When an injury prematurely ended Ward Richmond’s college football career, he turned to music — but also — to alcohol.
The Lakewood native’s relationship to both coping mechanisms inspired his latest album Big Addict Energy, which came out last month on his two-year sobriety date. Richmond, who has been making music and performing since his teen years, has explored addiction in his music before, but the new album and its lead single “The Non-Alcoholic Beer Drinkin’ Man” delves into the chaos.
A lot of what informs Richmond’s music career started in East Dallas. In addition to playing football, he was also involved in musicals and show choir at Woodrow Wilson High School (Class of 1996). Being in theater arts led Richmond to writing his first song as a sophomore and meeting classmate John Pedigo, who also went into music and produced Big Addict Energy.
Around age 17 or older, Richmond remembers seeing Lone Star Trio play at Trees, which inspired him to perform. The band’s members are a couple years older than him, and watching them on stage playing rockabilly music, along with discovering Deep Ellum, was “mind blowing.”
“Even though I grew up 10 minutes from Deep Ellum, I’d never been there before, and I didn’t really know it existed until I went down there that first time,” Richmond says. “Walking the streets of Deep Ellum and just seeing all these different types of people out on the street, all the different creative genres you can think of are all walking down the street, and music is blaring from the clubs, and there’s all the little shops down there, and I felt like I just entered another dimension.”
Richmond, on bass, started bands together with Pedigo, who plays guitar and sings. Richmond was in his late teens during his first performance in Deep Ellum.
After high school, Richmond was recruited to play football at Brown University in Rhode Island, but that didn’t pan out when he got hurt in his freshman year.
“I was a football player, and I had played since I was in fifth grade, and in my mind, I was going to play all four years of college, and that was going to be my college experience,” he says. “And then it ended, and I had to kind of reinvent myself. As a 47-year-old, that sounds exciting. As an 18-year-old, it can be pretty overwhelming, especially when you’re in a different environment. And I didn’t really know anyone. I didn’t have any friends there that I grew up with or anything.”
After that, music shifted from “side project to (his) main hobby.” Being the rocker at the bar became his new persona. Around 1998, Richmond joined Pedigo as a member of Slick 57, what he called his first “real band” — meaning they were recording and releasing CDs.
“When we came home for winter break and summer break, John and I would play shows constantly,” Richmond says. “I started writing songs a lot more and pouring myself into music. My new album is called Big Addict Energy, and that’s definitely when I started using alcohol as social capital beginning at that point in time when I stopped playing football because I could find common ground very quickly and found it really easy to get into that whole scene of drinking excessively in college.”
Richmond returned to Dallas after graduating with his degree in urban studies and business management. He found work in commercial real estate but two years later, stepped away to tour with Slick 57, doing close to 200 shows a year for four years. After that ended, he returned to real estate around age 27 and hasn’t toured since.
“I think if we were on tour, and our crowds were doubling in size each year, and we went from a van and sleeping on couches to a bus and hotel rooms, we probably would have kept going, but that just wasn’t the reality,” Richmond says. “So that was enough vans and couches as my bed for four years and not really making money. We were breaking even on the road.”
Photography by Steven Muns
Also after college, Richmond, Pedigo and some others started up the band Boys Named Sue as a way to keep performing without oversaturating Slick 57 with shows. The Johnny Cash tune the group is named after is meant to be funny, and the band capitalized on the joke by never performing that song.
“We played all kinds of Johnny Cash covers, and people would request that song,” Richmond says. “We’d say, ‘What song are you talking about?’”
Boys Named Sue regularly performed locally and regionally until the 2010s when the band’s drummer moved away and Richmond’s daughter was born. It was around this time that he also switched to recording albums solo. Now, shows — both for Richmond and with Boys Named Sue — are few.
“When I was in my 20s and we were touring, I did not like to be in the studio. I liked to be on the road,” he says. “Now, it’s flipped. I think I picked the right times of my life to be doing those two different things as a musician and songwriter.”
Richmond’s journey to sobriety started when a marriage counselor called him a “high-functioning alcoholic.”
“I was kind of taken aback by it,” he says. “No one had ever told me that before. I knew I drank a lot, but it seemed pretty normal because everyone I hung out with drank a lot.”
A lightbulb went off for Richmond when he talked with a friend who had gotten sober around that time.
“Really, we had a lot of commonalities in the amounts that we drank and also just like how we worked and drank,” he says. “It was part of our jobs kind of, because it’s a lot of dinners and happy hours and entertaining people.”
After those conversations with the marriage counselor and his friend about 10 years ago, Richmond got a therapist, went to rehab and stayed sober for six and a half years. Then, he drank again for a year in an intentional experiment to see if he could handle alcohol again while still maintaining his standards. He couldn’t. He quit again, relapsed again and now Richmond has been sober (from alcohol and psychedelics, which he used for healing purposes) for the past two years.
“I just had a change of perspective on what I thought was cool,” he says. “I used to want to be the human being who was the guy that was a good-time guy that drank and had fun and laughed and hung out at bars, and then one day, I just woke up and decided I don’t want to be that person anymore. That persona or identity served me really well when I was younger, but I don’t want that to be my identity as a father and as a grown man.”
During one of his relapses, Richmond remembers his daughter questioning him on his drinking, and while he was trying to justify it to her, he realized he needed to sober up.
“In mid-explanation to my daughter, I was like, ‘Dude, just quit drinking again,’” he says.
The relationship between peace and chaos, particularly with how it relates to his sobriety, has played a big role in Richmond’s songwriting today.
“I think I lived in a state of chaos for a long period of time leading up to my eventual sobriety,” he says.
Richmond wants his music to reflect that those who live in chaos, including his past self, are still human and deserve compassion. He’s adamant that sobriety is a vote for peace while heavy drinking is that for chaos, but he also says he’s not trying to judge anyone.
“For this album in particular, it is reflecting self work that I was doing,” he says. “You have to go back and forgive that younger version of yourself and find that empathy and compassion and forgiveness and look at that instead of just writing it off like, ‘Oh, I was crazy. Now, I’m good.’ That’s not true. I was just a human being trying to figure out life.”
“The Non-Alcoholic Beer Drinkin’ Man,” which sounds like a successor to songs like “The Joker” by Steve Miller Band and “Santa Monica” by Everclear, was born out of a meme. It had a picture of a man drinking non-alcoholic beer and said, “If you see someone drinking non-alcoholic beer, you know they’ve been through some shit.”
Richmond’s song aims to dig into that.
“I’ve been there. I get what’s going on, and I’ve done some serious work to try to make sense of it all and to try to stay sober,” he says. “That’s a pure game of consciousness that I have to play every day, and it’s always a choice.”
Photography by Steven Muns
The song also features what Richmond calls “drunk dreaming,” when a person in recovery envisions that they’ve fallen off the wagon. This was inspired by Richmond’s real dream of clinking glasses with Anthony Bourdain. Of course, he feels relieved when he wakes up from those dreams and realizes that it was all an illusion.
“I thank God every day that I’m sober for being sober.”
A release show for Big Addict Energy will take place at 7 p.m. Dec. 20 at the AllGood Cafe in Deep Ellum.
