Comedy in the Fast Lane: Sam Kinison’s Rock Star Life

Rehab at the Log Cabin

Bill, who was on the road with his brother 280 days of the year, had to make sure Kinison caught every plane, train, and automobile. Along the way, Bill would have countless dealers arrested. It was a relentless five years of madness.

Sam Kinison smiles as he poses on stage at the Emmy Awards.

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Finally, he forced his brother to get clean, or at least to try to. Kinison started rehab in Malibu at a place called the Log Cabin (it was “Like going to church, except Ozzy Osbourne was there”). The rehab actually worked, and the comic was relatively clean for the last year and a half of his life.

His Breaking Point

But every couple of months, he’d fall off the wagon. Bill described his brother’s “breaking point,” which was about a year and a half before he got killed. After returning from a “disaster” in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve, where they refunded $42,000 of the show, Kinison got drunk and out of control.

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People walked out and demanded their money back. In the month of January, he had three drunk-driving wrecks. By the end of the month, Bill, Kinison’s money manager and business manager told him, “You’re broke.”