Robb Flynn's Facebook posts are usually packed with anecdotes and fun little facts, but much like life, this week's took a much more serious and somber tone. Flynn's friend, and instrument technician for Machine Head from 1995 to 2000, recently passed due to an overdose on Heroin. In a specific passage in the long read, Flynn talks about his own battles with drugs and how he himself had overdosed in the past.
“When his wife discovered heroin needles, and threatened to divorce him, I sat him down at Red Robin burger joint in Concord, and I laid into him.
I wasn’t judging him.
Because I was no better than him.
I just tried to get it into his drug-addled skull, my horrible experiences with it.
Because I had done heroin at least 10 times.
I tried to share with him where it had gotten me.
I’d snorted china white, snorted tar, shot it a few times. Thankfully, I just never enjoyed the high. The whole puking-every-15-minutes-thing was a MAJOR bummer. I never got past that… and man, looking back… I’m so glad I never got past it.
The night that we signed the contract with Roadrunner Records on Oct 10th 1993, a buddy and I decided to go do some heroin at his dealers to “celebrate” after a long night of drinking at The Omni in Oakland.
They shot me up (I could never do it), and I OD-ed.
I woke up 6 hours later on a filthy bathroom floor in a puddle of vomit, feeling like death.
And at a heroin dealers house they weren’t about to call an ambulances to save me. They just hoped I was alive.
Genevra picked me and I confessed everything. She was livid. Incredulous. As I’ve talked about in an earlier General Journal, her father was a heroin addict his entire life. He died an alcoholic/heroin addict.
And while I was remorseful with Genevra, what happened one week later is what hit me like a ton of bricks.
Our friend Jimmy Lapin OD-ed on the same batch of bad heroin, from the same dealer.
But he didn’t live.
I lived.
And Jimmy died.
The song “I’m Your God Now” had always been about the dangers and seduction of drugs, but as I went into the studio a month later to record it for our debut album “Burn My Eyes”, it took on a chilling reality. The song became about that moment, me surviving, and Jimmy not.
“What the fuck are you doing with your life?” I screamed. And looking back I wonder if I was saying it to him, or if I was really saying it to myself. Trying to repair some fuck up I’d done 7 years earlier. We cried, we argued. He lied to me. Two hours later the whole conversation ended badly, he was mad at me, I was mad at him, and he was in the grips of a battle with heroin that he was never going to win.”
You can read the full post below, and as I've said in the past – if you or someone you know has the strength to get help for addiction, please either do it or help them along in the process.
