Right about there is where it all went south for Frankie Wilde. “He was a monster with the coke,” recalls one-time girlfriend Michelle Nelfi. “I’d be ready to go to bed at 5 am, which is bad enough in the first place, but Frankie — he’d still be up the next day at 6 pm when I woke. I remember one time he decided to try and give himself a coke enema because snorting and freebasing wouldn’t get him high anymore. It was one of the single most repulsive things I’ve ever seen. Could not get the mess out of my bathroom tiles.”

Mountains of cocaine and scotch by the gallon started to take their inevitable toll, as did the pounding sound systems that Frankie stood virtually inside of every time he DJ’d. With little warning, Frankie Wilde went utterly and completely deaf. Unable to hear anything but a maddening ringing, Frankie became unbearable — some say he went mad. Inevitably, his wife, stepson, manager, fans and record deal disappeared.

He sunk into a self-imposed exile, holing up in his bedroom, working his way through enough coke to power a small city, and banging on his shattered ears in hopes of knocking them back to life. Techno music journalist Tino Baldwin recalls, “The rumors about what Frankie was up to in that room were just insane. Some club groupies claimed that he was trying to carve two new ears on the top of his head — just sick, impossible things like that.”