“I watched a bandmember of mine almost die a couple of times, and I still didn’t get it,” says Sprung Monkey guitarist Will Riley. “I was a drug addict, and I didn’t understand that. A lot of things happened. I lost my mom. That was a big one. I wasn’t capable of processing a lot of what happened to me as a little kid — all the trauma — and I used drugs until I hit bottom. It came to a point where I either went to treatment or I fucking died. I had to walk away from the band in 2002, 2003. I was looking across the room at one of my bandmates, a family member. I remember the day we got dropped from our label. We’d just gotten done doing a full cycle of recording and touring, and we got dropped. I had to check out for a hundred days or so.“
Sprung Monkey is headlining a show to raise Fentanyl awareness, dubbed No One Plans On Dying and happening Saturday June 25 at Queen Bee’s in North Park. “When we were touring hard in the 2000s, people were smoking it, and yeah, it had an effect on the scene.” The drug is not new, but it is now being surreptitiously laced in with other drugs, which has resulted in what can only be described as an epidemic of accidental overdoses. It’s as if the bloated exaggeration of Afterschool Specials and scholastic anti-drug films are reverberating through the decades, providing the blueprint for a dystopia that makes Huxley’s Brave New World seem like a paradise by comparison — if only because Huxley’s vision wasn’t weighted down with corpses.
“It was either get help or die,” says Riley of his decision to clean up. “And I don’t want to leave right now.” The Saturday bill includes Systematic Abuse, Revolt-Chix, the Spice Pistols, Change Today (with former T.S.O.L. singer Joe Wood), and Project Sellout.
“I watched a bandmember of mine almost die a couple of times, and I still didn’t get it,” says Sprung Monkey guitarist Will Riley. “I was a drug addict, and I didn’t understand that. A lot of things happened. I lost my mom. That was a big one. I wasn’t capable of processing a lot of what happened to me as a little kid — all the trauma — and I used drugs until I hit bottom. It came to a point where I either went to treatment or I fucking died. I had to walk away from the band in 2002, 2003. I was looking across the room at one of my bandmates, a family member. I remember the day we got dropped from our label. We’d just gotten done doing a full cycle of recording and touring, and we got dropped. I had to check out for a hundred days or so.“
Sprung Monkey is headlining a show to raise Fentanyl awareness, dubbed No One Plans On Dying and happening Saturday June 25 at Queen Bee’s in North Park. “When we were touring hard in the 2000s, people were smoking it, and yeah, it had an effect on the scene.” The drug is not new, but it is now being surreptitiously laced in with other drugs, which has resulted in what can only be described as an epidemic of accidental overdoses. It’s as if the bloated exaggeration of Afterschool Specials and scholastic anti-drug films are reverberating through the decades, providing the blueprint for a dystopia that makes Huxley’s Brave New World seem like a paradise by comparison — if only because Huxley’s vision wasn’t weighted down with corpses.
“It was either get help or die,” says Riley of his decision to clean up. “And I don’t want to leave right now.” The Saturday bill includes Systematic Abuse, Revolt-Chix, the Spice Pistols, Change Today (with former T.S.O.L. singer Joe Wood), and Project Sellout.
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