comment: >
  
  I don't know why you were downvoted. I wholeheartedly agree with this. Plus - King himself was a drug addict. I think he knows what he's talking about.
  The problem with bands going downhill isn't with them getting sober. It's with them getting old. Metallica's last good album was "Death Magnetic" - which came out nearly thirty years after the band was founded. You can't realistically expect a band like this to keep its creative juices for more than 25 years - especially when most songs are written by one man - in Metallica's case that man is James Hetfield.
  Old band that don't go sober go downhill too. Have you seen Motley Crue? The first time they decided to retire was, IIRC, in 2015. Their last show back then was released on DVD. It is bloody awful. Vince Neil can't sing for shit.
  On the other hand, there are bands like Judas Priest - Rob Halford got sober in 1986. In 1990 they released "Painkiller" - which is among the greatest albums in the history of heavy metal.
context: "They say you ain't been the same, since you laid that bottle down,
  The songs ain't got no soul, the band's done lost it sound.
  Well get your head out of the clouds boy, pretty soon you'll realize
  That sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a dream is let it die." >
  
  This is the perfect comment! >
  
  American Aquarium.  "The Long Haul." >
  
  When it comes to entertainers who were not sober then became sober this is unfortunately true a lot of times. Perhaps because addiction equals personal pain and pain brings great art. Even average people too. I'll gladly take the fact that someone is doing better over my own entertainment but like some of my Facebook friends who got sober and just post nothing but sobriety and Jesus stuff were more interesting when they'd post about Google watching them and being bugged by the president and shit lol >
  
  "The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain." ~ Ursula K. Le Guin >
  
  "The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas.  
  They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers-common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words.   
  Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary  to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons. It doesn't matter if you are James Jones,John Cheever, or a stewbum snoozing in Pen Station; for an addict, the right to the drink or drug of choice must be preserved at all costs.   
  Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn't drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it's what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we are puking in the gutter."  
  - Stephen King "On Writing."