This was my last live-Wino diary ::: Back a couple years ago, the Times of London led a fight to compel authorities to force drug treatment on a young singer, Amy Winehouse.
Amy was the world's poster child for drug addiction.
Ferocious. The vid includes one uniquely-Wino performance moment @ 2:30. Blues to go with Ray and Lightnin and Bo. Soul into sound.
UPDATE ::: we failed.
Every life is a whole world -- some more involving than others.
From TTOL:
Almost 41 years ago, Mick Jagger was arrested, tried and sentenced to imprisonment for the illegal possession of four amphetamines without a prescription. While he was on bail awaiting his appeal, this newspaper took up his cause in a leading article entitled, in a line taken from Alexander Pope, “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?”
And then:
...the case of Amy Winehouse is very different. She might not be the superstar that Jagger was in the 1960s but she is a figure of considerable prominence and was the bestselling British recording artist last year.
Yesterday, her picture was cast across newspapers as she apparently consumed a gruesome cocktail of crack, Ecstasy and Valium.
TTOL begged for her life.
The plight of Winehouse is as iconic in its fashion as the Jagger affair was in 1967. At that time, drugs were predominantly associated with exclusive circles, not dark estates. Narcotics were linked with enhanced creativity, not abject addiction. As that leading article asserted, an opportunity had been seized to seek to cut Jagger, who seemed to embody decadence, and through him a counter-culture, down to a diminished size.
Winehouse's high-wire act with her life is of another order completely. Her addiction has become a surreal form of spectacle akin to reality television, which attracts attention and repulsion in similar measures. It is a curse that is duplicated in hundreds of thousands of other examples throughout this country in, if anything, even more squalid and sordid conditions. Many are to blame, including herself, her “friends” and certainly the media whose appetite for celebrity can sometimes blind them to their social responsibilities. Yet there are limits to what any of these outsiders can do other than ask Winehouse to stop dancing on the window ledge of life.
-- Force in Virtue or in Song
Here was Amy in a withdrawal cycle. Blood itch. wanting to be dead.
She hauled her ass over to AOL's DL Show. Payback for helping her when she was a kid. This is how Dave McCabe's best songs need to be done -- and screw trying to twist out "hits":
9,317,000 hits on YouTube. This girl lived so she could sing. The TTOL piece led to forced intervention.
Seems to be working. The criminals are gone, too. Took throwing a couple dozen of them in slam.
Those who think that giving up on druggies is the way to go... no-no-no.
UPDATE ::: The Met said there were no drugs in her house. COD is pending lab work.