Their music, their drugs, our fascination
http://www.montrealgazette.com/health/Their+music+their+drugs+fascination/3941030/story.html
By Juan Rodriguez
December 7, 2010
MONTREAL - Why do drugs and alcohol make for such compelling reading
in the biographies of pop, rock and jazz musicians? The question
struck me after finishing Life, the Keith Richards autobiography that
revels unrepentantly in the rogue's rock lifestyle, and Frank: The
Voice, the superbly written new bio of Sinatra by James Kaplan that
seemingly inhabits the singer's mind. Both are wildly entertaining,
and substance abuse helps fuel them.
The "why" of drug use by musicians is rarely explored, perhaps over
fear of falling into armchair psychology, and perhaps because both
drugs and music are so ephemeral and personal. Perhaps performers
feel they're flirting with death while on stage, compensating for the
fear of flopping with the anaesthesia of drugs and booze.
The fact that many drugs are illegal requires surreptitious ways of
acquiring them, which become compelling plot lines. Add the
voyeuristic element in reading bios and tell-alls, and tales of
drug-taking and boozing are page-turners. Vicarious pleasures abound
in reading about binges and addictions.
Before rock 'n' roll, big-band jazz was popular music, and those long
bus trips and strings of one-nighters engendered drinking and
drugging. If you're looking for hepcat reefer lingo, there's no
better place to start than Really the Blues, by Milton (Mezz) Mezzrow
(with Bernard Wolfe, from 1946). Mezzrow, a fairly undistinguished
saxophonist and clarinetist but also a drug dealer, was the original
White Negro, long predating Norman Mailer's more "existential" (and
pretentious) hypothesis about white people adopting black culture;
his nickname became a moniker for marijuana.
Describing the pacifying of a gunman with "muta" (or marijuana),
Mezzrow spritzes like a true believer: "Frankie's hard crust mightn't
ever have been punctured by the hop, but it sure turned to lard fast
after those two sticks of tea got a hold of him. Muta takes all the
goddamn hardness and evil out of you, cuts down the tush-hog bullying
side of your personality and makes you think straight, with your head
instead of your fist; it digs the truth out and dangles it right in
front of your nose.
"A viper (marijuana smoker) doesn't like lies he's on the up-and-up
and makes you get on the ground floor with him. You call your shots
all the way in viperland."
Well, perhaps you've got to get really high to believe that last part.
One of Charlie Parker's fateful sayings was "Do as I say, not as I
do," expressing guilt at the entire generation of heroin-addicted
musicians he inspired in the mid- to late '40s players who thought
the only way to reach Bird's improvisational heights was to consume
the drugs that did the trick for him. (In a 1953 Downbeat piece, Nat
Hentoff chastised the "epidemic" of drug use; he didn't mention names
outright, but offered broad hints.) Bird Lives! (1972), by Ross
Russell, who recorded Parker's seminal Dial masters in Los Angeles
and New York, raised controversy for being sensationalistic in
dealing with the saxophonist's gargantuan habits. Yet the
fly-on-the-wall detail and research makes this the best biography of
one of the music world's all-time greatest artists and one of its
most notorious drug users.
In his autobiography (Miles, with Quincy Troupe, 1989), Miles Davis
tells the story of catching a taxi ride with his hero Parker, in
which the latter licked fried chicken loudly and drank whiskey while
receiving sexual favours from a babe on her knees over the back seat.
Davis, a pampered son of a doctor in St. Louis, was offended ew,
gross! with Bird advising the trumpeter not to look.
"He had an entourage. All kinds of women were around Bird, and
big-time dope dealers, and people giving him all kinds of gifts. Bird
thought this was the way it was supposed to be. So he just took and
took. He began missing sets and whole gigs."
Of course, Davis, too, had a notorious private life, with periods of
heroin and cocaine addiction (and reclusiveness) played up in a
profanity-filled autobiography that triggered a famous attack by
critic Stanley Crouch (On the Corner: The Sellout of Miles Davis),
who described him as "draped in the expensive bad taste of rock 'n'
roll." Drugs (and the nasty behaviour associated with them, including
spousal abuse) are part of that legacy; his increasing illnesses and
excesses are best chronicled in So What: The Life of Miles Davis, by
John Szwed (2002).
Among the most harrowing autobiographies is Straight Life, by
saxophonist Art Pepper (with his wife, Laurie), who got hooked on
heroin as a member of Woody Herman's orchestra in the '40s and
eventually was jailed for long stretches. Written in 1979, this
hypnotically (narcotic?) lucid book coincided with Pepper's
late-career resurgence, yet was followed by an addiction to cocaine
in the '80s. After a lung operation, Pepper writes, "they gave me
Demerol and morphine. When they started pulling me off these drugs, I
dreamed and I saw things. I was being chased by police these were
dreams I'd had before I'd be with my grandmother driving on the
freeway trying to fix. She'd be trying to stop me and I'd be hitting
her with my fist. I'd be running, hiding, and then I'd actually see
things crawling around. Little insects."
Not all jazz drug lore is Downerville: Louis Armstrong smoked pot
every day, a fact that happily permeates Pops, by Terry Teachout
(2009). Once dubbed King of the Vipers, he introduced many younger
players to "gage," which he described in an aborted book as "an
Assistant a friend of a nice cheap drunk," "a thousand times better
than whiskey" and safer than hard drugs. "Show a dope fiend a bucket
of water and they'll run like hell to keep it from touching them. But
a viper would gladly welcome a good bath, clean underwear, top
clothes, stay fresh and on the ball."
Although marijuana and hooch were part of the street-corner doo-wop
and rhythm-and-blues culture of the early '50s, the passing of the
flame for the rock era occurred when Bob Dylan turned the Beatles
onto pot at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel on the band's second U.S. tour,
in the summer of 1964. The idea that drugs increased consciousness
had as heavy an effect on the Fab Four and their contemporaries as
Parker's drug use did in jazz. (Rock could be seen as "art" music.)
That summer, they also had an awkward meeting with Elvis Presley, who
already seemed distanced by "medications" from the newly fertile pop
music scene led by the Fab Four. The biography that best puts both
meetings in social context is Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain
and America, by Jonathan Gould (2007).
Presley's failure to cope with his own superstardom a '50s relic in
a string of lame and irrelevant '60s movies coincided with his
heavy pharmaceutical use, as chronicled salaciously by Albert Goldman
in Elvis (1981). Goldman was rapped by the rock establishment for
supposedly treating Elvis as a hick who didn't know any better (how
dare he!). Yet there's even more creepy detail by Peter Guralnick in
Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (1999), the follow-up to
Last Train to Memphis. While the latter volume was a celebration of a
great American artist in heat, Careless Love chronicles a very long
goodbye from 1958 to 1977.
Toward the end, Elvis was a truly drug-addled, puffy and sweaty
caricature, and Guralnick reports that "reviewers made frequent
reference to Elvis' slurred speech and the way in which he seemed to
stumble around the stage at times, but the crowds continued to turn
out, and for the most part they continued to be enthusiastic. Once in
a while there would be a show that reminded everyone of how it had
been, and sometimes the band and the guys were able to take heart and
imagine that maybe Elvis was going to pull himself together now and
turn things around but mostly the attitude was just to get
through." In this sense, the King is dead long live the King.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but there's a similar sense of
inevitability to the short lives of Jimi Hendrix ('Scuse Me While I
Kiss the Sky, by David Henderson, 1978 and recently updated), Janis
Joplin (Buried Alive, by her publicist Myra Friedman, 1973, nominated
for the National Book Award and recently re-released) and Jim
Morrison (No One Here Gets Out Alive, by Jerry Hopkins and Danny
Sugerman, 1980). The golden troika of the Age of Aquarius all died
alone after battles with drugs, at the same age: 27. Their musical
brilliance, so fleeting, remains undimmed by time, which is why these
biographies remain in print. Hooked on their highs, we want to know
what made them tick, creatively and personally; we want their ride.
Tales of drug use help keep the flame alive for rock's most famous flame-outs.
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