond, at other times and with other substances, they will undoubtedly take a devastating toll. In this feature excerpt from Australian Guitar #72, Deep Purple bassist Glenn Hughes recounts not only his own addiction, but also the struggle which ultimately claimed guitarist Tommy Bolin…
Whereas Mk. II (‘the Gillan group’) and Mk. III are probably the best-regarded Deep Purple line-ups over the years, the post-Blackmore Mk. IV line-up is seriously underrated. Come Taste The Band is a much better album than many would have you believe, and Tommy Bolin was an inspired choice to fill Blackmore’s mighty shoes. Unfortunately, little more than a year after the release of the only studio album he would record with Deep Purple, Bolin was dead from a drug overdose.
“We lost Tommy when he was twenty-five, and the fact is that he was just about to start what would have been a prolific solo career. We didn’t know that he had a vicious opiate drug problem. We didn’t know Tommy was into the heroin, morphine, barbiturate kind of drugs, and that is always a no-no in any situation. If he would have been possibly more together, he would have gone on to great, great things.”
Glenn has had his own battles with addiction over the years, though his poison was the only marginally less destructive cocaine. Glenn credits his recovery to an unlikely collaboration with the KLF in the early nineties, which saw the acid house duo reworking their anthem “What Time Is Love?”, with heavy guitars and Hughes credited as ‘the voice of rock’, as “America: What Time Is Love?”
“It was ’91, and let’s just say that I was on the edge of the gates of Hell. They came in, for me to record “America: What Time Is Love?” in the fall of ’91. I did the track and they asked me to do a video clip. I realized, you know, ‘I really need to sort myself out because I know this track is going to be mega’, and it was, it was in the top five all over the world. So I just figured, ‘I’m tired of feeling sick and tired, I need to get some spiritual help, I need to find out who I really am’, and that’s when I checked into Betty Ford. The greatest moment of my life is when I surrendered. I couldn’t beat alcohol and drugs without help and without a conscious contact with a higher power, which I have now. I’m very grateful and very humbled by it.”
