Every night I got up in front of a room packed full of enthusiastic, clapping, cheering college kids, not knowing how I would summon the energy to get through the show when, because of my diseased state of mind, I had no faith in what I was doing anymore. That was the worst part. All of a sudden my music felt hollow and worthless. I was singing without any love or conviction. Without the belief that what I was doing was meaningful and necessary, there really was no reason for me to be here, to be anywhere. There was nothing else to hold on to. My faith in my music was my one reason for getting out of bed in the morning. It had always been my lifeboat and now it was sinking, fast.
I somehow managed to get through each show and then, later, after I’d chickened out and not jumped out any window, I would go back to my hotel room and pray to God, every night before bed, for the courage to follow through on my plan the next day, to jump out the next window, the next night, on the next campus. Just thinking that it was finally going to happen — to really happen — tomorrow would make me feel almost happy, late at night, for a little while, like a bit of weight was lifting from me; I knew I would soon be lying blissfully unconscious, somewhere safe, out of the swamp in my brain, and away from everything and everyone; from the pressure and the business and the people at the label watching the charts and counting the days until they could drop the ball on me, on my album, on my future. And people would finally understand how much I was suffering, and that I wasn’t sullen and antisocial by choice, and that I hated that I was that way, and they would understand how hard it was for me to navigate the world of people.
But every morning when I woke up, the terrible crushing malaise would be upon me, full force, and I would cry upon opening my eyes, cry because I was awake, cry because I didn’t know how I was going to get through the day and the show.
This went on for the rest of the college tour until the last night, at NYU, where I had an epiphany. I realized in a moment of clarity that this depression of mine had become so unbearable that I was going to jump out of a window to get away from it, and that this was completely insane. I was sick in the head and something had to be done about it, immediately. I needed to cancel the European tour. My problem wasn’t a simple problem, with a simple solution and a quick turnaround, like flu or a headache or food poisoning or a sprained ankle, and I couldn’t manage it on my own anymore. I needed to check myself into some kind of psychiatric-treatment facility where trained professionals could help me to fix my broken psyche.
Before the show at NYU, I called my manager and told him that I wanted to cancel the European tour (which was scheduled to begin in a few days). I explained the situation and told him that if I didn’t do something about it I feared I might end up hurting myself. And then I said, “Gary, I am not well.”
Life on hold
I found it hard to admit that something seriously bad and out of my control was happening to me, and even harder to make the decision to actually try to find someone to help me. I was always reminding myself that everybody gets blue sometimes. “It could be worse” was my mantra. But “worse,” for me, now, might mean a broken back or a coma or two shattered legs.
I knew that my guys and my audiences and the European promoters would recover from my canceling. But I also knew there would be repercussions. Record companies don’t like it when artists shirk their promotional duties, for whatever reason.
For example, I was once in the middle of a tour when my bass player received word that his beloved grandmother had passed away. He wanted to take two days off to fly home and attend the funeral, and then rejoin the tour. It would mean a canceled show. When we informed my record company about the situation, their reaction was, “Does he really need to go to the funeral?”
I knew that my decision to cancel a whole tour of a whole continent, which was meant to launch the release of my newest album over there, would quite likely hurt the album’s success and sales. If I didn’t continue working, pushing my new product, working the momentum I had built up from my last big attention-getting album, I could screw up my whole career and future by failing to capitalize on whatever fleeting buzz I’d managed to acquire, temporarily.
