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Billie Joe Armstrong Opens Up About Substance Abuse

Green Day frontman gives his only interview about rehab and his road back

February 26, 2013 6:00 PM ET
Billie Joe Armstrong cover 1178
Billie Joe Amstrong on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Danny Clinch

In an exclusive interview in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone, Billie Joe Armstrong opens up about his years of alcohol and prescription drug abuse and his road back from his onstage meltdown at the iHeartRadio festival in Las Vegas last September.

Photos: Green Day Through the Years

"I couldn't predict where I was going to end up at the end of the night," he tells Rolling Stone senior writer David Fricke. "I'd wake up in a strange house on a couch. I wouldn't remember how. It was a complete blackout." He finally confronted his problem after the Vegas radio festival, where the frontman smashed his guitar onstage and shouted, "I'm not fucking Justin Bieber, you motherfuckers." Armstrong's recovery sidetracked promotion of Green Day's album trilogy ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tré!, and the group was forced to postpone tour dates.

"I remember tiny things," Armstrong says of the Vegas incident. "The next morning, I woke up. I asked [my wife] Adrienne, 'How bad was it?' She said, 'It's bad.' I called my manager. He said, 'You're getting on a plane, going back to Oakland and going into rehab immediately.'"

Read the full story in the new issue of Rolling Stone, on stands this Friday.

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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