David Bowie's Tragic Real-Life Story

"Cocaine," Bowie biographer Peter Doggett once mused, "was the fuel of the music industry in the '70s." If that's the case, Bowie was well fueled for much of the decade, to almost crippling effect. Bowie guitarist Carlos Alomar told the New York Post that Bowie used the drug to stay up late into the night, sometimes all night, sometimes for days in a row. "Its function was to keep you alert," he noted, "and that's what [Bowie] was doing. It did not stop his creativity at all." It did occasionally affect his performance onstage. While careful not to appear "out of it" in front of audiences, Bowie would sometimes forget lyrics, according to Alomar. In these instances, Alomar (who was also a background singer) would abandon singing his own parts and sing Bowie's, in order to get Bowie resituated in the song.

What cocaine did do, however, was sink Bowie into mental states akin to the schizophrenia other members of his family had suffered. "He spent a decade trying to avoid what his grandmother called the family curse," Doggett wrote, "and then several more years creating his own form of psychosis with cocaine and amphetamines." So bad was his addiction and the related mental issues while making the film The Man Who Fell to Earth in 1975 that Bowie claimed to see "demons of the future on the battleground of one's emotional plane." Soon after, he moved to Germany to clean up.

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