A (19:52)
The partying began the moment the tour began. Accommodations were luxurious and everything was catered towards having a great time. For the next few months, Depeche Mode was encased in a special hedonistic bubble with incredibly lavish and wild parties happening after the show every night. Most of the craziness came on the second leg, which took the band through North America. The stories are so incredible that some people may have to die before all these stories can be told. But we can report on a few things. Dave's ego and his role as a rock God got worse and worse. He became so insufferable that when it came to staying in hotels, the other members of the group insisted on being on separate floors from Dave. In June 1993, when the tour rolled into Berlin, Depeche Mot was banned from the Intercontinental Hotel, which was their usual place. Dave would spend days in his hotel room banging heroin into his veins. There was a rumor that Dave went through a vampire phase. His dressing room was dark and filled with candles. And as a joke, someone delivered a coffin to the tour and Dave obliged by taking a nap in the coffin before each show. Now, to him, this wasn't such a big deal. Here's a quote from Dave. Even the bed I slept in in Los Angeles was in the shape of a coffin. A huge double bed shaped like a coffin. My whole life was Spinal Tap at the time. There's a story that Dave demanded that Primal Scream get the opening slot on the tour because he knew they liked to party like he did. But the story goes that Primal Scream was so shocked by what they saw that they gave up drugs entirely. And before this, Primal Scream did a lot of drugs. Singer Bobby Gillespie was once quoted as saying that Dave did more drugs, more coke, ecstasy, heroin and alcohol than all of Primal Scream combined. And that is saying something. Even though he trained for the tour by working out, running and practicing martial arts, Dave looked awful. Those bruises on his arms weren't scratches from when he dove into the crowd. Those were needle marks. Dave and the band's road manager were arrested after fighting with security guards at a hotel in Quebec City on September 8, 1993. There was an occasion in New Orleans on October 8, 1993, when Dave couldn't do the encore because between the last song and when he was supposed to go back on stage, he OD'd and the paramedics had to be called. Here's what Dave had to say about that at the end of the gig. I couldn't go back for the encore. Martin had to do a song solo. I overdosed. I had a heart attack. While all the paramedics rushed me off to the hospital, I heard the song Death's Door in the background. But it wasn't just Dave Kahn and don't worry, we'll get back to him later. The other members of Depeche Mode were going crazy, too. Martin Gore would allegedly drink vast amounts of beer and and then stripped naked. He needed some very strong sleeping pills every night just to get to sleep. He was arrested in Denver after insisted on playing very loud music in his hotel room at 4 in the morning. This was November 3, 1993, and he spent the night in jail. He really should have been taking it easy because he started having panic attacks that were so severe that he thought he was dying. Then came a grand mal seizure in the middle of a business meeting at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles in November 1993, ahead of five nights at the Great Western Forum. The seizure was brought on by stress, alcohol and drugs. That was his second such attack, and I won't even mention all the minor panic attacks he'd been suffering during a break. About a week later, a private jet was chartered to take everyone on a quick trip from Dallas to the Caribbean. There was a pressurization problem and the plane struggled to get back to Texas, which freaked everybody out. Andrew Fletcher wasn't in great shape either. He was depressed and homesick and a hypochondriac, unable mentally and physically to handle what the band was doing. He suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be checked into the hospital for a month, missing the entire second leg of the tour. He told Daniel Miller, the head of Depeche Mode's record label, that he would never, ever again go on the road with Alan Wilder. Interesting. We were told that as the band's business manager, he had to stay behind to take care of some business. Well, the truth was that he wasn't on tour because he was very, very sick. At first he thought he might have a brain tour, but as it turned out, it was just a very, very severe case of depression. He was replaced on the second leg of the tour by keyboardist Darrell Badamonte for the last 39 shows. And he had a wild time, too. He turned 30 on the tour, and the party for his birthday lasted three days. Alan Wilder knew that he was definitely going to leave the band after the tour, so he was just trying to stick it out, even through an excruciating kidney stone attack while he was on a break in South Africa between the first and second legs of the tour. We'll get back to his situation shortly. And Dave, he just kept going and going. Depeche Mode was in Buenos Aires on April 8, 1994, when they heard about the death of Kurt Cobain. Dave was a little taken aback by the news. But after a day or two, he went back to his usual ways. Back in North America, Dave's onstage performances were getting more erratic. He'd forget words to songs and miss cues. The reviews were bad between and after shows. He needed cortisone shots for his voice. A roadie was hired to make sure 10 or 15 women were brought backstage to party. After every gig in Detroit, Dave took a big stage dive. That didn't work out. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital. So great was the abuse on his body that by the summer of 1994, Dave Grant weighed no more than 100 pounds. The crowds had been huge and the money was unbelievable. Both Dave and Martin wanted to extend the tour, make more cash. But Andy and Alan were dead against it. And it was decided in the end that enough was enough. After the tour, everyone scattered. No one wanted to see each other. Dave went back to la, where the parties continued. He had no interest in being clean. He liked being a party animal junkie. But the heroin had stopped working. His body had become so hardened to the drug that it had no effect. But he had to keep using just to keep from getting dope sick. He was still with Teresa at this point, but she was no Help. One morning he woke up on a dealer's lawn wearing nothing but pants, shoes and socks. His wallet, watch, jewelry and shirt were gone. Alan Wilder was having his own issues. He was still planning to quit the band because he'd had enough of the dysfunction and being creatively sidelined. And he also had his own near death experience. On September 1, 1994, about two months after the tour ended, Alan was driving through the Scottish countryside when an RAF jet fighter trainer almost crashed right on top of his skate car. This jet literally fell out of the sky, narrowly missing him by more than 200 meters. Had his girlfriend not seen the plane coming, allowing Allen to pull over onto a farm road, his car would have been hit by this plane falling out of the sky. The two pilots on board were killed. That'll make you think about your life. On June 1, 1995, almost a year after the tour ended, Alan Wilder resigned from the Depeche Mode after serving 13 years with the group. Here's his official Due to increasing dissatisfaction with the internal relations and the working practices of the group, it is with some sadness that I have decided to part company from Depeche Mode. Since joining in 1982, I have continually striven to give total energy, enthusiasm and commitment to the furthering of the group's success, despite a consistent imbalance in the distribution of the workload. Unfortunately, this level of input never received the respect and acknowledgment that it warrants. The quality of our association has deteriorated to the point where I no longer feel the end justifies the means. Given the circumstances, I have no option but to leave the group. Meanwhile, Dave Gahn's life was not going well. He went back to la, where he continued to do lots and lots of drugs. He grew paranoid and carried a gun with him, even if it were just outside to check the mailbox. He'd do things like watch the weather channel for 24 hours straight. He painted the walls and floors black. He started talking to his collection of stuffed animals and it got real weird when the animals started talking back. There were a couple of trips to rehab, including a secret visit to a fancy clinic in the Arizona desert. But when he checked out on August 17, 1995, he returned to his house to find that it had been completely looted. He was robbed. Nothing was left, just wires hanging out of the wall. His Harley was gone, all the recording gear, even the cutlery out of the kitchen drawers. That's when he loaded up on smack and checked into the Sunset Marquis Hotel. And while looking in the bathroom mirror, slashing his wrists seemed like a good idea, so he did while he was speaking with his mother on the phone. Two two inch cuts. Someone called an ambulance. When they arrived, there was blood everywhere and Dave was almost unconscious. They had to stitch him up right there without anesthetic because the situation was so dire. This was not the first time either. The same paramedic team rescued him several times. They started calling him the cat because he seemed to have so many lives. When he woke up in a straight jacket in a padded room, the psychiatric ward at nearby Cedars Sinai Hospital, all he could think about was getting high again. And who cares if a suicide attempt is a felony in California? He was going to do what he was going to do. Later, he tried to hang himself in his bathroom, but that didn't work out either. He began collecting more guns for his protection and had a.38 with him at all times. The people he hung out with got sketchier and sketchier. He started injecting powerful speedballs, dosages of heroin and cocaine, just so he'd feel something. Meanwhile, Martin Gore had sent Dave a tape of demos for the next Depeche Mode album. Dave flew to New York to work on the new songs, but he was too strung out to get much done. The story is that the song Sister of Night, one of the tracks from the 1997 Ultra album, was recorded while Dave was high on heroin. Not all at once, though, because he couldn't manage to get through the full song.
