Few 78-year-olds in rock and roll have as much going on as Michael Des Barres. But before running down the current résumé – and we’ll get there – it helps to understand where he comes from. And we’re not even talking about the six-century-old French title he carries as the 26th Marquis Des Barres. That’s besides the point. What matters more is that – raconteur streak a forest wide – Des Barres has done the bulk of his life’s work sober, beginning at a time when that was the least fashionable thing a rock musician could be.
Yet, somehow, he still managed to be the coolest guy in the room.
It started with acting. Des Barres was part of the supporting cast in the 1967 classic To Sir, with Love, starring Sidney Poitier. Music followed: a stint fronting glam outfit Silverhead in the early ’70s, then Detective, one of the few acts signed to Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song Records. And just as the ’80s dawned, he got sober.
Which makes what happened next even more improbable.
Instead of leaning on a bottle to steady himself in front of nearly two billion people at Live Aid, Des Barres walked onstage stone sober as the brand-new singer of The Power Station, replacing Robert Palmer mere weeks earlier. He didn’t use sobriety as a shield. He wielded it. Soon after, he jumped lanes again, returning to acting as Murdoc, the recurring nemesis on the hit series MacGyver.
Not only did he reject the drugged-out mythology of the decade, but he pushed back on it. Des Barres co-founded Rock Against Drugs (RAD), recruiting a who’s who – from Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley to Jon Bon Jovi, Lou Reed, and Ronnie James Dio – in an effort to warn young fans about the dangers of substance abuse. The campaign may have raised eyebrows in an era defined by white-line fever and Jack Daniels bravado, and it’ll always be marked as a genuine outlier of the time.
Fittingly, Des Barres himself remains an aberration. Not just in the rearview, but today.
Weekdays, he hosts “The Michael Des Barres Program” on SiriusXM’s Little Steven’s Underground Garage, spinning rock, blues, and soul with the authority of someone who’s lived it. He recently dropped a new single, “Kiss or Kill Me,” collaborating with punk guitarist Loren Molinare and still boasting the kind of swagger most modern frontmen would sell their souls to borrow.
He’s also revisiting the past. Org Music has reissued Detective’s It Takes One to Know One, mastered from the original tapes and complete with updated artwork and a previously unreleased hidden track, while Rhino has released a 40th anniversary edition of The Power Station’s self-titled debut. Though he’s absent from the studio album on the latter, Des Barres dominates the bonus material, including the 1985 Live Aid performance and a full Philadelphia Spectrum concert recorded just weeks later.
Recently, on New Year’s Day, The Sober Curator sat down with Des Barres to talk about getting sober when sobriety wasn’t cool, how he views Rock Against Drugs now, and why Sidney Poitier became the closest thing he ever had to a father.
Michael Christopher: Does it ever get old waking up on New Year’s Day and not being hungover?
Michael Des Barres: [laughs] I was born hungover. What are you talking about? Liquor was almost like eyeliner. You had to do it. You understand me? And unfortunately, I got into it, and it was pathetic because when you really think about it, it’s a growing procedure.
First and foremost, rock and roll is based on the understanding of “Jumping Jack Daniels,” essentially. So, “We’re all on heroin, and we’re all doing Jack Daniels, and aren’t we cute? And we weigh 110 pounds and wear tight trousers and a little bit of lipstick.” And it’s just…robotic. The antithesis of that is music. So many people that have been captured by chemicals have disappeared. And so that kind of percentage, I woke up one day, and I thought, “Well, that’s not the side of the coin I want to be on.” And I stopped.
Do you know your sober date?
Oh, yes. June 1st, 1981.
Was that your first time, or did you have a lot of false starts?
False starts. I’ve never done a false start in my life.
Did one thing lead to the decision, or did you have enough? That whole “sick and tired of being sick and tired?”
Bored. Bored at falling over. It’s an interesting vibe because 1981 is a very significant year. The ’80s were a very significant [period] for me. And for some reason, I don’t know whether it’s a deification or whether it’s by accident, but something struck me deeply that I gotta stop. And it wasn’t because I just shot someone, or I was married to three people, or whatever. It was like, “You’re an idiot. This is foolish.”
I read so many books, and I’ve been to these boarding schools and so on and so forth, and I’ve been very intellectualized about it. And of course, even during that era of the great writers in the 18th century, 19th century writers, they were all alcoholics. But they were the rockstars of that century. And I thought, “What am I doing? I’m copying these people.” Alcohol then became as important as velvet trousers. Unfortunately, there’s no Velvet Trousers Anonymous. [laughs] So there’s a problem. But I thought it was uncool and I’d done so many uncool things, and I’d hurt people’s feelings, and I’d been married three times, and it was just stupid “Jumping Jack Daniels.” Silly. I really thought it was childlike.
Really? Childlike?
Yes. I felt it was for children. But because of Keith, the brilliance of Keith Richards, who could deal with it and loved it, and that’s him. “But that’s not you, buddy. You’re from Dakota, or wherever you’re from, you’re not Keith Richards.” But I think that alcoholism and drug addiction were also as important as what they were going to wear that night in some club. The same principle. “I have to be a junkie in order to be a rockstar,” simply put.
But this is the advent of the ‘80s when you got sober. We’re talking about a decade that might best be defined by the amount of cocaine that was ingested throughout those 10 years. How did you avoid all of that?
Because I’ve always been a loner. I never knew my parents. I’ve lived individually, and I’ve never been one of a crowd. I like a crowd. When we’re playing to a crowd, that’s something else, but I’ve never been part of a tribe or a team or “come on lads, let’s do it again.” I never felt like that. And there was a certain amount of egoism there – narcissism in a way – was I saw these people stumbling around and putting on weight and so on. And I almost was laughing at them from the inside.
And this might sound horrible, but I could see the childish idiocy of when a great guitar player right there to my left does a wonderful show for an hour and a half. An hour and a half after the end of the show, he’s an idiot. So, then I had a problem because I loved the work, and yet it was affecting the player who was drinking a lot, which was everyone. I mean, the early ‘80s was the decade of drugs. I’d been doing coke and hashish for many years before that, and it changed people, so you didn’t know who to trust.
Was there ever any part of you that – and I’m thinking about the documentary where your dad had just kind of bottomed out – was there any part of you that was like, “I don’t want to continue damaging the legacy of our name. I want to be the one who stops this and doesn’t do what my dad did.”
Oh God, no. I didn’t know the guy. And I didn’t know my mother. I’ve never really thought of the marquis thing. In fact, I’m the opposite of aristocracy…[laughs] which is a great title for something. I just wanted to show off. I was born an exhibitionist, but that’s sort of glib, isn’t it? What I mean to say is I wanted to sing, and I wanted to act, and I wanted to play guitar, and I wanted to create stuff. I guess I wanted to de-create what I was, which was a marquis with a title. Individualism became very important.
Well, that’s interesting because individualism was the antithesis of what that “Jumping Jack Daniels” was all about, pulling in the audience. The rock stars of the day are holding the bottle, doing the whole David Lee Roth thing, swigging from the bottle of Jack Daniels.
David Lee Roth is the child of the people I’m talking about. A photograph of the real thing. God bless him, but he’s, to me, a comic. He’s not a rock and roll singer.
But were you ever worried about keeping up the appearances of being that rockstar with the bottle of Jack in hand, the always partying image?
No, because…I left school very early.
So acting came first?
I was meant to go to 18, and then they would throw me out. I thought, “What can I do? ” So, I ran away at 16, and I went to work at the Royal Theatre in London for props. The guy that was working with me, he said, “Listen, I’m going for an interview, an audition.” “I said, “Can I come with you? ” And that’s how it started. And I got the gig. And what happens? To Sir with Love. Imagine you’re 17, 18 years old, and Sean Connery and Sidney Poitier are standing there, and you’re going, “This is a dream. This can’t be true.” And it was true. And it was true for three months.
And I spent a lot of time with [Poitier]. He was very paternal. I’ve never seen anybody with his shoulders back and his head held high, so incredibly iconically heroic suddenly. [I thought] “My God, this guy’s got it sussed.” Plus, the guy’s a Black guy. He was the biggest star in the world. I mean, he was so amazing. We all absolutely adored him. And I knew him until he died. When I came to L.A. to rock and roll and married Miss Pamela and all of that, I still saw him. I still would go to lunch with him over the years, and he got older. I got older. And it was almost my dad, really. With love, man.
Do you think what drew you to Sidney Poitier is you were looking, maybe subconsciously, for a father figure, and this person who’s so heroic in appearance is there, and he’s welcoming you into his life?
Yes. Exactly what you’ve just said is exactly what I felt. At last, I’ve got somebody I can follow. At last, I’ve got somebody’s rules that I can believe in. And what I believe in is: do it. I don’t care how good you are, do it. So few people say, “Nah, I can’t do that. ” You can’t say that. And that was the first lesson learned.
Did your circle of friends change at all when you got sober?
To be perfectly candid with you, I’ve never had really great friends that I’ve depended on over the years. Distrust is a very devilish vibe. I didn’t trust a soul for many years. I just made it happen in the way that I wanted to make it happen. And am I Rod Stewart? No. Have I enjoyed it? Absolutely. I’ve done what I wanted to do. Now, what could be better than that? Is that being number one or is that enjoying music and acting and showing off? That’s not something that you can steal.
I guess it just keeps going back to that individualism, and maybe you kept people at arm’s length at the end of the day.
Yes, but not their legs. [laughs]
You call yourself an individualist, but you’ve had partners over the years. Could you imagine life with a partner who wasn’t sober?
No. No. I’ve only worked with people who can concentrate on the work. And also, I found that alcoholism, too, is that you hate yourself enough to lie, and alcohol induces that formula.
There’s so much self-loathing that it brings too.
Nicely. So, I want to be the opposite of that.
At the time, was there a worry that your creativity might be stymied by sobriety? And a lot of people say, “I need the drink to be creative. I need to do drugs.”
That’s a fantastic question. That’s a wonderful question. The answer is: “Are you fucking kidding me?” I’m going to take Jack Daniels over Little Richard? I mean, I get drunk on Otis Redding. I don’t get drunk on fucking whiskey, baby, you know? That’s for suckers.
Do you remember the first time that you did a show sober, or were you not a big drinker going on stage?
No, I wasn’t a big drinker going on stage. A little bit of coke – I did get hung up on that and got out there. But I was young enough to get to go, “Wait a minute…” because it affects your throat. And I was way too narcissistic to do something stupid. Narcissism is a drug too, [laughs], but it’s a hell of a lot better than drinking Jack Daniels. So, I want to go out there and be fantastic and have them scream and enjoy themselves.
And so, I was very careful, even though when I was drinking, and I was drinking like crazy, and I was drinking Southern Comfort too, which was again, almost a screenplay of what alcohol shall I become an alcoholic with. Janis Joplin and Keith and whoever else… I thought, “Oh, well, that’s the same as wearing tight trousers, isn’t it?” Unfortunately, I became an alcoholic. I didn’t know I was going to become an alcoholic.
Right. You just thought it was part of the gig. It was another accoutrement.
Precisely. Oui.
You only had two weeks to practice Power Station songs before –
Three days. Three days.
And you’ve got to be in front of not only the thousands of people at JFK Stadium in Philly, but the billions watching around the world. How do you cope with that anxiety or any residual stage fright?
Fuck ‘em. I don’t have anything else to say about it. Everybody says, “Oh, the world was watching.” I go, “Yeah, and I was counting.” Because I’m in a band with guys I don’t know. And I was down with DJ in Miami – Don Johnson, my dear friend, the greatest guy in the world, so funny – and I was hanging out with him, and I got the phone call saying, “Come to New York to meet with John Taylor and Tony Thompson.” I thought, “What’s that? That’s Power Station.” Suddenly, they didn’t have Robert Palmer. Robert Palmer did not want to do it because he had to do a solo album, and he’s a suit and tie, and he’s the Frank Sinatra of rock and roll. He’s not like Jagger or Iggy or whatever. And then I was flown to New York.
You knew it was the Power Station.
Yeah. What am I going to do? Kiss their ass, ask for their autograph? I mean, you know what I mean?
We had three days before Live Aid or whatever it was, a week. I don’t know. It wasn’t two weeks. And it was 24 songs, man. And it ended up 24 songs because they did eight of mine that I wrote on the road because all they had were six songs. That’s all they had. Six songs. We did a lot of covers and stuff, and I wrote some for them. And I know this sounds ridiculous, but that’s what happened. And rock and roll. There we go. It was amazing. And Live Aid was the second gig.
Unbelievable.
Yeah. I mean, the first gig was great. It was like you’re trying it out, and it was like two or 3,000 people there, that’s all, in New York City. And we did it, and it was fantastic. And so I was off and running and got a lot of shit from a lot of people in the front there going, “Fuck off! Robert Palmer! Schmuck! Get out of here!” [puts up his middle finger] Can I show you my check? And I was very mean to those people. Why? Because they needed to hear it.
I want to ask you about Rock Against Drugs. Looking back on it now, how do you view the campaign?
We did a good job. Because what I did was when I came up with the RAD, I went immediately to MTV, and I said… I got Jon Bon Jovi, and I got Jonesy [Steve Jones from Sex Pistols].
Jonesy was one of the most powerful ones.
His was the most powerful. Why? Because it was the truth. The rest were going, “And I will never, ever, ever do cocaine again. Excuse me.” [makes like he’s bending over to do a line] Shit. So, Jonesy goes in there and [says]: “Drugs suck.” And it was his whole thing. And that’s why it worked.
And we went to Washington, D.C., me, Jonesy, and Sheena Easton of all people. Because drugs became as important as the music to kids, to young people, it was almost de rigueur. You had to do it in order to be an icon. And that’s the stupidest thing ever. You’ll make one album, and that’ll be that. And that happened to a lot of people. But it was a fascinating and fun thing to do.
If you had been, say, 15, 20 years younger, would a RAD program have done anything for you. Let’s say, if Keith [Richards] had done a commercial.
Of course, because when you’re that young, you want to be Mick Jagger. You want to be Rod Stewart. You want to be all of the guys from the ’80s and the ’90s, and you want to be George Michael – kind of. And all of that bollocks, you want to be that. You want to be what they’re putting out. It’s the same as musicality. It’s the idea of a rock and roll guy.
And would I have listened to it? No. You have to find it yourself, you see. And a lot of it for me was… I started to look in a different way, and it was absolutely the vibe of, “I don’t want to look like that. I don’t want to feel like that. I don’t want to do that. It’s ugly, and it’s uncool.” But nobody could teach me to do it. I had to learn.
Was there ever a period, maybe in the first couple years after you stopped drinking, you stopped doing drugs, that you missed it, that you’d see other people and be like, “Ah, really miss that and wish I was part of that right now.”
“Good God, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. I’ve never ever in my life ever looked at some and said, “I shouldn’t have done that. Oh, maybe I should be having a big laugh.” It’s hard for me to describe. I mean, I’m not a member of any band, really, or any group of people. It’s a different vibe. It’s very difficult to explain. I spend most of my time reading and playing these guitars and doing my shows every day on the radio and extolling the virtues, the wonders of different artists. That was really interesting because it took away the idea that it’s all about you. It’s hard to describe, but DJing with Stevie Van Zandt at the helm for the last 12 years, every day, all week, has changed my life. Because now I’m extoling the virtues of somebody else, whereas I’ve been selling myself since I was 14 – in every single way you can think about, by the way.
What do you think your career would’ve been like if you hadn’t gotten sober?
Dead. Because if I did anything, I did it all the way.
Whenever you see people who have struggled a lot, a lot with staying sober, getting sober, your friends that have… I mean, Jonesy, he’s talked about his relapse. Do you ever feel lucky that you didn’t have to deal with that?
No such thing. No such thing as luck. No, that’s for kids. You either do it or you don’t. You make the decisions. If you make the decision, you’ll probably stick with it. If you pretend and you don’t really embrace the idea that drugs and alcohol is not for you, you’ll keep using it.
What do you think has led to the trendiness of sobriety now?
I don’t think about that. You can’t think about that. Why would you even want to know? Liars. They’re probably knocking down a martini every other day. I don’t care about people that lie. Yeah. It’s not something to talk about. You do it, or you don’t.
“Sober curious” is a big buzzword. Some people are “California sober,” where they still ingest THC, whether it’s through a joint or a gummy or whatever. To you, what is sober?
[Laughs] I can’t even believe people, all of that. The point of life is to discover who you are, who you really are, and to love and care for those around you, and be kind, and be cool, and be courageous. These are things you can’t learn. No book, no sponsor, no friend can get it through to you. It comes to you. It’s a very meditative thing.
I met a very old man when I was going to the first get-togethers of AA. And this was… Rip Van Winkle meets Plato. The way he carried himself and the way he talked about himself and what he’d been through, and that he woke up in the morning and walked with his dog. And it was also simplistic and beautiful. And I’m wearing black leather jeans, a fucking red trilby hat, and eye makeup. And I go, “Wait a minute. I got to listen to him.” And he became my sponsor, which is the key of AA. So he’s 82 years old… and he’s gone now. Just be kind and cool and courageous, and you’ll be okay. And he taught me those three words, and I’ve never stopped using them. I say it every day on my show when I say goodbye.
Michael Des Barres can be heard on Little Steven’s Underground Garage weekdays on SiriusXM’s Channel 21. His new single, “Kiss or Kill Me,” is available now. For more information, visit his official website.
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Who is Michael Des Barres?
Michael Des Barres is an English actor, rock musician, and radio host whose career spans more than six decades. He appeared in the 1967 film To Sir, with Love alongside Sidney Poitier, fronted the bands Silverhead and Detective, and later became the lead singer of The Power Station. He has also hosted “The Michael Des Barres Program” on SiriusXM for over a decade. Des Barres has been sober since June 1, 1981.
When did Michael Des Barres get sober?
Michael Des Barres got sober on June 1, 1981. He has maintained his sobriety for over four decades, navigating the height of 1980s rock culture without relying on drugs or alcohol.
How did Michael Des Barres handle performing at Live Aid sober?
Des Barres joined The Power Station just days before their performance at Live Aid in 1985, replacing Robert Palmer. With only days to rehearse, he performed in front of thousands at JFK Stadium and billions watching worldwide — completely sober — proving that rock star charisma doesn’t require chemical enhancement.
What was Rock Against Drugs (RAD)?
Rock Against Drugs (RAD) was an anti-drug campaign co-founded by Michael Des Barres during the height of 1980s cocaine culture. The initiative featured artists including Jon Bon Jovi, Gene Simmons, and Steve Jones. RAD challenged the normalization of substance abuse in rock music and encouraged young fans to rethink the connection between drugs and stardom.
What does Michael Des Barres believe about creativity and sobriety?
Des Barres rejects the myth that artists need drugs or alcohol to be creative. In his view, true creativity comes from discipline, individuality, and commitment to the craft — not from substances. He has often stated that music itself is intoxicating enough.
What role did Sidney Poitier play in Michael Des Barres’ life?
While working on To Sir, with Love, Des Barres formed a lasting bond with Sidney Poitier, whom he describes as a paternal influence. Poitier became a model of dignity, discipline, and integrity during Des Barres’ formative years.
