Taylor Hawkins Recalls Life-Threatening Overdose
Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins recalled the heroin overdose that put him in a coma for two weeks in 2001, saying he feared it would bring an end to the band.
The incident took place four years after he joined Dave Grohl’s band, by which time he had only appeared on one album, 1999’s There Is Nothing Left to Lose, and internal tensions made it look like the follow-up LP, One by One, was going to be ditched.
“I was partying a lot. I wasn’t like a junkie per se, but I was partying,” he told Beats 1 in a new interview, revealing the he referred to his coma as “the happy nap.” “I was the dumb kid that was just taking it too far. If you put a line of something in front of me, I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’”
You can listen to the interview below.
Hawkins said he’d been upfront with his children about the episode. “There’s no happy ending with hard drugs," he noted. "You’re gonna experiment, you’re gonna do all that shit, but at the end of the day, there’s no happy ending.
"I’m not an A.A. dude … I don’t really discuss how I live my life in that regard," he continued. "I have my system that works for me. There was a year where the partying just got a little too heavy. And thank God, on some level this guy gave me the wrong line or the wrong thing one night, and I woke up going, ‘What the fuck happened?’ That was a real changing point for me.”
During his recovery, Grohl found something else to fill his time. “Dave went and played with Queens of the Stone Age, and it really looked like the end,” Hawkins recalled. “We'd tried to make One by One and it really looked like the end. I don’t think that glamorizing that lifestyle is a good thing – I just don’t. I think it’s a bad message. … If you have an addictive personality or you’re a fucking dumb kid, you’re gonna get drawn into it. You gotta be careful, man.”