I never actually met Amy Winehouse, but I met her side-eye once.
It was May 9, 2007, and Amy was performing at the Highline Ballroom in New York City. This was before the Highline threw V.I.P.’s and press in the balcony and allowed them to sit side-stage in an area the size of a baby’s fist. I was covering the show that evening, and considering how packed the venue was, I just needed a tiny corner in the V.I.P. nook to at least post up and take some notes. No one expected Amy to actually get through this performance because she was already fucking up, as Back to Black was only six months old. I stood in the back of the piled up section, adjacent to a booth filled with a bunch of cockney accents. A guy who looked like Ethan Embry with a slight meth face and a fedora was sitting closest to where I was standing. "Jussit on the railing, lahv," he said to me, pointing to the railing behind me. And so I did.
When Amy hit the stage, she looked directly at him. And then she looked directly at me. Her ice grill was enough to give my eyes hypothermia, as she volleyed glares back-and-forth between me and not-Ethan Embry for the duration of her set. I later learned that was Blake Fielder-Civil sitting next to me, but still had no idea why Amy would want to murder anyone in his vicinity with a uterus. The Amy documentary (directed by Asif Kapadia) cleared all of that up and more.
Amy will give you myriad emotions, but mainly it will piss you off.
The film highlights that there were warning signs—ones we all ignored collectively as a society, blinded by the demand for more music or to take part in the burgeoning gossip blog shit show formed from the evil genius of guys like Perez Hilton. There are rumblings that the Winehouse family hates this documentary, and they should. It paints them (primarily her father Mitchell) in the worst possible way, yet the footage is pretty raw and straightforward. The biggest takeaway, though, is that everything everything Amy Winehouse endured in her short 27 years of life was interconnected in some way, from beginning to end.
The casual Amy Winehouse fan can look at her life and say, "Tsk tsk. Another Janis Joplin. Someone with so much potential who drank herself into a casket." Embodying that rockstar "live fast, die young" mantra, right? Yeah, not so much.
Amy’s parents split when she was nine years old, and she credits that moment as the turning point when her life went downhill. By 15, she unlocked the key to recklessly eating and not contributing to her medium frame: binging and purging, otherwise known as bulimia. As an early teen she told her mother about this phenomenon she invented, but her mother ignored the severity of it.
She played with pot first, but by the time she met Blake for the first round of their relationship in 2005 (when she moved to Camden Town), she was fully dependent on alcohol and still harboring an eating disorder. Blake, another addict with deeply rooted issues, held the double-duty of being her ride or die and life preserver. The relationship was grossly toxic (as we all witnessed), but there was much more going on.
It’s reiterated throughout the film that Amy hated fame and felt ill-equipped to handle it. "If I really thought I was famous, I probably would go and top myself," she once said. Meanwhile her label, Island Records, began putting the pressure on for a follow-up to her 2003 jazz project Frank as Amy’s addictions were rising. She hit a wall and almost died of an overdose with Blake in tow. Her then-manager Nick Shymansky tried driving her to the middle of the forest for an intervention and suggestion to go to rehab. She said she would go if her father thought she needed to. He said she didn’t. Art imitated life on the track "Rehab", as Amy sang "I ain’t got the time/ and if my daddy thinks I’m fine…"
There’s this joke about her entering rehab and exiting within 15 minutes, but that moment according to Shymansky was a complete missed opportunity to save her life the first time around. After that, Blake dumped her in time for enough fodder to fill her follow-up, 2006’s Back to Black. She traveled to Miami to record with friend and producer Salaam Remi (who said she was clean throughout her writing/recording process) and then with Mark Ronson for the other half. She let Shymansky go and hired Raye Cosbert ("Raye Raye" to Amy) as her manager. By the time Back to Black became gargantuan, Blake circled back and the two were married in Miami in 2007. There’s this scene in the film where Blake is either too stoned to recall that he just got married or he’s just being cheeky, but he seems to have amnesia and then asks who is paying for the half-assed reception because he’s "broke." When it’s confirmed it’s on Amy, he orders Dom Perignon. It was during that honeymoon that Amy graduated to whatever Blake was on, which was crack and cocaine. "I want to feel what you feel" was her reasoning. Crack, coke, heroin—all chased with alcohol—began attacking her starved body like a one-two punch.
By the summer of that year, Amy reached her addiction ceiling yet again and this time was carted off to rehab (with Blake), so that rehabilitation essentially turned into a bender. Through some rough footage, though, we see Blake is eating at the walls while Amy peacefully says she likes it there. Blake later goes to jail for an "attempt to pervert justice," as a clean and sober Amy wins fivefold at the 50th annual Grammy Awards in 2008. Her acceptance speech for Record of the Year birthed the infamous "Mah Blake incarcerated!" sound byte. She pulled her best friend Juliette Ashby to the side during that ceremony and said, "Jules, this is so boring without drugs."
The next few years were like a domino effect. Fame piled on, the media (both UK and U.S.) were beyond cruel to an already fragile soul. She took an 8-month sabbatical in St. Lucia in 2009, interrupted by her father arriving with a camera crew to film his reality show "My Daughter Amy". "Why bring cameras?" she asks him when he gets to St. Lucia. There were no drugs on the island, but a lot of alcohol. Within a year and some change, Amy is advised of a heart irregularity where she will die if she drinks any more. She has a comeback penciled in for June 2011 in Serbia, which she doesn’t feel ready to handle. She’s brought on the plane to Serbia in her sleep, and is later booed for not performing on the stage. A month later she drinks herself to death.
It’s important to see that timeline laid out before footnoting it all. In five years’ time, Amy Winehouse hit her proverbial rise and fall. People enjoy referencing her as the latest inductee into Forever 27, but it could have possibly been prevented. On the career side, this was a modern-day case of the Billie Holiday effect, where wringing out the creativity of a drug induced star led to her demise. Amy was pressured into becoming some sort of a musical savior. Lauryn Hill was on hiatus, so the industry needed a new golden girl to translate soul to a broader market while simultaneously getting the coveted hip-hop cosign. Add to that Amy’s designation as the spokeswoman for the second British Invasion and it was all eyes on her. Like the Amy film expresses, she wanted to disappear. Her love affair with Blake was the dark looming cloud that kept feeding her depression, which ironically was the impulse behind the music we loved. And then there’s us, the rest of the world, who fed into the hoopla of watching someone’s spirit gradually decay. Journalists wrote stories about the ticking time bomb, housewives gawked at the Microsoft Paint coke flakes comically dotted under her nose in photos online as a precursor to the meme era. "If I could give it all back just to walk down the street with no hassle, I would," she’d say before passing.
This was the story of a girl who was wildly insecure but had a gift and not enough people around her to protect it. It’s not the first time that this happened (nor will it be the last), but it is the first time we had the technology to watch it unfold from beginning to end. Amy Winehouse was our first real casualty of the Internet—yet another accolade she never wanted to win.