Aloha to a reverend and two musicians who affected others in ways they might not have if there were not addicts.
Sometimes, it takes an addict:
The Rev. Zachery Tims, Jr., who founded a ministry of 8,000 Floridians and became well-known due to frequent television appearances, found dead in a Manhattan hotel room at age 42 with what appeared to have been illegal drugs (“a white powdery substance”) in his pocket. He chronicled his teenage drug addiction in a 2006 memoir after, according to Rev. Randolph Bracy, catapulting “a church that started in a hotel room [10 years earlier] into a megachurch.” In 2009 after admitting to an extramarital affair he and his wife of 15 years divorced. It was “unclear” what brought Mr. Tims to Manhattan a week earlier. Inexplicable goings-on when associated with recovering addicts almost always suggests relapse, as would even one extramarital affair.
Jani Lane, the former lead singer of the metal rock band Warrant, found dead in a Woodland Hills, CA hotel room at age 47. Lane embodied the “excesses” of the 1980s “hair metal” rock bands, joining Warrant in 1984 and writing several hit songs. He had an on-again off-again relationship with the band. In recent years he appeared on VH1’s “Celebrity Fit Club,” made news for a DUI and, in 2003, for being admitted to rehab due to alcohol- and drug-related “exhaustion.”
And so long too to Dan Peek, founding member of the band America, which was responsible for some of my favorite melodies of the 1970s including “A Horse With No Name,” “Ventura Highway” and “Sister Golden Hair,” dead at age 60 from unknown causes. We may never know for sure, but the “unknown cause” will likely prove not to be an overdose, as Peek admitted to Goldmine magazine last year, “I was a spectrum drug abuser, alcoholic, you name it” and he was found dead in bed by his wife, with whom he appears to have had a stable marriage. Peek was probably sober since leaving the group in 1977.