Cocaine Blues

When I look out over the perpetually shifting, shame- and secret-filled landscape of drug use in the Northwest rock ’n’ roll community, I often think about Raymond Carver’s short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk about Love. Its defining theme is the words that go unspoken when we discuss matters of the heart. Replace “love” with “drugs” and you have an unfortunate summation of what makes Seattle artists particularly vulnerable to chemical problems.

What do we talk about when we talk about drugs? We talk about who’s doing them, who’s doing too many of them and who’s a laughable loser as a result. We’ve done a bang-up job of forging our own subculture of fear. Consequently, the shame of admitting they might have a problem often inhibits artists in distress from reaching out for help when they need it most. While this phenomenon is not unique to the Northwest, there is a particularly insidious strain of hypocrisy that has proven especially dangerous to our community: nobody wants to tell the truth.

An example: in my early thirties, during what I decided midstream would be my final voyage into South by Southwest, Austin’s “Spring Break for Indie Rockers,” I saw and felt a painful illustration of this hypocrisy. I’ll never forget it.

“When in Rome!” exclaimed a wildly talented and widely respected alt-country musician, dipping his face towards a hotel mirror zigzagged with lines of coke. I was shocked, not by someone doing drugs (heaven knows my own past is dotted with unwise chemical choices), but by the cavalier and unnervingly duplicitous attitude this particular artist was displaying. I had heard him express great disdain for the burgeoning popularity of blow. In fact, that hotel suite was full of artists and industry veterans who regularly mocked “hipster cokeheads” in public but, in the privacy of a late-night bash, were circling the room with their jaws grinding, conveniently side-stepping their previous self-righteousness.

Many weeks later, at clubs around Seattle, I saw those same individuals seek and do those same amounts of drugs, but this time with a huge amount of secrecy and shame. Some of them have gone on to shroud themselves in addiction, humiliation and fear, thanks in part to the music community’s hypocritical mindset about cocaine. We’re not exactly embracing the concept that truth telling can help others.

However, occasionally an artist comes along who is fearlessly forthright about his past and knows that being honest about his struggles isn’t just brave, but a gesture of compassion.

“See that guy? I had him in the crab legs. He didn’t know I was serious. I was going to kill him.”

Veteran country musician Knut Bell, sporting a well-tailored ebony overcoat, is gesturing towards the late afternoon barkeep at the Little Red Hen, unashamed about illuminating the darkest corners of his past – in this case, the night he nearly strangled a long-time employee of the Greenlake honky-tonk. He is still rounding off the edges of European jet lag, having returned the night before from a transcontinental journey that took him from Norway to Paris and back to his Skagit County home.

He has been sober since 2008. It’s been a rough journey.

Bell now holds down regular gigs in Seattle at the Hen and in the little-known but well-traversed rural circuit that includes Longhorn Saloon and the Conway Pub, a down-home venue near Mount Vernon, not far from Sedro-Woolley, where he grew up.

When he was three years old, his grandmother got him a guitar. Bell started making up his own truck-driving songs at a rate so brisk, he often couldn’t keep up with himself.

“I remember my grandfather would push me on the swing and ask me to play the song from the day before and I wouldn’t remember,” recalls Bell, sipping a tall glass of bubble tea he’s brought to our interview.

His grandmother helped nurture not only his interest in classic country music, but his respect for it. “She would set the records out after dinner and you’d have to sit in silence and listen. Red Fowley, Eddie Arnold, Hank Williams, Elvis.” Blessed with a distinct and devilish baritone and a natural sense of showmanship, Bell took that inspiration from his grandmother and soon garnered a following playing classically themed country songs about women, rough living and heartbreak, but with a solid foundation of ’70s-style rock sounds that set him apart from other by-the-book acts.

Even as his music career developed, however, Bell found himself favoring activities far less virtuous. A family friend hired him to play a party when he was fourteen. “Then the debauchery began,” he says. “We were little white kids in seventh grade who stole Mom and Dad’s Everclear and were passed out early in the afternoon.”

As his music career developed in his twenties, Bell alternated stints on the road with grueling gigs as a king crab fisherman in Alaska. In his early thirties, he bounced from Montana to Michigan and briefly to Austin, where a back injury led to an introduction first to painkillers and eventually to cocaine. What followed was a nightmarish descent into an ounce-a-day habit that lasted 863 days. “I kept track. What sort of weirdo keeps track?” he says, laughing.

Meanwhile, his touring activity led to airplay on KEXP. This was followed by an invitation to play Paul Allen’s private screening of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line and a coveted slot at the annual Rockabilly Ball. It was then that one of Bell’s biggest champions warned him about the road he was heading down. “We played the Rockabilly Ball and [promoter and KEXP DJ] Leon [Berman] came up to me and said, ‘You know, you can take this as far as you want. Don’t fuck it up.’ I was pissed; I had this justification in my mind that no one knows the exact details, so no one can tell me what I can’t do.” With his increasingly heavy cocaine use came seizures, two suicide attempts, an affection for firearms and the unwanted attention of both feds and high-level dealers.

On January 4, 2008, he was at his parents’ house in the basement, at about three-thirty in the morning. “Don’t laugh,” he says, his eyes welling up with emotion. “This is what happened. I watched a blue mist come out of my body, and I heard a voice say, ‘This is what happens when you run your life this way.’ And I remember I had this thought in my head. All I could think of was a pile of shit and bones.”

Bell woke up his parents and told them he needed to go to rehab. It took him three more months to actually get there, but when he did, a powerful combination of twelve-step ritual and Eastern philosophy helped him crawl out of his hole. He’s been sober since and has become deeply entrenched in both martial arts and the Taoist tradition, a dual support system that he credits not only with keeping him clean, but with helping him navigate the universe with more grace. It has also helped him handle continued success on the honky-tonk circuit, which remained his primary source of income. His long-awaited fifth album, Wicked, Ornery, Mean and Nasty, is slated for a 2011 spring release, and he’s currently in licensing talks with the producers of the hit reality series The Deadliest Catch, who are interested in featuring his compositions in an upcoming season.

“When I was younger, I always handled things in such an aggressive way,” Bell tells me as our interview winds down. “Now I realize there’s more power on the other side.”

Bell’s confessional attitude extends beyond my interview with him. He has gained a reputation for fearless honesty both onstage and off, not because of his own needs, but out of a desire to give hope to others. “It’s not like I needed to to ‘set myself free,’” he asserts. “I needed to help people.” •

Photos by Andrew Waits