Soul survivors

Despite temperatures in the 20s, general manager Leo Verde took the risk of opening Sullivan’s Ringside on a Wednesday night to premiere an Arizona-based Southern rock band recommended by a restaurant patron.

While the band had played Austin’s Sixth Street, the Moon Bar in Fort Worth and the Howlin’ Wolf in New Orleans, the Capital City show held special significance for the band’s lead singer and drummer. It marked the end of a long road home and, perhaps, the end of a war.

Exposure to An Invisible Epidemic

In middle school, long before they met one another, Robbie Watson and Wes Williams discovered their passion for music. Soon, the Baton Rouge boys spent their days in rival prep schools and their nights rehearsing with competing cover bands. Before they were old enough to enter a bar, Watson and his buddies—known as the Sue Johansons—and the Wes Williams Band were playing parties, proms and college taverns.

With high school came indulgence in the city’s laissez-les-bons-temps-rouler lifestyle, from LSU tailgating to Mardi Gras debutant balls and summer barbeques. The country club memberships, nice homes in gated communities and good schools did not insulate these affluent teenagers from the influence of drugs and alcohol. In fact, it gave them access.

At keg parties that have become a rite of passage for Southern teenagers, Williams and his classmates experimented with inhalants and rifled through medicine cabinets searching for prescription pills.

“[As a freshman at Catholic High,] a bandmate’s brother got me kick-started on marijuana,” Watson says. “He opened my mind to the various drugs over the years.” Watson was soon mixing alcohol with the antidepressant Xanax. Two years later, he graduated to crushing and snorting time-released painkiller OxyContin tablets.

With driver’s licenses plus pocket money from allowances and after-school jobs, the party intensified for both young men in their senior year. Unlike crack and other street drugs, which are often of questionable origin and potency, designer drugs were popular because they were manufactured in sterile environments to clinical standards. The exclusivity of being able to afford expensive controlled substances heightened the allure. It didn’t, however, hamper distribution.

“In Baton Rouge, you didn’t swing into downtown and flag a guy,” Williams remembers from his Dunham and University Lab school days. “It’s all a bunch of upper-class white kids that have drugs and consider themselves drug dealers. They’re not scary people. They went to Episcopal [and] Catholic High. They drove $60,000 sports cars. They had money. And their parents would never suspect anything because the drugs are really easy to conceal.”

Higher Education in Addiction

College offered the absence of parental oversight and unfettered exploration of pharmaceuticals.

“It’s hard to say when somebody becomes an addict or an alcoholic,” Williams reflects. “But by the time I got into BRCC [Baton Rouge Community College], I started to like painkillers and take them on the weekends with my friends. [When] I began to bartend, painkillers really helped me be sociable, so I started taking them more often.”

Between classes and Baton Rouge band gigs, the dormitory life at Southeastern Louisiana University allowed Watson to experiment as never before. The next fall, he transferred to BRCC. “For about a year,” Watson says, “I was waking up with the shakes, drinking a pint of vodka by noon and mixing alcohol, opiates and benzo [Xanax]. I would have to leave class midway through to score drugs because I was itching.”

Through a series of jobs and a savings account, Watson came up with cash. Through connections, he located elderly chronic pain patients willing to sell a portion of their pills for profit. “I would befriend them and go [to their homes],” Watson recalls. “No matter what, I would find a way. It consumed me.”

As Williams searched for a consistent source, a friend recommended a local sports medicine physician he had heard would write a prescription for painkillers. Armed with his parents’ insurance card and an X-ray from a previous back surgery, Williams netted a prescription at his first visit. Each month, the healthy 19-year-old singer and guitarist received 240 30-milligram quick-release oxycodone pills, plus 90 80-milligram OxyContin tablets—enough to provide a terminal cancer patient in severe agony with nearly 45 days of round-the-clock and intermittent pain relief. Not surprisingly, within three months, Williams developed dependence on the drug.

Even though Williams and Watson were increasingly under the influence, both escaped serious consequences from encounters with law enforcement and, for a while, suspicious friends and family members. Neither landed in the emergency room. “I probably overdosed a couple of times,” says Watson, “but I don’t remember it happening. I just passed out. I should have died many times.”

But eventually, the physical and mental strain of addiction took a toll. “There came a point where I didn’t want to do it anymore,” Williams recalls. “One day, my sister came to my apartment. When I didn’t answer the door, she broke out a window because she thought I was dead. It got to that point. I truly believed in my heart there was nothing I could do.”

The Beginning of the End of the War

As his body’s demand exceeded supply, Williams schemed to find another physician who would prescribe an even greater volume. The plan backfired. After receiving an inquiry from another physician’s office, his doctor dismissed Williams as a patient and cancelled the remaining prescription. To fend off the excruciating withdrawal symptoms, Williams reverted to purchasing pills from the black market until his family enticed him to enter rehab.

But within 24 hours of returning from two separate stints in 90-day programs, he ingested OxyContin. “No amount of police, parents, teachers can make you do it,” says Williams of completing rehab successfully. “As soon as you say, ‘I have a problem. I want help. I’m done fighting.’ That’s your jumping-off point. You believe yourself.”

Beginning Dec. 31, 2008, Williams spent a year at an Arizona inpatient facility. It took three months just to complete withdrawal and acclimate to life without opiates. “It is the most serious addiction and eats away every fiber of who you were,” he says. “I know who I am now—what I’ve become through the whole process. But I don’t even remember what I was like before OxyContin.” Also, Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step program proved essential in maintaining sobriety.

For Watson, confronting addiction began with an intervention mounted by his bandmates—all lifelong friends—that ended with the drummer’s expulsion from the Sue Johansons until he got help.

“Music was my passion. But it always came second. Drugs and alohol came first,” Watson explains. “When [the band] did this, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was miserable. I sank deeper into my addiction.”

Three months after the dismissal, the 20-year-old sought outpatient treatment at St. Christopher’s Addiction Wellness Center and work at Guitar Center. After failing every drug test and losing his dream job for doing drugs on the counter, Watson entered an inpatient unit Nov. 21, 2008.

Watson became convinced the only way to recover was to leave Louisiana. “Even being locked up in a facility, we would go out. I’d see people I knew that I had gotten drugs from or did drugs with. Everywhere. I couldn’t take it. I had to get out of Baton Rouge.”

Watson entered a northern Arizona rehab program designed for relapsed 17- to 25-year-old OxyContin users. Afterward, he remained in Prescott Valley, which has become a mecca for twenty-somethings recovering from addiction. There, at an AA meeting in 2010, the two Baton Rougeans recognized one another and discussed playing music. Soon, Williams invited two friends from rehab—guitarist Brian Moss and bassist Chris Fairless—to practices.

Prior to treatment, each member’s music career had stagnated. As the nascent band mastered complex harmonies and intricate riffs at rehearsals, they realized how much drug-induced delusions had previously stifled their performance potential and masked their talent.

Inspiration for original songs wasn’t hard to find. “Some of [the songs] go back to when we were struggling,” Watson explains, “and some of them are about how it is today and how much our lives have changed.”

Although the band performs covers such as Ray Charles’ I Don’t Need No Doctor, their collective experience emanates through 75% of their four-hour set list. While some fans ponder the lyrics of The End of the War and other originals, most audiences simply seek a danceable dose of New Orleans-influenced soul and progressive Southern rock ’n’ roll.

Rewriting Rock History

As the Wes Williams Band booked tour dates, the question remained whether the ex-addicts could succeed traveling down a road littered with temptations.

Ironically, the environment that has driven other bands to destruction has become the salvation of the young musicians. Despite liquor shots proffered by fans and pot offered by opening bands, the four found solace in music and support for sobriety in each other.

In fact, the Wes Williams Band has a good chance of rewriting rock history—emerging as new artists with the specter of addiction in their past rather than their future.

“[When you’re using] you can never imagine your life sober,” says Williams. “Now, I could never imagine my life back on drugs.

“Who really thinks they’re going to be a rock star?” Williams asks. “I didn’t think it was possible. But it’s really cool to see the way our lives are turning out and [what] we’re able to do because we’re sober. We put that first. Without sobriety, it all goes away.”

With two years of sobriety, a career as a professional musician and the birth of his son, Watson says, “If you can find something that you love and can dedicate your life to, your happiness will prevail over everything else.”

Not only has the group stayed sober touring the Southeast and Southwest, they have developed a fan base and contacts at prime venues and developed plans to record at a Las Vegas studio. Exposure in Albuquerque or Austin might be a stepping stone to signing with a label, headlining a tour or radio play. However, the boys from Baton Rouge marked a milestone with a performance at Sullivan’s Ringside last January.

“I had been such a screwup and a drug addict in Baton Rouge. I was a terrible singer and didn’t even realize it because I was on drugs. I was playing little daiquiri shops for no money,” Williams admits.

“Then I went out to Arizona, got sober and changed my life. The next time [Robbie and] I played music in Baton Rouge was at Sullivan’s in front of hundreds of people.”

And their first show won’t be the last. “It was a beautiful Wednesday night at Sullivan’s,” recalls Verde. “They knocked it out of the park. They’re good-looking kids who play a lot of original stuff. It was a wonderful mix of people [in the audience]. They’re coming back.”

Check out Wes Williams Band’s music at facebook.com/weswilliamsband.