The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

An Experiment That Failed

Posted on | May 19, 2020 | 3 Comments

 

Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by . . .

Will the people who sold us all that Sixties “peace and love” business ever admit that the road we’re traveling does not lead to Utopia? Is there nothing that can cause them to look back and say to themselves, “Y’know, everything was actually better when Eisenhower was president”?

In 1988, when Ronald Reagan was still president and MTV still played music videos, rock guitarist Melissa Etheridge was recording a video for her song, “Bring Me Some Water,” when she met Julie Cypher, who was working on the production crew. At the time, Etheridge was not yet “out” as a lesbian, and Cypher was married to actor Lou Diamond Phillips, who had recently soared to stardom in the 1987 Richie Valens biopic La Bamba. Nevertheless, a romantic affair commenced. Cypher divorced her husband and became Etheridge’s girlfriend. The celebrity couple officially “came out” together in 1993. Cypher gave birth to a daughter, Bailey, in 1997, and in 1998, a son Beckett was born. Both children were conceived via artificial insemination, and there was widespread public speculation as to the sperm donor, with the actor Brad Pitt being one of those rumored to have been the couple’s semen supplier.

To universal surprise, in a Rolling Stone cover story in February 2000, it was revealed that the sperm donor was David Crosby, the singer whose work with the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had defined the folk-rock sound of the 1960s and 70s. Why, of all people, would anyone choose this portly middle-aged drug addict as a sperm donor?

Did I mention that David Crosby was so damaged by his decades of substance abuse he had to undergo a liver transplant in 1994? But bad decision-making was more or less baked into the cake of the Etheridge-Cypher relationship. Mere months after being featured on the cover of the Rolling Stone as a sort of ideal of postmodern family life, the couple split. Cypher decided she wasn’t actually a lesbian and, four years after leaving Etheridge, she married a man. Etheridge, meanwhile, hooked up with Tammy Lynn Michaels who, in 2006, gave birth to twins, conceived with an anonymous sperm donor, but Etheridge and Michaels split in 2010, and Etheridge then moved on to marry Linda Wallem.

Well, what about the kids?

Melissa Etheridge has paid tribute to her son Beckett Cypher who has died following a battle with opioid addiction, aged 21.
Cypher, son to US grammy-winning star Etheridge and her former partner Julie Cypher, died on Wednesday.
Etheridge, best known for songs ‘Ain’t It Heavy’ and ‘Come To My Window,’ announced the news on her social media.
The 58 year-old wrote on Twitter: “My son Beckett, who was just 21, struggled to overcome his addiction and finally succumbed to it today.
“He will be missed by those who loved him, his family and friends.
“My heart is broken. I am grateful for those who have reached out with condolences and I feel their love and sincere grief.
“We struggle with what else we could have done to save him, and in the end we know he is out of the pain now.”

What sort of “pain” was Beckett Cypher in? Spoiled rich kid pain:

Melissa Etheridge’s son Beckett spent his final two months ‘on a bender’ in the luxury $3,500-a-month Denver apartment where he was found dead last week, DailyMailTV can reveal.
An exclusive DailyMailTV video shot nine weeks ago shows Beckett, who was 21, inside the stylish one-bedroom apartment shortly after he moved in.
Beckett, who is seen at the home with an unidentified friend, appeared to be high as he filmed himself pulling poses in the mirror and showing off his new space.
Another video shows him taking a hit of an unidentified substance from a large bong while a third includes footage of the large collection of modified guns he amassed.
Friends said Beckett often posted videos to social media of himself drinking ‘lean’ — a highly intoxicating mixture of codeine cough syrup and Sprite, which is also known as ‘purple drank’.
In addition to that, he was known for his regular use of the opioids Xanax and Percocet and, according to a friend who knew him from his time in Snow Mass, Colorado, was notorious for knocking on his neighbors’ doors late at night to ask for baking soda which can be used to turn cocaine into smokable crack.
Fishing guide Joe Kayafas, 38, who had been friends with Beckett for three years, told DailyMailTV: ‘I’ve known him since he came [to Snow Mass]. I don’t know if he was in college much at all — he was an animal.
‘He takes after his dad [singer David Crosby who is notorious for his drug use]. I’ve never seen people do that much drugs.
‘He did everything. He once showed me a bag with a thousand Xanax and he was like, you want some?
‘I like to party but I’m not into things like that. He was always on something pretty much.’ . . .
But according to Kayafas, drugs became all-consuming for Beckett and he became notorious in Snow Mass for the prodigious quantities he took — on several occasions taking an eight-ball of cocaine, which is three grams of the drug, every day for five days in a row.
He said: ‘I would just be watching him do lines of coke – one after another, after another, after another.
‘Not like most people when they party – it’s a social thing. But he was like hammer down. That’s all he really did: snowboarding and drugs, play video games and just sit there and zone out.’
Kayafas added: ‘I’ve never known him to do dope [heroin] or shoot anything. He was about pills and smoking stuff, eating, drinking or whatever.
‘I’ve seen him with Percocets which is another opioid. He would make cocktails — do coke and Xanax together. Scary shit. Uppers and downers, speedballing… That’s not good for you.
‘He would do an eight-ball of cocaine for himself every night of the week for five days and he would just keep buying.
‘I know people who sell drugs and they would be like, dude, he hits me up all the time.’ . . .
Beckett . . . lived a nomadic existence in his last two years, pinging between Colorado, Montana and Etheridge’s home in California.
Kayafas said much of his time was spent in hotels drinking lean, often accompanied by ‘call girls and random dudes’ or with Etheridge.
Jobs would come and go and he went through three trucks in three years — one of which was wrecked in a crash in Los Angeles in 2018.
His final two months were spent in Denver where according to Kayafas, he made money by dabbling in bitcoin trading.

A complete waste of life. One hesitates to blame this on Beckett’s dysfunctional family background, when it’s so much easier to blame the genetic legacy of notorious druggie sperm donor David Crosby. At any rate, all that Sixties hippie peace-and-love business has failed again. The Woodstock generation did not teach their children well, so to speak.



 

Category: Celebrities, Music

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3 Responses to “An Experiment That Failed”

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