Posts by Steve Wildsmith
Tommy Vext of Bad Wolves: Recovery is the road map out of the mouth of madness
It’s mid-afternoon on the West Coast, and Bad Wolves frontman Tommy Vext is hurting. He’s just left Gold’s Gym, where his personal trainer put him through the ringer. The trainer, Vext tells The Ties That Bind Us, is the same guy who helped actor Josh Brolin get into shape for his role as Cable in…
Read MoreLady sings the blues: Janiva Magness transcends the pain of the past through music, sobriety
Courtesy of Paul Moore The Almighty has a hell of a sense of humor. Blues diva Janiva Magness knows that intimately. If ever she needed proof, she found it in Los Angeles, in the middle of a relapse, when she was 34 years old. She’d gotten clean nearly a decade earlier, but after moving from…
Read MoreChristopher Tait of Electric Six uses sobriety as a springboard to recovery activism
Electric Six, chilling poolside. Keyboardist Christopher “Tait Nucleus?” Tait, far right, joined in 2003 and got sober eight years later. When Christopher Tait came to after an Electric Six show at Nashville’s Exit/In, the willingness to do something about a problem that was about to cost him his band lasted roughly three days. Tait had…
Read MoreThrough sobriety, singer-songwriter Katie Toupin makes her ‘Moves’
Courtesy of Thomas Crabtree/Gasworks Entertainment A great many alcoholics and addicts take their first tentative steps into sobriety with some amount of trepidation, and Katie Toupin was no different. After all, substances — in her case, alcohol — are fun long before they make life miserable. If addiction and alcoholism hit the same legal, social,…
Read MoreWith almost 16 years sober, blues guitar ace Mike Zito’s gratitude knows no bounds
Courtesy of Norma Hinojosa This month, guitarist, singer, producer and bandleader Mike Zito will celebrate 16 years clean and sober, but he’s never lost sight of how broken he was in late October, 2003. By that point, he told The Ties That Bind Us recently, he had long since accepted that he was an addict.…
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