Inside a 3,500-square foot saloon called Monty Bar in the Westlake section of Los Angeles, Max is spinning tracks from The Misfits’ Static Age. He shakes his red mop of hair and sports a black Johnny Thunders “Dead or Alive” T-shirt. “Elvis isn’t a very good DJ,” he says, laughing. “He plays good music, but he isn’t very good at it. I’m probably better.”

Behind him is a taxidermic buffalo pinned to a wall above the dimly lit wooden stage. Schwartzel looks up at the 20-foot vaulted gold ceiling that resembles a cathedral in miniature. He adjusts his bucket hat and unzips his oversize gray hoodie. He flips through vinyl records from Blondie, Ramones, Public Image Ltd., and the Cosmonauts before stopping on The Wailers’ Live Wire!!! The three have been DJing here on Wednesdays for the past year or so when not touring. To his right, Elvis, who looks exhausted, finishes his second beer of the night in a booth with some friends. He dribbles some on his red shirt, which matches his sunburned face. Carper doesn’t join the band for these evenings.

“It would be a lie to say it wasn’t hard to deal with when Zac was using,” says Max. “Dealing with a junkie was never an easy or fun thing.” He looks uncomfortable talking about this, the same impression I get from all the members when discussing Carper’s addiction.

Schwartzel, while fiddling with the volume at the deck, adds, “Basically, we used to get fucked up all the time. We were all partying, so you never thought that it was a problem, because we were having fun. I think when it got to the point that it got bad for him, when he needed to get help, it really affected me. We’re very close. You start thinking, Why is he doing this to himself all the time?’ It had a big effect on all of us.”

The band first sang about their wild party lifestyle on their self-titled 2013 debut, focusing on what it’s like to be young, drunk, and not worrying about the future. But a few songs like “Stoked and Broke” took a darker approach, discussing the idea of the bandmates smoking weed until they died because all their friends are pieces of shit.

“In the beginning, the goal for me was to play and write music,” says Elvis. “I wanted to start this band and not be controlled by anyone. ‘Cheap Beer’ was our first song and single from the record. It was a fun party song, like most of our songs, but it was a different time then. We have all progressed and changed. I guess the biggest thing now is that we are making music and touring, and living off that money, which is rare. It became a job instead of just a fun thing we did.”

“It was hard for four young people to start a business together,” adds Max. “We had our differences and stuff, which can be tricky, but you have to make it work. But we are all a little bit older now, and our mindset has changed. I was 19 when we first started touring. I didn’t go to college, and I didn’t have a whole lot of responsibility. Back then, we were partying all the time. I don’t wake up anymore and start drinking. Partying hard like that gets old and boring. You grow out of it.”

In 2011, the band left California to perform at SXSW in Austin, Texas, for the first time. Carper had scabies that he acquired from sleeping in drug dens. He drove down with stand-in drummer Danny Nogueiras and Elvis. They had a stash of acid and ecstasy in their car. The guys buried their stash on the side of the road on the freeway before they went through border control.

“We didn’t know exactly about the Texas border, but we know they can be pretty gnarly about drugs, and there was a dog there,” Elvis recalls. “So we mapped the location on our phone so we could come back to get the drugs.” On the way back, the boys took all of them. Schwartzel paints the picture: “I was tripping just watching a McDonald’s truck with ice cream cones on the side for 20 minutes or so.”

“Yeah, I was fucked up,” says Carper. “But I was a huge junkie. I was a full-on heroin addict and meth head. I’d do heroin and then I would have to get up to play a show or something, so then I’d smoke some speed. I don’t even remember many of the shows I played. It was just kind of this bipolar-ness, until I would crash and burn after a week or so of staying up. And then I would have a freak-out and sleep for three days or some shit.”

Carper was still hooked on drugs when the band began writing songs for Too. By that point, he had been in and out of rehab five times, and the other members were getting fed up. He finally checked in one last time. “I wanted to kill myself every day. But being a junkie got boring. When I was in rehab, nobody in the band wanted to talk to me. I don’t think I had ever been sober more than a month,” he says, looking around the restaurant. “The band wasn’t talking to me. I stopped caring what they thought of me, too. I thought we were done.”

The last time Carper left rehab, he was determined to use again. He was depressed, and all of his close friends but Schwartzel had abandoned him. The only others who hung around were still using themselves. Fortunately, he got a call from Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong, who had gone through addiction problems of his own. He talked to him for an hour on the phone, advising Carper that it was worth it to try to stay clean.

“I probably wouldn’t be sober today if Billie Joe didn’t call,” he says. “He really helped me when no one else was there.”

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