I am so lucky to have been in artist development at the network right as Logo TV was launching. It meant that I got to host TV shows (plural) on cable! My music videos played around the clock on Viacom properties — Logo, obviously — but also on VH1, MTV proper, and Spike TV (RIP The Man Channel lol).
It was a completely bonkers time in my life and I will always be grateful to MTV executives like Perry Turcotte back then who championed me into a reality where my vision and my songs found their way into over 26 million homes each week. This lasted for years and it was hard to comprehend the scale or impact at the time but I get it now. It has been 20 years and I’m very clear that I am still here, largely because of that.
I can’t believe it’s been 11 years since this single premiered on MTV, Logo, VH1 and a bunch of other channels, radio stations, and like…MySpace, I guess?
It was the first time I had ever been on network TV or signed to a major label, and so many people were projecting things onto me at the time, working to mold me, and trying to help fit me into the big game somewhere. Anyone who was tuned in to my nonsense back then will recall, I did not respond well.
“Feed Me To The Wolves” was my first big break, but at its core it’s a song about me trying to survive cocaine addiction, and this video is the last time I would ever be filmed coked out of my mind or drunk. The fact that it was so celebrated at the time — that I was so celebrated in that state of actively, messily, visibly spiraling towards imminent death — seems so curious to me now, over a decade into my recovery.
I was blowing through an 8 ball of coke and drinking at least a fifth of vodka every day, and I showed up to my big break accordingly. I spent $67,000.00 on cocaine in 2007 alone. I was terrible and mean and people thought it was hilarious and marketable.
The crazier I acted, the more folks wrote about me and booked me for shows; and the stranger things got on and off stage at those shows, the more people offered me TV gigs and would come to watch me spin out…but what so many people ended up watching was me canceling performances because I couldn’t remember my words, bailing on appearances at the last minute because my voice quit working (from smoking crack), having my nose begin to die and nearly fall off my face, several public, well-documented overdoses, and eventually (thankfully) disappearing into hospitals and rehabs, emerging well (ish) nearly two years later.
I wish I could go back in time and tell this sad dude to go get help before help is forced upon him in emergency rooms just 18 months later; To not worry about blowing his one shot by pausing the career clock because he ends up blowing his one shot in the end anyway; And that even that’s bullshit because there is no such thing as just one shot, in life or in music.
All that said, I am so grateful for this song, for the peculiar way it continues to find its way into the world all these years later, and how it has ultimately made so many things possible for me, my career, and my life.
