changes,tryingtofitin,tryingtobeknown,
and liquor didn’t help.” In grati and hip-
hop, though, he found artistic pursuits that,
taken seriously, demanded not just daring
but devotion. Nurturing this side of him,
his parents sent Haggerty to a summer art
course at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, as a
teenager.Itdidn’tgowell:“Iwastedanen-
tiresummergettingdrunkandhighand
notmakingart,andIhadtomakeupa
lietomyparents,thattheairconditioner
leaked on my artwork and I had to throw it
away.”ItwasatPrattthathecameupwiththenameMacklemore–alarkthatstuck
–andwherehemetakidwhotoldhim,
“ ‘Bro, you’re an alcoholic.’ And I had never
thoughtofthatbefore.Iknewthatthings
happened when I did drugs and when I
drank,butneverappliedthatwordtome.”
WhenRolling Stonefirst profiled
Macklemore, in 2013, he took us to a re-
coverymeetinginAustin,whereheand
LewiswereplayingSouthbySouthwest.“I
didn’t say this then, but I’d relapsed right
before that interview, and Tricia was like,
‘You need to get to a meetingnow’,” hesays. His troubles continued as he got
increasingly famous, with stints of so-
briety interrupted by backslides. He
drank “lean” – prescription codeine
cough syrup – and can speak authori-
tatively about its deeply unglamorous
side ef ects. (“It makes you constipat-
ed. So when you stop drinking lean,
you get fucking backed up with co-
pious amounts of poop, but you can’t
poop, so then, at a certain point, that
has to come out. And when it does, it’s
usually in the form of diarrhea.”) But
the real ef ects of his addictions were
more insidious. Depressed and isolat-
ed as he snuck around seeking his next
score, Macklemore hid his drug use
from those closest to him: “I’m trying
to maintain like everything’s all good,
but in actualit y, from the moment that I
wake up to the moment that I go to bed,
I just care about getting drugs.” There
have been injuries, too. “One of his rock
bottoms would probably be passing out
in the bathroom and smashing his face
into a sink,” Lewis tells me. “That’s
happened numerous times,” Mackl-
emore admits, adding, “I’ve put my-
self behind the wheel with so many
drugs in my system.... I don’t say
this to be dramatic, but I should’ve
been dead a long time ago.”
Macklemore’s meeting is in a
small hall with scuffed furniture
and weathered carpeting, in a de-
creasingly black neighbourhood.
“These streets were my playground,”
he says. “I spent more time out here
than in class. It’s really sad: Am-
azon” – Seattle’s most prominent
new-money employer – “has jacked
up the rents so fucking high.” When
he laments gentrifi cation, it’s from
the necessarily confl icted perspective of
a guy who recently bought a $2.1 million
house in the tony Capitol Hill area, but it
feels genuine. In the meeting, he is one of
four white people among 26 attendees, and
one of a handful who looks younger than- Macklemore waves, gives out hugs. A
man starts talking about his rough child-
hood, and Macklemore ducks into the hall
and returns with a cof eepot; he walks the
room, pouring everybody cups. Next up is
a big guy who starts crying as he apologis-
es to another addict for yelling at her the
other day.
At the past few meetings Macklemore’s
attended, he hasn’t shared, but today he
is compelled to talk next. He tells a story
about his di culty making amends with
Tricia. “I knocked some [amends] out, but I
still had my wife, and I didn’t know where
to start,” he says. “How many years do I go
back? What do I do? Eventually, I relapsed.
So I was high, and I was in bed with her, and
I was about to get more drugs, and I tried to
make my amends there, as I was high, to try
May, 2016 RollingStoneAus.com | Rolling Stone | 79CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: MARK SELIGER; GETTY IMAGES; JASON KOENIG; MACKLEMO
RE/INSTAGRAM
Return of the Mack
(1) With collaborator Ryan
Lewis. (2) With his wife, Tricia
Davis, at a Seahawks game.
(3) Working on an early
version of “Downtown” with
Lewis in 2015. (4) At the 40th
annual Seattle Pride Parade on
June 29th, 2014.1432