Original Maroon 5 drummer Ryan Dusick on addiction, recovery after being fired from band: 'I was convinced… that the rest of my life was just going to be this big letdown'

In 2006, Ryan Dusick seemed to be living the dream alongside his childhood best friends. The founding drummer of rock band Maroon 5, Dusick had first met his “annoying little brother” Adam Levine when he was 12 and Levine was 10, and after a false start with their underrated, pre-Maroon 5 powerpop band Kara’s Flowers in the late ‘90s, their decade of hard work had finally paid off. Maroon 5’s landmark debut album, Songs About Jane, had sold 10 million copies and spawned four top 40 hits. They were playing on SNL, jamming at Prince’s house, hanging out with Justin Timberlake and Bono and touring arenas with John Mayer. They’d even just won the Grammy for Best New Artist the year before.

But just as Maroon 5 began work on their follow-up album, Levine — who had long since emerged from Dusick’s shadow to become the group’s leader — called a band meeting at Rick Rubin’s “Houdini Mansion” home/studio to inform Dusick that his services would no longer be needed. Dusick was fired from the band he’d helped create.

Dusick may have been blindsided at the time (his bandmates had promised him that he would always be a part of Maroon 5 and they would not make another album without him), but his mental and physical issues — anxiety and burnout from years of nonstop touring; the aggravation of wrist/shoulder/back injuries, stemming from his highly competitive childhood softball days, that resulted in chronic nerve damage — had started becoming insurmountable, just as Maroon 5 were finally breaking through to the mainstream. By the time the band made the difficult but unavoidable decision to permanently replace Dusick with Matt Flynn, Flynn was already their touring drummer. Dusick was still joining Maroon 5 on the road as an entourage member, watching from the wings and attending afterparties in an increasingly futile effort to maintain a bond with his buddies and hold onto his former glory, but he was unable to actually physically perform.

“I think if I was blindsided, it was just because I was in denial. The writing was on the wall,” Dusick — who revisits his trauma and eventual triumph in his new book, Harder to Breathe: A Memoir of Making Maroon 5, Losing It All, and Finding Recovery — tells Yahoo Entertainment. “It had been dragging on for like a year and a half at that point, and they were very graciously giving me a lot of time and a lot of opportunity to work through what was a problem. It was the elephant in the room, that of which we do not speak. I would pretend like I was doing great and put on this party-animal/rock-star alter ego, but everyone knew that I was struggling underneath that. It was just too uncomfortable to even talk about. When it finally happened, it was like, ‘There's no more denying this.’ If it was a shock, it was more just like, ‘Let me hold onto this denial a little longer. I don't want to let go.’”

The band went on to enjoy even greater success, while Dusick, having lost his ability to play along with his passion for music, embarked upon a “lost weekend” of drugs, depression, alcohol and anxiety that lasted nine years. “It took a decade for me, really, to find closure on that chapter in my life,” he confesses. “I was convinced in dealing with the loss of my career and my whole identity as ‘the drummer in Maroon 5’ that the rest of my life was just going to be this big letdown, and that all I could really hope to do was try to self-medicate or otherwise find moments of pleasure that would pass the time and help me to escape from this feeling of disappointment and loss. The idea of finding actual purpose and meaning again, and a sense of contentment and fulfillment, wasn't even on the menu for me.”

But Dusick eventually got sober and found a new calling, pursuing a degree in clinical psychology and becoming a marriage and family therapist. “How profoundly inspiring and sort of miraculous it is that I have been able to find a second chance and been able to rediscover hope and inspiration and fulfillment and purpose and meaning in the last seven years. Those were things I didn't think were in store for me,” he marvels. “To be in that place in recovery makes it all kind of worthwhile, because now not only do I get to enjoy that, but I have the purpose of being able to share that with people.”

Dusick shares his story in Harder to Breathe as well as in his candid conservation with Yahoo Entertainment below.

Yahoo Entertainment: You were fired from Maroon 5 in 2006, and you finally got sober in 2016. What made you want to write Harder to Breathe at this point in your life?

Ryan Dusick: I actually thought about writing the book maybe 10 years before I did, when I was dealing with the loss of leaving the band and in a really dark place, dealing with depression and anxiety and alcoholism. I knew I had some good stories to tell — the whole formation of the band and everything that happened, me leaving the band and how tragic and heartbreaking that was. I just didn't know what the purpose of that book would be at that point, because it just seemed like a very sad ending. So, fast-forward a decade when I'm in recovery and doing really well and thriving in this new passion for mental health and psychology. … I was in grad school getting my master's degree in clinical psychology, and it just hit me that I had a happy ending to my story — and that it was something that not just musicians, but anyone who's struggling with anxiety or depression or perfectionism, alcoholism, all of the “isms,” could relate to.

The book may have a happy ending, but it has a very sad beginning: It quite dramatically opens with the band meeting at Rick Rubin’s house when you were fired. Why did you start with that especially painful memory?

I looked at it like I was writing almost a murder mystery. It's like, you open with the scene of the crime, and you're like, “How the hell did it get to that?” Then I spend the first two-thirds of the book, getting up to that point, then in the last third of the book exploring everything that came after.

Well, let’s get into those first two-thirds, so to speak. Early in the book, way before you even get to Kara’s Flowers or Maroon 5, you write about having obsessive-compulsive and perfectionistic tendencies at a very young age, which unfortunately set you up for the difficult times you’d have later.

Yes. I remember being hard on myself, being perfectionistic, as an athlete — I excelled as a softball pitcher and did well a lot of the time, but when things didn't go quite my way, I would get very upset, very angry at myself. I would throw my hat, even if it was in the middle of a game where I was winning eight-to-one or something. So, that kind of intensity about excelling to the highest level translated to a lot of things. I just had this real internal drive to achieve and do everything at the highest level that I could.

Where did that pressure to succeed come from?

I kind of struggled [to figure that out] when I started writing the book, because you'd think with that attitude that my parents would’ve been domineering types that expected us to be high achievers and go to an Ivy League school and all that stuff. But that wasn't really the case. I think it probably came more from the fact that I got a lot of attention for my achievements and a lot of praise. My parents gave me unconditional love, but they were just so proud and so excited about all the things that I did that it was reinforcing, like, “Well, that's a good feeling!” … I don't know if my parents read books about building up your kid’s self-esteem or if it was just their nature, but they just thought me and my brother were very special kids. From an early age, we were told how great we were. Most of the things that I applied myself to, I did well in… but I don't think I'd really built up any real resilience to deal with failure.

You definitely experienced some failure with Kara’s Flowers when they were dropped from Reprise Records after just one album. Let’s get into those early days when that band formed. You were just teenagers, and Adam Levine was two years younger than you. It’s interesting to read in your book how Adam started off as the “little brother” and you were the leader, and then that dynamic shifted — to the point where he was the one who called that fateful band meeting in 2006.

That was an evolution that happened over time. When I look at Adam now, I still see a 14-year-old boy with acne. That's always the way that Adam will live in my mind. That’s who I know is underneath all the tattoos and the muscles and everything. When we started the band, he was 14. He was a cute kid. He had pretty eyes and was a cute little boy. But in adolescence, he had an outbreak of acne and was very self-conscious. He'd wear his hat down low and could barely look people in the eye. I kind of saw through that. He had something underneath that. He had a spirit and certainly a natural talent. I don't take too much credit, but I could see that there was a diamond in the rough there. If you looked at him at 14, you'd think, “That's not a frontman,” but when I saw him sing, I had this moment where I was like, “OK, if I'm going to start a band, it's got to be with that voice at the front of it.” But I was definitely the leader and the hustler of the group. I was 16 and I had a car, and I was willing to take our demo tape and walk into the Whisky a Go Go and hand it to them and work out a contract for tickets and stuff. It was my idea, the original sound of the band, and I was writing a lot of the songs.

But it evolved pretty quickly, within the first couple years of being a band. Adam's acne cleared up, and he became a very popular kid at school. He was dating all the girls. And his talent was emerging for melody and harmony. He didn't have the organizational skills, he didn't have the leadership quality yet, but he and [keyboardist/guitarist] Jesse [Carmichael] had this songwriting chemistry together. Jesse was emerging as a real talent as well. And so my role changed at that point. I was still the organizer, the one that was mindful of making sure that we were on top of stuff and not going off in 18 different directions, corralling all of the madness into something that was productive, but I wasn't the main guy. That was tough for me, but I accepted it as, “What we're doing is so special, I'm just grateful and happy to be a part of it.” And I kind of resigned myself to that.

You say you saw Adam as a diamond in the rough before he became the rock star “Adam Levine.” Can you tell me more about that?

There were lots of qualities that were frustrating about Adam. He was an ADHD guy. He could be flighty, a little self-involved, and those were things that were frustrating to me, the guy who was trying to organize things and being sort of obsessive-compulsive about everything. But he was this very special talent and personality and a very, very charming guy. You liked him immediately if you got to know him, and so that was going to translate to him being the guy onstage that you fall in love with and just can't take your eyes off of. But that was also something that evolved over time. I remember even telling him at a certain point, “Push yourself, man! Get out there and go, go too far. Try to be Prince!” And he did it. I mean, he went too far for a couple shows there — he was like humping the mic stand and crawling all over the monitors, overtly sexual stuff which was not his comfortable space. But I think by doing that, he got out of his little box and was able to find the sweet spot where he was comfortable being a frontman. He became much more of this cocksure, strutting lead guy. Watching him from afar now, I'm absolutely impressed by him; I'm proud of him for becoming that. But again, while I see him for the heartthrob that he is, I also still see this acne-faced teenager underneath it all.

So then Kara's Flowers land a major-label deal while most of you are still high-school-aged, you release a great album, The Fourth World… and nothing really happens and you get dropped. That must have been tough for you guys, being so young and especially for an anxious high achiever like yourself.

Yeah, Rooney and Phantom Planet were our best friends on the scene at the time, and Phantom Planet had a little bit of success with their song on The O.C., “California.” So, we were like, “Ugh, our album tanked, and they have a hit!” There was that feeling like we were really blowing it. It was disappointing and heartbreaking for all of us, because we really did think we were going to be stars with that Kara’s Flowers album. I don't think it affected anyone quite as much as it did Adam, though. This was supposed to be his chance to shine. I mean, him being an ADHD kid, I don't want to psychoanalyze him too much, but he wasn't excelling in school the way I was. Being a musician was now his identity, so there was a lot riding on it for his sense of self-worth and confidence. To have that fail, I think, really knocked him down and made him have to gather himself and figure out who he was and whether he wanted to continue doing it.

But then you regrouped as Maroon 5, got another deal with Octone Records, and all your rock ‘n’ roll dreams came true — for a while, at least.

Yeah, we learned a lot from the Kara’s Flowers process. We learned we had to work that much harder and not take anything for granted. We took everything we were doing much more seriously. This obsessiveness and this perfectionistic quality emerged in Adam as well. He has his own version of perfectionism, which is slightly different from mine, but essentially he wants everything to be not just like, “Oh, that's a good song” — like, it has to be [as good as Michael Jackson’s] “Beat It”! It has to be a classic groove that people are going to be listening to 50 years from now. That's the kind of thinking he had at that point. Again, not to over-psychoanalyze him, but he had been so disappointed by that first failure that it was like, “This has to be the best thing ever!” So, we were under a lot of pressure and a lot of stress. Even though we were only in our early to mid-twenties at that point, we’d already had a failed record deal. We weren't going to get a third one if this one didn't work. We really wanted it to be an amazing record and not miss this opportunity, to feel like we’d put all of ourselves into it. And I think that we did. And I think that it shows.

It does, but I think some people might not remember that Songs About Jane was not an overnight smash at all. Octone worked that record for two years before it took off. It’s great that you got this second chance, but you were working so hard and for so long to seize advantage of this rare opportunity that taking a break for mental health or just to rest wasn’t an option then. Can you tell me about how that grueling pace of touring and promotion set you up for all the hard stuff that followed? I don't want to know if I want to call it a “breakdown” but…

Oh, I would call it a breakdown. It wasn't something that happened in one day or one week or one tour, even. It happened over a long period of time. We got our first taste of touring in ‘97 on the Kara’s Flowers album The Fourth World. That was only for about six months, but right away I was more exhausted than I’d anticipated, even then at 19 years old, because there just wasn't as much sleep as I thought there would be. … And just the adrenaline that goes with performing every day was wearing on me, because being that high-intensity, high-pressure-on-myself kind of guy, I would find myself wearing down. When we went back on the road [as Maroon 5], I kind of took the attitude of, “OK, this is going to be a long haul. I'm going to treat this like I'm still in college. I'm living with a bunch of my buddies, just sleeping on the couch and trying to party and have a good time.” And that worked for probably about a year and a half. At a certain point it was exhausting and I wanted to retreat from it, but there really was nowhere, or no time, to retreat from it. It was just unrelenting. For a certain amount of time it was OK because I was able to step into this character, but then when I hit the wall and it was too much for me, there was nowhere to go.

But at the same time, all of your hard work was finally paying off, so you must have had mixed feelings.

Yes, all of a sudden, about a year and a half in, we had a gold record. We a moderate hit with “Harder to Breathe,” and we did our first headlining tour and got our first tour bus. So, that's a big change when we’re already running on fumes from a year and a half of touring in the van. And it just kept ramping up and ramping up. The pressure that I always put on myself was unrelenting, wearing me down. It was manifesting physically, which was a combination of a lot of things, but in retrospect, I'm able to see that it was a mind/body thing as much as it was a purely physical thing. The pressure was at an all-time high because the external demands were even greater than the internal demands that I put on myself. Now we're playing on live TV, on Saturday Night Live in front of millions of people, then getting on a plane and flying to Europe to start a European tour — just one thing after another that was high-stakes and a lot of attention. It was really exciting, fun and inspiring, but terrifying when you feel inside like, “I don't know how long I can do this. My body is breaking down, My mind is breaking down. My entire constitution is breaking down.”

Can you tell me more about how all this was manifesting itself physically?

I've diagnosed myself with something called musician’s dystonia. Dystonia is a movement disorder, and there's a lot of reasons why you might get it, but it is specific to people who do very specific, high-level tasks repeatedly — athletes, musicians, performers. In sports they call it the “yips,” like with a professional baseball player who has thrown the ball exactly where they want to a million times, better than anyone on the planet at the highest level, and then all of a sudden something happens in their hand where the muscles contract and won't let them do it. I used to think it was performance anxiety, but really, it is a trauma response. The same way that when you put your hand on a stove and feel that heat and have a reflex to pull away, you develop a reflex not to do something because your body has identified it as a threat. My nervous system just started to reject what I was asking of it and said, “I’m not going to let you do this anymore. You're killing yourself.” It just wouldn't allow me to coordinate playing the drums anymore. I started having these nerve issues that were totally confounding. I went through two years of this. The way I used to do it wasn't working, so I started manipulating and changing my mechanics: “Maybe if I play more underhanded, maybe if I grip the sticks this way, maybe if I sit lower, maybe if I sit higher, maybe if I move where all the drums and the symbols are…” And it works for a minute, but it's not a fix.

That must have been so frustrating for you, because you had been working towards success for so long, and all of these problems started happening right when your ship was coming in.

Yeah, imagine 10 years into being a band, the band that we started in my garage when I was 16 years old with my best friends, and we now are at a place where we have No. 1 hit songs on the radio, a multiplatinum album, selling out arenas, and I am literally feeling like this is going to end really badly for me any day now.” It was a mindf***. It was complicated, because as much as it was really my body trying to take care of me — trying to protect me, right? — I couldn't recognize that in my cognitive mind. All I could think to myself was, “What is wrong with you?” I felt like there was something defective inside of me, something to my core that was bound to fail. And so on top of having this physical injury, I was literally adding insult to injury by telling myself that I was a failure, telling myself, “You can't hack it. You’re not good enough.” Ruminating on these negative outcomes, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nowadays, more and more artists are being open about having to take professional breaks to recoup, mentally or physically. But in the early and mid-2000s, no one was really talking about how constant touring can be so debilitating. I am sure you wonder if things might have turned out differently if you’d been allowed to pace yourself more slowly.

Of course, I’ve thought about all the what-ifs. But I have to have compassion for myself at the same time because I didn't know those things then. I didn't realize the level of demands was going to lead to a breakdown. It's delighting to me to see that we're having this conversation now, just as a starting point to destigmatize people talking about their mental health and prioritizing their mental health. Because yes, in the short run, you might suffer a little bit if you have to postpone a tour and the bottom line gets affected by every extra day off, and people might accuse you of being a diva or being pampered. But at the end of the day, we're human beings. It doesn't matter whether you're Britney or Mariah or the Foo Fighters or the biggest band in the world. You're still a human being that has to get out there and do something with a lot of eyes on you, expecting you to be your best self, and show up and earn that $300 ticket that people paid for. And it’s not just about that show and that tour; it's about a whole career. There are people who burn out in ways worse than me — you see the tragic ends that these things can come to. Some of my heroes are no longer with us. Nobody wants to see that happen. Nobody benefits from that. There's no bottom line anymore when the artist is no longer there. Everyone wants to make a hundred million dollars on a big tour, but at the end of the day, if you're just thinking about the bottom line and you're torturing human beings in the process, you're thinking very shortsightedly.

So, building sustainable careers is really a wonderful outgrowth of the kind of conversations that we're starting to have now and the kind of resources that hopefully will be available to artists. It’s not just about waiting till it gets to the point that it did for me and then trying to find an answer, like, “OK, now let's cancel the tour.” It's preparing people way before that. By the time I was breaking down and I had to stop playing, it was probably too late for me at that point. How was I going to bounce back from that? I was already in PTSD mode. It would be much better to prevent PTSD from ever happening in the first place.

How could it have been prevented?

It would've been easy to have us, as a band, sit down with a therapist or somebody who had some experience with this life and maybe start to prepare us. Maybe we could have had group therapy, like family therapy as a band, to figure out how to support one another and how to be kind and compassionate to one another. Another thing that has changed recently is we're now starting to allow people to speak more vulnerably. And this has historically been particularly a problem for men — being able to speak up when something is not OK inside. We're told to tough it out, to be strong, don't be a wimp or a worse word than that. Even being a guy that was pretty in touch with my feminine side, not a tough guy by nature, I still felt that to a large extent. It was like, “Whatever, I'll get over it, I'll be fine.” And that doesn't help anyone. You might get through a few days of being a tough guy, but you're still breaking down internally.

Besides all this other stuff that was going on with you mentally during the Maroon 5 whirlwind, weren’t you dealing with some body-image issues as well?

Yes, it took me a long time to kind of come to grips with that. When I first thought about putting it in the book, I was like, “That's not so flattering.” And then I was like, “Well then, I definitely need to put it in the book!” I don't know if I would describe myself as having a full-on eating disorder or being anorexic, but it certainly was a factor. It was a big factor. So, maybe it was a disorder.

What happened, exactly?

Well, I was an athletic kid. I have a big frame, broad-shouldered, and if you look at a lot of the guys in rock bands, they look like they're withering away. That's kind of the cool look historically, like if you look at the Stones, the very skinny, very waifish rock star, the “heroin chic” thing. You had the Strokes and you had a lot of the bands in the late ‘90s or early 2000s that had that look. And then the other thing you had at the same time was the boy band era, where you didn't want to look like a man, you wanted to look like a cute, cuddly little boy. And I was none of those things. I think I had a self-consciousness about not fitting into that. I got a lot of feedback [about my body size]. We’d do photo shoots and they'd try to dress me up in certain ways that I just wasn't really comfortable with, and I would get comments like, “You look too healthy. Your posture is too good. Could you slouch over a little bit more?”

I would look at the photos afterwards and I was like, “OK, [then-bassist] Mickey [Madden] looks like a rock star. Adam looks like a skinny pretty-boy. Jesse's got a boyish charm. And here I am, this big monster compared to them.” And so oftentimes I'd wake up on the road and I just wouldn't eat breakfast. Then I didn't want to be full before soundcheck, so I wouldn't have a big lunch. And then I didn't want to be full when we went onstage. I remember going on and playing, having barely eaten, and then eating a big disgusting meal after the show at 2 in the morning at Denny's or something. That was just not a healthy lifestyle. And I was trying to maintain a certain weight — I'm 6’3” and I was like 165 pounds in those days, which is like 20 pounds lighter than I am now. I just wanted to feel very small. I don't know if I was thinking about withering away, but I just was conscious of my size. Yeah, I guess I did have an eating disorder.

All this eventually came to a head in 2006, and the band decided to continue without you. That wasn't a decision made out of nowhere, and they’d given you many chances, but I was surprised when I saw endorsements from your ex-bandmates on your book’s jacket, and that the foreword was actually written by Adam Levine. Obviously you’re on good terms with them still, which is great. But I would not blame you for being at least a little bitter, since they’d literally once told you they would not make a second album without you and then reneged on that promise.

Because of the awareness I've gained [since getting sober], in retrospect I don't blame the guys at all. I can see completely all the things that they went through as well in dealing with what I was going through. They didn't have a roadmap for how to deal with it, and they were just trying to manage this emerging enormous career that we had built and how to get through it — and how to be a good guy and do the right thing, but also not f*** up what we had spent a decade building. Yes, at the time, hearing, “Take as much time as you need, we're not going to make a record without you,” and then they tell me, “Um, we are going to make a record without you” — of course I was angry and bitter when that happened. I think probably when they said [they would keep me in the band no matter what], they were trying just to be supportive and say what they thought I needed to hear at the time. But it probably wasn't even true at that point. They had to know, “Look, if you can't play the drums, we can't make a record with you. We need someone to play the drums.”

But that was too painful of a reality to face. And so you push it down and push it down and live in denial, and you look at other people to blame. I felt that bitterness and displaced anger. In that moment when your bandmates, your brothers, the people that have been your best friends for a decade are telling you, “We can't support you anymore, it's time to move on,” I was trying to find any excuse, any rationalization, any reason why that wouldn't be the case. But inside I knew they were absolutely right. This was not a tenable situation. So, there was never really real bad blood. I did hold a grudge for some time, but even when I was still struggling, I was 10 times more upset with myself than I was with them. I would go to their shows and try to be very supportive and loving. But then I would experience the pangs of jealousy and resentment — like, why them and not me? But I think a lot of that was perpetuated by the addiction, feeling sorry for myself and self-medicating. When I got the alcohol out of the way and I was in recovery, I started growing by leaps and bounds and finding more awareness. Within the first year or two of my sobriety, I went to my first show of theirs sober, and that was a very different experience. I had nothing but gratitude for having been a part of building that, and I was proud of them for continuing to build that career and be where they are now.

What is your relationship like with them now?

We still share that bond — Adam and I, I think, more so than anyone else. We had a relationship, and still do, that is like brothers — that love/hate, push/pull, real competitive brotherly thing. We'll talk and we'll be silly like we're teenagers just goofing around, and then some of that competitive stuff will come up, but then we'll just talk about how grateful we are. We're in a very different place being in our forties now, and have so much to be really proud and grateful about where we're at in our lives. And there's that added element of time, and awareness of having been in a different place. So, it all makes sense to me now.

You seem like you’re in a really good place now. You did get your happy ending.

Yeah. Obviously I would've gotten to do a lot of things that I didn't get to do [if I’d stayed in Maroon 5], and I would probably be a lot richer than I am now! But in the grand scheme of things, I don't know that those things would've been worth it. I think that even if my body somehow had been able to sustain for another however many years, I probably would've felt even more beat down just emotionally, in terms of like, “What am I doing this for?” It might've been good, it might've been bad, but I never would've had the opportunity to learn the lessons that I did and have this opportunity now, which has an added element of service — an altruistic element that makes what I do now much more meaningful on a deeper level. And that's not knocking what we were doing in terms of creating art and entertaining people; that's all very meaningful and purposeful work. But for where I'm at in middle-age at this point, I am thinking in terms of, “What is the legacy of what I'm putting out into the world, beyond just entertaining people? Can I do something that's ultimately going to be helpful to others?” And having a certain platform because of my past, I take that seriously. I look at it as a responsibility and an opportunity to find a new sort of mission.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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