What was the reaction of the band to not necessarily you not wanting to be in the band anymore but to your personal situation of being saved? What’s the relationship with the band now?
At the time, it was kind of a situation. We were smack dab in the middle of recording Last Call For Vitriol. We had come straight off the road, where our drinking had sort of escalated to Bon Scott levels for a sustained period of time. We went into the studio to record, and instead of backing down a notch, we stepped it up a couple of notches. We’re working like 16 hours a day, and I got to where I wasn’t eating or sleeping very much but was drinking an awful lot. That alone, you’ll find yourself behaving in a bizarre fashion. Your brain’s not working right, and added to that is the process of making the record. I always get a huge adrenaline buzz and really get fired up about making records anyway. My behavior, I’m sure, leading up to all of this was erratic.

The band was concerned, with good reason. The next thing that happens, you walk in the door and tell them that you’ve found Jesus. In the best of times, they’re going to look sideways at you for a minute. But those guys were just concerned about my health. It wasn’t until later that I found out that my liver had gone toxic, and I noticed that I was turning yellow. I didn’t pick up on these things until after the fact. Never once did they try to talk me out of having faith in God.

Things went on for about another 18 months or so. We finished the record and went out and toured. At the tail end of that was when (bassist) Sam (Powers) decided to leave the group, and I knew the writing was on the wall for me, too. Trying to explain the way I was feeling was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. It was really hard. It wasn’t an acrimonious split or anything, but it was hard, man. It’s hard to explain to somebody why this batch of songs over here can come out under this banner but these over here can’t, even though they’re written by the same dude. As far as matters of the spirit are concerned, when it became clear that it was more than a passing fancy, they took it for what it was worth.

From the moment I was saved, I’ve just not been the same. It changed me. There’s a peace that comes with it that I’ve never had and that I’d been in search of. I tried to add a lot of artificial ingredients to get to it. Like I said before, I’m not trying to turn this story into a crusade against alcoholism or drugs or whatever. It can be anything. Anything can put distance between us and God.

I understand that you can trace being saved to the actual day that it happened. What were you doing? Was there a physical feeling that you went through?
Oh, yeah. Superdrag had been in the studio, and we were pushing ourselves as hard as we could to finish the record. We were in the middle of the recording process, and it was about six weeks before Wendy and I were going to be married. Anyway, we were planning all of these events, like the rehearsal dinner, and I didn’t have a suit. I mean, I had rock ‘n’ roll suits, but I didn’t have a nice one. I was on my way to get fitted for a suit—feel free to draw any symbolism from that that you choose. I got in the car having no intention of changing anything about anything and didn’t have the slightest notion that anything needed to be changed, at least on a conscious level. I definitely didn’t get in the car planning on becoming a Christian in the next 15 minutes. But I was driving down I-40, like I’d been doing every day, and little by little, I started to feel this sense of distress or duress. It got worse and worse, kind of like when your foot falls asleep and you get up and walk on it—I had that needles and pins feeling from head to toe.

It dawned on me that God was dealing with me. I just realized it. This is all going on while I’m driving a car at 75 miles an hour. Before I had a chance to think about doing anything, I started to pray. I started talking to God, begging him to tell me something. There was a big void inside my heart somehow. It was the weirdest thing; in that instant, I suddenly knew it would never be filled with Gentleman Jack. It would only get bigger. I had spent all of this time running as hard as I could run in the opposite direction from what I knew in my heart to be true, and I didn’t know why. I didn't hear a voice, I just knew these things in my mind. All at once, this floodgate of emotion opened, and I was able to admit to myself that I was worn out and worn down. I remember specifically asking for peace. I was tired of fighting, tired of running. In that moment, it came over me. It was a Spiritualized song waiting to happen. It just washed over me.

When you’re going through this, you intuitively thought it was God, but you’re also having a physical sensation. How did you know it wasn’t something health-related rather than a spiritual experience?
That’s a good question. I don’t know if I have a good answer for it or the right answer for it. It’s like you say, it was intuition somehow. That’s the only way I can describe it. I spent a lot of effort writing about the conflict of my upbringing versus the whole rock ‘n’ roll folklore that I bought into. I spent a lot of time thinking about that and dealing with that and sort of being skeptical and cynical and almost hostile toward it. So I don’t know how to explain how I knew what was going on—I just knew it. It’s not because of any great wisdom I had. I had no wisdom. I didn’t have sense enough to look around me and see that I needed God. He kind of filled me in on it in the space of about 30 seconds.

You hear a lot about that, man. You hear about people being high or out of it and then finding God and it becomes a temporary phase or a passing thing. I’ve set my feet on the path. I’m by no means righteous, but I’ve not abandoned the hope to make seeking righteousness the aim of my life. I don’t think we can ever get it, but part of the purpose of living and the process of living and dying is putting your feet on the path and seeking it. Then there was the whole drinking thing, and from that moment on, I haven’t had a drop.

Do you think you would’ve stopped drinking without being saved?
I really don’t, to tell you the honest truth. I was so wrapped up in it. It basically dominated my life, and I didn’t even know it. Furthermore, there were all of these red flags going up, and I didn’t notice them. I ended up getting medical attention after all of this happened. The doctor pretty much told me in plain English that if I didn’t stop doing what I was doing, I wouldn’t live much longer. When a doctor tells me something like that, I choose to believe it. Then there was a pretty intense period of physical withdrawal. I think when I quit smoking—maybe because it was more of a long-term thing—I paid a greater price. That was hard, man. It was awful. With the drinking and going through detoxifying, it was pretty hard. It was a harrowing enough experience to where I wouldn’t want to have to go through it again.

I know plenty of people that drink and plenty of Christians that drink, but a lot of people can do stuff like that like they have some sense. I can’t. I just have to be that person sitting the back of the van listening to George Jones trying to see how fast I can drink a liter of whiskey. That’s the problem. Millions of people enjoy a beverage and it doesn’t take over their reason for living. I just have that kind of personality.

Would you categorize yourself as a clinical alcoholic or just somebody who had to stop for medical reasons?
Well, I ended up seeing a shrink for a while. He diagnosed me as an alcoholic, plain and simple. I wouldn’t disagree with that, but by the same token, I couldn’t smoke five cigarettes a day, I had to smoke 60 a day. I couldn’t just have all of the Beatles’ LPs, I had to have all of the Japanese LPs and the British LPs. That’s just my tendency. If I do anything, my tendency is to take it to the maximum.

So you maybe have an addictive personality rather than merely being an alcoholic?
Yeah, and the thing that backs that up is that I never find myself thinking, “Man, I’d like to have a belt of booze right now.” When I get uptight, I don’t ever have that impulse. There have been moments where I’ve looked down at my hand and said, “Why do I not have a cigarette in my hand?” Ultimately, I think it’s a personality defect with me. If one of a thing is great, then 20 would be wonderful.

OK, so you undergo this transformation, both physically and spiritually. You don’t drink anymore, you don’t smoke. You’re essentially a new man. What does that feel like?
It’s really weird. For example, I used to love to smoke. I took real joy in smoking. I held onto that for a while. It’s only been over a year since I gave them up. It took me a good nine months to start to feel like a non-smoker, to change my thinking. I don’t even think of myself as a new man in physical terms or in terms of deeds so much as I think of myself as a new creation in New Testament terms. That’s part of the deal, going into the grave and coming back out of the grave with Christ. I really take that to heart and cling to that. I feel in a lot of ways like the same guy, just without of a lot of bad habits that I had. My wife likes me a lot better as a non-smoker and a non-drinker. I feel a lot different on the inside, but that’s more of a spiritual thing. I feel like my attitude toward most everything is different. I try to think of others so much more than I ever have before. I used to be hung up on what I like and what I wanted to do and what was good for me. I try to put what I can do for others foremost in my thoughts. You read that stuff in the Bible and it sounds good, but I try to keep it foremost in my mind.

Was there ever a thought in your mind that since you have this addictive personality, maybe your religion was your new addiction and that it might not hold? Or did you know right away that you were going to stay with it?
That’s a good question, too. I committed myself to it. I threw myself into it all the way. It’s the one thing about living where to take it to the maximum is not going to produce negative results. That’s the one time where having my defect can actually be profitable. Really, the fears I had worked in the opposite direction. I was a lot less afraid of my salvation not taking hold than I was of not being able to write music anymore. That was a big fear. If I didn’t have these little placebos that I used to get into writing or that I would prescribe to myself as a method of being creative, would I still be able to create? Would it be worth listening to? That was a much greater fear for me than whether or not I was really saved.

How long did it take you to figure out you could still write songs that you were pleased with?
I didn’t write anything for a solid year. That was the first time that ever happened, and it scared the crap out of me. When I finally sat down to write and get over that psychological hurdle and open my mind and let my thoughts come out like I used to, I wrote “I Hear Your Voice,” the first song on the album. That was where I tried to go back to that exact moment when I became a changed man. I tried to remember exactly what I thought and felt. Once I did that and recorded it on the four-track, that gave me a lot of courage to go ahead and press forward with the record.

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