The ‘Poison’ hitmaker revealed he was drinking so heavily at one point that his doctor gave him an ultimatum that if he carried on abusing his body with spirits and drugs, he’d end up dead.
After throwing up blood one day, he decided to “divorce” himself from his on stage persona because his “heavy image” would end up killing him.
The 67-year-old singer said: “When you have an image that heavy, it’s going to kill you because you can’t maintain it on and off the stage. That got me the idea to divorce myself from the character on stage, to be able to turn him on and off . . . and I almost didn’t.“I came within two or three weeks of dying. The doctor said, ‘If you want to join your Vampire friends, just keep drinking the way you’re drinking’. I got up one morning and threw up blood, you know?”
The veteran rocker also thinks witnessing The Doors frontman, Jim Morrison and iconic guitarist, Jimi Hendrix lose their lives at the hands of addiction taught him how “easily” you can die and made him rethink his behaviour.
He told The Sun newspaper: “We watched Jimi and Jim die at 27. These guys lived fast and loose and we had to learn from that.
“We learned from our big brothers that you could very easily die.”So I think guys like Steven Tyler and Iggy Pop and myself all came to that crossroads of saying, ‘I’m either going to have to radically change what I’m taking into my body, if I wanna make another 30 albums, or I’m going to die’.”
