Chad Smith went deep on a recent episode of podcast The Trap Set about his struggles with drugs and alcohol, which he finally kicked in 2008 after close to three decades of abuse.
“It was, like, ‘Okay, I’ve got to be there for my kids, I’ve got to be there for my wife,'” he explains.
“It was hard, this is nine years ago, and you’re used to a certain lifestyle and nobody telling you no. ‘I’m not in the gutter, I’m in a successful rock band, I’m playing great!’ Whatever. You can tell yourself all this stuff.
“Spiritually, I was pretty bankrupt, so I was, like, ‘Okay, let’s try this.’ I went to rehab.”
Smith’s rehab stint was well overdue. In the late ’80s he was jailed for thirty days for a drunken hit and run accident. “Hit and run? Oh yeah. I went to jail for like thirty days in 1986. Twenty-six days, because you get one day a week off for good behavior.”
He also concedes that his various addictions killed his first marriage. “I just wasn’t ready. As long as I kept being an addict with drugs and alcohol — I liked cocaine, but I wasn’t a big cocaine user. Mainly it was alcohol, and then kind of all bets were off. I just made a lot of poor choices.”
