Guitarist Lee McKinney Discusses Xanax Addiction

GETTING OFF –

Feb. 17, 2021 – Lee revealed his anxiety developed during Born Of Orisis’ grueling touring schedule. “It was probably the peak of our touring schedule. We were on ‘Mayhem’ [festival] with Rob Zombie and Children of Bodom and Five Finger Death Punch, huge tour, and it was like our biggest meet and greets every day and probably our biggest partying every day too, so it was just all on 100%. So many people, so many drinks, drugs, everything full force, like women, whatever. And I don’t say that to sound cool, but that’s just what it was. I ended up meeting my wife on that tour and that’s why I can say that.

“But then I came home and I booked a motorcycle trip. And I got an hour down the highway, and I suddenly felt like my back tire was doing this… which obviously it can’t. If you can take riding a bicycle, for example, it’s terrible, that feeling. So the thing I mentioned with my ego riser moving, it wasn’t moving, and my back tire wasn’t moving either.

“So then I started feeling like, OK, think about this, you’re riding, you’re on a treadmill right so you have forward motion, but instead of what it looked like to me, instead of me moving forward, it looked and felt like I was on a treadmill. Everything is bad. The problem with that is that if you ever come to a dead stop on a bicycle, what happens? You tip as you have no forward momentum. So even though I was moving forward down the highway, it felt to me like it was coming at me, which means that I wasn’t actually moving, which meant to me I had no momentum. And so I started freaking out, and so I didn’t know. I thought it was a vertigo.

“For years I thought it was all these different kinds of things, couldn’t stand on the ego risers like I used to. So that was when it came, that was the [answer to the] question of when it started. But, yeah, I used to have to have towels in front of my amps on stage, because I would walk around on stage and I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m slipping on water, and I would have to just rub my feet on these towels to dry them off to make sure that there was no water. So I was just a victim in my mind about this stuff.”