Rockers, Models And The New Allure Of Heroin

But alternative rock has its roots in the punk movement, not the hippie era. When Nirvana's 1991 album ""Nevermind'' hit No. 1, a range of attitudes and behaviors from the fringe of pop culture suddenly hit the mass market: dressing rebelliously, flouting conventions, screaming real loud, taking drugs if you want to. The most revered bands carry out the message in their lives as well as their songs. Since kids emulate rock stars, they're liable to emulate their drug use. The number of top alternative bands that have been linked to heroin through a member's overdose, arrest, admitted use or recovery is staggering: Nirvana, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins, Everclear, Blind Melon, Skinny Puppy, 7 Year Bitch, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stone Temple Pilots, the Breeders, Alice in Chains, Sublime, Sex Pistols, Porno for Pyros, Depeche Mode. Together these bands have sold more than 60 million albums -- that's a heck of a lot of white, middle-class kids in the heartland. Bob Dole is making drugs a campaign issue. How long is it going to take him to turn on MTV?

The music business, it seems, is already anticipating an attack. Ten years ago cocaine was so widespread that one former label executive reports getting hired after doing a line in the president's office. Today attitudes have changed. Ask executives if there's a heroin problem in the music business, and more than one will answer, ""Absolutely.'' ""It's worse than it's ever been,'' says one record-company vice president. Art Alexakis, singer for Everclear, has been drug-free for 12 years, but he still has to deal with other bands' problems. ""I've walked into my dressing room and had people sitting on my amp, shooting dope,'' he says. ""That was two years ago, when we were still at the opening stage. They wouldn't shoot up in their own dressing room, being the headliner. They'd come over to our place.''

Mike Greene, the head of the National Academy of Recording

Arts & Sciences, which puts together the Grammy Awards, is leading the charge by pushing an outreach program called MusiCares. Last December and again in June, he called together 400 members of the industry for closed-door symposiums to discuss the issue. The idea is for executives, managers and agents to stop looking away when an artist clearly has a drug problem. ""It's a moral question,'' says the label vice president, ""and we don't like to talk about morality and rock and roll. But the f-ing right wing does, and if we don't clean our own house, then we become vulnerable to them.''

This moral question has deeply shaken the music business. Judging from some of the responses to Greene's initiatives, the industry is far from a consensus on how the problem should be handled. Many musicians are suspicious of the executives' motives. ""They don't want their artists taking dope because they won't be able to milk more platinum out of them next season,'' says singer Henry Rollins. Even among executives, bitter factions are emerging. Conspicuously absent from Greene's symposiums were key members of Kurt Cobain's management team, John Silva and Danny Goldberg of Gold Mountain. (Goldberg is now the president of Mercury.) In the wake of Cobain's suicide, former Aerosmith manager Collins, who is closely allied with MusiCares, wrote a save-our-artists editorial in Billboard magazine that implicitly accused Cobain's people of allowing him to die. Neither Silva nor Goldberg will discuss the situation publicly. But Ron Stone, another manager at Gold Mountain, responds angrily. ""I find it the height of hypocrisy that people run around grabbing headlines about how they're going to do all these things,'' he says. ""The reality is, none of the record companies are going to let go of a platinum artist because they're on drugs. And if they would take a position saying "We don't want to do business with you,' then there's 20 other record companies that would do it in a second.''

At the heart of this conflict is anguish and guilt over Cobain. Two and a half years later, emotions remain raw over his loss. Cobain was like the star pupil at a high school full of promising young talent. He was a brilliant musician and a nice person. No matter how many Pearl Jams, Stone Temple Pilots and Bushes reach the top 10, he can't be replaced, and his decision to commit suicide has left a terrible pall over the industry. ""We constantly tried to get him help,'' says Stone. ""The truth is, when he sobered up, when he made a serious attempt to get his life in order, he took a real good look at his life and he killed himself.''