What is the title of his new memoir Tell it like it is: my story might suggest, Aaron Neville holds nothing back.
The five-time Grammy winner and Neville Brothers frontman — best known for his silky R&B classics like “Tell It Like It Is” and multiple hit duets, including “Don’t Know Much” with Linda Ronstadt — has survived a tough life as his tenor is smooth. From an early stint in prison for stealing a car to a decades-long battle with heroin addiction, Neville fell to his knees time and time again before faith and love pulled him through.
In this week’s issue of PEOPLE magazine, the 82-year-old New Orleans native shares an exclusive excerpt from his riveting book, out Sept. 5, revealing when and how his devastating addiction to heroin began.
“For my sixteenth birthday, I gave myself a gift that lasted my whole life. I made a tattoo on my face,” he writes about his ink signature. “My schoolmate came over, we sat on the back steps of my parents, he tied two matchsticks together and put a tattoo on my cheek. It’s a dagger. Some people see it as a cross, and it was one thought away from a skull and crossbones. Don’t ask me why I did it. I guess stupidity was in place at that age.”
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It was at the same age that he decided to experiment with heroin. Neville writes: “I’ve heard people talk about it as far back as Calliope [housing projects, where he grew up]. And I knew a lot of other people who did it. They seemed to be having a good time with it. I wanted to do that too.”
For the young, mischievous musician, nothing could stop him. “I was playing and making money, so I had some money to make,” Neville writes. “I was a curious child, always looking for the next feeling, the next experience, the next adventure. To me, heroin was just another thing like that.”
Neville, who tried the dangerous drug while at a friend’s house, writes that the lasting effect was immediate: “The first time you take heroin, your brain is hooked and wants it, even if your body doesn’t crave it yet. It’s a kind of curiosity, and then it turns into a longing that you shake off on the weekend, and then before you know it, you’re in the game, running around looking for her.”
His addiction took him to dark places, including a basement boiler room in New York where he recalls passing out drug paraphernalia to others while praying, “Dear God, please get me out of here.”
Aaron Neville in 1977, before he broke his heroin addiction.
Courtesy of Aaron Neville
It would be years before he decided to enter rehab in the 80s, after learning that he and his brothers had landed a promising new record deal.
“I was really tired from running,” writes the star. “I drew myself on a cross with syringes as nails. It was slowly killing me. I was ready to kick forever. I was excited and scared. I knew what mainlining did to me. I knew what withdrawal felt like. But to completely give up drugs – that was a new venture. I was 40 years old and hadn’t been clean since high school.”
After that first withdrawal, Neville says he never touched heroin again, though he would have a brief bout with prescription opioid abuse many years later. Now sober, healthy and living happily on the farm he shares with wife Sarah A. Friedman, 54, the star tells PEOPLE it’s “time” to talk about his life and his darkest days. “I didn’t want someone else to write it,” he adds. “I’ve been there. I know.”
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Tell It Like It Is by Aaron Neville.
Read more about Aaron Neville’s fascinating life and long road to sobriety in this week’s issue of PEOPLE, available Friday.
Derived from Tell it like it is: my story by Aaron Neville. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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