But all was not well. Beck's alcoholic mother had committed suicide when he was 13 (she drowned herself in a bay near Tacoma). Later, one of his brothers also took his life, and another brother died young of a heart attack. Add a raging case of attention deficit disorder — Beck takes medicine for ADD — and you had a boiling pot of anger, fear, insecurity and ego all mixed together. To the world, Beck was a likable wise guy, but inside he was all those other things. He turned to alcohol and drugs.

"I was taking drugs every day of my life since I was 16 years old," he says. "I was a self-hating egomaniac. I thought I was not smart enough or talented enough. I thought I was destined to repeat my mother's life. I was a fraud and I was successful. I was a cutup in class, but the teacher liked me. I was the one you didn't want to go out with your daughter but you didn't know it."

At the height of his DJ career, he was drinking a gallon of Jack Daniels a week "and most people had no idea," he recalls. "One reason I drank like that is I couldn't slow down enough to play with my kids. I had to be doing something. After two minutes I was losing my mind."

He flinches visibly when he recalls his behavior in those days. He once fired an assistant for bringing him a ball-point pen instead of a Sharpie. On another occasion he grabbed a producer by the collar and hoisted him nearly off the floor, telling him he would eat him "for (expletive) breakfast." He fired the man.

"I was a monster," says Beck. "I just wasn't a good guy. I was a scumbag."

Sitting in a Salt Lake restaurant, Beck recalls a dream he had many years ago, and the tears begin to flow.

He was standing in a flattened, desolate cornfield that was sliced by a long straight road. At the end of the road there were greenish-black storm clouds gathering with some evil portent. A voice from behind asked him which way he was going. Beck turned to find a withered, grimy old man. Beck replied that he was not going toward the storm. The man took his hand and guided him through the clouds to the other side of the storm.

"It's so warm here," Beck is saying, as he describes the dream. He chokes on his words and stops momentarily to check the flow of tears.

"It's sooo warm. I could actually feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. Everything was in vivid color. The grass was so green. And then I turned to look at the (old man), and I saw him for a fraction of a second. I saw part of him, and he was made of light, vivid white, and his beard was like fiber optics shooting light. I saw that and woke up."

Beck wipes the tears from his eyes and continues. "That dream changed my course. It told me, Glenn, you're in the middle of nowhere. If you want life and an afterlife, you've got to move through things you're afraid to look at."

The dream, combined with a quote he read from Thomas Jefferson, started Beck on a personal search for religion in 1995. It occurred just as Beck was facing up to his alcoholism after years of denial.