Why did everlast have a heart attack

For example, Everlast viewed his conversion to Islam as a serious undertaking and thus prays daily, practices fasting, and regrets his sacrilegious tattoos. Moreover, the same day he completed Whitey Ford Sings the Blues , Everlast suffered a near-fatal heart attack--brought on by a birth defect, in addition to a lifetime of smoking, drinking, and stress--that he continued to recover from throughout His grandfather was a "red-headed singing bartender from Brooklyn," Everlast's mother, Rita Mulligan, told Aaron.

Everlast's father, a construction worker, moved the family to Southern California when he was around 11 years old. The Schrody family's finances fluctuated throughout Everlast's childhood, and during the early s, Everlast and his sister Cassandra born around were bounced back and forth from Los Angeles to New York as his father chased jobs. Here, Everlast found himself one of the few working-class kids among a group of wealthy kids with little direction and started smoking marijuana.

However, Everlast's interests suddenly shifted as soon as he heard the rap group Run-D. Before long, Everlast started rebelling against suburban life, often ditching school to take the bus to Los Angeles with his new Latin and African American friends. Around this time he also met future House of Pain band member Danny Boy, his only significant white friend.

Everlast later recalled these adventures as the happiest times in his life, even overshadowing the success he achieved with House of Pain. With friend Divine Styler, who later released three albums, including 's Directrix: World Power 2 , Everlast started rapping and making tapes produced by good friend DJ Bilal Bashir.

He lived with the Bashir family for a short time when his mother kicked him out of the house for neglecting his schoolwork. Several of Everlast's friends knew rap artist Ice-T, one of the founding fathers of the gangsta rap genre.

And after Ice-T heard one of Everlast's demos, the legendary rapper expressed an immediate interest. Released in and produced under the auspices of the Rhyme Syndicate, the record made little or no impression, and Dibbell noted that "the rapper was packaged as a boxer with a Sean Penn pout and greased back locks. As he told Aaron, "I thank God every day that record flopped.

I could have been Vanilla Ice, dude. Then it really would've been over. Inevitably, Jump Around made an appearance in this set, and its homeboy euphoria induced mass wobbling in the stuffed Astoria. One supplicant even waved a pair of crutches over his head. But its good-time foolishness was an anomaly in an evening devoted to Everlast's two solo albums, the 3m-selling Whitey Ford Sings the Blues and last year's Eat at Whitey's.

Even as Jump Around trumpeted to a halt, Everlast was climbing behind an acoustic guitar for the painfully lovely torch song Black Coffee.

In he split-up his former band House of Pain anyone remember "Jump Around"? He also knew that House of Pain had become a cleverly-marketed product based on braggadocio and a hard-living image. A beguiling blend of samples, blue-collar politics, acoustic guitars, and the occasional Erik Satie- esque piano, it's a mature, often affecting record which goes some way towards defining the future of song-based hip hop.

In his Washington hotel room, Schrody conducts our interview with the television on and the sound turned down. He tells me that the album is about "shedding fears"; fear of loneliness, fear of God, even the simple fear of how the record itself might be perceived. In the silences between his answers I can hear a soft, metronomic ticking. Thanks to a plastic heart-valve, Everlast has become a human beat-box. Those who know him say that he's mellowed.

New album, new sound, new life, same locale. As he says goodbye, the man who plays up his intimidating reputation one minute is speaking the next minute about being frightened to make his pilgrimage to Mecca because secular tattoos are forbidden in Islam. He leaves you with one final contradictory image: a hulking man with stern eyes who suddenly looks helpless as he speaks of his first solo post-operation trip out of the house.

For the rest of that day, that kid on the rail would bring tears to my eyes. I use the word subtle a lot lately. Life is so subtle. Newswire Powered by. Close the menu. Rolling Stone. Log In.