While the name Patty Schemel may not be familiar to everyday people, she’s been a well-known drummer for many years, playing with Courtney Love’s band Hole, and she also played in Motley Crue for a brief spell. Schemel has now come out with a memoir, Hit So Hard, where she details her 15 drug rehab stays, and 22 detoxes before she got sober.
In writing her memoir, Schemel told Billboard, “I made a point to talk about the experience as honestly and as gritty as it is. I was a drug addict in a band with crazy people, I was crazy, and it was chaos. It isn’t romantic…”
Schemel also called the addiction and recovery process as “like a hamster wheel…what does it take to get you off? Deaths of friends? Suicide? The loss of everything important? Your family?”
Before heading back to music, Schemel worked a normal job to teach her responsibility. “First of all: getting a job. And then getting up and going to work. A week of getting up and going to work and getting there on time…those things were little tiny pieces of gold that you put in your pocket, then your pocket starts to fill up, and you just need to build that self-esteem.”