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10:04 pm - 02/26/2013

Billie Joe Armstrong Opens Up About Substance Abuse

Green Day frontman gives his only interview about rehab and his road back



In an exclusive interview in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone, Billie Joe Armstrong opens up about his years of alcohol and prescription drug abuse and his road back from his onstage meltdown at the iHeartRadio festival in Las Vegas last September.

"I couldn't predict where I was going to end up at the end of the night," he tells Rolling Stone senior writer David Fricke. "I'd wake up in a strange house on a couch. I wouldn't remember how. It was a complete blackout." He finally confronted his problem after the Vegas radio festival, where the frontman smashed his guitar onstage and shouted, "I'm not fucking Justin Bieber, you motherfuckers." Armstrong's recovery sidetracked promotion of Green Day's album trilogy ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tré!, and the group was forced to postpone tour dates.

"I remember tiny things," Armstrong says of the Vegas incident. "The next morning, I woke up. I asked [my wife] Adrienne, "How bad was it?" She said, "It's bad." I called my manager. He said, "You're getting on a plane, going back to Oakland and going into rehab immediately."

Read the full story in the new issue of Rolling Stone, on stands this Friday.

SOURCE

I'm so glad he's back and doing better. ♥
josh_the_k 27th-Feb-2013 05:35 am (UTC)
Wonder if they'll still play "Hitchin' a Ride."
marmar627 27th-Feb-2013 06:09 am (UTC)
There are SO many things, like this, I'm wondering. Not just Hitchin' A Ride, but given the subject nature of a lot of the trilogy songs, I wonder how he'll perform them (I feel like X-Kid will be tough, but I think that since it's the current single and lbr one of his best songs - idk where he's getting 99 Revolutions from! - they'll have to). Or, like, will Drunk Bunny still come out? How will he handle the small club shows they have coming up?

Edited at 2013-02-27 06:10 am (UTC)
josh_the_k 27th-Feb-2013 06:28 am (UTC)
After I read the article, I had only one thought: If, as Billie himself sorta states, a lot of what I liked about Green Day over the past decade or so was due to his addictions, will the band still be as good now that he doesn't have those addictions?

In other words: What if they suck now?
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