Life's Too Short by Darius Rucker

Author:Darius Rucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

14

“The Lady Is a Tramp”

Frank Sinatra

After Letterman, “Hold My Hand” starts surging up the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and cracked rear view rises into Billboard’s top fifty albums. We continue playing some of our favorite clubs in the South, but we add larger venues as well, and we set up a national tour. In December, we shoot our first video for VH1, for “Hold My Hand.” Turns out we’re naturals when it comes to the camera. Well, we don’t have to do much. Just stand and play the song. But we’re so laid-back and down to earth that everyone on the shoot loves us.

“You’re so easy to work with,” someone on the production team says.

“Hey, this is fun, and we’re all about fun,” I say.

Then, in late December, another milestone. We perform “Hold My Hand” on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the first of what will be eight appearances on the show. With cash flow flowing, we finally junk our ratty van and upgrade our ride. We buy a true, tricked-out rock band bus—a rumbling, rolling combination rehearsal space, living room, and man cave with leather seats, air-conditioning, plenty of legroom for us and our golf clubs, a state-of-the-art sound system, a refrigerator, and most important, a fully and always stocked bar, and functioning brakes.

We head into 1995 on a high. We plan our first European tour, eight cities, beginning in Amsterdam, ending in Bologna, a month overseas. Then, right before we leave, we get the word. The amazing word. The incredible word. A word, I admit, I had fantasized about.

Gold.

cracked rear view, the album that F, a top record executive at our label and major naysayer, had only seven months earlier predicted would make the label a laughingstock if they released it, has gone gold.

I don’t want to call him and gloat. I really don’t.

Well, okay, I kind of do, but, nah, not really.

Why not?

Because, man, we’re just having too much fun.

* * *

The party never stops. Whatever you got, I’m in.

Booze. Drugs. Everything you can name, anything you can think of, and piles of it, tons of it, as omnipresent as air. We drink, we smoke, we sniff, we stockpile. We once purchase two garbage bags full of mushrooms for fifteen grand, cash, right there on the spot. We stuff the mushrooms into the freezer on the band bus. I calculate we’ve just purchased enough mushrooms for a year and a half. Another time, after a show, we’re sitting around on the bus, Dean, me, and a bunch of people we don’t know, and I say to the guy next to me, “So, what do you do?”

“Seriously?” the guy says. “I’m a drug dealer.”

“What do you deal?” I ask.

“Some weed, mostly X.”

“X,” I say reverently.

Ecstasy. Coke.

Our middle names.

I try to appear casual to the drug dealer. “So, how many do you have on hand?”

“Maybe two thousand hits,” the drug dealer says.

“What do you sell them for?”

“Twenty dollars a hit.”

“What do you buy them for?”

“About eight dollars a pill.

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