Shadoe Stevens
speaker
98 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Shadoe Stevens’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I know Sarge and I have a lot in common. Okay. And I got big too. And people would say, you're big boned. So I knew, I knew. But there's video. So we did this thing called Fear and Loathing in Big Sur. And what I did is I bought motorcycles for all the guys. So we all had motorcycles and we put them in a big truck with all the equipment, the cameras and the lighting and everything.
And we had a sober driver. and headed off for Big Sur. And we had an RV, and in the RV, we were loaded up with cocaine and magic mushrooms from the Amazon, and I mean, on and on. I'm just like, we were well-packed. And we got up there, and part of that was to open stores in Sacramento and Fresno.
So we'd do live appearances, and Fred would show up, and people would stand in line for two hours to meet Fred. Fred Radin? Yeah, that was my character. Fred rated for better. It was all alliteration. It was like Fred rated for federated, Fred and Freda rated for federated, Fred and Freda rated, my dog Veer for federated. You know, so listen fast and I don't have a lot of time to talk.
I've been irritated, furious, frustrated.
Well, the difference, the difference is that your commercials were good. Well, we never, no commercial ever went longer than 10 days. We did five to seven, eight commercials a week. Turn them out. We meet on Monday. We would figure out the writing on Monday. We would get it prepared on Tuesday. We would shoot on Wednesday. We would edit on Thursday and turn them in Friday for six years.
I will have order in this court. My client was denied her rights to selection and freedom of choice.
But she couldn't have been under choice at Federated. We have everything in audio, video, TV, and tape. Now an NEC 26-inch color monitor. Save $100 now at Federated 749.
You'll see he had a VHS camera, so he was videotaping Fear and Loathing and Big Sur. And we're in the van on the way, and I'm amped. And you'll see it. It's funny and crazy as can be. And then it, there's a point in the video that shows, and then he went into rehab because it was like clearly out of control. But I mean, I was using, I lived in Malibu Canyon and I used into convulsions regularly.
I had guns because I thought people were trying to kill me. I could hear, I could hear whispers outside the window, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I put sheets over the windows and the doors. And I put quilts over the sheets and the windows and the doors because you can see silhouettes through sheets. And then I realized you can see around the cracks around quilts.
So I put nails at one-inch intervals. And I sat with my 12-gauge short barrel double-odd buck. And I thought, either there's somebody out there or I've gone insane. I need to confront my destiny. And I went outside and I sat beneath the window with my 12-gauge and waited. And I heard a rustle in the bush. And then I jumped up screaming, No, you die, mother... And I chased them through the brush.
And they got away. So I went back to the bathroom to celebrate. Locked the door. Put the towel under the door. Ran the tub. Had another hit. And then rocked back on the floor in convulsions. And when I came to, I thought, I should take a breather. Not I should stop, I mean, because stopping wasn't clearly an option. When I got a... My doctor saw me and...
And I had a physical and he said, if you're lucky, you're going to die. I don't think you're going to die. I think you're going to have a heart attack or a stroke any minute. And you've got to stop or you're going to lose your ability to talk. You're going to lose the left side of your body. Something awful is going to happen any minute. And you got to stop.
And I knew he was right, but I couldn't. I was humiliated. I was so ashamed of what had become of me. I thought, I'm insane. What's wrong with me? I can't do that. And I didn't. So countless convulsions later, I had an overdose in my studio. And my guys that worked for me came and found me at 4 in the morning, and they got afraid.
And they called my family, and my family ganged up on me and talked me into going into recovery. I went to Betty Ford, and there was no room. So they said, come back in a few weeks. I went, please, come back in a few weeks. No. And they said, well, let's make a call. And they found me a... a room in Scripps in La Jolla. And that's where I went. Worst day of my life.
I'm sure that I would never laugh again. I'd never be creative again. I was like going into a mental hospital. And then I talked to the counselor in admissions, and he said, you know, this isn't a mental hospital. You can leave anytime you want, but clearly things aren't going well for you, and maybe you should give it a day. Okay. So I did. And then my roommate turned out it was just like me.
He was a wannabe up all the time, crystal meth coke user. He was ready to leave. It wasn't working for him. And then we talked and we laughed. And he made me laugh. And that was my key. I laughed my way into sobriety. I sat there. We had a lot of opinions. And I say this when I share stories. We had a lot of opinions for you alcoholics because, you see, we were the elite of the mentally ill.
We were drug addicts. And they weren't talking about drugs. They were talking about steps or something that made no sense at all. And I couldn't relate to. So the counselor comes in a couple of weeks in and he said, you know, you guys should try listening. We were voted least likely to succeed because we had so many opinions about this whole program thing.
And he said, this is the only thing that's worked. It's worked for millions of people, but you got to do it. And maybe you should figure out, listen to how it works. And then he turns and he said, you've got some anger issues. So if I were you, I'd get a sense of humor.
If you don't have a sense of humor about who you are, what you've done, where you've been, and where you're going, you're in for a rough ride. This life gets tough. You better be able to laugh at yourself. And for me, a bill went off in my head. And I got up the next morning, half hour before everybody else, and started meditating.
Tell me about the meditating, because that's what you're doing now.
Showing 21–40 of 98 · page 2 of 5
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