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The CDs of
Michael Purington
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CDs of recovery music dealing with alcoholism, drinking problems, alcoholic recovery stories, and the personal recovery from alcoholism.
Michael Purington & The Messengers New CD "Promises" Demons & Redemption in Alcoholism Recovery "Promises" was one of the first songs I wrote for this project three years ago. At that time "this project" was a vague concept about exploring specific problems and solutions in sobriety. I was going to place them back to back: this hurts; this helps. I have been hemorrhaging lyrics ever since. The wealth of material is astonishing, inside myself and all around me. I have discarded more songs for "Promises" than I need for the next five CD's. Not that they were not all cherished treasures, but there was a criteria here, a measuring of substance, depth and accuracy. "Awakening" slipped out one morning before I'd finished my coffee, no conscious effort involved. "Your Ego Is Not Your Amigo" required a short laundry list of my meager Spanish vocabulary. Most of these songs sort of wrote themselves; I just tried to keep a good pen handy. The band and I recorded this collection over the past year. The process has been fluid, nearly psychic. Everybody understands what's going on, and how often does that happen? The performance and production are by far the best we've done so far. And the order of the songs ended up, of course, telling a story. It's quite a story, if you have 77 minutes and 45 seconds to share it with me. There's delusion and clarity, madness and hope, isolation and connection…oh, I guess just your basic life and death situation.
So hop in. Let's go for a ride and see what we see. Come on. Michael Purington
An Even Tenor You know the type, the life of the party, the guy who orders a shot, holds it up in the air and challenges everyone in the bar to chug-a-lug, to bottoms-up, to down their drinks all at once. That was Michael Purington. As a musician with the popular 1970s group Lost Highway Band, Purington would start with a beer in the afternoon, during rehearsals, and progress to liquor at night, during gigs.
For a dozen years he traveled and played and drank - having fun, he says: "It was working. It was a great life." When the band quit, in the mid-80s, Purington didn't. "When there's no gig, you have a lot of time to fill," he says. He'd work from 8 to 5, then go home at night and get drunk. He quit writing songs; he stopped making music. Then for the umpteenth time, he quit drinking. He was sober for about four years. "Quitting is easy," Purington says, paraphrasing W.C. Fields. "I quit a million times." He returned to music - as a promoter this time, bringing blues acts to Missoula. He booked Bonnie Raitt into the Wilma Theater, he says; he brought John Prine and John Lee Hooker to the Top Hat. The bar scene proved too great a temptation, though; in 1989, he took to the bottle again. "I just wasn't hooked up with other people who were sober," he says. "It just about makes you crazy if you don't have help." Then he found himself playing in a band at Harry David's nightclub: "It was horrible," he says – not the band, necessarily, but the experience. After all, he'd toured all over the place with the Lost Highway Band, had recorded albums during an era when doing so was a big deal, had nurtured big dreams of making the New York scene - and now, the best he could do was a Missoula South Side bar? "So I started," he says, lifting an imaginary drink to his lips. To escape? "Oh, yeah - to escape life. Just let me die ... slowly." He drove home shakily that night. The woman he was living with was so fed up with his drinking, she wouldn't talk to him. That was bad enough. "But mostly, I had reached a point where - it was very undramatic - I started asking for help."
Ten years later, Purington, 52, is not only as sober as a stone, but he's writing, and playing, music again. Not just any songs, either. While most country musicians write and sing about drinking, Purington sings about NOT drinking. His CDs have caught the attention of the sobriety community and Purington, who sells cars for a living, is touring again. Last September, for instance, he played a gig for recovering alcoholics in Cherry Hill, N.J., - across the river from Philadelphia. So close to New York, he could almost see the Empire State Building. Now he's entertaining offers from "sobriety cruise" companies inviting him to perform for their audiences. "I spent all these years of my life trying to make it someplace," he says, shaking his head. Sobriety is paying off for Purington in all kinds of ways - not the least of which is this one: He's writing songs again, lots of songs. "Not just about drinking," he says. "It's about living a different way. "We all know people that are just flat-out good people. For the rest of us, there is a way to learn to not only be who we want to be, but to be who we are." Sober, he says, "You get to be who you really are. Your real self emerges. You attain your potential. Stuff starts happening in life. It becomes an adventure."
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