While I agree with John Donegan that “celebrity wisdom” is often questionable, I have a few points of contention with his recent column (“Celebrity wisdom,” Sept. 22).
He claims that before the 1960s, there were no positive depictions of drug use in the entertainment industry. I guess he doesn’t consider alcohol and nicotine to be drugs even though alcohol is responsible for approximately 140,000 deaths per year and smoking tobacco for 480,000. (In contrast, 107,000 died from illicit drugs last year.) Starting with the end of Prohibition in 1933, people in movies were often found drinking booze, most often within the context of having a good time, sometimes humorously when a person was drunk, and only occasionally were the negative effects depicted. They also lit up their cigarettes, cigars, and pipes frequently, and a young Ronald Reagan posed for magazine ads promoting Chesterfield Cigarettes.
When psychedelia first started creeping into popular music in the mid 1960s, relatively few songs were explicitly about drugs. For most Beatles fans, “Tomorrow Never Knows” was that strange John Lennon song at the end of Side 2 of Revolver. At the time, few realized he borrowed lines from Timothy Leary’s version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. As far as I know, it wasn’t until Jefferson Airplane hit the charts with “White Rabbit” in the Summer of ’67, that a Top 10 song mentioned “some kind of mushroom” and “a hookah-smoking caterpillar.”
Meanwhile, songwriters Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil had already written their song “Kicks” that became a hit for Paul Revere & the Raiders that warned “Kicks just keep gettin’ harder to find/ And all your kicks ain’t bringin’ you peace of mind./ Before you find out it’s too late/ Girl, You better get straight.”
Mr. Donegan also mentions the film Easy Rider but fails to discuss a few of the ambiguities present in the film. Wyatt and Billy (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) are selling the cocaine at the beginning of the movie to fund their motorcycle trip, the song playing is “The Pusher” by Hoyt Axton performed by Steppenwolf. The Refrain is “God damn the pusher man.” Then there is the LSD sequence in New Orleans with the two prostitutes. One of the women spends most of her time crying, in what can only be described as a bad trip. Finally, toward the end of the movie, Wyatt declares that with regard to their quest, “We blew it.” Shortly thereafter, both Billy and Wyatt are literally blown away by a blast from a shotgun.
I also want to mention two more songs that came out in this time period that also had anti-drug themes: First was “Amphetamine Annie” by Canned Heat with the refrain, “speed kills.” The second is the “pathologically smug” (?) Neil Young, “The Needle and the Damage Done,” which was his reaction to one of his bandmates overdosing on heroin.
No, celebrities—whether they are musicians, actors, preachers, or politicians—aren’t perfect human beings, but sometimes they can say or sing something meaningful. It is up to each individual to decide for themselves what is wisdom and what is foolishness. Δ
Respond to Brent Dannells from Atascadero with a letter to the editor sent to letters@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 9, 2022.
I enjoyed Mr. Dannell’s trip down memory lane, and his impressive recollection of some of the popular entertainment of that time. Apparently, neither of us dived so deeply into the 1960’s zeitgeist as to be unable to remember the era. Fun fact: In Easy Rider, the role of the drug dealer to whom Fonda and Hopper made their delivery was played by Phil Spector, later best known for his improbable wigs and his proclivity for presenting his dates with a gun instead of flowers.
Other druggie tunes I immediately recall are the Bird’s “Eight Miles High”, and Huey Lewis and the News in “I Need A New Drug”. There are lots more.
Mr. Dannells is correct about Neil Young’s song showing his disdain for injecting drugs. I recall that the cut off point of the time distinguishing “good drugs” from “bad drugs” was the use of hypodermic needles to inject them. I recall that this stance seemed to endure at least until the movie “Trainspotting”, which seemed to soften the view of heroin junkies, and gave rise to the term “heroin chic” to describe the then-fashionable gaunt look found among IV drug abusers. I would guess that some songwriters of the day added a cautionary note about drugs to their songs to get them past the censors
It is up to each individual to make wise decisions and live their life to their own satisfaction.
Not me.
Not you.
Not the gov’t at any level.
No force or fraud and isolation in self sustaining “prisons” of those who will harm others.