"Learning about all those different things psychologically - about grief and my own addictions and problems and stuff like that, and really getting an education on it, I think it was part of the process of it, learning about it and trying to lick it"
About this Quote
Sambora talks like a guy who’s spent years narrating his life through guitar solos and suddenly has to narrate it through a therapist’s vocabulary. The sentence lurches and loops - “and stuff like that,” “part of the process,” “learning about it” - because the subject is messy: grief, addiction, “problems” that resist tidy rock-star mythmaking. That looseness is the point. He’s not pitching redemption as a clean arc; he’s describing recovery as an awkward apprenticeship, where the first skill you learn is how little you understand your own mind.
The key move is his insistence on “education.” For a musician whose public identity is built on instinct, swagger, and performance, framing healing as study subtly demystifies it. He’s rejecting the romantic idea that you either conquer demons through willpower or you don’t. Instead, he frames self-destruction as something with mechanisms: triggers, coping patterns, grief responses. Naming those mechanisms doesn’t “cure” them, but it gives him leverage - a manual for the parts of himself that used to run on autopilot.
Then there’s that phrase “trying to lick it,” an old-school, almost locker-room idiom that carries pride and embarrassment at once. It signals a generational masculinity still reaching for toughness, even while admitting vulnerability. In the late-20th-century rock context - where excess was both brand and cover story - Sambora’s candor reads less like confession than course correction: reframing survival not as legend, but as work.
The key move is his insistence on “education.” For a musician whose public identity is built on instinct, swagger, and performance, framing healing as study subtly demystifies it. He’s rejecting the romantic idea that you either conquer demons through willpower or you don’t. Instead, he frames self-destruction as something with mechanisms: triggers, coping patterns, grief responses. Naming those mechanisms doesn’t “cure” them, but it gives him leverage - a manual for the parts of himself that used to run on autopilot.
Then there’s that phrase “trying to lick it,” an old-school, almost locker-room idiom that carries pride and embarrassment at once. It signals a generational masculinity still reaching for toughness, even while admitting vulnerability. In the late-20th-century rock context - where excess was both brand and cover story - Sambora’s candor reads less like confession than course correction: reframing survival not as legend, but as work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mental Health |
|---|
More Quotes by Richie
Add to List
