Writer and musician John Albert did not have a standard trajectory to literary success—in fact he says he became a writer by accident when he submitted information about his amateur baseball team, which was made up of a slew of misfit former addicts and rebel rousers, to LA Weekly. That information became a story, that story became a cover story and that cover story became Albert’s widely praised bookWrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates. This wasn’t Albert’s first foray into the public eye: he co-founded the cross-dressing band Christian Death and was the drummer in Bad Religion. Now sober over three decades, the husband and father works for a record company when he’s not handling the movie offers Wrecking Crew regularly receives (it’s been optioned more than four times by various people, including the late Philip Seymour Hoffman). In this episode, we discuss having sex with borderline schizophrenics in rehab, the essay on Sober House he wrote for my reality TV anthology and being on methadone at the college where your dad teaches, among other topics.
Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or listen to it on Soundcloud or Stitcher. Find John Albert on the Simon & Schuster site and see his archive of LA Weekly pieces here. John Albert photo courtesy of John Albert.
This website or its third party tools use cookies, which are necessary to its functioning and required to achieve the purposes illustrated in the cookie policy. By tapping on "I accept" you agree to the use of cookies.
