Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars on Drugs

Read an Excerpt

It's a matter of historical record that musicians have always liked drugs.

Okay, that's not true. I just lied like a thieving junkie. We don't really know if musicians always liked drugs, but we do know that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, so I've got to suspect the dude was seriously baked. Indeed, Nero had a reputation for being a libertine and ancient Rome was famous for extravagant, drunken orgies that would have brought the Stones to their knees ('cept Keith, of course). Roman culture was so self-indulgent that they used to make themselves vomit after eating! Yeah, I know ... but I'm not talking about a bunch of damaged chicks trying to look like Kate Moss. These Romans were fat 'n' sassy. They threw up only to make room for more food and booze! I'll grant you-maybe John Bonham did the same thing. But aside from Bonzo, I doubt if the eat-puke-eat cycle has been much employed by decadent contemporaries (rock stars).

Now you might assume that Nero was just buzzed on the sauce. The thing is-according to Professor Carl Ruck-in ancient Roman times "wines were always fortified, like the 'strong wine' of the Old Testament, with herbal additives: opium, datura, belladonna, mandrake, and henbane. Common incenses, such as myrrh, ambergris, and frankincense are psychotropic; the easy availability and long tradition of cannabis use would have seen it included in the mixtures." So you see, Nero may have been seeing things in that fire. A burning man, perhaps? "Hey," said Nero. "Let's burn this city down, turn it into a desert, and invite folks from all around to pay some bucks to come back here and really freak freely!"

Seriously though, there have been beaucoup associations between the performance and appreciation of music and plant-based altered states throughout human history as well as within more contemporary "primitive" cultures.

The Shamans

Music has frequently been a part of psychedelic shamanic experiences-mystical healing experiences using psychedelic plants under the guidance of a sort of spiritual magician have frequently included the use of shamanic songs and sounds. The most musical psychedelic shamanic culture of all was probably that of the Sharnahua Indians of Eastern Peru. For an apprenticeship during which they are presumed to have gained the experience to both heal and kill with their spiritual magic, the Sharnahua shamans would learn an entire set of psychedelic numbers that would be employed in ayahuasca-enhanced healing ceremonies. (Ayahuasca is a tryptamine-based hallucinogen that contains DMT. Psilocybin-your friendly "'shrooms"-is also in the tryptamine family.) These Peruvian shamans had songs for virtually every possible form of illness known at that time and they had songs for animals and for elements of the environment. In more contemporary times, when the Sharnahua encountered technological objects like airplanes and radios, they created psychedelic/shamanic tunes for each object-a cool concept that some contemporary psych band may want to take up as a surefire way to make creatively inspired and strange music while at the same time alienating their fan base.

Wine, Women, and Song

Shamanism aside, isn't that great triumvirate of rock-star paganism-sex, drugs, and rock and roll-really another way of saying "wine, women, and song"? Well, according to our friends at Wikipedia, this celebratory slogan has deep roots in a number of ancient cultures.

According to our WIKId pals, in the Bengali/Hindu/Sanskrit tradition the term was "Sur, Sura, Sundari"-meaning "music, wine and woman." The Czechs have been praising "Víno, zeny, a zpev"-"wine, women and song"-for centuries. So have those fun-loving Europeans-the Germans. If you visit Berlin, and don't want to partake of the overabundant smorgasbord of chemical alterants that are so easily available, you can kick it old school by asking for "Wein, Weib, und Gesang."-good old-fashioned "wine, women, and song."

Looking toward the Scandinavians, the Swedes have been getting their "Vin, kvinnor, och sång" groove on for centuries as well. It's the same with the Norwegians, where the women come first (if they come at all). "Kvinner, vin, og sang" = women, wine and song. Sorry, ladies, I am not aware of any nonpatriarchal societies that emphasized "wine, men, and song" but it's never too late to launch a cool feminist rock subculture.

It was those nasty, naughty, and nice Danes who took it to the next level. Sure they had their "Vin, kvinder, og sang"-"wine, women, and song"-just like everybody else. But they also had their very popular "Øl, fisse, og hornmusik" a.k.a. "beer, cunt, and horn music." Wikipedia also mentions that old Dane sawhorse, "Tjald og lal og lir"-which means "cannabis, fooling around, and being sexually aroused." What? No music?

Incidentally, the Wikipedia entry also inexplicably includes the Turkish saying, "At, Avrat, Silah," which means "horse, women, gun." Now I don't want to create an international incident by implying that the Turks were confused about their sexuality so I'll just leave it to you to picture your own kinky scenarios.

While it doesn't seem that the citizens of the fourth-third century B.C.E. Greek democracy had their own "wine, women, and song" slogan-we do know that the fellas there partied hardy in public "gymnasia" and in private "symposia." During nightly feasts, wine seriously flowed. Besides kickin' it with food and wine, these feasts revolved around public conversation and debate-but would also feature music, dancing girls, and comedy. Male citizens, whether married or not, were considered entitled to a full sexual smorgasbord, including unmarried women, prostitutes, and-most prominently-their fellow males. In other words, it was wine, men, and song ... and the occasional chick. Think Elton during the seventies, but without the coke, the glitter, and the big glasses.

The Jazzbos

In the context of popular American musical culture, it was among jazz musicians that drugs and music became deeply entwined. It all started in New Orleans-already the nation's swingin' hot spot for getting loose and sinnin'. Harry Shapiro writes about New Orleans around the turn of the twentieth century in his fascinating book, Waiting for the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music. "From its earliest days a city of low life, thieving, gambling and above all prostitution, New Orleans tolerated with impartiality small-time hustlers and high crimes, self-serving mayors and fifty-cent whores. In a town of corruption and easy money, the establishments that thrived were bordellos, gambling joints, saloons, cabarets and dance halls ... music was a subsidiary of the gambling business: The hustlers, gamblers and racetrack followers were often hard-working musicians.... They used drugs in a big way ... everything was for the asking."

By the mid-1920s, marijuana and jazz were practically synonymous. Mezz Mezzrow, a white cat jazzbo of middling talent, became a legend as a groovy cat and a dealer who always had the best weed. His pot was so ubiquitous in jazz circles that pot was nicknamed "Mezz." In 1936, Stuff Smith and the Onyx Club Boys glorified pot in popular song with "You're a Viper," singing, "Dreamt about a reefer / Five feet long." Victoria Spivey meanwhile had a minor hit with "Dope Head Blues," praising the rejuvenating wonders of cocaine and promising to throw a bull without a rope behind "just one more sniffle."

There were, in fact, dozens of popular jazz songs that referenced the mighty reefer in those days, and the musicians largely got away with it because the straight world didn't have a clue as to what they were singing about. For that matter, would a song title like "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?" as sung by Harry the Hipster Gibson, be allowed onto the hit parade today as it was during the 1930s? (The pressing issue in 2007 was ... who put the Ketamine in Ms. Spears' Ritalin?)

This creative gumbo of music, dope, race, jazz, and hipness reached an ambiguous apotheosis as heroin became more of an issue. Charlie Parker, the founding father of bebop-a radically avant-garde form of jazz for its time that separated the hipsters from the weekend warriors-became a star, a great legend and a hero of the hip, during the 1940s. In terms of his cultural influence, Parker was sort of the first Keith Richards. He had a massive drug habit-he was a heroin junkie, but he also wasn't averse to all kinds of pills, weed, and some serious binge drinking when the smack supply was running low. As with Richards and his rock-and-roll progeny, far too many aspiring jazz musicians saw the inspired work Parker managed to produce under the influence as a cue and followed him down the heroin path. Unlike Richards, Parker himself flamed out entirely behind dope, missing gigs, screwing up recording sessions, and even getting himself committed to a mental hospital for six months. He died at age thirty-four from pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, brought on by a confluence of everything.

Not surprisingly, the jazz age saw druggy musicians exploited as social pariahs by political figures. Harry J. Anslinger, who made a career for himself in the federal government as an antidrug crusader, becoming America's first Commissioner of the newly formed Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). Anslinger kept special files on jazz musicians. In those files, Anslinger reported even the most trivial bits of information-right down to some barely known musician copping a nickel bag of marijuana in Kansas City, Kansas-and Anslinger never failed to mention that (for the most part) they were "negro" musicians. As with contemporary drug hysterias, the press spread the word. Even the hoary English music magazine Melody Maker got into the act in 1936, writing in an editorial: "Drug peddling and drug-taking is growing in this country. It can no longer be denied that jazz clubs have been among the haunts of drug peddlers.... (we are) determined to stamp out everything that will hamper the healthy growth of music ... (including) those who would make jazz clubs the market-place for dope." And in 1943, the jazz magazine of record, Down Beat, responded to the excitement about reefer smoking in jazz with an editorial that didn't so much object to the musicians getting high as it warned them that the heat was going to come down on them if they didn't stop. "We know that there are musicians who smoke tea ... we know that there is a select clique that has been working in the top bands for years who do it, and we know that they are going to get it in the neck if they aren't careful.... We can only suggest to anyone who uses the stuff: STOP IT NOW, BEFORE YOU GET YOURSELF AND YOUR FRIENDS IN A POTFUL OF TROUBLE!" (capitalization theirs).

Fucked-Up Brains Make for Mighty Fine Music!

Why do drugs and music seem to go together so frequently, and for listeners almost as much as the musicians? In a way, it's obvious. Music is a leisure activity, a form of play. It's associated with good times. In our compartmentalized contemporary Western lives, it's pretty distinct from those activities that require highly focused, rational concentration. Thrashing out the 890th punk version of "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone" is about as far as you can possibly get from doing your taxes.

So the easy and obvious connection between the appreciation of music and drugs is that certain drugs help us to get loose. In the 1960s, psychedelic legend Timothy Leary said, "You have to go out of your head to come to your senses." European music appeals primarily to our auditory senses while African-based rhythm-oriented music grabs hold of our entire bodies. In either case, you may want to get a bit out of your rational mind to let the sounds and rhythms carry you away.

For musicians, particularly for composers, it's the same. Many musicians tell the same story about composing music. They don't plan it. It just seems to come to them when they're not thinking about it-in the normal sense of thinking. As Keith Richards told High Times back in 1977, "You step outside and smoke a joint. The little antennae go up and you pick up a song." (Unfortunately, Keith seems to keep picking up pale variations of the same song during the last few decades.)

Of course, not all drugs make you loose. Stimulants like cocaine and meth make you tight ... but wide awake. And they also make you feel like God itself, and then later than same day, they make you feel psychotic and morose. Both these brain states are sometimes conducive for playing and/or composing exalted, megalogomaniacal, irritated, paranoid, manic, and morbid tunes-which may be a pretty good description of some of the best moments of post-Velvet Underground/post-punk rock history.

When we're talking about drugs, we're talking about the brain. And the past decade or two has seen a quantum leap in our understanding of the brain. One would hope (particularly if one was the author of this book) that some neuroscientist somewhere might have researched the relationship between drugs and music and the brain. Does music activate the same areas of the brain that certain drugs do? Does the pleasure (or pain) of hearing certain types of music release neurochemicals similar to the neurochemicals released by certain mind-alterants?

This writer has searched the entire globe for a scientist who has explored this question, haunting the halls of the esteemed Institute of Neurological Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania for weeks on end, accosting random bespectacled types. He trekked across the Sahara desert by donkey with naught but a single Sherpa, a jug of water, and a six-gram brick of Moroccan hashish in search of the answer.

Okay, that's not true. But I did search long and hard on the Web, at my local library, and I even sent an unanswered e-mail to neurology legend Candace Pert, and as far as I was able to ascertain, no one has published any research about these possibilities. Still, we may want to take a hint from a marvelous book about how people with naturally aberrant brains experience-and sometimes compose and play-music. Oliver Sacks's recent Musicophilia: Tales of the Brain leaves a reader with the distinct impression that having a fucked-up brain might be a path to extraordinary musical experiences and abilities.

One example of this may be the classical composer Shostakovich. He had a brain injury as the result of shrapnel stuck in the auditory area of his brain. As Sacks tells it, "Shostakovich ... was reluctant to have the metal removed and no wonder. Since the fragment had been there, he said, each time he leaned his head to one side he could hear music. His head was filled with melodies-different each time he was composing. Moving his head back level immediately stopped the music." Sacks doesn't report as to whether Shostakovich lost any of his talent or inspiration after his operation, so I wouldn't recommend that any frustrated future rock stars attempt to inject some "heavy" metal straight into the auditory part of the brain just yet.

The examples of musical savants may be another neurological phenomenon that drug-fiend musicians might want to ask neuroscientists to examine. Musical savants are, of course, mentally deficient persons who are able to play and/or compose music without any previous experience or training that would explain their abilities. Two students of musical savantry, Allan Snyder and D. J. Mitchell, theorized that everyone has savant talents early in life, but that those talents are inhibited in the brain as the person matures. So maybe stoner rockers are experiencing a little bit of the savant when they lose their maturity and their inhibitions behind a favored substance.

Perhaps the most fascinating area that Sacks explores is the musical experiences of people who have a brain condition called synaesthesia. Synaesthetes may hear colors, see sounds, or taste colors and sounds, ad infinitum.

Sacks writes, "While synaesthesia usually appears very early in life ... it can occur transiently ... under the influence of hallucinogens."

While Sacks couldn't confirm his suspicion that synaesthesia occurs more frequently in musicians, he does present many cases in which musicians who did have synaesthesia were influenced and inspired by it and found it integral to their creative process. Most of the syneasthetic musicians Dr. Sacks worked with were happy with their difference. One synaesthete imagined that a life without synaesthesia would be "impoverished." So listen to the color of your dreams, 'shroom boy. Is it not living?

Drugs Are Bad, Mmm'kay?

Up until the mid-nineteenth century, those razor-fanged demons heroin and cocaine were legal and easily available. Heroin could be found in many cure-all types of medicines available without a prescription through pharmacies and cocaine was mixed into just about anything-Coca-Cola, wines, topical anesthetics, and gumdrops.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from EVERYBODY MUST GET STONED by R.U. SIRIUS Copyright © 2009 by Ken Goffman. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---