A Brief History Of Drug Taking In Popular Music And The Influence Of Drugs On The Creation Of Music

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CITY UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC
MSc in MUSIC INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
A Brief History of Drug Taking in Popular Music and
the Influence of Drugs on the Creation of Music
Burak Beklenoglu
9 July 1997

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Abstract
The aim of this project is to try to explain the relationship between drugs and
creativity in music, by examining this relationship throughout the history,
though mainly in the twentieth century, a period of vast changes in musical
style, experimentation and expression. Drugs did create a new environment
for music to develop; they had a significant impact on already creative and
talented minds and it is highly probable that without them the best of jazz,
rock and dance music would not have emerged. Drugs are seen as a route to
new forms of musical expression, but to which extent this is the case cannot
be clearly defined by the musicians and researchers.
This essay contains chapters on the influence of drugs in the creation of jazz,
psychedelic rock and (Acid) House & dance music, as well as chapters on
how drugs have influenced creative artists in other areas of artistic
expression, and a brief history of music & drug relationship with the reasons
why musicians take drugs.
This essay is not trying to justify any of the drug taking or trying to prove that
drugs are necessary to create good and new music, but merely recognises
the significance of them for musicians, who create new music.

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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank :
My friend Sinan for making me to do the MSc and inventing the subject of this
dissertation; Jim Grant and City University Music Department for convincing
the people at high places and enabling me to do this course ; my tutor Gerry
Farrell for his help and ideas and support; the staff at the Institute for the
Study of Drug Dependence Library for their extreme nicety and help and the
library staffs of the University of Westminster, City University and Goldsmith’s
College.

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Preface
Creation of music can be viewed differently with different types of music. In
conventional terms the creation of a musical piece would involve composition
of the piece and the writing of the lyrics. However, this essay recognises that
live performance, especially in jazz, psychedelic rock and the recent dance &
club music, which includes House, Techno, Trance and Ambient, is also a
means of creating music, in terms of new directions and sounds.
A jazz piece or a rock song is likely to be played differently each time it is
performed, with far less closure than a classical performance is likely to have.
Improvisation is a central element in jazz and later in psychedelic rock, it is
possible that there are certain personality characteristics which attract the
musicians to a field in which it is not necessary to follow a score literally, but
in which hovering around the reality of the beat of the music is a desirable
quality.
Another point to be made is that except for purposes of comparison, this
essay excludes any detailed consideration of alcohol. This is not to suggest
that alcohol is not a drug; whatever other drugs have been in fashion among
musicians, alcohol has never been out of favour. However, alcohol is an
accepted legal drug in Western society. Its use is not surrounded by the
excitement, fear and ignorance which attends the use of other drugs like
heroin, cocaine, LSD and Ecstacy .
Finally, this essay includes a chapter on drugs and their effects on artists and
on artistic creativity throughout the history. Although this chapter may be
regarded as irrelevant to the subject, this chapter should prove to be useful in
understanding the relationships presented in the latter chapters, considering
that musicians are artists.

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I
Drugs and drug taking have been associated with almost each new trend in
music throughout this century. Jazz music of the 1920s and 1930s was
associated with cocaine, and later in connection with Black culture, with
marijuana. Folk music of the 1960s was associated with the “beatnik” world
that rejected alcohol in favour of other drugs. Then came rock and roll and
picked up on drugs and included them in its music, which is most probably
how much of the drug-oriented music of the 1960s originated. Psychedelic
music was music about drug taking; music meant to enhance drug taking, or it
meant to substitute for drug taking. Cocaine and other stimulants were the
drugs of choice in the late 1970s disco subculture. Drugs also have
influenced punk and new wave music (1976-85), which formed the basis of
some of the Acid House and Techno & Trance sound of today.
Music can be anything from a form of release to a symbol of resistance
against social norms; it can function as a technique for communicating with
the spirit world or a clip-on tool for doing one’s head (and body) in. Drugs of
various kinds can emphasise these possibilities or sabotage them.(1) In a
society where cultural industries are developing and there is a widening of
education, manifestations of bohemia increase, and music becomes the
superior site in which these new representations acquire form. Thus, the
increase in drug consumption in the second half of the 20th century is part
and parcel of its omnipresence in rock and pop music, and of the adoption of
the rock star as model for new artistic lifestyle.(2) In its systematic search for
innovation, popular music tries to discover new worlds, in its means of
distribution it brings to light or dramatises those milieus or subcultures who
live extra-ordinary lives, outside social conventions. (3)
Patrick Mignon asserts in his article Drugs and Popular Music : “The meeting
of drugs and music is not a meeting of two psychoactive products each

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producing their own effects on body and soul. This idea of a power of music
over the soul has a long history in the West. Music, like drugs, has several
names : ragtime, jazz, rock’n’roll, rock etc. This diversity relates to the
different ways they are defined, for groups or individuals, in order to face up
to historical conjecture. This is why music must be analysed as a social world;
that is, as an ensemble of practices, of values, of significations, of systems of
valorisation and production. It is in such a social world that drugs intervene as
one of the elements of its definition. In effect, drugs may occupy a place
which is functional -as an aid to work or a means of bearing its load- and, at a
symbolic level, be an expression of a relationship to the world, allowing us to
examine certain contradictions in its musical project. Music encounters drugs
when the experience of drugs accompanies the accession to the musical and
cultural avant-garde, when the definition of the musician as artist renders
necessary the manipulation of the ensemble of signs of his election; drugs
encounter music when they are the necessary component of a way of life of
certain sub-groups, when they form part of the definition of what the good life
is.“(4)
The workings of popular music, notably the competition amongst the
producers of this music and their quest for innovation, are at the root of the
discovery of new musical and social worlds. In this context, music discovered
drugs because they are commonly used by musicians, but also because they
are tied to the way of life of exotic and fascinating populations, for example
(during the jazz era of early 20th century) the blacks, who represent lost
nature or excess. (5)
Neither rock ‘n’ roll, nor the mod or garage bands of the sixties, nor punk in
the seventies can be legitimately considered outside the context of
amphetamine. The same applies to West Coast rock and acid, and to reggae
and marijuana. But this is not to suggest that acid-rock bands used only LSD
or that stuck only to amphetamine; far from it. Certain drugs influenced the
sound and creative context of particular genres more than others, but as the
pharmaceutical industry became more competitive and street chemists more

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sophisticated, so more drugs were added to the music pharmacopoeia. There
were sedatives, hypnotics and tranquilizers in a hundred different colours and
dosages, notably methaqualone; a range of synthetic painkillers like Dilaudid;
an alphabet soup of hallucinogens -LSD, DMT, PCP, MDA, STP etc.- and a
variety of one-offs like amyl-nitrate. (6)
The fundamental difference between alcohol and hallucinogens as mind-
altering substances lies in the fact that alcohol stimulates interpersonal
warmth (kinship), while drugs draw the subject away from other-oriented
behaviour and into himself (loneliness). For this reason, Western
communities tolerate alcohol (though a potentially lethal drug), while pot and
LSD remain illegal.(7) Many composers have combined drug-influenced
mood, lyrics and texture to produce songs that the psychedelic enthusiast
refers to as “a real trip”. Examples often cited include the Beatles’ “Lucy In
The Sky With Diamonds”, the Rolling Stones’ “You Turn Me On”, the Byrds’
“Eight Miles High” and the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star”. Some groups combine
simple lyrics with a complex musical texture that demands structure and
interpretation from the listener who is in an altered state of consciousness.(8)
For example what the Beatles’ music conveys to the recipient in this period is
an inward, mystic state of union with the Other and a soaring, private
euphoria. This is both the message sent out and the response received :
many people at the time listened to these albums stoned on pot or on acid, so
the circle was complete.

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II
It is impossible to be certain how long people have been using drugs to
change their states of consciousness; certainly the systematic use of drugs
dates back many thousands of years. It is possible that the earliest drugs to
be used would have been those that occur naturally. About four thousand
plants are known to yield psychoactive drugs, but only about forty of these
have been regularly used for their intoxicating effects.(9) As a consequence
of this, also the use of drugs by artists has an extensive heritage. In Central
America, stone sculptures from 1,500 BC have been found which portray
hallucinogenic mushrooms from whose stems emerge the heads of gods. The
arabesques, Persian miniatures, and geometric designs of Moslem culture
are linked by many art historians with the use by the artists of Cannabis sativa
and its derivatives, especially hashish. (10)
In Europe, it is quite well known that Byron, Shelley, Keats, Lamb and Scott
all took opium, and William Wilberforce, George Crabbe, Thomas de Quincey
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge became addicted to it (11). In the 1790s,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s visions induced by laudanum, a solution of opium
in alcohol then commonly available as a proprietary medicine, stimulated his
famous mystical poem Kubla Khan. (see Appendix 1)(12) Dr. Michael Gossop
argues that “In fact, both Coleridge and his puritan critics shared the same
misconception. Opium was not the source of his poetry nor did it lead to the
death of his muse. The effects of a drug depend largely upon the psychology
of the person who has taken it. Had Coleridge not experienced that particular
drug-reverie of which he spoke, he might never have been inspired to write
Kubla Khan. At the same time, the vision itself, and more particularly the
translation of that experience into lines of poetry afterwards, owed more to the
personality and talent of Coleridge than it did to any drug.(13) When Alethea
Hayter (1968) examined the work of Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire,
Hector Berlioz, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens
as well as other artists under the influence of opium, she found out that opium

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did not transport any of these artists into a totally new world of the imagination
but it may have provided access to unconscious material which was utilised
creatively. (14)
In the 1950s Aldous Huxley argued that the brain functions normally as a
screen. Its job is not to create but to shut off. It is a reducing valve that limits
our perception to only a minute portion of what might be called the mind at
large. ‘Drugs’ -in Huxley’s case mescaline(*)- ‘unlock the doors to perception
of total reality, to all those sensory reports that our brain, in making us
concentrate, filters out. The drug allows our attention to wander virtually
undisciplined over the infinity of things we would normally see but not see,
hear but not hear, think but disregard. Under the influence of the drug we
cannot think, for thought requires disciplined attention, narrowly reduced
sensory input. But while we cannot think logically under its influence, the drug
opens the door to intensified feeling and offers an escape from the world of
the intellect, from lives “at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous,
poor and limited that the urge to escape... is and has always been one of the
principal appetites of the soul.”’ (15)
What Huxley said of mescaline, others said of the less esoteric hallucinogens,
marijuana and acid. The effects of LSD, British social historian Peter Laurie
concluded, are “to break down the processes that limit and channel sense
impressions in the deeper interpretative layers of the brain, allowing neuronal
excitation to spread indiscriminately sideways. “
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(*) Mescal and mescaline are derived from the peyote, a small spineless cactus, which grows
in Mexico and parts of the southwestern United States. The drug action results in unusual
psychic effects and visual hallucinations. The individual may perceive brightly coloured lights,
geometric designs, animals, and at times even people. Although one’s sense of colour and
space perception may be impaired, insight generally is not. (Einstein, S. Beyond Drugs
(Pergamon, 1978), pp. 62-63 & 65)

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Investigator William Braden reported in his own clinical jargon that acid “stops
time. Or in any case, it ceases to be important. ...The subject is content to
exist in the moment - in the here and now. ...The sense of personal ego is
utterly lost. Awareness of individual identity evaporates...and is expanded to
include all that is seen and all that is not seen.” (16)
Chemical substances have different effects on different people, and their
effects on the same person often vary on separate occasions. For this
reason, many scientific investigators have seen little practical use for drugs in
the fields of creative endeavour.(17) However, in general it can be said that
the chemical changes brought about by LSD interact with the situational
variables to alter the amount and type of information available to brain. LSD
may only be indispensable for “mind-expansion” itself; and in art or music one
can legitimately exploit the effects of something one hasn’t experienced -
otherwise no one could sing sea shanties who hadn’t sailed, or sing drinking
songs without being an alcoholic.(18)
Masters and Houston (1968: 8) have defined a “psychedelic artist” as one
“whose work has been significantly influenced by psychedelic experience and
who acknowledges the impact of the experience on his work.” An experience
defined as “psychedelic” (from the Greek for “mind manifesting”) is one
delineated by Masters and Houston (1968 : 8) in which awareness is
profoundly different from the usual waking conscious state, from dreams, and
from familiar intoxication states. Sensory experience, thoughts, emotions, and
awareness of the internal and external world undergo marked changes as
one’s consciousness “expands” to take in the contents of the ordinarily
inaccessible regions of the psyche : “Of the classes of phenomena most
common to the psychedelic experience, a few have particular relevance for
the artist. They include (among others) accessibility of unconscious materials,
relaxation of the boundaries of the ego, fluency and flexibility of thought,
intensity of attention or heightened concentration, a breaking of perceptual

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constancies, high capacity for visual imagery and fantasy, symbolising and
myth-making tendencies, empathy, accelerated rate of thought, “regression in
the service of the ego”, seeming awareness of internal body processes and
organs, and awareness of deep psychical and spiritual levels of the self with
capacity in some cases for profound religious and mystical experiences
(Masters & Houston, 1968 : 88). (19)
Barron (1963) administered psilocybin to a number of highly creative
individuals and recorded their impressions. Psilocybin is the active ingredient
of a “magic” mushroom, which is native to Central America. Its drug effects
are practically indistinguishable from those of mescaline and LSD.(20) One of
Barron’s subjects stated, “I felt a communion with all things.” A composer
wrote, “Every corner is alive in a silent intimacy.” Barron concluded : “What
psilocybin does is to...dissolve many definitions and melt many boundaries,
permit greater intensities or more extreme values of experience to occur in
many dimensions.” Some of Barron’s subjects, however, were wildly
enthusiastic about their apparently increased sensitivity during the drug
experience only to discover, once the effects wore off, that the production was
without artistic merit. One painter recalled, “I have seldom known such
absolute identification with what I was doing - nor such a lack of concern with
it afterward.” This statement indicates that an artist is not necessarily able to
judge the value of his/her psychedelically inspired work while under the
influence of the drug. (21)
Contrary to popular belief, most artists find it possible to exercise some
technical proficiency, with varying degrees of success, under the influence of
LSD. This seems to improve with repeated experiences. The artistic
productions are not necessarily inferior to those performed in ordinary states
of consciousness. However, they are often judged by the artists to be more
interesting or even aesthetically superior to their usual mode of expression. In
many instances, artists felt that the LSD experience produced some desirable
lasting change in their understanding of their work, which continued to
influence the form and direction of their artistic development.(22) The painter

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Arlene Sklar-Weinstein had only one psychedelic session but claimed that “it
opened thousands of doors for me and dramatically changed the content,
intent, and style of my work.” (23)
Timothy Leary (1963) administered psilocybin to 65 writers, musicians and
artists. Written reports were elicited from each subject. The great majority
claimed that they had undergone “a creative experience”. Leary reported that
the group, as a whole, responded positively to the psychedelic sessions and
appreciated the “intense and direct confrontation with the world around
them.” Leary postulated that creative persons must break through “game
structures” (i.e., their cultural conditioning) if they are to create innovative
productions that will be of artistic merit. LSD and similar drugs are seen as
one method to facilitate this breakthrough. (24)
In another test carried out by L. S. Zegans, J. C. Pollard, and Douglas Brown
(1967) investigating the effects of LSD upon creativity it was suggested that
LSD “may increase the accessibility of remote or unique ideas and
associations” while making it difficult for a subject to narrow his attention upon
a delimited perceptual field. As a result “greater openness to remote or
unique ideas and associations would only be likely to enhance creative
thought in those individuals who were meaningfully engaged in some specific
interest or problem”. (25)
It is of special interest to note that many of those elements that are universally
reported under the influence of LSD are those features traditionally
associated with heightened artistic creativity. The ultimate explanation for
these changes may lie in a biochemical basis of perception and/or cultural
history of the individual. The aesthetic experience typically involves an
awareness of something strange, unusual and incredible. Both the non-artists
and the artist can experience surprise and wonder as their information-
processing mechanisms are altered, magnifying the strange perceptual and
cognitive material that emerges in psychedelic experiences.(26) The creative
person uses the psychedelic experience as raw material for an eventual

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painting, composition, poem or invention (Ebin, 1961). Other individuals may
have access to aesthetic information once the experience is over and
subsequently demonstrate a greater interest in art or music. In the case of
artists and musicians, states of consciousness are evoked with properties that
are reflected in the creative products.
Jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow described his first experience of smoking opium
with the following words : “...lighting up a million bulbs in my body that I never
knew were there - I didn’t even know there were any sockets for them...”. This
single phrase may be sufficient to explain why so many creative artists take
drugs.(27)
III
Serious drug-taking has always had some part in the making of music. The
excessive use of stimulants and depressants of one sort or another has been
associated with the rebel image and with music-making since well before the
first bohemians walked the boulevards of Paris. (28)
For the Yanomami Indians, living in the rainforests of Brazil and Venezuela,
the spirit world is an essential part of everyday life. Access to this world
comes through frequent use of hallucinogens and chanting, a functional
connection between music and drugs which is probably at the root of the
much music-related drug taking.(29). Drugs and music have also been
associated at the wine-centred Dionysian rites of ancient Greece and the
Vedic hymns in praise of soma, a hallucinogenic mushroom (Wasson, 1969).
In both Greece and Turkey smoking hashish was an established communal
urban low-life activity usually accompanied by music, played on a baglamas
or bouzouki, and song, often consisting of a series of improvised or semi-
improvised couplets(30). It has been known that cocaine has been a

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musician’s drug since Charles Gounod, the composer of the operas Faust
and Romeo and Juliette, who recommended it to his singers as an energising
elixir for the vocal chords - over a century ago. (31)
The many attempts to classify types of drug according to their effects,
however, have come to grief on the fact that people will use almost any drug
to achieve almost any effect. Opium and its derivatives, morphine and heroin,
traditionally regarded as painkillers open to abuse as a destructive escape
from everyday problems, can be used to induce visions. Cannabis (Marijuana)
can be used as anything from a sedative to a hallucinogen, depending on
how, why and by whom it is ingested. LSD, much-praised by hippies and
mystics as a gateway to other forms of consciousness, is often used as a
stimulant, or again as a form of escape. In spite, or perhaps because, of this
interchangeability of their functions, different drugs have been popular at
different periods in the history of rock and have become associated with
different lifestyles, philosophies and types of music. (32)
The professional musician is confronted by the availability and general
approval of alcohol and drug consumption, being involved in an industry
surrounded by the pursuit of pleasure and set in an atmosphere of leisure.
Initially it may become a means of relaxation or pleasurable temporary
distraction but with sustained involvement it generally becomes transformed
into an occupational hazard.(33) Drugs are thought to be a means, a “helper”,
into what the musician’s primary concern seems to be : music, the
composing, arranging, performing, and experiencing of the music.
Narcotics addiction was prevalent among modern jazz musicians in the
United States in the period after the Second World War, and appears to have
come about at least partly as a result of stressful factors in the musician’s
lifestyle. Due to the unacceptability of his music, the musician suffered from
feelings of alienation and found it difficult to make a living. Also, he
sometimes felt the need to sustain a sense of heightened emotional arousal,
created by music, by taking drugs.(34) The regular reporting in the popular

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press of the premature deaths or arrests for drug abuse of musicians is just
one indication that the professional musician who works in the field of popular
music, which encompasses jazz and jazz-influenced music, rock, pop and
commercial music, appears to be particularly subject to stress.
Little Richard, who began to seriously use cocaine in the early 1970s,
believes that the majority of professional musicians generally begin using a
variety of drugs as a way to combat boredom, to experience adventure and to
artificially reproduce the exhilarated feelings gained from performing their own
music in front of a live and frenzied audience of supporters.(35) What drug
use can do for a musician, in addition to making it possible for him to get up
on the bandstand at all, is to reinforce his feelings of belonging to a group, if
the other musicians in the same band are also on drugs. This special
emotional contagion of jazz musicians who are “on” may even be picked up
by a musician who has not used drugs and is called a “contact high”. The
more the musician possesses this feeling of group belongingness, the better
he is likely to play in a group. Some musician drug users take drugs for the
opposite reason : to feel more alone.(36). With regard to rock and pop
musicians , Herman (1982) feels that drugs can be a necessary form of
sustenance when involved in arduous work schedules, unsociable hours and
the high expectations of audiences. John Lennon is quoted as saying that the
only way to survive in Hamburg in the early 1960s when playing for eight
hours a night was to take amphetamines. (37)
By the time the Beatles led in a new musical era with their first recordings in
1962, music and drugs had long had a special relationship. Jazz musicians
had habitually smoked cannabis for half a century and many also took heroin,
in some cases with tragic results. The reasons for this connection lay partly in
the social circumstances of the jazz musicians, and partly in the fact that
drugs have been used for inspirational purposes since the dawn of history.

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IV
The whole history of Jazz began tied to the seductions of a life outside the
law. During prohibition, the night clubs, run by the Mafia, harboured the big
names of the period in the name of a community of outsiders of American
society, and in that of the seduction of the margins. Here illegal alcohol and
drugs circulated.(38) In the New Orleans period of jazz, in the early years of
the twentieth century, the stimulant most widely used by jazz musicians was
alcohol, the use of which was socially acceptable. Famous pianist Jelly Roll
Morton reported that he and his fellow New Orleans musicians used to go out
of their way to go funeral work because there was lots of beer and whiskey at
funerals. This period was one of the few when jazz musicians were an integral
and accepted part of their community. Alcohol traditionally leads to
aggressive and loud behaviour, and Dixieland jazz music is notably
aggressive and loud.
A similar circular relationship might have begun to manifest itself in the 1920’s
in Kansas City, when jazz moved north. Not only in Kansas City, but also in
Chicago and New York, into the 1930’s and the swing era, the stimulant most
frequently used by jazz musicians was marijuana. During this period, jazz
became less acceptable to the larger culture and the self-concept of many
musicians grew more alienated. Marijuana was not a socially acceptable
stimulant. Its traditional effect is to make the user feel more light and
“swinging”, which is an accurate description of much of the jazz music of the
period.(39) Improvisation is and has always been a central element in jazz
and it is possible that there are certain personality characteristics which
attract the jazz musician to a field in which it is not necessary to follow a score
literally, but in which hovering around the reality of the beat of the music is a
desirable quality. One jazz musician who has openly discussed how

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marijuana use improved his playing has said : “Our rebel instincts broke
music away from what I would call the handcuff and straitjacket discipline of
the classical school...” (Mezzrow & Wolfe).(40) To defy the American way of
life was to plunge into black music and jazz; to become a musician was to
discover the secret language of drugs and music; grass gave energy, the
desire to play, to listen to what others play and to play with them. Grass and
music allow one to be cool, to have a good time and get through all
eventualities. Jazz is both rupture and an entrance into the bohemian life, into
a community which grass, and the slang to which it gives birth, consolidates
and protects against the outside.(41)
When jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow first smoked marijuana, “I found I was
slurring much better and putting just the right feeling into my phrases....All the
notes came easing out of my horn like they’d already been made up, greased
and stuffed into the bell, so all I had to do was blow a little and send them on
their way, one right after the other, never missing, never behind time, all
without an ounce of effort. The phrases seemed to have more continuity to
them and I was sticking to the theme without ever going tangent. I felt I could
go on playing for years without running out of ideas and energy. “ Mezzrow’s
experience wasn’t unique; it was widely felt among the jazz community that
marijuana helped the creation of jazz by removing inhibitions and providing
stimulation and confidence. Hoagy Carmichael described the influence of
marijuana and gin while listening to Louis Armstrong :”Then the ‘muggles’
took effect and my body got light. Every note Louis hit was perfection. I ran to
the piano...I had never heard the tune before, but somehow I couldn’t miss. I
was floating in a strange deep blue whirlpool of jazz”.(42) Marijuana, though it
may heighten a musician’s sense of humour and whimsy, may also interfere
with his time sense.
From a report by C. Knight Aldrich printed in 1944 : “Musicians, particularly
members of dance orchestras, are reputed to use marijuana for the purpose
of enhancing their musical ability. Piel, in Life Magazine, reports that in the
state of marijuana intoxication “the swing musician ascends to new peaks of

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virtuosity.” Medical writers, however, are inclined to question this belief, and
Walton states that “there is very little probability that an individual’s
performance is in any degree improved over that of his best capabilities. As
judged by objectively critical means, the standards of performance are no
doubt lowered.” In an endeavour to discover the cause of the common
misapprehension, he says : “There is an increased sensitivity to sound and a
keener appreciation of rhythm and timing”, but he feels that “these
phenomena, as judged by objective criteria, probably do not exist except
during the early phases of the drug’s effects.” He suggests that the release of
inhibitions by marijuana may result in bringing latent talents to the surface or
in evoking a more intense emotional performance. He also recognises, with
Bromberg and others, that a subject’s evaluation of his own performance is
enhanced.(43) Marijuana was also central to the jazz scene in the fifties, and
was enthusiastically taken up by white musicians on the folk-blues circuit. For
those whose folk music was heavily politicised, smoking dope became
integral to the protest movement.
With the end of prohibition, a rupture occurred in the world of jazz musicians.
The closure of the big clubs spelt the end of the big orchestras and an easy
living : positions became hard to find and record and radio competed with
public spectacles. The new black musicians also defined themselves
differently. They were no longer ‘entertainers’, but artists who affected a
double rupture; opposed to the white world and to the conventional world.
(44)
Heroin was the ultimate downer. Ironically, the drug was originally derived
from opium in 1898 as a non-addictive substitute for morphine; but by the end
of the First World War there were already an alarming number of addicts in
major American cities. Also around that time the connection between
narcotics and popular music appears to have been made specifically with
regard to American modern jazz. Nat Hentoff puts forward the theory that
modern jazz was a revolutionary music which was rejected by the general
public. Like the music, heroin was anti-establishment, as well. The comments

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of the jazz musician Gerry Mulligan illuminate this further : “In the late 1940s,
just making a living was rough....These were the days of widespread general
use of junk around town (New York)....There was a frustration everywhere
with us. Nobody really seemed to know what they were doing or where they
were going. Junk could provide a dream world. The daily process of living was
dull, and you had to scrounge for an income when you just wanted to play
your horn. Junk seemed to help in a bad time.“(45). Heroin, it is said, creates
an inner sanctum among those who use it within the tribe, that transcends the
ordinary channels of musical dialogue and social communication. (46)
The 1950’s, which saw the greatest upsurge in the use of heroin by
musicians, also saw considerable publicity about the heroin use of great jazz
artists like vocalist Billie Holiday and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. Some
critics speculated on the extent to which the genius of these artists was linked
with their drug use. Others noted that some drugs slow down the time sense
and allow musicians to perform marvellously fast passages which do not
sound fast to them, while some writers discussed how drugs provided
otherwise unavailable wings which permitted a soloist to soar, possibly
reflecting Parker’s nickname of ‘Bird’.(47) Because so many of the big star
names of jazz were in trouble with drugs, it was easy to equate their genius
with an indulgence in an artificial means to awareness and inspiration, even
though to latch onto the drug taking habits of say, bebop musicians, was in a
sense to take the whole exercise out of context. Heroin for example, was just
one of the ways for the new wave jazz players of the Forties in their bid to
exclude society at large, utilising a very intense, complex music called bebop.
This new drug appeared as a way of putting some order into the social and
aesthetic uncertainties which characterised the new jazz musicians. The
effects emphasised most were those that produced a ‘cool’ attitude and a
detachment -which is also a description of much of the jazz of the post-World
War II period- enabling them to cope with the contradictions of their situation :
being amongst the avant-garde, marking off the boundary between the
ordinary world and the extra-ordinary world of creation, intensifying, by the will
to control over the self and the drug, the will to master one’s artistic project,

20
but also intensifying, in the competition for heroin, the competitiveness which
set musicians against one another. (48)
It has been suggested that the very use of heroin helped this form of music to
develop, causing as it does a ‘cool’ detached view of the world, in contrast to
the swinging up-tempo, jumpy style of the earlier jazz bands high on happy-
go-lucky marijuana. While there may be an element of truth in this, it is safer
to acknowledge the heroin use among bebop musicians as the catalyst
serving to shut out the world politically and socially by establishing its own
milieu of rebellion, and musically, by closing out all external interferences
allowing the musicians, initially at any rate, to focus his concentration.(49)
The “cool” jazz style that was largely introduced by such recordings as those
by the Miles Davis units on Capitol in 1949 and 1950 was not as detached as
the term indicated. It was lighter in texture both in ensemble and solo
passages, and the rhythm sections were subtler. But the music they produced
was often bitterly intense and aggressive. Miles Davis, for example, has never
been emotionally “detached” in his work, nor has Gerry Mulligan, who was
largely identified at first with the “cool” nucleus. In fact, the “cool” jazzmen
generally distilled all the emotional strength they could muster for their music.
While it is true that the effect of heroin on the “cool” addicts was to lower their
emotional commitment to nearly everything but jazz, they did not consciously
use it to separate themselves from their music. Many were, on the contrary,
under the illusion that they could play more “purely” if they were “high”.(50).
Also it should be noted that many interpreters of the “hot” modern jazz of
musicians such as Charlie Parker in the early 1940’s were hooked on heroin
and the allegedly more detached “cool” jazz was not in vogue until the late
1940’s and early 1950’s.
In a study conducted in New York City during 1954-1955, in order to
determine how many jazz musicians use narcotic drugs, with what effects,
and what the trends in drug use seem to be, one respondent voiced a
reaction which was mentioned by a few others and which gives considerable
insight. “Heroin makes me feel better, but has little effect on my playing. I do

21
feel I can execute things a little more freely than when I’m off. Some days I’d
love to be back in bed instead of playing, and on these days heroin helps me
to play at all.” An example of the kind of rationalisation employed by some
heroin users was a comment by one very successful musician, who compared
taking heroin to “... going into a closet. It lets you concentrate and takes you
away from everything. Heroin is a working drug, like the doctor who took it
because he had a full schedule, so he could concentrate better. It lets me
concentrate on my sound.”(51) Gerry Mulligan, who was addicted to heroin in
the late 1940’s, does claim that “heroin eventually has a degenerative effect,
and in my case, I finally couldn’t finish an arrangement.” Heroin does indeed
have a fairly quick degenerative effect if an addict has to scrounge for
supplies, often gets impure drugs, and is not on a regular, medically
controlled dosage.(52) One heroin user said that “If I’m playing something I
know well, like ‘How High The Moon’, heroin helps me to be more creative.
But if I’m playing something new, the drug interferes.”(53). Jazz being a very
difficult form of music to play at its highest standards, the fact should be
recognised that heroin addiction failed to stop Charlie Parker, Bud Powell,
Miles Davis and John Coltrane from pushing the technical and emotional
boundaries of the music to the limit (54).
However, the integration of the heroin into the jazzman’s way of life can also
be seen in terms of its practical advantages; it doesn’t stop one from playing
and it protects against the minor illnesses which hamper the life of the
musician, such as colds and flu - or at least eliminate the symptoms. This
function is another version of the relationship between music and drugs;
drugs exist also as drugs for working, and in this sense they are not drugs
but remedies against minor physical ailments, and anxiety. No musician could
play blind drunk, but plenty played well while stoned on heroin. But the belief
that you had to have a habit in order to play like Charlie Parker was the
classic mistake many of musicians or would-be musicians made. What they
failed, or chose to fail, to comprehend was that Bird played brilliantly on
heroin because he was dependent on it, that was the only time he felt well
enough to play normally - i.e. better than anyone else. He wasn’t playing

22
better because of heroin; he was just playing normally because he didn’t feel
sick.(55) As Art Blakey observed : “You do not play better with heroin, but you
do hear better. Bird said he wanted to kick the habit so that he could tell
people what he heard...While he is suffering, he cannot produce; but
reflecting about his pain, he can create. Musicians who have been ‘junkies’
and then rid themselves of the habit have sometimes really then come into
their own musically.” (56)
The addicted jazz musicians who took part in the Narcotic Addiction Research
Project, which had been started in 1955, had a wide variety of attitudes
toward the effect of drugs on their playing. “I thought at first that they helped
me play better”; “I used to think I played better when I was on, but I don’t
anymore”; “Drugs relax me before I begin playing and help me to be able to
play at all”; “Drugs interfere with my playing”; “Drugs help me to play cool
music”; “Drugs help me play better”; “I’m less tense when I’m ‘on’ ” were
among the range of responses reported. More musicians thought that drugs
had no particular effect on their playing than thought that they had a positive
effect. Most of the patients who stayed in therapy had some kind of
identification with a great jazz musician who was a kind of “hero” to them.
These “heroes” played the same instrument which they played and were
usually addicts. It is possible that the patients, in some magical way, assumed
that they would play as well as the “hero”, who took drugs, if they also took
drugs. (57)
As for whether marijuana and heroin generally help a musician’s playing,
introspective or otherwise, the usual flat answer by writers on jazz is that they
do not. The Psychologist Charles Winick (1959) once interviewed 357 jazz
musicians and found that 82 per cent had tried marijuana at least once and
23 per cent smoked it regularly. In addition, 53 per cent had tried heroin and
16 per cent used it regularly. A majority of the interviewed musicians replied
to the question whether they perform better or worse than usual when under
the influence of drugs, that the drugs decreased rather than improved the
quality of their musical performance. Furthermore, Winick was unable to show

23
that neither marijuana use nor heroin addiction was related to either a
musician’s positive professional standing or lack of esteem as rated by his
peers.(58) Winick states that “there is absolutely no reason to believe that
heroin use improves anyone’s playing, although it may help a musician to
function at all. Without the drug, the addict is unable to do anything, so that
the drug helps him to reach his minimal level of functioning. There has never
been any demonstration that any ‘plus’ factor is added to a musician by his
heroin use. There has, however been ample proof from the experience of the
Musicians’ Clinic...that a heroin user who stops taking drugs, with appropriate
psychotherapeutic help, improves in his musicianship.”(59) However, this
study , tells us little, whereas if we could ascertain how many musicians use
some drug in relation to composition, or to arranging, or to technical execution
on an instrument, we would have some interesting data, -interesting, because
it would relate not only to the effects of the drugs on cognitive processes and
technical functioning, but to the process, however stimulated, of generating
ideas and the subsequent externalisation of them in art forms.
Some studies on a small number of subjects have demonstrated that
marijuana use leads to a decline in performance on an objective musical
aptitude test (Aldrich, 1944; Williams, 1946; Winick, 1957). This test
measures the ability to distinguish musical intervals and rhythm. The subjects
also thought their performance under marijuana was better, whereas it
actually was poorer than it was in a non-drug state. There is some question
about whether tests of this kind, conducted in an institution on a non-jazz
musician group, can be generalised to jazz musicians using their drug under
illicit circumstances and in the special environment of a night club or similar
establishment. (60)
There is no doubt that much that is original and profound in modern jazz has
come from musician addicts who were as fixated on as immature an
emotional level as are most drug users. Over-simplifying a complex subject,
we could say that jazz was primarily a music of protest and alienation, and the
musicians who were the most alienated were those who took drugs in order to

24
reinforce their feelings of separateness so that they could function and
express these feelings in music. (61)
V
In a lecture delivered in New York in January 1882, the Irish author Oscar
Wilde made a now-famous assertion : “Music is the art which most completely
realises the artistic idea, and is the condition to which all the other arts are
constantly aspiring.” (62)
The musician as artist is a concept as old as music itself and the musician
has always held a special place in society, but this was reinforced by those
who rose to fame as a result of the Sixties youth rebellion with an image of
the musician as guru, in many instances playing homage to the Great God
Acid. Much of what happened in music during this time is virtually impossible
to consider outside of the drug context. Acid had its prophets and scribes in
Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey and the Brotherhood of Love; its
balladeers, the Grateful Dead, Jafferson Airplane and Country Joe among
others; its disciples the hippies and its philosophy of peace, love and self
realisation. Some musicians found themselves in a position of consistently
having to deliver the revelations which meant trying to reach an even higher
plane than the fans were on, through the inspiration and sensitivity as creative
artists and through ever increasing amounts of hallucinogens. (63)
The sixties were the years of a massive eruption of drugs. However, if one
mostly has the image of grass, of hippies and LSD, of counter-cultural values,
this also involved other products inscribed within a different process. The
eruption of rock’n’roll in the fifties was by no means part of the wake produced
by jazz or the beat generation. Drugs were a completely invisible object within
rock’n’roll. Nevertheless, besides the exhausting tours which encouraged
taking something to keep on going, rock’n’roll involved models of behaviour

25
which made alcohol and drugs the necessary ingredients of a certain way of
life.(64) Even before the hippies hit the streets, rock and roll was pushing at
its outer limits, both in terms of lyric and musical structure. It wouldn’t be any
exaggeration that psychotropics had a major hand in the perception that
brought about all this new ground breaking. Speed may have been the fuel for
the live show, but marijuana was the great aid to the recording studio. A
heightened perception coupled with a rapidly expanding technology and
increasingly sophisticated recording techniques enabled rock and roll to go in
every direction. The Beatles and Rolling Stones took the simple R&B
structures that were the base of rock, and moulded them in elaborate and
increasingly baroque directions. Bob Dylan was writing lyrics that would have
been scarcely believable to anyone in the fifties. Brian Wilson layered
harmony upon harmony, bringing an unprecedented lushness to a simple
vocal workout, while Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and, a little later, Jimi Hendrix
produced sounds from the electric guitar that were undreamed of by Duane
Eddy or Hank B. Marvin. All this experimentation alone would have
constituted both a major achievement and a giant stride in the development of
rock and roll. Only a couple of short years after the rock generation had first
grappled with the new visions and perspectives revealed by marijuana, LSD-
25 hit the street market.(65)
LSD-25, lysergic acid diethylamide, was one of the most notable psychedelic
drugs, which embraced everything from nature’s cannabis, peyote and
mescaline to the new products of modern chemistry. LSD-25 was first
synthesised in 1943 in the laboratories of the Swiss pharmacy company,
Sandoz, in Basle, by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. It did not arrive in
America until 1949, where it remained part of a restricted medical research
project in analysing psychological states of mind, like schizophrenia and
paranoia. LSD-25 was an extremely effective way of creating temporary
hallucinatory states of mind that enabled doctors and psychologists to literally
enter the same states of consciousness their patients were experiencing -
obviously enhancing their ability to treat these patients through a fuller
understanding of their fears. Even though it was strictly used for psycho-

26
analysis, its testers included not only medical patients, but gradually,
throughout the 50s, members of American intelligentsia and the beatnik sub-
culture, mainly around Venice Beach in San Francisco, Greenwich Village in
New York and Austin in Texas.
LSD-25 got more publicity through the beatnik writers who tried the drug
(such as Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg) and gained
tremendous popularity in the sixties thanks largely to the proselytising efforts
of two Harvard university researchers, Drs Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert.
As it was presented primarily as a mind expanding substance, which could
only aid artistic perception and literary expression, it is not surprising that it
appealed to the limited number of beatnik intelligentsia aware of the drug : for
professional reasons rather than recreational ones. (66)
By the summer of 1963, when Timothy Leary was dismissed from the
University of California for holding LSD-25 sessions with a greater regularity
than was acceptable to the Board of Directors. From this point it is noticeable
that LSD-25 started to lose its scientific status, becoming more and more part
of an underground lifestyle and thus being expressed in the music and arts of
that society - the ‘Family Dog’ folk music co-operative around San Francisco
were an early group of artists and musicians to emerge in 1965. Ken Kesey
and The Merry Pranksters, formed the year before to basically document acid
experimentation through film and tape recordings simultaneously publicised
the drug via a bus painted in noticeable day-glo paints, travelling around to
those who were unaware of LSD’s existence. Even though Kesey and Leary
were independently presenting LSD for its scientific merits - to enlighten
people- many misinterpreted their cause. LSD became increasingly a
recreational drug. (67)
The most commonly reported phenomena resulting from an LSD experience
and having particular relevance to the question of creativity, were greater
freedom from prescribed mental sets and syntactical organisation, an unusual
wealth of associations and images, synesthesia, the sharpening of colour

27
perception, remarkable attention to detail, the accessibility of past
impressions, memories, heightened emotional excitement, a sense of direct
and intrinsic awareness, and the propensity for the environment to compose
itself into perfect tableaux and harmonious compositions. (68)
The effect of LSD on perception is mainly optical but also creates
psychological implications which in turn affect the rest of the senses. Retinal
recording in the eye of colours is enhanced, enabling many colour
combinations that would normally not be noticed, to stand out more clearly. A
person would not usually spot all of the varying shades of green on an apple
immediately, this would be carried out subconsciously and require deep
concentration and scrutiny before these subtleties were acknowledged by the
conscious field of the brain. LSD not only heightens the retina’s ability to
differentiate these subtleties, it also frees the ‘filtering function of the
conscious field of the brain, therefore allowing the conscious access to a
higher percentage of information normally stored subconsciously (that
percentage depending, of course, on the strength of the dosage).
By allowing a freer connection to exist between the subconscious and
conscious means that stored memory of the past events and experiences are
more accessible (usually when the conscious part of the brain suppresses the
majority of, mostly irrelevant, stored memory). But as the LSD has, in a
sense, ‘liberated the policing’ of the brain, by loosening the filtering action of
the conscious field, the capability to imagine and allow stored memory to
interact more freely causes some form of hallucination to take place.
Hallucination may also occur through the intensification of the senses,
obviously intensifying colour reception. This would explain why some tones of
green on the apple may be interpreted as being luminous or sharper than
they really are (also helped by the increased powers of detection that the
retina in the eye has received by the action of the drug). There seems to be a
paradox between the improved ability of the senses, and the heightened
ability for the brain to get confused by the abnormally large amount of
information held by the conscious field (information which has not been

28
filtered off for subconscious storage). Like in hypnosis, the subconscious and
conscious are handling information in unison - therefore breaking down social
conditioning which normally helps to govern conscious behaviour. By
breaking down those restrictions exercised by the conscious field, LSD
promotes autonomous handling of new and previously stored information -
normal logic becomes surreal. LSD creates a kind of schizophrenic
relationship (perhaps even a conflict) between the retina (as a sense organ)
and the brain (as a decipher of the information provided), hence LSD-25’s
original use in psychological research to analyse paranoia and schizophrenia,
where the individual does not distinguish between the difference of conscious
and subconscious actions.(69) While amphetamines tend to heighten one’s
sense of relation to reality, producing a ‘hyperreality’ as it were, LSD distorts
and rearranges the original referent (‘reality’), often to the degree of
temporarily blotting it out and imposing an alternative order of sensations. For
example, listening to music might induce one to envision a set of moving
coloured lights. The LSD user feels awash in a stream of new ideas. Attention
span is quite short, for each new idea carries the mind away. With strong
doses, some LSD users have difficulty retaining a single thought long enough
to voice a complete sentence. Fine motor skills, on the other hand, do not
seem to suffer much, which is important for a musician.(70)
Hallucinogenic drugs are said to make music sound more meaningful, so it
might be just as valid to say drug taking encourages an interest in rock music.
It is significant that music was considered equally integral to the enhancement
of hallucinogenic experience. In particular, the musician-listener harmony was
heightened by an emphasis on shared experience, which, in the sixties, was
reflected in the lyrics and constructed through musical techniques which
emphasised an electronic mutation of sound and shifting textures of timbral
colours, so providing a metaphor for the enhanced awareness of colour and
temporal disorganisation associated with LSD. Associations with the
metaphysical were generally structured through an adoption of Eastern
scales, drones, shifting metres, chant-like singing, and particular

29
instrumentation to include, for example, sitar, tambouras, dilruba and tabla.
(71)
Much psychedelic art depicted central vanishing points and cosmic
arrangements, like the Chocolate Watchband’s album cover for ‘No Way Out’
in 1967. Hearing is often blurred into more drone-like patterns, caused
perhaps by the autonomous way the brain is dealing with sonic information (a
sense of nausea brought on by the drug -marijuana particularly- also plays a
part in that). This also explains the Indian raga/drone effect bands such as
The Byrds and The Beatles introduced during this period, through their
experience of Indian sitar music and a wish to reflect LSD’s effect on hearing.
Once people had experienced these fundamental changes in the process of
perception most reflected that in their ‘widened’ thinking and expression. Paul
McCartney and George Harrison underline the effect of LSD on the lives of
60s users : “It opened my eyes. We only use a tenth of our brain. Just think
what we could all accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part. It would
mean a whole new world.” (Paul McCartney). “It’s shattering because it’s as
though someone suddenly wipes away all you were taught or brought up to
believe as a child and says : ‘That’s not it!’. You’ve gone, so far, your thoughts
have become so lofty and there’s no way of getting back.” (George Harrison).
(72)
LSD-inspired music and groups opened wholly new and seemingly endless
possibilities of lyric, rhythm and sound. But it was jazz musicians rather than
rock musicians who first tried hallucinogenic drugs, including Thelonious
Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane, who after an LSD trip said he had
‘perceived the inter-relations of all life forms’.(73) However, the fact is to be
acknowledged that the state of mind induced by LSD ingestion affected
musical creation in both positive and negative ways, such as directing
attention to novel sources of inspiration and the inability to follow complex
chord sequences, respectively.

30
The effect of acid on rock and roll was immeasurable. The idea of actually
translating the mind wrenching revelations of the new wonder drugs was an
elusive prize that numerous rock and roll bands grasped out for. Only a very
few managed to come close to reproducing even a single facet of the
psychedelic experience.(74) By 1965 it started to show in the music -most
notably of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan-. Rock’n’roll started
to look into itself and created a sound that was built for LSD. Compositions
became more and more complex as pop moved out of outdated blues 12-bar
structures, under the influence of drugs, with higher aspirations (particularly
with post-65 Beatles and Pink Floyd). New instrumentation and effects were
introduced, as well as samples of audiences, orchestras, backward tapes,
conversations and ragas to form an altogether more eclectic assemblage of
ideas. Psychedelia was not particularly an attitude, more an awareness and
open mindedness to enable more creativity.
Acid rock was a musical genre that sprang up around the use of LSD and
similar drugs, such as mescaline and psilocybin. The music developed
features that clearly derived from the effects of the drug, including the short
attention span, the emotional ambiguity and the lack of unequivocal attitudes,
the great interest in novel sensations, the egalitarian fascination with
everything and with all activities, and the impatiently creative desire to explore
complex and subtle elaborations. The psychopharmacological properties of
the drug did not directly produce the musical forms. More likely, the drug
created mental states with certain preferences and receptivities.
Consequently, the music took on features that corresponded to these mental
states. (75)
A major contribution of LSD to the evolution of rock music was expansion of
the use of sound colour. The interesting subjective distortions and spreading
of sound caused by LSD, led users to explore new musical sounds in the
quest for fascinating sensations. Electronic refinement of musical sound was
greatly stimulated during the acid era. This development can best be seen in
the Beatles. George Harrison told journalist Hunter Davies about his first time

31
taking LSD, ‘It was as if I’d never tasted, talked, seen, thought or heard
properly before.’(76) While under the influence of acid for the first time, John
Lennon started drawing and perceived George Harrison’s house as a big
submarine where they all lived. This child-like imagery soon grew more
pronounced as Lennon became obsessed with acid, taking hundreds of trips
which undermined his already volatile personality. (77)
Beatles For Sale (1964) and Help! (1965), though not without memorable
numbers, were mostly exploitation albums to satisfy the market. Early Beatles’
music was commonly a simple rhythm-and-blues arrangement : guitar, bass,
drums and vocals, with few or no sound effects. By 1965, however, Rubber
Soul (1965), Revolver (1966) and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
(1967), influenced in their composition by the use of marijuana and LSD,
placed the Beatles’ achievement on an unprecedented plateau of genius. A
concept of love that goes beyond a quick one behind the gasworks appeared
in The Word, while Nowhere Man examined the inner mental workings of the
individual as revealed by psychedelic drugs. She Said, She Said was inspired
by a conversation Lennon had with actor Peter Fonda during his second acid
trip, and Leary’s psychedelic version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead
provided the material for Tomorrow Never Knows.(78) The sitar appeared on
the Beatles’ records around the time that the Beatles may have first been
exposed to LSD.
To quote Carr & Taylor : “Rubber Soul is the Beatles’ first step into mystic
and, although subsequent albums seem to extrapolate these visions much
further, the insight - and cutting social comment- showed that the group had
ditched the jelly babies forever. They were a studio band pure and simple -
touring had long since become a question of going through the motions”(79).
The Sgt. Pepper album has a large variety of sounds. The acid influence is
apparent in the drumming on that album, for the drums are used to create
varied sensations and not merely to keep the rhythm. Lucy in the Sky (1967)
is a trip song -what with taxi and train and boat, and the tangerine trees and
marmalade skies, and the loss of time and the distortion of normal

32
proportions, and the music, if nothing else, and of course the LSD of Lucy,
sky, and diamonds, a trip song that is an invitation to discover what acid can
turn us on to : our senses of touch and taste and sight and smell and wonder.
Paul McCartney’s response to the question ‘What was the life that was
reflected in the Sgt. Pepper album?’ was : “Drugs, basically. They got
reflected in the music. When you mention drugs these days, heroin and crack
and cocaine and all of that serious stuff comes to mind. Remember, drug
taking in 1967 was much more in the musicians’ tradition. We’d heard of
Ellington and Basie and jazz guys smoking a bit of pot, and now it arrived on
our music scene. It started to find its way into everything we did, really. It
coloured our perceptions. I think we started to realise there weren’t as many
frontiers as we’d thought there were. And we realised we could break
barriers.” (80)
The Beatles seem to have used LSD for initial inspirations and then edited
and mixed and refined extensively while not under the influence of drugs,
whereas many other groups of the era were composing, recording and even
performing under the influence of drug. This can be accounted as the main
reason for the psychedelic but clean-cut sound of the Beatles when
compared with the others.
Bob Dylan went through some profound drug experiences during 1964-65,
taking up Boudelaire’s formula for immortality : ‘A poet makes himself a seer
by a long prodigious and rational disordering of the senses’. He talked about
recapturing spontaneity and about writing songs that matched his thoughts at
the age of ten, which was not going to happen while he was the doyen of
protest folk. So he turned his back on politics as marijuana and acid turned
him in on himself. Within a few short months the hard-nosed political reality of
the Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and the Ballad of Hollis Brown, gave
way to expressions of drug experiences like Chimes of Freedom, Lay Down
Your Weary Tune, Subterrannean Homesick Blues and Mr Tambourine Man.
Michael Gray cites Lay Down Your Weary Tune, written in 1964, as Dylan’s

33
first acid song, ‘the first concentrated attempt to give a hint of the unfiltered
world.’ (81)
Under the influence of LSD, the Grateful Dead did not vary their sound
greatly. For example, they seem to have eschewed the “fuzz tone” distortion
that was popular with the British bands, but still achieved a very pretty,
colourful sound. Noteworthy in this regard was their persistent use of the
acoustic piano instead of one of the electric keyboards that were so
predominant. The acoustic piano produced a sound that electric ones could
not match. It also deserves mention that the Grateful Dead were not a
particularly loud band, especially by comparison with other rock bands.
Loudness is not essential to acid rock. (82)
The Jefferson Airplane engaged in considerable exploration of sound,
including their extensive use of combined sound effects with the guitar (e.g.,
reverb, which produces an echo-chamber effect, superimposed on fuzz tone),
experimentation with sound collages (which was also tried by the Beatles),
and especially the use of improvised blends of voices. Thus on the live
concert recording Bless Its Pointed Little Head, several striking effects are
achieved by having the male singer carry responsibility for getting most of the
lyrics sung, while the female vocalist was free to oscillate between singing
improvised harmonies, shouting in unison with the lead male singer and
simply holding long notes. The last of these was especially unusual, for the
female vocalist would be singing the same words (more or less) as the male
lead and then would abruptly hold one word/note while he sang the next line
or two. (83)
Under the influence of Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys recorded tracks in the
mid-60s using the noises of fire, water, carrot-munching and even, if you
listen closely and with a certain amount of imaginative freeplay, the
unmistakable sound of sex on the studio carpet. Thanks to the ingestion of
huge quantities of LSD-25, surf ‘n’ car ballads effortlessly gave way to cosmic
thoughts and musical experiment. (84)

34
Jim Morrison of the Doors freely admitted that he “gobbled down acid like
candy” during his days in Venice, California, when he conceived and wrote
the major percentage of his songs. Morrison delved deep into the
subconscious and used the images and fears that he found there to create a
nightmarish, sinisterly erotic fantasy world where mystic killers roamed
dreamlike highways, virginal princesses sacrificed themselves to black leather
monsters, cities burned, violence was always lurking just below the surface
and reptiles abounded. Morrison presided over his strange creation in the role
of his lizard king character. (85)
Through 1966 and 1967, LSD spread through the British rock scene. Eric
Clapton claimed that ‘Acid was conductive to exploring music’. After taking it,
he never played straight blues. Brian Jones, who had initially been the drive
and musical inspiration behind the Rolling Stones, was particularly prominent.
In 1966, the Stones found themselves musically dried up. LSD provided
something of an answer, encouraging them eventually to make Their Satanic
Majesties Request. Also the Pink Floyd’s See Emily Play is a good example
of the British psychedelic sound. However the Pink Floyd took an almost
diametrically opposed position. Half hidden by the swirls and blobs of one of
the first lightshows, and motivated by the brilliant but far from stable Syd
Barrett, they produced a cold, aloof form of music that evoked images of both
the glittering icy void of deep space and the chill isolated corners of the
paranoid mind.(86). Whilst Pink Floyd stressed that they were not a
psychedelic group per se, they drew attention to the need to know that
particular forms of music, such as their own space rock, were played when
‘tripping’. Syd Barrett had suggested that Astonomy Domine, the opening
song of the 1967 album Piper at the Gates of Dawn, was a description of an
acid trip taken whilst composing the song, whilst Roger Waters stressed the
importance of the light show, the visual context which underpinned the ‘other-
worldliness’ and beauty of the space rock experience. ‘Space Rock’ , as the
name implies, refers to the sense of being ‘spaced out’, ‘tripping’, and is
musically constructed through layers of sound, kaleidoscopic colours,

35
unpredictable and sometimes disorienting effects which create a dramatic
realisation of movement through time and space, and which are analogous to
the extra-ordinariness of hallucinogenic experience. Within Astronomy
Domine the electronic mutation of sound, the huge overwhelming textures,
the sinuous tripping of the lead guitar and organ around the harmonic riff and
the magical, mesmeric effect of Pete Jenner’s voice as he intones the names
of stars and galaxies through a megaphone, resonate with the state of mind
when tripping. In particular, the dip shapes in the guitar solo create a strong
feeling of floating around the beat and this is reinforced by the lazy
meandering around the notes, again suggestive of tripping where the fixed
point takes on a new reality. The chord sequence, itself, moves against any
sense of formal organisation and, apart from the pause, which separates the
two parts of the song to create a feeling of stopped time, and the final
cadence, there is no real resolution. Rather there is a disorientation of the
norm and a total absorption within the sound itself to effect a musical
metaphor for being spaced out, the escape from a rational time sense. In live
performance, the electronically generated sound effects and the long
improvisatory passages resonated with stroboscopic lighting to effect a feeling
analogous to the effect of LSD : the ‘piling up of new sensations’, the
associations with changed perceptions and colour. (87)
A subtle but extremely important influence can be found in “texture” or the
physical properties of the music. These properties often influence one’s state
of mind and sometimes produce psychedelic effects in listeners which remind
them of their drug experiences. Jimi Hendrix innovated music with these
unique textural properties. Hendrix, a self avowed psychedelic stunt pilot,
came close to the jangle, the loop and the curve experienced by the acid
saturated brain.(88) Blue Cheer utilised 15 amplifiers and, in their live
concerts, often played at volumes considerably above the pain thresholds of
their listeners in an attempt to produce a distinctive texture.
The emphasis on changed perceptions associated with the increasing
importance of textural and timbral colour in psychedelic rock was facilitated by

36
advances in the ‘technicalisation’ of music and a growing awareness that
synthesisers, such as the revolutionary RCA and the MOOG, could be
creative compositional tools. Synthesis facilitated atmospheric textures and
multi-layered spatial compositions where the sound could travel rather than
staying at a constant distance. Components of sound could also be adjusted
in tempo to effect a ‘sounds parts’ timbre, whilst tape-splicing provided the
means to access and creatively deploy sound rhythms.
Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale, The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields, and
Stg. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Yardbirds’ Happenings Ten
Years Time Ago, Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black and Have You Seen Your
Mother Baby, the Small Faces’ Itchycoo Park, and Hendrix’s Purple Haze,
were examples of the experimental and imaginative, but above everything
else, aspiring to genius song-writing within pop music. All these songs feature
stark changes in tempo and harmonic key. Some groups combined simple
lyrics with an extremely complex texture; the Beatles have done this several
times (e.g., “Strawberry Fields Forever”) producing an effect which demands
structure and interpretation from the listener. (13/105). One musician
remarked, “The Beatles’ Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and I am the Walrus
are the musical equivalents of a light show - everything is happening all at
once, the instruments, the sound tracks, the words pile on top of each other
and you can assimilate them much better when you’re stoned”. One writer
(Korall, 1968) described the result of this combination : “At their ultimate in
surrealism and ambiguity, Dylan, the Beatles, and acid-rock groups, ... might
initially cloud the mind with a crazy quilt of image, but they do draw you to
them within the maelstrom and engage your capacities in a search that
frequently is as exciting and fulfilling as the revelation that sometimes lies at
the end of a trip. Observers have paralleled the experience with the drug turn
on - an analogue not without basis in fact. The drug phenomenon is very
much with us and figures in the music of youth.” (89)
As mentioned above, one hallmark of the acid sound was subtle complexity.
Admittedly, the subjective effects of LSD may have made things far less

37
subtle for a user. Nevertheless, novel sounds, cultivation of the use of
accompanying instruments and percussive contrasts produced auditory
sensations that users sought. Loud volume was not essential, although it was
often thrown in for good measure. Another feature of acid rock’s sound was
the occasional use of brief repetition of a simple phrase, with either increasing
volume or increasing tempo. This tended to produce in listeners the sensation
described by users as a “rush” : a subjective state of brief, agitated euphoria.
The popularity of this device was quite possibly enhanced by the fact that
marijuana users also experienced rush sensations and would therefore loudly
applaud such repetition during live performances.
The chord structure of acid rock songs is generally extremely simple. The
preference for simple chords can probably be attributed to LSD’s disruption of
the attention span and conscious memory. Within the framework of a few
simple chords, however, acid rock became highly complex. It was only during
the acid era that rock musicians seemed to discover the great potentialities
that lay in their instruments. Early rock musicians had simply strummed
chords while they sang. Acid rock produced lead guitar solos, the use of “fills”
(i.e., the insertion of brief, often improvised instrumental phrases between the
singer’s lines) and “jams”. A good example of acid musical structure is the
song Truckin’ by the Grateful Dead. Their live recording of it fills an entire
album side, yet it is almost all done on a single chord. Acid rock cultivated the
creative use of what might be called the intermediate instruments :
intermediate between the lead vocalist and the basic rhythm section. On the
Grateful Dead’s ‘China Cat Sunflower’, for example, the guitarist quietly plays
a melody behind the singer, one that is more complex than the singer’s
melody.
Another interesting feature of acid rock is that melodies were not generally
remarkable. The complexity of acid rock was in spontaneous, improvised
elaborations on the simple compositions. In short, the structure of acid rock
was geared toward a performer with a weak memory and an abundance of
inspirations. At the structural level, acid rock sought new rhyme schemes. The

38
standard ‘June-moon’ and ‘blue-you’ rhymes were quickly abandoned, just as
repetitious bass lines were discarded. The quest for novel rhymes was
tempered, however, by the impatience of the acid rock composer. Perhaps
the most distinctive feature of acid lyrics was their lack of unity across the
song. In the typical acid song, each verse is about something different. As
mentioned previously, the LSD user has a short attention span and an intense
fascination with anything that enters the mind. It would therefore be
unimaginably constraining, after getting through the chorus or refrain, to have
to resume the topic of the previous verse. For example, considering the first
three verses of the Grateful Dead’s ‘Truckin’’ (see Appendix 2), each verse
has a different topical theme and a different rhyme scheme as well. The lyrics
for the songs on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album often have unity, although in
many cases this unity is just a loose structure that provides a framework for
heterogeneous observations (e.g., Good Morning, Good Morning or A Day in
the Life). The Jafferson Airplane, at the opposite extreme, are often cryptic to
the point of incoherence in their lyrics. They carried the lack of unity to
extremes : to the point of titling songs with no relation to any of the parts or
verses. For example, the title of 3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds is never
explained and apparently has nothing to do with the song, except perhaps
that it is a fast song. (90)
Because pop music encompasses many aspects of the contemporary scene,
it was natural that references to drugs should eventually appear in the lyrics.
Since rock music began, most of its lyrics had dealt with love. In acid rock,
love lost its central emphasis. Lyrics became poetical rather than simply being
based on romantic entanglements and teenage frustration. (see Appendix 3
for the lyrics of Tales of Brave Ulysses (1967) by Cream). The egalitarian
mentality of the LSD user finds everything fascinating, so love is nothing
special. This development can be seen in the contrast between the early
Beatles’ music, which focused heavily on love lyrics, and their acid rock.
When acid rock did turn to love, it was generally without romantic passion. As
previously suggested, the acid user was typically detached from such
emotions.(91) There are more subtle psychedelic influences on lyrics than

39
specific mention of drugs, according to Larry Larden. He told Stanley
Krippner, “The usual girl-boy theme of pop music is often replaced by a man-
cosmos theme. Psychedelics often expand a song-writer’s perspective and he
starts to write about a man’s relationship to his fellow man, to nature, and to
the universe.” This trend is noted in the titles of many pop albums (e.g., The
Grateful Dead’s Anthem To The Sun, The Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic
Pillow, The Beatles’ Rubber Soul). (92)
The emotion in acid rock has a paradoxical character. It is often intense, but
there is a detachment at its core. This may derive from the drug’s effects.
Insofar as LSD stimulated and amplified sensations, it would enhance and
intensify emotion. However, the short attention span and the enhanced
capacity to see various sides and implications of an issue work against
emotion. A main source of intense emotion in acid rock comes from the
excitement of performing in front of a large audience. The audience
counteracts the attention span problem by continuing to be there and to make
noise, which has the effect of reminding the performer to be excited. Studio
acid rock, in contrast to live performances, tends to be unemotional -as can
easily be heard on the Beatles’ acid records. Confined to the studio, they
played a highly intellectual acid rock, which was full of ideas but had little
emotion. The Jefferson Airplane became similarly introspective and
intellectual in the studio (e.g., After Bathing at Baxter’s). Their occasional
studio attempts at emotionality (e.g., It’s A Wild Time on the above album) fall
flat and are just loud and empty. (93)
Acid, however, like marijuana, was not the ideal drug for a coherent live show.
Maybe the Grateful Dead could tank up on psychedelics and play a five or six
hour show of erratic brilliance, but they were definitely an exception. More
often than not, a bunch of acid before a show could lead to uncontrolled
outbursts of the kind that Jim Morrison was famous for, or else total confusion
and breakdown of even the slimmest musical continuity. A typical case was
Eric Burdon, who, at a legendary San Francisco concert, spent more than an
hour on stage, unable to do anything but wander, awe-struck, around the

40
stage gazing at the lightshow and murmuring “Gosh, wow” periodically into
the microphone. (94)
David Crosby’s autobiography is a case study in the difficulty of living a hippie
lifestyle to the full and being a professional musician. “I was never able to play
while that stoned on psychedelics”, he admitted. “If I was fully dosed and tried
to play, I’d be in another room with a guitar three feet thick, while still on stage
with the band with which I was supposed to be playing. In one case, that was
The Byrds at Fillmore West. Guitar strings would turn to rubber, my hands
would pass entirely through the instrument, and the audience (if I saw them at
all), could be anything from a field of waving buttercups to a pack of howling
demons”. (95)
Like any creative artist, Jimi Hendrix was intrigued by the visions he had
under the influence of LSD. Like so many others, from his use of mainly LSD
flowed an interest in the occult sciences, I Ching, astrology, numerology and
colour as sound. Carlos Santana was down at the Record Plant in mid-
November when Jimi was doing overdubs for Room Full of Mirrors : “This was
a real shocker to me. He said, ‘Okay, roll it’, and started recording and it was
incredible. But within 15 or 20 seconds into the song, he just went out. All of a
sudden the music that was coming out of the speakers was way beyond the
song, like he was freaking out having a gigantic battle in the sky with
somebody. It just didn’t make sense with the song anymore, so the roadies
looked at each other, the producer looked at him and they said, ‘Go get him’.
I’m not making this up. They separated him from the amplifier and the guitar
and it was like he was having an epileptic attack....When they separated him,
his eyes were red.....He was gone.” (96)
Bill Graham (Graham and Stafford, 1969), perhaps America’s leading
entrepreneur of pop music : “I’ve seen many musicians perform very, very
well, and on occasion they have said, ‘It’s a result of ... having used acid.’
This I have heard many times. But for the most part the musicians I’ve seen
perform under the influence of acid - it was close to tragic. The danger ... of

41
acid is that it’s used by many who haven’t learned how to cope with it in
proper fashion.” (97)
In 1968 and 1969 Stanley Krippner interviewed 27 pop musicians (25
instrumental performers and two vocalists), most of them rock performers. All
27 had smoked marijuana and 24 had tried LSD. Five musicians stated a
preference for smoking marijuana before performing, seven felt it impaired
their performance, while the others claimed it had neither a positive nor a
negative effect. Three musicians claimed that their performance was
enhanced by LSD, while six claimed the substance had no effect on their
performance. The other 15 were of the opinion that LSD and similar drugs
had a negative effect on the quality of their performance, although many
claimed that some of their most creative ideas had come to them during
psychedelic experiences. According to Stanley Krippner : “I have heard
musicians perform both with and without the influence of LSD. In no case
could the LSD performance be called superior, or even on an equal level. The
performer may have been under the impression that he was doing well; in my
opinion however, he typically demonstrated difficulties co-ordinating his
performance with that of other members of the group. Problems in tempo
were common; frequent fingering errors and missed notes also occurred.
Insofar as marijuana is concerned, the effects appeared to be somewhat
different, and highly variable from person to person. In general, I have
detected neither an improvement nor a deterioration among musicians
performing under the influence of marijuana.” (98)
The musician and poet Donovan once stated : “It was a very heavy change,
the hallucinatory drugs....I tend to think that the drugs didn’t make me write
the way I wrote songs.... I believe that very early, before I had taken acid, I
was writing dream-state songs, but they were certainly increased and
heightened by the use of acid.” (99)
John Lennon’s answer to the question asked in the Rolling Stone interview in
1971 “How do you think LSD affected your conception of the music ?” was :

42
“It was only another mirror. It wasn’t a miracle. It was more of a visual thing
and a therapy, looking at yourself a bit. It did all that. You know, I don’t quite
remember. But it didn’t write the music. I write the music in the circumstances
in which I’m in, whether it’s on acid or in the water.” (100)
Not all rock stars favoured LSD. Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead’s Ron
‘Pigpen’ McKernan, for example, rejected LSD in favour of alcohol, speed or
heroin. They seemed scared of LSD’s disorientating effects, and sought other
drugs and drink in order not to ‘expand their consciousness’ but to shut it
down.
Amphetamines are powerful central nervous system stimulants. Unlike
cocaine, which is a naturally derived stimulant, the amphetamines are
synthetic drugs. Originally synthesised in 1887 by the pharmaceutical
manufacturers Smith, Kline and French, amphetamine was launched on the
market in 1932 as a Benzedrine nasal inhaler to relieve the symptoms of
colds, hayfever and asthma.(101) Amphetamines and barbiturates -uppers
and downers- have been prescribed by doctors since the thirties to restore
lost energy or ensure a good night’s sleep respectively. Although their
widespread abuse has led to a more responsible attitude towards their
prescription among the medical profession, for a long time they were handed
out like sweets, a practice satirised by the Rolling Stones in Mother’s Little
Helper.
The major medical use for methedrine (speed) was only emergency injection
to revive victims from a state of technical death due to heart stop. In other
words, it was for waking up corpses. At its most terminal, methedrine (‘meth’)
could produce extreme and often violent paranoia and hallucinations. Speed
stood at the cross-roads of early rock ‘n’ roll and country music, consumed by
performers, roadies and audience alike. It was not exactly unknown among
British musicians. Amphetamines in various shapes and colours kept the pop
and rock ‘n’ roll tours moving in the fifties and sixties and Phenmetrazine,
marketed as Preludin, was consumed by the handful by bands, most notably

43
by the Beatles, on their trips to Hamburg. Speed (and later cocaine) worked
by giving musicians the courage to get out there and sufficient edge to keep
going throughout the performance. (102)
The speed phenomenon produced a crop of suitably demented songs.
Favourites among the San Francisco speedfreaks were an outfit called the
Blue Cheer. Almost a prototype of today’s heavy metal bands, the Blue Cheer
relied on sheer volume to punch across their point, boasting anything up to
two thousand watts of guitar amplification. The Velvet Underground’s
notorious cut Sister Ray has been one of the speedfreaks’ favourite recording
worldwide. Nobody could deny that it fitted the mood exactly. In its twenty
minute duration the song screeched its way through a high velocity ribbon of
the most disquieting jangle the world had ever heard. It is a fact that nobody
listened to the music too much, not even the almost inaudible, but oft
repeated, lyric line “I’m searching for my mainline”. The record was not there
for aural gratification, more to heighten the illusion of jagged, high power
madness.(103) Each Velvet Underground song used a small group of notes
that kept battering against one another until feedback -the screech, the
amphetamine shriek- was the only place to go. The rhythm never let go, it
held you down while the lyrics swamped you with street images. The sound of
the band was an aural presentation of the amphetamine experience. That
was the band’s context, the framework within which they operated; Lou Reed
put an amphetamine stutter in Sister Ray to emphasise the point. Against
this, Reed sang of a white boy going to Harlem to score heroin (Waiting For
The Man) and of the all-consuming love affair between a heroin addict and his
drug (Heroin). (104)
Amphetamines became the favoured drug for the live show, as acid, like
marijuana, was not the ideal drug for a coherent live show. The useful familiar
pills did their rounds, but in addition to the well known Dexedrines, spansules,
Drinamyl and the rest, methedrine, which was available in clinical ampoules,
bootleg pills, capsules or powder, was more powerful than anything that had
previously gone the illicit distribution route.

44
Brian Wilson in the Rolling Stone Interview in 1976 : “I used to write on pills. I
used to take uppers and write, and I used to like that effect. In fact, I’d like to
take uppers now and write, because they give me, you know, a certain life
and a certain outlook. I mean the pill might be unnatural, but the song itself
doesn’t turn out unnatural on the uppers. The creativity flows through.” (105)
In the mean time barbiturates and other, milder downers like quaaludes and
mantrax have remained popular among oblivion seekers and heavy-metal
freaks lost in a ‘Valhalla’ of plodding rhythms and tortured guitar feedback.
As the methedrine craze had worn itself out, heroin became the number one
fashion turn on. Heroin was simpler, easier, more to the point and, in the long
run, much more deadly. It held the pressures at bay and gave the user not
only mental space but cocooned him in a psychological capsule that pain was
unable to enter as long as he keeps taking the medicine. James Taylor
commented on the effects of heroin : “It knocks out your sensitivities at the
same time that it gets rid of the suppressed emotion that you can’t stand
anymore. I was incapable of writing on heroin. I imagine even methadone
does that to me, to an extent, except that after a while the presence of
methadone disappears. You can’t feel it. “ (106)
As for another crucial drug used heavily by the rock musicians, however
smoother, Stephen B. Groce’s findings as of his research on ‘American small-
time rock and roll musicians’ (1987) reveal that most users found that
cocaine ‘interfered with your sense of rhythm’ and caused users to ‘inspect
what you’re performing rather than just performing it’. In addition, most of
these stage performers reported that they were involuntarily ‘speeding up the
songs’ when high on cocaine. (107)
Cocaine is a central nervous system stimulant which is derived from the
leaves of the Erythroxylon coca, a small plant which is native to the slopes of
the Andes. It disrupts normal chemical processes of brain activity. When

45
cocaine is sniffed or injected, the person may feel a sense of restless
excitement and as if he/she has unlimited energy. The person may
overestimate his actual capabilities at the time. The toxic effects of cocaine
use include anxiety, confusion, paranoid delusions, delirium, and auditory,
visual, and tactile hallucinations.(108) Most of the cocaine users illustrate that
sniffing cocaine or injecting the diluted powder into a vein produces an ego-
reinforcing euphoria, exhilaration, and a powerful rush of well-being.
In a study carried out by O’Bireck , the ex-user musicians reflect on their
compositional practices while they were users. In most cases complete
immersion in the subcultural life of cocaine use while composing resulted in
some of these experiences being transformed into authored material. Living
by subcultural norms, complete with resultant activities sparked by continual
cocaine use, seemed to provide a large number of raw material from which to
elicit novel ideas for original music composition. A songwriter has told once :
“Yeah, I wrote my hottest songs when I was on my longest benders...beer and
blow (cocaine) mostly...a sense of desperation, you know ? I tried to capture
the pleasure I had the night before in all the pain I was in then.”(109) A well
known keyboard player told at some stage that he felt he couldn’t compose at
his peak without using mass quantities of cocaine. The band was relying on
him for new material, and he was relying on coke. (110)
As cocaine use is combined with occupational activities, a sense of
competition appears to follow where the utopian effects of cocaine appear to
triumph over occupational obligations. Where ultimate pleasure was once
experienced from the composition, recording, dissemination and live
performance of original music, cocaine use takes away this pleasure. As a
result, musical pursuits are reduced to a strictly obligatory function of a
professional musician’s life. This generally results in a marked loss of control
over basic life processes and wider career goals.
Although the use of cannabis among musicians seems to have declined
slightly with the changes in musical fashion, it is still true that where you find

46
any form of rock music you will almost certainly find cannabis. In a sense one
can argue that the Beatles, by turning on, perverted pop and invented rock as
we know it.
VI
By the mid 1970s, the rock music business had become strongly linked to the
drug trade, and it was estimated that 90 per cent of all cocaine use in the
United States centred on the rock and film industries. In the musical front,
possibly one of the main problems of the seventies was that no new drug
appeared on the streets to change both the consciousness and the music of
rock and roll effectively. For over half the decade, both music and the drug
consumption seemed to stabilise and turn in on itself. Jazz survived its
evolution into concert music, but acid rock did not. Probably much of the
reason for the dwindling of acid rock was in the growing disfavour with LSD
itself. Musicians and their audiences took new drugs instead of LSD and acid
rock declined. Experimentation was constricted to flirtations with the trappings
of glittering homosexuality, right wing politics and bizarre chemicals like
animal tranquiliser or angel dust. For the most part the successful consumed
cocaine, the unhappy used heroin, the struggling took speed and downers
and just about everyone used as much booze and marijuana as they could
get their hands on. (111)
Originality in music comes only after musicians concentrate on amassing
knowledge of history (musical and social) and gaining technical ability on
musical instruments. A perfect example of that development from a
retrogressive state to progressive thinking is Pete ‘Bassman’’s account of his
musical career that started in 1982 with Spaceman 3, who concentrated on
exploration but did so under the influence of drugs. They were not technically
proficient but ‘stoned’ enough to produce 30 minute, one note, high volume
songs which they felt at the time “didn’t conform to anybody’s idea of a good

47
group we know, and so felt like we were pioneers of a certain sound...”. In
fact, despite their intentions, Spaceman 3 were repeating what the Velvet
Underground and the Stooges had done twenty years before them, not
because they wanted to imitate those idols, but because the same conditions
were in operation. They were young, ‘stoned’, not technically advanced but
still in need of exploring, musically as well as mentally, through the help of
certain drugs. (112)
Just as it began to look as if the seventies weren’t going to produce anything
of value, the new wave broke. A new generation marched into the picture with
new ideas, new fashions and a more raw energy than had been seen since
the mid sixties. The music, which had previously been moving through an
unadventurous and inward looking phase, became stripped down, energetic
and quite prepared to kick out at old or redundant ideas. Once again rock and
roll seemed ready to face the strain.
The new wave also brought back the need for fuel. Failing to find any exciting
chemical innovations, the punks, just like their spiritual fathers before them,
turned back to the tried and trusted standby. A new amphetamine cycle
started, proving that the direction of rock and roll is probably more circular
than linear (113).
During the summer of 1988, a musical concert experience called Acid House
arrived on the cultural scene in many British cities. Acid House music was
banned from the pop music charts, radio and television, and retail outlets.
Some psychoactive substances have been bought, sold, and consumed at
Acid House events. At the physiological level, the nature of this music,
especially the drumming aspect, seemed instrumental in providing altered
states of consciousness. At the interpersonal and social level, the set and
setting of Acid House events further enhanced and reinforced the specific
physiological psychological responses. (114)

48
The reason why so many comparisons are being made between sixties
psychedelia and developments since Acid House is mainly due to the
emergence of Ecstacy as a social stimulant in British club culture during the
second half of the 80s. Ecstacy or Ecstasy, often called ‘E’, ‘ADAM’ or ‘XTC’
is known chemically as 3,4 Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA for
short. The oils from such diverse plants as nutmeg, dill, parsley seed,
calamus, crocus, saffron, vanilla beans and sassafras all contain the chemical
precursors of MDMA. However, more often than not, MDMA is produced
synthetically in a laboratory from Methamphetamine.(115) Ecstacy was
obviously a suitable social drug as it broke down inhibition and conscious
defences which also qualified it for serious therapeutic use, a use that LSD
had originally been intended for.
The fact that many danced tripping on Ecstacy and LSD led to similar forms
of dance appreciation that had first appeared on a mass scale during the late
60s - due to the liberating effect of drugs and music. People now ‘freaked out’
to the music under the influence by standing still, keeping their limbs stiff and
waving their arms, often shouting “Acieeed!”. Others appeared more
mellowed and slowly waved their hands in front of their eyes to witness the
visual hallucinatory effect of LSD on the perception of movement. These
forms of drug induced abandonment and dancing resembled the freak-outs
seen in the films covering the Monterrey and Woodstock festivals of 1967 and
1969 respectively. (116)
Ecstacy arrived during a period in the early 80s when the UK was increasingly
beginning to look to black American danceability, and street-wise ghetto
attitudes. This might explain why Ecstacy in Britain was strictly contained
within club culture rather than appealing to an exclusive designer minority.
The dance-inducing effect of Ecstacy (through lowering normal inhibitions),
particularly when mixed with an amphetamine (providing an artificial feelings
of energy), no doubt influenced this too. The fact that Ecstacy was
‘discovered’, so to speak by a group of DJs (Nick Holloway, Danny Rampling,
Johnny Walker and Paul Oakenfold) and clubbers on Ibiza, during 1986, also

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