Guitarist-to-the-stars Billy Morrison recently dropped the mini-rockumentary Who the F%@k Is Billy Morrison? ahead of his fourth solo album, Hollow. But a skim of his long list of career credits indicates that plenty of people know who he is, and he knows just about everybody.
In addition to his work with the Cult, Billy Idol, his late best friend Ozzy Osbourne, and the supergroups Camp Freddy, Circus Diablo, and Royal Machines, as well as his concurrent career as an acclaimed fine artist, Morrison has recruited a who’s-who roster for Hollow: Godsmack’s Sully Erna, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt, Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan, Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniels, the Offspring’s Dexter Holland, Cypress Hill’s B-Real, Fuel’s Brett Scallions, and his longtime Billy Idol bandmate, Steve Stevens. He’s well aware that the general public might always know him more for his famous friends than for his own CV — hence his doc’s cheeky title — but after all that he’s been through, he’s just happy to be making art on his own terms.
“I’m not trying to be Taylor Swift here,” he chuckles, speaking via Zoom with Licorice Pizza Records’ LPTV. “I’m not trying to carve out a huge solo career for myself. I am making music and putting out solo records because I love making music and I am able, luckily, to put them out. I have a record deal that doesn’t force me to be someone I’m not… and if any one person other than me likes the album, I’m a success.”
Ironically, in some ways, it actually is hard to know just who Billy Morrison is. He sometimes plays it close to the vest during his LPTV interview — like when it comes to discussing his friendship with Osbourne, or how he finally got sober in 1995 after a 15-year battle with substance abuse that he began when he was 14 — and he says he has no desire to write a tell-all autobiography like some of his formerly hard-living rock ‘n’ roll peers. He’s also been the subject of a few rumors and urban legends (which is a sure sign that he’s “made it,” right?), some of which amuse him, and one of which is he willing to clear up right now.
“I made the mistake of looking at Reddit the other day,” he laughs. “There was someone who was discussing, ‘Where does Billy Morrison get his money from, because he wears golden diamonds and drives expensive cars?’ And literally, there was a theory on there: In Europe, there is a Morrison Supermarket, and this person was saying, ‘Clearly he’s the heir to the Morrison Supermarket chain, because he has nice jewelry and a nice car.’ I mean, it doesn’t warrant the energy, but I really wanted to go on there and go, ‘Yeah, God forbid it’s about hard work and writing good music and painting good paintings and working hard!’ So yeah, I’m not the heir to the Morrison supermarket chain, just to be clear.”
photo: Jane Stuart
On the contrary, there was a time when Morrison didn’t even have enough money to buy supermarket groceries. He was homeless for two years — and not “Hollywood homeless,” aka sleeping on friends’ sofas, but actually “sleeping under a piece of metal. It was sheet metal that I’d propped up on the sidewalk on 8th and Burlington, in the Alvarado District of Los Angeles. My only source of income was begging for money on freeway off-ramps, mainly,” he reveals. The harrowing experience inspired Hollow’s “very, very personal” title track.
“I have experienced people stepping over my body on the sidewalk and looking at me with disgust and judgment,” Morrison says flatly; he may be a man of mystery regarding certain subjects, but when it comes to talking about recovery and mental health, he’s an open book. “I have experienced begging for dimes, and not on the odd occasion — I spent years of my life like that, begging on the streets and people stepping over me and crossing the roads, crossing the street so they didn’t have to walk past me, judging me and criticizing me.”
Morrison thankfully got clean by age 29, but he freely admits that at one time, “I absolutely thought I’d be dead before I was 30, 100 percent. I mean, I was shooting heroin in my neck. I’ve been shot; I’ve been stabbed. Of course I thought I was going to die! And I didn’t give a shit. I didn’t care. Or at least I thought I didn’t care. There was absolutely no thought whatsoever of living, let alone having a career, let alone, God forbid, being somewhat happy. … It’s very hard to see that [possibility] when you’re shooting heroin in your neck and you’re homeless and the cops are trying to lock you up every five seconds. It’s not easy, but it is there. And so, my purpose is to try and not worry about talking about it in interviews. I’m not shy about it, because I am living proof that it’s possible.”
Morrison readily acknowledges that he’s unusually fortunate, which is why he has become such a staunch advocate for less fortunate others who are struggling — for instance, organizing regular all-star Above Ground mental health benefit concerts with his friend and fellow recovering addict, Dave Navarro, to raise funds and awareness for MusiCares. (Above Ground is on hiatus this year, but will hopefully be back 2027.)
“I think at some point in anyone’s career, you have to stop and look around and go, ‘I’m really lucky, and I want to give back in some way,’” Morrison muses. “My story is my story, and I think I’ve been put on this Earth to try and help people not die. And if you can hear the message from someone like Navarro or myself that it is OK to ask for help… we get led down this path and they use that expression, ‘You’re a pussy,’ or ‘Throw them in the army, that’ll sort ‘em out!’ And it doesn’t. It just kills people. It kills people, because they just go inwards and feel like they are not able to get the help that is out there. [Above Ground] started because we lost Chester [Bennington] and we lost Scott Weiland and Chris Cornell. They were dropping like flies. Dave and I were like, ‘Enough’s enough. We have to try and at least make a noise.’ We’re not trying to raise millions of dollars, though money is needed in those arenas. We’re just trying to use our voice to say, ‘If you are feeling trauma, PTSD, depression, anxiety, ADHD, all of that, you’re not alone. You’re not a weirdo. And there are plenty of resources that we can help you with. Just let us help you.’”
While Morrison was still a young man with many good years ahead of him when he got help and got a new lease on life, he has been a self-declared workaholic ever since. (“I don’t avoid burnout,” he chuckles, when asked about his work/life balance.” It seems he’s still trying to make up for lost time.
photo: Jane Stuart
“I clearly am a creative person that had — or not had his creativity stifled, but chose to stifle his creativity for a couple of decades with heroin and cocaine — and so, I am playing catch-up. I am exorcising the creative demons that most people exorcise when they’re 25,” Morrison explains. “Most of my peers — Nikki Sixx, Dave Navarro, Anthony Kiedis — formed a band in high school, wrote some songs, got signed, sold a few million records, bought the house, put some money in the bank, and then started shooting heroin or smoking cocaine or whatever they did. I’m not minimizing that trauma; that trauma is exactly the same. But the difference when you come out the other side is that you still have a house and some money in the bank. And I couldn’t even get that right! I woke up in my late twenties with nothing, not a dime to my name. So, that is why I’m playing catch-up with life. … I just woke up late and had this fire burning. And [Hollow] is the product, I guess, of that late bloom.”
Morrison is grateful for what he now calls his dream “day job,” which, along with buying all those Reddit-gossip-fueling gold chains and luxury automobiles, “takes me around the world to beautiful places where I can go stroll along the river in Prague or have oysters by the Sydney Opera House in Australia. That’s my job!” But he never expected to have a side job: as a contemporary painter whose works have been exhibited in fine art galleries around the world. And he owes that career to a certain famous friend.
“It absolutely was Ozzy’s fault that I became a proper fine artist! He pushed me into my first painting. I’ve always loved art; I’m surrounded by art in my house. I have an amazing private art collection,” Morrison says, as an original Andy Warhol painting can be seen hanging behind him in his home office. “But I never thought I could do it myself. Ozzy saw something in me that I didn’t even see in myself and pushed it, and it came out. …. We were in Argentina and I was having an argument with Ozzy, because he was driving me absolutely crazy, saying, ‘You should paint, you should paint!” And I’m like, ‘Ozzy, I can’t even draw a stick figure!’ But we were in an art supply store and to shut him up, I bought four colors, one brush, and a tiny little canvas.” Morrison ended up creating his first painting, of a skull — “I figured a skull seemed like a good thing to paint while hanging on the Black Sabbath tour!” — which he later gifted to Osbourne and Ozzy’s family. And suddenly, a new creative fire was lit.
“The feeling of putting paint to canvas and creating visual art was exactly as cathartic to me as learning to play ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols for the first time on guitar,” Morrison marvels. “It was absolutely the most incredible, energizing, creative, cathartic experience, and that was all I needed: Here’s another avenue to get the demons out, to express myself.”
Morrison exorcised many demons on Hollow, and enjoyed his hard-earned freedom to “make music in whatever genre I want to make that turns me on.’ That’s especially evident on the Judgment Night soundtrack-meets-Manchester banger “No Suspects,” which features no fewer than three hip-hop legends, all on the same track. It’s the most sociopolitical song on the album, but Morrison once again puts his guard up when asked specifically what it’s about, stressing that the rappers wrote their own lyrics for their respective verses.
“I like not to do things by halves, so just to get B-Real, Chuck D, and DMC on one track together! … Listen, you don’t ask Chuck D or B-Real or DMC to be on a song and then go, ‘But I need you to say this,’” he laughs. “[Chuck and DMC are] in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I let them do what they want!” However, Morrison does feel there are similarities between the protest energy of classic hip-hop and the old-school punk that he cut his teeth on.
“I am hugely influenced by early hip-hop: N.W.A., Public Enemy, Cypress Hill, all of that. Punk rock was not a haircut or a fashion statement. Punk rock was an attitude, and when N.W.A. came out of the gate, it was just a bunch of disenfranchised youths screaming as loud as they could that they had something to say. Well, that is punk rock,” he explains.
Speaking of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Billy Idol will finally be inducted this year (“The fact that it took Billy this long to get in, are you fucking kidding me?” sighs Morrison), and Morrison, who’s been in Idol’s band since 2010, will perform with the new wave legend at the ceremony, because his boss feels it’s crucial to have his crew share the stage and glory that night. “I will be there, yeah. And that encapsulates everything that is wonderful about being in Billy Idol’s band, because Billy is an old punk rocker that comes from the concept of a band. We are a band,” Morrison says proudly. “Billy takes that seriously, and I’m super-grateful.”
As for which songs Idol and his band might play at the Rock Hall’s November ceremony — Stevens has stated that he’d love for them to dust off a Generation X classic like “Kiss Me Deadly” — Morrison once again plays it close to his studded leather vest and quips, “I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m just going to be there. I’m going to be there with my friends, and I’m going to support my friend. Billy and Steve are getting inducted. I don’t give a shit what we’re playing!”
So, now that Morrison is fully embracing and enjoying his second act — and now that plenty of people know his name, despite what his movie’s title sarcastic claims — what else does he want to do with his life? Apparently, he wants to really be in the movies.
“I would love to do a major motion picture. I love acting,” says Morrison, who’s had a few film and TV roles over the years. “Acting is another cathartic experience where you can let go, become someone else, and get the demons out. I would love to do a McG action movie or something like that… I want to be in a Guy Ritchie/Jason Statham movie.”
Watch Billy Morrison’s full LPTV interview in the video player at the top of this page.
