[within-fantasy]

"By now, my playing and singing was getting in the way of me getting high. I remember I got my supplier a room key and he would come in an hour before we have to leave. He'd been given a couple of coke spoons by Jagger and Richards - Keith's being much bigger. He'd pull out a two-ounce vial of coke and say, "Which spoon do you want, Mick or Keith?" I would always take Keith. My breakfast was always a massive line of cocaine. But wasn't that what everyone else did? Wasn't it normal? I thought it was what every successfull 23-year old did. I was handling it pretty well. I'd get up and do a bump,and I was getting very thin, but I thought it was OK. I honestly didn't think it was bad for me.
It got the point where I would stick a straw in a vial of coke, which could kill you if you didn't know how much was coming up the straw. It was very pure. By now coke was becoming the single most important thing for me - within not much more of a year of taking it. It was more important to me than sustenance, or my girlfriend. I thought it made me look better , it made me feel better and I thought it would make me run everything with it. But show me someone who's made it big on cocaine. You flush away all your money: I look on it as demonic. I remember collecting a gold album for Burn and going to bathroom for a line, and seeing one of the Warner Bros executives doing some coke too. That was normal back then: it isn't the case now.
Although I wasn't paranoid yet and I wasn't seeing any boogeymen, I was starting to question my sanity - which happens when you stay up for three nights and days in a row. So I was being erratic and I was getting irritable, with mood swings."

***

"I can't remember how I found out that Ritchie was leaving. It would have been in January 1975, right after we played a festival at Sunbury in Melbourne, Australia. The management at the time was switching to a new manager called Rob Cooksey, who is a pretty tough guy and doesn't take shit from anybody. I think Ritchie wanted to be in control of his band and to make Bach-influenced classical rock music, which is why he formed Rainbow. Because I was so fucked up, I don't remember many of my feelings at that time. Coke had now taken hold of me, slowly but surely.
I was unsure of what Purple were going to be without Ritchie: I knew that David and I were becoming the main songwriters, and I was also gearing up to do my own album, but I was too fucked up to do that...I was coasting: partying with my house in Beverly Hills and wondering whether I should quit, but all I really wanted to do was snort coke. I was deep into my disease now. Music was secondary to my drugs: it was getting in the way of my fucking partying. To go and play shows was a hardship to me: I was like, "How dare they take me out of my house?" That's the mind of an addict. And some people don't make it. John Bonham didn't make it. Bon Scott didn't make it. Chris Farley didn't make it.
It was obviously in the back of our minds that Ritchie was leaving. His last performance at the Palais des Sports in Paris in April 1975, and we were recording there. The recordings were going great. After the gig, I remember snorting coke in a stall in the bathroom, and coming out and seeing Ritchie standing there and smiling. I said, "Man, it's been really great playing with you." But I also had the feeling that Ritchie knew I had become addicted. I felt dirty, and that I'd let him down."(c) Glenn Hughes Autobiography