My feelings toward John were very mixed over the next few days. On the one hand I felt enormous sympathy for him: he’d been through a horrific ordeal and he, more than anyone, had suffered the most from the pressured of twenty-four-hour attention. Being at the center of the circus was something that was starting to eat away at all of us, and it would eventually affect every one of us in a different way. For now, John was the one who was suffering the most. But besides feeling sympathy, though, I was angry with him, too, and there were moments when I didn’t feel sorry for him at all. It was the second or third time that something like this had happened to him, and I was beginning to lose patience. There were plenty of times when I had felt like punching out management but I’d held back, so I reasoned that John should have done more to avoid getting into bad scrapes
“You don’t fucking do things like that at our age”, I cursed to myself.
Officially, the injury to John’s foot was due to an accident. All he said afterward was that he was drunk and dancing around his room when he accidently stepped on the vodka bottle. In my view, drugs had been an aggravating factor- and it says a lot that the thing we turned to to get us out of the mayhem had been more cocaine. Sadly, the incident wasn’t the only time blood was spilled. There was more to come at our end-of-tour party. A lot more.
We had two or three more shows to do, and I was counting the days before I could go back to the UK […]. The madness of being on the road seemed never-ending, and despite the fact that the tour had started with such a high due to all the adulation we received, our moods started to dip. A rock-and-roll lifestyle had no structure. When you are young you don’t look back, but later on you realize it’s a series of highs and lows. You can get high on creativity as well as drugs, but what goes up must come down and it can drain your energy. ‘The Reflex’ was about to go to number one, but in addition to the incident with John, there was more trouble ahead- and it would further take the shine off the things.