My childhood was pretty ordinary for the time and place.  I was born in 1924 and grew up in L.A. and Harlem.  I always had music in my life.  My father was a concert singer during the Harlem Renaissance and my mother was very active in the

“Bobby’s back,” one of the nurses said. “Bring up the piano.”

community, working for the Urban League. 

I went to DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, graduating in 1942.  Like a lot of young men in those years, I joined the army after graduation.  I trained as a military policeman and was stationed in my home state of New York for a while before I was moved to Breckenridge, KY.  Even then music stayed with me.  I remember being locked in a guardhouse on base, singing “I’m Traveling Light.”  The guys got a real kick out of that.  While I was in Kentucky I was classified as disabled due to a jeep accident, after which I was discharged from the military and headed back home to New York.

The GI Bill afforded me the opportunity to go to school, and I studied music theory at the Greenwich School of Music and then the Manhattan School of Music.  While I was there I made money by writing songs, which I would sell on Tin Pan Alley.  I sang for a bit with Benny Carter’s

My advice for others with a drug or alcohol problem? Seek treatment – counseling or therapy. For heroin addicts, find a clinic and detox or apply for methadone maintenance.

band, and put together a little group, “The Top Notches,” with a couple of guys and a girl I knew.  We won first place at Amateur Night at the Apollo singing “Blue Moon.”

In 1948 I left school to move to Chicago.  It was there that I first got into heroin.  I would sniff it to get high – I wasn’t into shooting up back then.  The first time I sniffed it I got sick and threw up.  I’ve heard that this happens to a lot of people – the body rejects the drug.  I should have taken that as a sign and stopped. But instead this went on for the two years I was in Chicago and continued when I came back to New York.  I got back into school, got some things going musically – even sang at the Savoy Ballroom.  The drug use wasn’t debilitating back then.  I would spend maybe $5 or $10 a day, and I was making enough to support the habit.  There were a lot of drugs around in the music community

“She didn’t even look at me, just threw the bill onto the floor, like she was throwing a scrap to a mangy dog.”

at that point.

After a while, I graduated from sniffing to “skin pops”, injecting the heroin right under the skin, but not into the vein.   Each time I got high I was looking for that euphoria I felt the first time, and each time I came up shorter.  The skin pops were more intense than the sniffing, but it was never enough – it never could have been.  Of course, there were people around me who were shooting up – “mainlining.”  One day I was getting high with a friend of mine and I asked him to shoot me up.  He wouldn’t do it.  Here was this guy I’d get high with all the time, a junkie.  But he wouldn’t shoot me up.  When I saw the movie Ray, it was the same thing with Fathead Newman.  He’s a junkie, but he won’t have any part of it when Ray wants to try the junk.  Your real friends don’t want to see you get messed up, even when they are.

Of course, it wasn’t long before someone else – not such a friend, helped me shoot up, and from there that was it.  That was around 1957, 8 years after I first sniffed the junk.

I cringe to remember the person I was when I was on heroin.  Junkies will do anything for the high.  I was living with my parents then – I was spending so much money on drugs and I wasn’t good for anything steady, so I couldn’t keep an apartment.  I pawned my mother’s steam iron, her sewing machine, anything that could get me a little money for drugs.  And I stole from my parents.  Not only the possessions that I pawned but money as well.  They knew, of course, and it must have been so frustrating for them to see their only child turn into this despicable person over drugs.  I remember very clearly one day asking my mother to “borrow” $5.  I offered up some lie or another as to why I needed the money, but she knew the real

Music fulfills me in a way that drugs never did.

reason.  She didn’t even look at me, just threw the bill onto the floor, like she was throwing a scrap to a mangy dog.  Of course, I took that money and went straight to the dealer.

I augmented what I was getting from my parents by writing up lead sheets for music publishers and writing songs to sell.  I wrote “Unchain My Heart” on a Sunday night.  I was feinting for a hit and I had no money.  I was determined to sit down and write something simple that the publishers would go for.  I didn’t have any particular affection for that song. But ironically, of all the songs I’ve written, it’s the best received. 

I know some of the people who love that song will be surprised that I signed it away for $50.  And I had to work to get that $50.  Went out that Monday, and the first publisher I brought it to didn’t like it.  So I went to another publisher, and he said he’d give me a $50 advance on the song if he could put his name on it as a co-writer.  That meant that he would get 50% of the writer’s cut in addition to his cut as the publisher – so he basically took 75% of the song for that $50.  But I was in no mood to negotiate – I needed the money because I needed a hit.

In 1961, Ray Charles recorded “Unchain My Heart” around the same time that I hit rock bottom. My mother found a rehabilitation program for me, at the Metropolitan Hospital in New York.  I went in for 30 days and got clean.  I was ready to do it, but it was a hard road to travel.  It was a locked ward, a mental ward.  The staff there was good, and I was lucky for that.  They took an interest in me, in my music.  One day they brought a piano into the ward for some diversion, and once I got my hands on that thing, it didn’t leave the ward until I did.  I would play for the staff and the patients.  But mostly I was playing for myself.

When I got out I went home and fell back into my same routine, writing some, doing the lead sheets.  It was during that time, in 1962, that I wrote “Don’t Set Me Free,” which is kind of a sequel to “Unchain My Heart.”  Ray Charles recorded that song as well – they were both top-ten hits.  But, the problem was that I wasn’t filling my time. I found myself around the same dead end people, and, when I made a little money, it was back to the heroin. Back to the same lying, stealing, hurting my parents, making myself sick, and for what?  It’s frustrating to think back to that now.    

I went back to Metropolitan.  It was hard to walk in there a second time, after all they had done for me the first time.  But they understood that this thing could get a hold of you and it held on.  “Bobby’s back,” one of the nurses said. “Bring up the piano.”

The second time I got out of rehab I was back home again, and I was broke.  I went over to the publisher to ask for an advance on the two Ray Charles songs.  He said there were no royalties coming in just then, but that he would buy out the songs completely.  So he bought both songs outright for $1,000.  While it seemed like a lot of money at the time, it was a small fraction of the profits the songs had actually been racking up.  And, of course, it all went up my arm anyway.  The money was all gone within a few days.

Some time later, having been in rehab for a third time, I was keeping it together. The publisher was drinking with a mutual friend of ours, and bragged about the sweet deal he had cut with me – basically that he got these two very profitable songs for, well, a song.  The other guy took issue with that, he was an honest guy and didn’t like to see me get cheated.  So they argued and I got a call from the second guy.  He told me that that $1000 the publisher had paid me for the songs was actually money that I had coming to me in royalties anyway, and not even all of it.  He referred me to a lawyer friend of his, who agreed to take the case. 

I was happy about the prospect of getting my songs back, but in the meantime I knew I had to keep busy.  I started working at Metropolitan as a staff assistant.  I worked on psychopharmacology studies.  I did that for a few years, then headed out to California, where I got a job as a drug counselor at the Pittsburgh Community Hospital. 

I was a good counselor – the clients could not play games on me (I knew them all) and as a result they respected me; they figured that if I could kick my habit and straighten out my life, so could they.  The possibility of staying clean and productive was there right in front of them. Drug addicts need structure and monitoring.  Of course there are some addicts who won’t adhere to treatment and I’ve read the autopsy reports of a number of clients who ended up at the medical examiner’s office on a slab.  I’ve also seen others clean up and rejoin society – stay clean. For some, 21-day detoxes can help; residential treatment programs are good for others. The main thing is this:  drug abusers need treatment and determination to straighten up and fly right. It can be done.

I had been working as a counselor for a year when my settlement came through.  I got the royalties due to me and the right to take the copyright over when it expired in 1988.  I was homesick at that point and used some of the money to buy a new car and head back East.  And, eventually, back to using. 

Same old story, more lies, more theft, more breaking my mother’s heart.  She was getting older at this point, and I knew I had to make it right, once and for all.  I headed back to rehab.  This time I was put on a methadone regiment.  On methadone maintenance I went to the clinic daily for my dose; had sessions with my counselor; attended groups and eventually detoxed off of methadone in 1980 at the Veteran’s Administration drug program. (I last used heroin in 1975-6.)

My mother passed away in 1977.  She left me, her only surviving family, with a letter.  She said she hoped that the small inheritance she was leaving me would help me to find what I was looking for – that I would find peace. 

After that, I knew I had to get out of New York for good, and I headed back to the West Coast.  After a while I found a position at the San Francisco West Side Community Mental Heath Center, where I worked until I retired in 1988, the same year I renewed the copyright on “Unchain My Heart”.

My life has been full of peaks and valleys. I lost a lot of time to drugs, and as I get older I realize all the more that you can’t get that back.  So I make the most of my time now.  My songs are being recorded and I’m still writing.  Natasha Miller recorded eleven of my songs this year on a CD – “I had a Feelin.” The CD consists of ten songs of mine never recorded before as well as “Unchain My Heart.” Music fulfills me in a way that drugs never did.