So on my last post, I used fictional examples. Some replies mentioned that there should be real life dudes as well.
I'm making this a thread.
I'm starting with a personal hero of mine as a guitarist and metalhead:
Zakk Wylde
Before he was known as the bearded berserker of Black Label Society, Zakk Wylde was just Jeffrey Wielandt, a soft-spoken kid from New Jersey who practiced guitar until his fingers bled.
And then, at just 20 years old, fate called: Ozzy Osbourne was looking for a new guitarist. Zakk sent in a demo, and overnight, he was thrown into the fire.
For years, he lived the dream — and the nightmare — of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. The stages got bigger. The parties got crazier. The bottle became a friend, then a crutch. But through all of it, one constant remained:
Barbaranne Wylde.
They met before the world knew his name — when the Les Paul was still just a dream and not a symbol of legend. She wasn’t just the girl behind the rocker. She was the strategist, the manager, the fireproof shield around his chaos.
They married in 1992 and built a life around the storm. She raised their kids while Zakk raised hell on tour. And while he became the face of Black Label Society and the muscle behind Ozzy's riffs, she quietly held the empire together from behind the scenes.
💔 In 2009, Zakk collapsed after a gig. Doctors found life-threatening blood clots in his legs and lungs. If not for Barbaranne’s insistence that he get checked, he might not have survived. That health scare changed everything. Zakk got sober. He swapped the whiskey for workouts, the chaos for clarity.
But he never lost the fire.
🖤 Even now, as he tears across stages with his bullseye guitar, he talks openly about his love for Barbaranne. She’s his manager, his protector, his co-pilot in a world that eats rock stars alive.
Zakk Wylde may look like a Norse warrior on stage — but it's love, loyalty, and survival that built the legend. And in a world that chews up guitar heroes, Barbaranne Wylde is proof that sometimes the fiercest power in a metal saga... is the woman behind the curtain.
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I would submit for everyone's approval, Mr. Danny Trejo.
By the time he was 8 years old, Danny was smoking weed. By the time he was 10, he was using heroin. His uncle Gilbert introduced him to both, as well as cocaine when he was 12. Worse yet, he started selling drugs at the age of 7, and was arrested when he was 10. Sounds like the beginning of a wasted life, doesn't it? And sure enough, he was in and out of prison until 1972.
But during that time, he got his high school diploma, got sober, and found faith. (Not my path, but it worked for him, so I'm all for it.) In 1973, he became a substance abuse counselor. In the early '80s, he worked with Western Pacific Med Corp to establish a number of sober living houses.
He got his first big break in Hollywood as a direct result of his work with Western Pacific Med Corp, when a teenage patient was having trouble with cocaine on the set of Runaway Train in 1985. They liked his look, and offered him a role as an extra in some of the prison scenes.
I won't go over his filmography, which is vast, but I will say that he has consistently chosen anti-heroic or villainous roles for the purpose of teaching young people that doing the wrong thing never leads down a good path. There are legends in Hollywood of his goodness, generosity, and commitment to hard work. He didn't even let Hepatitis C slow him down. In 2019, he even helped free a 5-year-old child from an overturned SUV, because he just happened to be there.
