COLTRANE AND ADDICTION
COLTRANE AND ADDICTION
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If Coltrane was inconsistent, it had to be partly due to his struggle with heroin, which he’d become addicted to around 1948. Few people realize that Coltrane was also an alcoholic during this time. He quit several times, but only for a week or so. Davis said in his autobiography, “He’d be playing in clothes that looked like he had slept in them for days, all wrinkled up and dirty and shit. Then, he’d be standing up there when he wasn’t nodding-picking his nose and sometimes eating it.”
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During this period Coltrane was trying to quit heroin and alcohol for good. His friends and family helped him go “cold turkey” over a period of one or two weeks, probably in May 1957. Although it has been said that he stayed home the whole time, John Glenn, a Philadelphia saxophonist, recalls that while Coltrane did stay home all day he was gigging nightly at the Red Rooster-with McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison, among others. In a taped interview with August Blume from 1958, Coltrane talked about this period:
Coltrane: …I made a decision, myself, that’s when I stopped drinking and all that shit. I was able to play better right then.
Blume: Did you used to drink heavily?
Coltrane: Yes. [Pause] So by the time that [Monk] started the group I’d stopped drinking. Found I could-that helped me in all kinds of ways when I stopped drinking; I could play better and think better.
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