Illustration by Lusco y Fusco
In the 1980s, when AIDS was first emerging as an international epidemic, Sir Elton John was a wicked cocaine fiend. He stood back, resting on his laurels, while thousands upon thousands of mostly gay men were dying.
“I was having people die right, left, and center around me, friends,” John told the Today show in 2012. “And yet, I didn’t stop the life that I had, which is the terrible thing about addiction. It’s that bad of a disease.”
The legendary Grammy-winning piano man and singer-songwriter has released 30 albums over the past 50 years, selling more than 300 million records and qualifying him to be one of the most successful musical artists of all time.
John is best known for the songs “Tiny Dancer” — used memorably in the 2000 film Almost Famous — “Your Song,” “Rocket Man,” and the second-bestselling single of all time, “Candle in the Wind.”
But beneath the cloak of superstardom, there were two horrible diseases lurking — addiction and AIDS.
In his memoir, Love Is The Cure: On Life, Loss and the End of AIDS, John writes: “I was consumed by cocaine, booze, and who knows what else. I apparently never got the memo that the Me Generation had ended.”
John admits to having a shy temperament and has said that cocaine was the drug that helped him shed the layers of that timidity.
“I could talk to people,” he said. “But then it became the drug that closed me down, because the last two weeks of my use of cocaine I spent in a room in London, using it and not coming out for two weeks.”
John emerged from addiction in the late ‘80s without contracting HIV, but he took on the cause of fighting AIDS after meeting and forming a friendship with Indiana teenager Ryan White, who inherited the HIV virus from a blood transfusion, succumbing to AIDS in 1990.
White inspired John to evaluate his own life. He didn’t want to take it for granted anymore, caught up in his addiction.
“[White’s death] got me to realize how out of whack my life was, because I was just in and out of a drug-fueled haze in the ‘80s,” John says in his memoir. “I did nothing to help people with AIDS… I was a gay man who really sat on the sidelines.”
John still has bouts with cravings, but only in his dreams.
“I still dream, twice a week at least, that I’ve taken cocaine and I have it up my nose,” John told NPR in 2012. “And it’s very vivid and it’s very upsetting, but at least it’s a wake-up call.”
In 1992, he founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation and has raised more than $275 million to fight the disease.
