![]() “What the fuck is that?” (Many more such complaints came than would ever make final cut.) Starr’s endurance for it all finally broke on the third day I was there, when, to provoke a dramatic moment whose therapeutic merit I’m unqualified to assess, the producers flew in Starr’s main using buddy, who also happened to be his father. “I mean, I’m sound asleep, I wake up, and there’s a fuckin’ camera on me,” he said at one point. ![]() Starr was probably the most camera-conscious member in that season’s cast and frequently complained about their intrusions. His life story provided a steady supply of one-liners: Here’s a guy who managed to get himself kicked out of Alice in Chains … for drugs a guy who walks around with earphones blasting nothing but Alice in Chains songs a guy who, word is, now plays in an Alice in Chains cover band - “playing for, like, 82 people a show,” a crew member marveled as Starr sat in one screen, seemingly staring right through the camera at the peanut gallery running the show. ![]() In this, the lumbering, ponytailed Mike Starr played like a character from some John Cusack–helmed comedy about aging Gen-Xers, stuck in a grunge time warp. As the crew steered coverage of the unfolding events, they gave the kind of running commentary any sleep-deprived surveillance team does sometime after their 36th hour in front of a screen. I sat with the director and various crew members in a small, dim, gear-packed inpatient bedroom that served as the production’s control center, where a wall-spanning grid of closed-circuit TV monitors carried static shots from different rooms. Drew Pinsky and spent a few days at the Pasadena Recovery Center to observe Celebrity Rehab as it was shooting its third season. In early June of 2009, I had been assigned to write an article on Dr. And I get the sense none of them would have been quite so wounded by indignity as Starr seemed to be when I saw him. Nobody laughed at any of the famous victims of that strangely nineties rock syndrome, heroin addiction, because none of them lived to see the media culture that drafted Mike Starr’s epilogue. Even Alice in Chains singer-songwriter Layne Staley - whose much longer, grislier demise ended with the discovery of his body still upright in a chair, two weeks after his death and six years after his band’s last studio album - got off easier than his former bandmate Starr did. Kurt Cobain died instantly, the world wept, his music was enshrined, and the spotlight moved elsewhere, which was more or less the same trajectory following the overdose deaths of Sublime’s Brad Nowell, Mother Love Bone’s Andrew Wood, Blind Melon’s Shannon Hoon, and other musicians whose fans, friends, and families were left to grieve offstage. If nineties rock has a sadder story than Starr’s it’s hard to find. Drew Pinsky, Celebrity Rehab’s creator, host, and chief medical officer: “Devastating to hear of Mike Starr succumbing to his illness. Mike Starr!! Such a sad day!” “Drugs and alcohol aren’t a joke.” And from Dr. But today, he’s a low, single-note counterpoint to the merry melodies of Charlie Sheen, his passing marked not by candlelight vigils or teary radio-show call-ins, but those cursory, dot-dot-dash micro-eulogies of the multitasker, tweets. Decades ago, Starr would have been a former rock star who died a rock star. While it’s unclear how this particular reality will affect the show’s tenability and ratings, even obituary headlines seemed to recognize the milestone, identifying the deceased as “Celeb Rehab Rocker” or “of Alice in Chains/Celebrity Rehab,” - epithets reflecting Starr’s dual role in public life during his last two years alive. Last Tuesday afternoon, the Celebrity Rehab reality show suffered its first certified death: Mike Starr, Season 3, dead at 44.
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