From childhood trauma to rock legend: How pain and arrests fueled a superstar’s rise

”We’d have televisions one week, then my stepdad would throw them out because they were Satanic… Women were evil. Everything was evil.”

”Rejected” by his mother since he was a baby

The rock icon has said that his father was physically and emotionally abusive to him. When Barry Manilow’s song Mandy came on the radio, the young boy sang along, only to have his stepfather cuff him over the song because it was deemed “evil.”

Adding to his anger, he said his mother let the abuse happen, something he later drew on in his songwriting. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he reflected:

“I’ve been doing a lot of work and found out that I’ve had a lot of hatred for women. Basically, I’ve been rejected by my mother since I was a baby,” he said.

 

“She picked my stepfather over me ever since he was around and watched me get beaten by him. She stood back most of the time. Unless it got too bad, and then she’d come and hold you afterward. She wasn’t there for me.”

If home life was far from ideal, school wasn’t much better for the red-headed kid. By eighth grade, he already had a tough attitude. A former cross-country coach recalled in 1991 that, as a young and relatively unknown kid, he was bulContinue reading…