"I started shooting up heroin when I was 13," Art Alexakis remembered when I first spoke with him in 1996. "Most kids were shooting up at 15 or 16, but I was hanging out with older kids, so I didn't want to be left out of all the fun."
'Fun' is not a word that crops up much when Everclear's frontman looks back on his early life. That much was never more clear than on a lyric on his band's ninth album, Black Is The New Black, on You, a song that will stop your heart.
"I was raped when I was eight years old on a sunny afternoon," Alexakis sang. "See me, playing with the older boys in a house where my mama told me not to go. They started hurting me, laughing as they held me down. They broke me as I screamed inside."
"Obviously they had been beaten and raped themselves," he reflected in 2023, speaking on the Lipps Service podcast. "Hurt people hurt people. I never told my mom about that because my mom kept a .38 under a mattress and she would have killed them."
