Ryan Dusick ’01
There are books that we read for pure enjoyment, others that we read for the historical knowledge, still others we read because they illuminate the human condition and potentially help us to become better people. Rarely does a book come along that encompasses all of these aspects of life and learning. Ryan Dusick’s “Harder to Breathe: A Memoir of Making Maroon 5, Losing It All, and Finding Recovery” is one such work.
Dusick was drummer, percussionist and backing vocalist of “Kara’s Flowers,” the high school garage band that he founded in 1994 along with schoolmates Adam Levine and Mickey Madden, and friend, Jesse Carmichael. In 2000, they performed at UCLA’s Spring Sing, and in 2001, the band morphed into Maroon 5. They released their first album, “Songs About Jane,” which contained hit singles "Harder to Breathe", "This Love" and "She Will Be Loved."
In his own words, Dusick takes us on an introspective journey on how it all began and life after Maroon 5.
Signs
I was a shy kid growing up, kind of a momma’s boy, and I had been sort of a big fish in a small pond in a public elementary school — because I was a very high-achieving kid and had a close-knit group of friends that was very centered around the parents and the PTA organizing things for us — just a very sheltered sort of existence, where everything seemed to go right for me up until a certain point in life.
In high school I experienced some failures and some disappointments, some feelings of inadequacy and insecurities — and the shyness became a bigger factor because I just really didn’t fit in at school. I don’t know what caused what but somewhere along the line I just felt very alienated, I felt disconnected from my surroundings and very self-conscious within my body — feeling symptoms that now I can relate to as anxiety, but I didn’t call it that then. The one thing I really connected to was the grunge music of the early ʼ90s. I really related to Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains and all that music, which was very heavy and very dark.
So that was obviously an indicator of what was going on inside — there was definitely a darkness that came out in my adolescence. But then the band was kind of the thing that became my outlet. Bangin’ on the drums was freedom to me as a teenager; it was expression and it was fun and it was cathartic.
I quit baseball in high school after being a really good pitcher in little league and up through middle school; on the varsity team I really fizzled out with this injury. My pitching injury never bothered me when I was playing the drums as a kid. The first time that it became an issue for me was when we were on tour in ’97. Playing the drums had a different meaning than it had before because now we had a record out that we were promoting. We were on stage and we had to be at our best at all times, as opposed to just having fun. I just remember drumming seeming more difficult than it had before — feeling more tense when I was doing it. I had always had a tendency towards perfectionism and sort of obsessive compulsiveness, and for the first time, those things started working their way into my drumming and my performance. I never related to the idea of stage fright — I wasn’t scared of going on stage or scared of the crowd, but I was just putting more and more pressure on myself to perform.
False Start / Restart
I was really fortunate in my experience at UCLA that I kind of got to do a do-over, because I went to UCLA right out of high school and at that point in my life, I was burned out on academics and in a band that was working on our first major record deal. So starting college at that moment in my life, it was hard for me to be really committed to the process and to be really present.
Classes and my social life at school were kind of secondary. I hadn’t declared a major yet and by the time I was in my second year, we were making our first album on Warner Bros. What had been a little bit of hesitant engagement became not really showing up at all and then dropping my classes. In my thinking, I was leaving to go on tour to become a rock star and leaving college behind completely.
Probably one of the best life lessons I could have received at that moment in my life was that the album failed miserably. We came home after about six months of touring with our tail between our legs. I was kind of in my first little moment of identity crisis and crossroads in life — where am I going from here? Is the band going to keep going? What am I going to do if the band doesn’t keep going?
I decided to go back to UCLA. I wanted to declare a major and make that a challenge and a goal for myself — to get my degree as a backup plan. But more than that, I just wanted something for myself that was separate from the band and separate from music, that I could invest myself in. I think I had been a little bit [irritable] until that point in life — even on tour. I was homesick most of the time and I had a small group of friends and a girlfriend and I didn’t really like branching out from there. So going back to UCLA in ’98-’99 was kind of like a renaissance in my life. I decided to take a different attitude, to really invest myself in college life and be open to new opportunities — and it was wonderful.
I declared as an English major, started going [to class] and I really committed to it. I don’t know how I fit in everything that was going on in my life at the time, because I was living in Westwood – six of us in a three-bedroom apartment – and the social life was outstanding. There was constant energy and things going on, meeting new people, and then really committing myself to the English program, which was a lot of work. I think, more than anything, my undergrad degree at UCLA gave me the tools of critical thinking; how to kind of organize my thoughts and present them in a persuasive way. That helped me in grad school and helped me in writing the book. I'm indebted to my time at UCLA for that a lot.
Then the band had a renaissance in its life, and that’s when we transitioned into becoming Maroon 5. All of that happened between 1999 and 2002 when the album “Songs About Jane” came out. Luckily, I got my English degree in 2001, but that was sort of the end of a really magical period of my life when everything was firing on all cylinders and it was really fulfilling for me. Then the next phase started, which was a whole other ballgame.
Surreal
From 2002 to 2005, the internal pressure I had been putting on myself was ramping up and now the external pressure was ramping up. We had an album that was starting to take off, the demands on us were getting greater and greater day in and day out. For three years we toured nonstop, played on all kinds of stages, live television and award shows, and with other artists. With all of that going on, I just started to feel imposter syndrome because I was this guy who had been a self-taught drummer, a garage rocker. And now we're playing with guys who were Juilliard-trained or Berklee School of Music-trained, top notch jazz and R&B and funk and pop virtuosos.
It was a weird time for me. I became a drummer in the era of grunge, and then all of a sudden, in the early 2000s when we became Maroon 5, we were making a record in a more digital way and then going on tour and playing with pop bands. I had to transition from being a garage band drummer to being a pop star.
I had physical problems playing the drums and it started with pain in my shoulder, which I connected with the pitching injury I suffered in high school. At the time I went down with my injuries and was unable to play the drums, the story that was given to the public was that I had an old pitching injury, which was a joint issue that became a nerve issue and that’s why I left the band. My understanding of it has evolved. I knew at the time that there was more going on than just that — I didn’t really have the vocabulary to describe what was going on; there wasn’t an awareness or any outlet to discuss that. I had a feeling overall of being defective, like my body and my mind were not capable of maintaining what we were doing.
Impending Doom
The intersection of that internal pressure with the external pressure started to build up right at a moment in my life when I was starting to have pain in my shoulder again. I felt this tightness and this overwhelming feeling of perfection and needing everything to be just so. It just felt like it was getting harder and harder to execute it the way that I wanted to or the way that I could. It was degrading. I was in pain. I was feeling it physically in terms of my coordination suffering, but I also just felt like my entire constitution was breaking down, like there was this impending sense of doom, like I'm barely hanging on here and there's no end in sight and there's no way this is going to end but really bad for me. That built up over time. It wasn't something that happened one day or after one show. It was something that happened over a matter of a few years until I hit a wall. “Nervous breakdown” is not a clinical term, but it's a good phrase to describe what happened. I thought it was nerve damage. Now I understand it more as trauma.
At the time I wasn't really given a lot of helpful advice. I was given a lot of medication which didn't seem to help. I started self-medicating more, which for me was alcohol. And in a matter of a year and a half of trying to come back from my injuries, it got worse. It got to the point where my nervous system literally couldn't coordinate playing the drums anymore. So when it was time to make another album, I was forced to walk away from the band and go down a really dark path in terms of the loss of that identity, the feeling of being a failure. My mindset had shifted from being on top of the world to now feeling like I had lost that. I had to go through a grieving process.
The Impossible
There was depression and there was anger. And my drinking was really unmanageable at that point. I was in a crisis and it took me about a decade to work through all that and finally reach a point where I had gotten sick and tired of being sick and tired. I realized I was able to find a place of acceptance, which is both the end of a grieving process and the beginning of recovery from alcoholism. Step one is acceptance.
It was 2016 and I was ready to have closure on that chapter, both the previous chapter of the band and the chapter of alcoholism. I began a new chapter of recovery, which has been six and a half years of feeling more fulfilled in life. If it's possible to have a life that's more fulfilling than Grammy Awards and millions of records sold, I'm living it now. I went back to school and became a therapist. I got a masters in clinical psychology; I'm an AMFT (Associate Marriage and Family Therapist). While I was in grad school, I wrote a book about my whole journey of mental health and the story of the early years of the band, which culminates with this story of recovery.
I quoted Vin Scully in my book. I set it up in the first chapter during the ʼ88 World Series where there was that famous call when Gibson hits the home run and Vin pauses - he lets Gibson round the bases and lets us hear the crowd. And then he says, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.” So I believed anything was possible, of course, because of that. It inspired me.
At the end of the book, when I talk about my recovery in the last few chapters and I'm celebrating my first year of sobriety - my dad and my family and a few other people came to watch me speak in my AA meeting and take “my first cake”. They call it a sober birthday, so you take a cake every year when you have another year of sobriety. I just thought it was apropos at that moment to quote Vin Scully again, “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.” Just the inspiration from that reflected the innocence of youth.
Purpose
I wrote the book for two reasons. One is because it was sort of the ultimate closure for me. It was the last step in a few years of therapy, kind of a narrative therapy to rewrite the story of my life in a way that was going to be more useful for me moving forward: finding the meaning in the suffering, finding purpose in overcoming it, but also being of service to others. To write my story in a way that if they can relate to anything I went through, not necessarily being in a band or playing an instrument, but the feelings, the perfectionism, the anxiety, the depression, the pressure, the imposter syndrome, all that stuff, that's very common. It's not just people in a pop band that experience those things. Maybe others will see themselves as well through my journey of recovery and find some hope in that.
That's the purpose of the book. It fits very nicely into where I'm at in my life right now. I’m in the middle of this new journey, wanting to help others as a therapist, but also as an advocate. It feels good to put something out into the world that I think could be helpful to people. It's really fulfilling. Entertaining people is fulfilling; it's definitely a lot of fun and I don't make light of it, just people being able to go to a concert for two hours and forget their worries and dance and sing is a wonderful service to provide people. But helping people with their mental health or inspiring them in their recovery — there's another level of service in that. So I'm enjoying it.
For a more in-depth understanding of the Dusick’s journey, pick up a copy of his book, “Harder to Breathe: A Memoir of Making Maroon 5, Losing It All, and Finding Recovery.” He also recently participated in a virtual alumni panel on the topic “Navigating a Mid-Career Pivot” which is available on video.