BOSTON - Feb. 23, 2016 - PRLog -- Ricky is the founder of Ricky Byrd’s Clean Getaway Foundation, a non-profit that brings songs, storytelling and conversation to people who are often on the edge of making the commitment to get sober like he did so many years ago.
“I got clean in ‘87 and the last album I did with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts was in ‘88 — and by happenstance, I was wearing my 12-step medallion around my neck on the cover photo. I started to get letters from kids saying, ‘It’s so cool that you’re sober.’”
That’s when Ricky realized that his status as a successful musician made him a potential role model for kids who had seen the party side of music get glamorized like he did when he was young.
“I’m not preaching to them. I’m not pointing fingers at them. I’m saying, ‘I’m just like you, but somehow I turned my life around — and you can too,’” says Byrd.
Ricky insists that from all his years playing at the Sunrise Detox Center, you can never predict who your message will reach that day. “It’s not my job to decide who’s ready,” he says. “I throw the cards on the table and whoever wants to play can play.”
Byrd talks about his work in detox centers with the wizened experience of someone who has seen people change their lives because of his music and seen people who relapse anyway and don’t get another chance. “Recovery is such a timely event,” he says. “You gotta give somebody treatment when they want treatment because the moment passes very quickly.”
What Ricky does in telling his stories and singing songs is give people the chance to have that moment. “Many of them have these walls built up around them and the therapists are trying to get through to them, but sometimes the music, and the fact that they know that I played with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, is this weird key to unlock one of the parts of the wall,” says Byrd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOH_fVDWa9I
Ricky started writing recovery songs with Richie Supa, a songwriter famous for his work with Aerosmith with the idea that, “If we wrote songs by addicts, for addicts, we might help in the recovery process somehow by holding up a mirror to what they were experiencing.”
It’s an emotional experience for everyone. “If you think about it," says Byrd, “as an artist, my job is to make people laugh, cry or think. You touch people. You get inside their heads and hearts. With art, paintings, movies — it’s all the same. You get to their emotions.”
Ricky Byrd is on the faculty at the Center for Narrative Practice and will be joining us at our March workshop. Learn more about Ricky at Clean Getaway and more about the March Narrative Practice workshop here.
Media Contact
Scott Alderman
857-488-3515
***@narrativepractice.org
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