Drugs in the arts – narcotic reactions

It’s a long long, long, long way down

The history of drugs in the arts can be read as the story of impressionable middle-class romantics’ fascination with the forbidden; the desire to slum it in the underworld, hoping some of that transgressive chic will rub off. Add a dash of homoerotic fixation on the criminal class bit o’ rough, and you get one of the most enduring fallacies of 20th century counterculture: the myth of narcotic use and abuse as a tattoo of outlaw cool.

It’s an enduring illusion that originated with the Romantics and Decadents, persisted through the jazz age and the Beat Generation, and continued to enthral pill-popping rockabilly pioneers, hippies, dreadlocked Rastas and white punks on dope, coked-up disco-goers, Ecstasy-addled ravers, the self immolating grunge set and the blunt-sucking suburban hip hop whiteys of the ’90s.

Consider the etymological roots of the term ‘hip’, as outlined by Nick Tosches in his 2000 Vanity Fair essay ‘The Last Opium Den’:

“The word ‘hip’, whose currency was common enough for it to have appeared in print by 1904 – around the time, coincidentally, that the first opium song, ‘Willie the Weeper’, seems to have originated – may have derived from the classic, age-old, pelvic-centred, side-lying opium-smoking position, and may have been used originally as a sign of mutual recognition and reference by those who were in the know about the big sweet smoke.”

Tosches identified the patrons of early 20th century opium dens as “gangsters, the demimonde, and the slumming vampires of Broadway and high society.” In other words, rich folks beset by the urge to get down and dirty. Many of the avatars of post-war narcotic cool were from surprisingly comfortable backgrounds. Miles Davis, the very embodiment of black radical smack-addict elegance, was from an affluent Illinois family. William Burroughs was a trust fund brat. Jack Kerouac was a high school football star who entered Columbia University on a scholarship and died an embittered alcoholic still tethered to his mother’s apron strings. Iggy Pop was the son of a former high school teacher and basketball coach.

With the occasional exception (Billie Holiday, Marianne Faithfull, Amy Winehouse), it’s a boys’ club. From Thomas De Quincey to Pete Doherty, urchin junkie glamour is a seductive myth that persuades suggestible Orpheuses to descend into the shades, lured by the siren cry of an illusory Eurydice. Gifted and often introspective types with too much time and money on their hands, plagued by boredom, ennui and the Western metropolitan affliction that a friend calls First World Problems. Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Miles, Coltrane, Lenny Bruce, Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Roky Erickson, Tim Hardin, Syd Barrett, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Tim Buckley, Danny Whitten, Iggy, Bowie, Jim Carroll, Johnny Thunders, Sid Vicious, Nick Kent, Philip Lynott, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Peter Perrett, Kurt Cobain, Dee Dee Ramone, Pete Doherty.

The lucky ones die young and pretty. We envy these poor delicates their youth and beauty, their exquisiteness, their damnable skinniness, but still secretly gloat to see them brought low by inglorious decay, hair thinning, skull-faced, teeth rotted from speed, swollen-livered, acned from smack, wheezing from nicotine emphysema, girding up for one last heart bypass. It’s not true to say there are no old junkies; you just don’t see them out much because they don’t venture too far from the toilet bowl on account of having lost control of their basic functions.

COLERIDGE’S OPIUM DREAM

When did this whole tortured artist/degenerate chic shuck-and jive begin? Probably when the first biped ingested a fistful of the wrong fungus, felt a bit funny and was inspired to inscribe fractal patterns on the wall of his cave. From there it was a short leap to Shamanism, peyote cults, yage visionaries and sweat lodgers. Homer praised opium and wine in the Odyssey. Even the good book itself bore the mark of psychotropics. Could Revelation’s phantasmagorical images have been inspired by John’s exile on Patmos, starving and reduced to eating wild herbs? It says it right there in scripture: the angel gave him the parchment and John ate of it.

In The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross (1970), a book much favoured by Philip K Dick, scholar John M Allegro proposes that Christianity, as well as Judaism and other religions of the Near and Middle East, was a cover story concocted by a mushroom-munching fertility cult persecuted by the Romans for their dissipated ways. Around about the same time as Allegro’s book became required freak reading, Faber & Faber published Alethea Hayter’s Opium & The Romantic Imagination, which served to indicate in a timely fashion just how much the ’60s bohemian set were influenced by poppy-eyed necromancers and poetic champions such as Poe, Coleridge and Keats.

The template of the solipsistic, androgynous, eyelinered recluse (as played to great effect by Mick Jagger in Cammell and Roeg’s Performance) was directly inherited from the Romantics and their successors the Decadents – Stoker, Wilde, James Clarence Mangan (the laudanum drinking poet adored by Shane MacGowan), Charles Baudelaire (author of a little treatise entitled ‘On Wine and Hashish’), outlaw artists like the enfants terrible Rimbaud and Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau (Opium) and JK Huysmans, whose Á Rebours (Against Nature) was a masterpiece of splendid isolation much beloved by Richard Hell and Lester Bangs. Indeed, there’s a strong correlation between the Stones ‘Dead Flowers’ (“I’ll be in my basement room/With a needle and a spoon”), or Spiritualized’s smacked out foxhole prayers, and that fantastical tale of Des Esseintes sequestered in his ivory tower of synthetic, synaesthetic sensations, a world so hermetically sealed that its inhabitant died from being literally poisoned by fresh air.

But then, the ’60s bohemians could claim consciousness expansion and spiritual inquiry because the drugs were better. Acid was Owsley’s, coke was pure as the driven snow and the grass was all green around here when I were a lad. But by the grim and gruesome early ’70s, the black-economisation of narcotics was big business. Narcotics ceased to be regarded as creative laxatives or Shamanic aids in the accessing of other realities, and were now an underground leisure industry. Drug ‘experimentation’ gave way to recreational use. Rimbaudian Dylan’s motorcycle crash and Bowie’s coke crack-ups were totemic, bookending the Big Comedown of ’67-’75. The former retreated to bucolic upstate New York while the latter absconded to Berlin with Iggy to get clean and pray his muse could function post cold turkey.

Which brings us to the contentious question: do drugs allow the artist access to inner reservoirs of creativity that couldn’t otherwise be achieved through meditation, lucid dreaming, or good old fashioned graft? And if so, at what price? A cursory glance at any library of rock biogs reveals the same old story: a fast and furious courtship followed by a disastrous marriage; a big downpayment with steadily diminishing returns – and a terminal interest rate.

When one hears fabled stories of Coleridge transcribing ‘Kubla Khan’ from an opium dream, or Ginsberg banging out Howl on a three-day amphetamine binge, or Dick typing 1000-page exegeses and countless novels while speeding out of his brain, one is reminded of the ageing and sickly Sir Laurence Olivier’s query about Dustin Hoffman’s torturous method process on the set of Marathon Man: “Why doesn’t he just act?” In this case, one might reasonably ask, why don’t they just make this shit up? Humans were born with imaginative faculties installed in their hard drives, not narcotics. Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ works just as well as fairy tale or dream allegory as it does acid anthem.

Emmanuel Carrere’s brilliant psycho-biography I Am Alive And You Are Dead: A Journey Into The Mind Of Philip K Dick, suggests the visionary writer’s phenomenal profligacy (often, it must be said, at the expense of craft and content) bespeaks a man in the grip of hypomania, aggravated rather than inspired by amphetamines.

THE CIA AND LSD

This is not to say there’s never been a great book written about, or under the influence of drugs, especially when the writer understands that in order to convey the karmaceutical experience, one need not abandon punctuation, syntax and scansion in favour of first or even second-person present-tense stream of consciousness (a la Bret Easton Ellis’s early fiction). It is to be expected that some of the best books about the subject have been scholarly works of hard journalism (Robert Sabbag’s Snowblind) or autobiographical accounts in which the author doubled as lab rat (De Quincey’s The Confessions Of An English Opium Eater, which, far from being the undisciplined bilge of a dope fiend, groans with beautiful, elaborately sculpted sentences, while Aldous Huxley’s experiments with mescaline in The Doors Of Perception were recounted with the dry precision of a pharmacist’s report).

Hunter S Thompson’s Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas may be justly renowned for a tour de force hallucinatory opening sequence, but it’s the real mark of the Doc’s journalistic rigour that he would and could catalogue the contents of his trunk in Wolfian detail:

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt-shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.”

Similarly, Burroughs’ memoir Junky, rather than seeking to describe the author’s journeys through the land of nod in abstract prose, is rendered in crisp, spare language somewhere between the bitten-off cadences of crime noir and dispassionate reportage. Even Naked Lunch (like Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, ostensibly a book about addiction as a system of social control) was, between the talking asshole stand-up routines and auto-erotic interludes, written with a scientist’s scepticism. Nelson Algren’s 1949 novel The Man With The Golden Arm, later adapted into a film that featured Frank Sinatra’s remarkable portrayal of a morphine addict, was written from the point of view of the observer, not the participant. Its logical successor, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, was not a book about heroin, but a cross section of a substrata of non-working-class Glasgow, a book that owed more to Kelman than Burroughs. Indeed, the so-called Ecstasy Generation of Scottish ‘90s writers didn’t write about drugs per se but chronicled the social set who used them, and in this regard seemed as realist and revolutionary as Dickens or Zola, because they were documenting lives considered invalid fodder for fiction by the musty middlebrow dead poets society of Tory Britain. In the US, Denis Johnson’s 1991 masterpiece Jesus’ Son was sometimes impressionistic and poetic, but always painfully lucid in its rendering of the grime and poverty of life on junk.

By the same token, the best rock ‘n’ roll drug songs apply dirty realist principles, reporting on the squalor of the junkie’s lot rather than attempting to evoke the rush (although, it must be said, the Velvets’ ‘Heroin’ comes close to doing both). This is exemplified by a positively Shakespearian couplet from Johnny Thunders and Dee Dee Ramone: “I’m livin’ on a Chinese Rock/All my best stuff is in hock.” Or Warren Zevon’s ‘Carmelita’, the tale of a strung-out writer stranded in a bordertown. Or ‘Waiting For The Man’, with its clear delineation of the dealer-buyer hierarchy: “No point being early/He’s always late/First thing you learn is that/You always gotta wait”.

Perhaps the most unflinching comment about addiction comes from John Prine, told from the point of view of those closest to the damage: “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes.” Give me that over Clapton’s dopey rendition of JJ Cale’s ‘Cocaine’ anyday.

But while the ’50s Beatniks and ’60s libertines were getting their kicks using the drugs of choice of the black underclass and white negros, jazzbos and Harlem shufflers – namely hard liquor and reefer and smack – The Man was also getting in the act. The CIA’s use of LSD as part of their psy-ops MK Ultra mind control experiments in the early ’60s has become the stuff of Manchurian Candidate legend, and it’s no longer considered conspiracy theory that governmental agencies used heroin as a means of scuppering the black revolutionary movement. In a recent interview on the Henry Rollins show, actor Samuel L Jackson, a former black radical who served as an usher at MLK’s funeral, and whose breakthrough role as a crack-addict in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever came directly after a stint in rehab to cure his long term addiction, spoke of how in the summer of 1969 all marijuana and hallucinogens disappeared from the Atlanta streets, and the only available drug was heroin, resulting in widespread dope dependency and overdoses among young black males. Forget about the War on Drugs, this was the Drugs on War. “That was the most effective defuser of the revolution that they came up with,” Jackson said. “And it worked.”

Sly Stone’s 1970 classic There’s A Riot Goin’ On album serves as a musical metaphor for the pacifying effects of drugs on the black power bloc. Rather than a call to arms, it sounds like the least seditionist record ever made, the quintessential solipsistic coke artefact, the song of a made man come down from his castle swaddled in furs and shades to survey the mean streets of the old hood from the back seat of a tinted-windowed cadillac. Contrast this with The Dramatics’ bristling Stax classic ‘The Devil Is Dope’. Small wonder that blaxploitation scorers like Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes found their politics compatible with, and wrote soundtracks to, films featuring vigilante Stagger Lees like Shaft, black Dirty Harrys who liked nothing better than to bust the heads of pimps and pushermen.

CREATIVELY BURNED OUT

The film industry has always had an ambiguous relationship with drugs, simultaneously spinning morality parables while capitalising on the live-fast-die-young flash of its principle actors. The Hays code (effectively enforced from 1934 until 1967), Hooverism and the influence of politically connected pressure groups, meant Hollywood always had to police its content as well as reprimand (and even blackball) bad boys like Robert Mitchum, Dennis Hopper and more recently Robert Downey Jr – as much for insurance as PR purposes.

Consequently, big screen drug stories are either shrill warning klaxons (wonderfully titled 1930s and 40s artefacts like Cocaine Fiends, Reefer Madness, She Shoulda Said No! or Marijuana: Weed With Its Roots In Hell), gritty crime dramas (The French Connection, Traffic, Narc) or Icarus myths that chart the heady rise but inevitable and eventual comeuppance of their hubristic subject (Lenny, The Doors, Velvet Goldmine, Blow, Walk The Line).

The only unabashedly hedonistic tales that make the cut are sweetened with stoner comedy: Cheech & Chong’s Up In Smoke, Fast Times At Ridgemount High, or kitsch acid fantasias rescued from the censor’s office (1968’s The Trip). The rest are tales of fallen innocents or lapsed professionals (Lost Weekend, Christiane F, Bright Lights Big City, Permanent Midnight, Sid And Nancy, The Basketball Diaries, Leaving Las Vegas, Boogie Nights) or psychotropic horrorshows (Altered States, Jacob’s Ladder, Naked Lunch, Requiem For A Dream, Shrooms).

Even the indie drug movies that revel in proud outsider cred – from Easy Rider to Drugstore Cowboy and Trainspotting – are capped with ambiguous or downbeat denouments that parallel the real life falls from grace of actors like John Belushi, Midnight Express star Brad Davis or River Phoenix. As I write, news has just come over the wires that 28-year-old Perth born actor Heath Ledger was found dead of a drugs overdose in his New York home on January 22. Ledger had just made the transition from matinee idol to critically acclaimed actor on the back of a succession of substantial roles in Monsters’ Ball, Brokeback Mountain, I’m Not There, and a hotly anticipated turn as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. In the words of the late, great Ian Dury, what a waste.

Jim Morrison was fond of quoting Blake’s proverb, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” as a means of justifying his booze and drug gluttony. Much as I admire Morrison’s talents as a singer, performer and songwriter (but not, I hasten to add, poet) I think he got it wrong. Blake never specified excess of what: he might well have been referring to excess of thought, of work, of love, even excess of moderation.

Each generation revolts against its predecessor. Some of the foremost artists of the ’90s grunge and hardcore scenes – Henry Rollins, Eddie Vedder, Courtney Love, Dave Grohl – were Ritalin kids, representatives of the Ice Storm age, caught in the pincers of baby boomer parents dizzy with new permissive mores, and pharmaceutical companies aggressively marketing wonder drugs to obliterate the often dubiously diagnosed ADD of kids who ran wild for want of commonsensical parenting. Cue Jonathan Richman’s seminal straight edge ditty: “I’m certainly not stoned/Like hippy Jawwny/I’m straight/And I want/To take his place…I’M STRAIGHT!!!’

The drugs only work until they stop working. William Burroughs was a functioning addict to the end, but until Last Words had been living on past glories for decades, a Mr Burns-like narcosis poster OAP who eked out his third act as a speaking engagement personality available for bar mitzvahs and weddings thrown by punk rubberneckers. Hunter S still had lead in his pencil until his suicide in 2005, but Generation Of Swine and Kingdom Of Fear couldn’t compare with Hells Angels or the Fear & Loathing years. Many so-called survivors – The Stones, Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, Shaun Ryder, Shane MacGowan – are now all but creatively burned out, their best work far behind them. Only those with enough grit and discipline to replace addiction with art before the onset of middle age have produced superior work in their autumn years: Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Nick Cave, John Cale, Steve Earle, Leonard Cohen, Marianne Faithfull, Johnny Cash.

In the long run, narcotics render the artist self-conscious, isolated and narcissistic. They encourage him or her to play to type. They frustrate the muse, tire the mind and exhaust the body.

In other words, fuck the glamourous junkie myth, and fuck sentimental death chic. Fuck cool. Fuck drugs. Fuck rock ‘n’ roll. Give me Neil Young over Kurt Cobain. Fuck those suburban white boys and their inferiority complexes. AD 2008, drugs are just another capitalist product designed to satiate and distract. And in a rabidly consumerist age, the greatest act of rebellion is to create.