’90s rock star says nights out in SF are the reason he went sober

At a concert in San Francisco on Tuesday, Art Alexakis, frontman for 1990s rock band Everclear, said that a four-day bender in the city in 1989 eventually led to his sobriety.

“On the fifth day, I got sober,” Alexakis told a packed house at Lower Nob Hill’s intimate August Hall. It was one of the final stops on a tour of over 25 concerts supported by the Ataris and the Pink Spiders that started in the summer and is slated to conclude Oct. 15 in Pioneertown.

Alexakis, who launched Everclear two years after giving up drugs and alcohol, has kept his sobriety for the past 34 years — which he shared with the mass of concertgoers, who then erupted with one of the loudest applause-and-cheer moments of the entire night.

Alexakis’ journey to sobriety has been well documented. He had his first beer when he was around 3 and his first shot of tequila when he was 6. He started drinking and smoking weed regularly when he was just 8. “When I was a kid, I was raped and abused and beaten badly,” he told People last month. Alexakis started dealing drugs at 12 and shooting up at 13. His older brother died from an accidental heroin overdose when Alexakis was just 12, and Alexakis nearly died of one himself in 1984 at the age of 22.

“I had worked on getting clean for a while, but when I started drinking really heavily, I started going looking for dope,” he said in a 2019 interview. “My wife at the time and I were living in San Francisco, both making $25,000 a year each, which in 1988 or ’89 was a lot of money. With no kids, you could live a pretty good life unless you’re going out drinking and blowing money, and I was right on the edge of going down.

“It was after a really bad drunk, where I actually bought some dope and a needle, but I didn’t shoot up. I remember I was staying in my car, and I was sitting there, just crying. It was 9 in the morning, and I couldn’t go home to my wife.”

Alexakis ended up at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting later that day. And then another. And another.

He hasn’t touched drugs or alcohol since, and Tuesday night, it showed.

Thirty-two years after starting Everclear — a Billboard Modern Rock Band of the Year Award winner and a Grammy nominee for “Afterglow” — Alexakis’ band sounded almost identical to the way it did in the ’90s on Tuesday night, a sing-a-long-filled evening of swaying bodies where everything was indeed “Wonderful.”