FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH's JEREMY SPENCER Says 'Really Scary' Drug-Abuse Episode Convinced Him To Get Clean

FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH co-founder and drummer Jeremy Spencer says that a particularly bad episode of drug and alcohol abuse convinced him to finally get clean and sober, saying that he didn't want to let his parents down after achieving the kind of success he dreamed of as a kid.

Speaking to the Albuquerque, New Mexico radio station KZRR while promoting his newly released autobiography, "Death Punch'd: Surviving Five Finger Death Punch's Metal Mayhem", Spencer recalled the incident in question, explaining: "I'd been up for a couple of days. I was at the Mandalay Bay in [Las] Vegas. It had been about two days. I was just doing coke and meth and drinking the whole time. I think I had a straw in one hand and a bottle of Jack in the other for about the past 20 hours, something like that — 17-20 hours. And all of a sudden my body just went, 'Enough.' And I started convulsing, and my heart was kind of starting to skip beats. It was really scary. I was breaking out in cold sweats and I was shaking. I was laying on the bed, thinking, 'You may have done it this time, you idiot.' And then I started really thinking about how bummed out my parents were gonna be, that their son, who left home at 19 years old to achieve this dream, had finally achieved it, and then he's gonna die. I just felt terrible about myself and terrible about letting them down. So I thought, 'If you get out of this one this time, you're gonna fix it.' So I did get out of it, I finally got myself together, went home, called a treatment facility and checked myself in on my [39th] birthday [on January 8, 2012], and I've been clean ever since."

Asked how difficult it is for him to maintain a clean lifestyle while spending so much time on tour with a near-constant party atmosphere, Spencer said: "Well, you know, for starters, I wanna be clean, so that helps. And we're fortunate enough to have a couple of different buses when we're on tour, and usually the bus I'm on is the mellow bus [with] the people that don't wanna partake in the craziness. So I've been fortunate. Everyone's respectful of my situation. They know that I'm a better person not on that stuff, and they don't want me to die. So everyone's supportive."

"Death Punch'd: Surviving Five Finger Death Punch's Metal Mayhem" was released on September 2 via HarperCollins. A week prior to the book's publication, Spencer's bandmate, FIVE FINGER guitarist Zoltan Bathory, commented on Jeremy's autobiography, writing on Facebook: It was very interesting and definitely entertaining to put on [Jeremy's] goggles and see our story through his eyes as our perception is unique to every one of us; we live through the same events yet we all experience and file them in our own individual ways. I was laughing out loud many times as I was re-living the events through his book."

He continued: "If you want to see behind the curtains, it's definitely lifting the veil off of some of the things nobody would have guessed from the outside... As for the accuracy of the story... I'd say it's around 25%, because he do admits almost dying, but, maaan... in reality, he was partying waaaaaayyyy fucking harder... but in his defense... I'm not sure any publisher would dare to print the whole story."

Spencer told The Pulse Of Radio how "Death Punch'd: Surviving Five Finger Death Punch's Metal Mayhem" came about. "I decided to clean myself up and I went into rehab a few years ago, and the day I got out I basically just started writing my whole life as a therapeutic kind of exercise," he said. "I was writing about a thousand to two thousand words a day. I would do it on tour, in the tour bus, wherever we were, and it started to shape up into something kind of interesting. I'm really excited because I think that it's relatable and I think it might be able to help some people and people can relate to the story."

The book is described as Spencer's "personal journey through the wild highs and terrifying lows of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle… a wry and rollicking tale of music, addiction and recovery, revealing the path that served as a catalyst to make him the man he is today."

Spencer has committed a percentage of his personal income from the book to support NAADAC, the Association for Addiction Professionals, which represents more than 75,000 addiction counselors, educators and other addiction-focused health care professionals in the United States, Canada and abroad.

Spencer's book has already received advance accolades from rock legends and recovering alcoholics Alice Cooper and Rob Halford.

FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH begins its fall tour with VOLBEAT on September 16 in Salt Lake City.