Corned Beef Should Not Be Blue Love him or hate him, Woody Allen is one of America’s most prominent filmmakers.  This month, we look at some particularly controversial titles in the Woody Allen canon.  Plus… The Woody Allen Theft Guide.

Got It Made Singer-songwriter Greg Trooper talks with Zayne Reeves about his new album, working with Dan Penn and life in Nashville.

With Kaleidoscope Eyes: An Abridged History of Art Under The Influence Brighid Mooney chronicles the influence drugs have had on music, film, literature, and art.  “Far out, man!”

Casey Comes Clean Stephen Gill catches up with Ken Casey, founding member and bass player of Boston’s beloved The Dropkick Murphys.

Damn The Torpedoes: Matt Mays & El Torpedo Matt Mays took some time out of his busy schedule on tour with Blue Rodeo to answer a few of Adam M. Anklewicz’s questions.

The Music Made Them Do It – The Intersection of Film and Music Lisa Hood-Anklewicz looks at music and the important role it has played in cinema, both past and present.

Pull The Wires From The Wall Dan Crosby bids farewell to one of Scotland’s great bands, the recently disbanded Delgados.

With Kaleidoscope Eyes:
An Abridged History of Art Under the Influence
by Brighid Mooney

Artists of all media are generally known for the unique way they see the world, and also the way they channel that singular vision through paper, canvas, film or music. Sometimes their artistic visions are fueled by sensitivity, pain or wisdom, sometimes by outright insanity. And sometimes, the greatest art comes from something wholly artificial, a self-inflicted altered state, which bends the artist's mind, the very sight and sound they perceive, or the hands with which they fashion reproductions of their bizarre personal worlds for the rest of us to see. Whether it be absinthe, opium, marijuana, LSD, alcohol, or any number of other mind-altering substances, there is a long tradition of artists building a canon of unique, otherworldly creations made under the influence.

So many artists, and even more non-artists, have been involved in a plethora of drug experimentation since humanity's humble beginnings that trying to document this unwieldy subject in full would be a fool-hardy, if not impossible, endeavor. Instead, we will focus on those artists, and their work, whose drug use is not only the most discernible, but also arguably the most beneficial to their artistic output. So instead of cataloguing practically every rock and roll band to play a note through the 1960s, and ignoring those writers and artists whose work did not reflect their altered states of consciousness, we'll take a closer look at people like The Beatles, whose music, it can be argued, got remarkably more interesting and complex as they started experimenting with marijuana and LSD, and writers like Aldous Huxley, who not only took a scientific and philosophical approach to his experiments with mescaline and LSD, but recorded his experiences in detail in works like The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, which later went on to become immensely influential to subsequent generations of curious, mind expansionists everywhere.

 

"Newspaper taxis appear on the shore, waiting to take you away."

From acid rock to acid jazz

Comedian Bill Hicks was a huge fan of both music and mushrooms and often made reference to both in his act. "I think drugs have done some good things for us," one of his jokes goes. "If you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor. Go home tonight, take all your albums, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them. Cause you know what? The musicians that made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years? Real fucking high on drugs. The Beatles were so fucking high they let Ringo sing a few songs."

Music is one of the areas of art more obviously and overtly affected by drug use, and while band after band, from the pioneers of rock and roll, to those still practicing in their parents' garage, has experimented with drugs of varying types, perhaps none have more to show for it than the Beatles. Although through the years they have sometimes denied the influence of drugs in their work, it is more than obvious in quite a few places, and fun to speculate in the rest. Until his death, John Lennon continued to assert that the song "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" was not about LSD, despite its conspicuous initials. About "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds," Lennon says, "I swear to God, or swear to Mao, or to anybody you like, I had no idea it spelled LSD." Instead, he maintained that it was a description of a picture made by his then five year old son, Julian. That story may be true, but bandmate Paul McCartney has made it clear that whether Lennon's son was the inspiration or not, the song most definitely has psychedelic overtones. In fact, McCartney has been much more forthcoming on the subject of the real meanings of the Beatles' songs, especially in recent years. His confessions show that while "it's easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on the Beatles' music," at the time, perhaps, most people didn't guess just how far the influence actually went. “A song like 'Got to Get You Into My Life,’ that’s directly about pot, although everyone missed it at the time," McCartney said in an interview last year in Uncut Magazine.¹ “‘Day Tripper,’ that’s one about acid. 'Lucy in the Sky,’ that’s pretty obvious."

In various interviews before his death, Lennon concurred. “‘Help!’ was made on pot," he told Rolling Stone in 1971, "’A Hard Day's Night’ I was on pills."² McCartney has also admitted that it wasn't until the Beatles started making their Sergeant Pepper album that they "started to use [cocaine] in the studio." For other songs and albums, there is only speculation and reading between the lines. Songs like "With A Little Help From My Friends," which former Vice President Spiro Agnew once called "a tribute to the power of illegal drugs," "Yellow Submarine," "She Said, She Said," which Lennon is reported to have come up with during a paranoia-fueled LSD session with actor Peter Fonda, who kept repeating "I know what it's like to be dead," and "Strawberry Fields Forever" have a psychedelic feel to them and more likely than not were at least influenced by the Beatles' experiments with LSD and marijuana. And "Tomorrow Never Knows," with its swirling, drawn-out guitar and manic sound effects, was supposedly written because Lennon wanted to write a song that felt like a trip on LSD. Sometimes it comes down to the artist's explanation, which may or may not be truthful, versus the gut feeling a particular song will give you. Art, like most things, is subjective after all. With a song like "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" we may never know the truth, if there is one. While Lennon swore that "it wasn't about 'H' at all," with lines like "I need a fix cause I'm going down" and Lennon himself admitting that "a warm gun means you just shot something," it's hard to believe that the song isn't about heroin on at least some level.

One well-known rock and roll rumor has it that the one to introduce the Beatles to drugs was none other than prolific songwriter and drug user Bob Dylan ("Dr. Robert"). While Dylan is a musical poet whose songs tell a wide variety of stories with vivid imagery and intricate rhymes, some of his songs have long been suspected of being drug-related, including "Lay Down Your Weary Tune," "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and, especially, "Mr. Tambourine Man." Of the latter Dylan has said that "drugs never played a part in that song ... drugs were never that big a thing with me. I could take 'm or leave 'm, never hung me up."³  Journalist Al Aronowitz, in whose New Jersey home Dylan wrote "Mr. Tambourine Man," wrote in 2002 that "Bob was never hung up on drugs. He could take ‘m or leave ‘m. But mostly he took ‘m."⁴ Regardless of whether or not the song was really about a dealer and his wares, the fact remains that drugs were a large part of Dylan's life at the time he wrote it, and it is probably as open to interpretation as anything else. Since drug use was so prevalent in the 1960s, and most rock and roll bands especially seemed to partake, it hardly makes sense to spend time deconstructing the songs of bands well-known for their drug use like the Doors, the Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead. Instead, we'll skip over to guitar virtuoso Jimi Hendrix, because his drug use, like his guitar playing, was legendary, and because it also seemed to make a discernible imprint on his music.

Legend has it that Hendrix used to cut his forehead and put LSD litmus under his bandana, and thus be tripping while he was playing on stage. Hat brims soaked in acid, absorbed into his skin, mixed with sweat and rolling down his face into his eyes, Hendrix would literally be dripping in LSD, and the music certainly reflected that, with its hazy distortions and psychedelic lyrics. The song most speculated to be about drugs is the famous "Purple Haze," which most people assume to be about an acid trip. But like Dylan with "Mr. Tambourine Man," Hendrix insists that "Purple Haze" had "nothing to do with drugs," but instead "was all about a dream I had that I was walking under the sea." Like many songs of the sort, it is just as likely that it was both about a drug experience and based on a dream. Or perhaps about a dream had while on drugs.

But it isn't just rock and roll that has felt the effects of its creator's chemical experimentation; many musical genres have had the hand of contraband mixed into their conception. Many of the most famous and innovative musicians of the jazz era were known for drug use, which was often more debilitating than inspirational. From Billie Holiday's descent into opium and heroin addiction to Charlie Parker's struggles with heroin, alcohol and methamphetamine, the influence of drugs on the legends of jazz has been substantially negative. Legendary jazz trumpet player and lifelong marijuana advocate Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, on the other hand, seemed to incorporate his addiction into his music more often than not. "It really puzzles me to see marijuana connected with narcotics ... dope and all that crap," he once said. "It's a thousand times better than whiskey. It's an assistant, a friend."⁵ Indeed, Armstrong was so enchanted by the positive effects of marijuana that he rarely performed without imbibing and was said to be stoned while making the historic recordings with the Hot Fives and Sevens, who were also, allegedly, partaking. In fact, his famous song, "Muggles," is even titled after one of his favorite nicknames for his drug of choice.

From early jazz to the club scene of the 1990s and beyond, where ravers drop ecstasy in a mad swirl of electronica and flashing lights and dance themselves sometimes to death, the role that drugs have played in the making and performing of music is sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes bleak, inspiration and self-destruction moving hand in hand as these musicians have explored the manifest destiny of the human mind.

 

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

Pages and pages of iambic pentameter

Before LSD became illegal in 1964, writer, philosopher and scientific thinker Aldous Huxley was taking experimental doses of varied psychedelics, including LSD, mescaline and psilocybin, recording his experiences in careful detail and exploring the possibilities of their effect on the human mind and on humanity's evolution. His seminal scientific exploration, The Doors of Perception, so named after William Blake's poem "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," in which Blake wrote that "if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite," went on to become extremely influential to the hippie generation of the 1960s, and is even where Jim Morrison's mystical band The Doors found its name. Aside from Huxley's personal experiences, the drugs themselves also often turned up in fictional form in his novels. Soma, for instance, was the mood-elevating drug used by the denizens of Huxley's Brave New World, and the inhabitants of his Island used a psychedelic drug called moksha in their religious and spiritual rituals.

One of the last century's biggest proselytizers of psychedelic experimentation was former Harvard professor Timothy Leary, whose at first controlled and legal experiments with LSD using graduate students helped to raise awareness of the drug's existence. But Leary's biggest contribution to the artistic world was probably turning on many of the most important artists and writers of the era. Despite his ignominious decline in the public's eye after the drug became illegal, Leary, who infamously urged the world to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," introduced a variety of influential artists to the psychedelic experience, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs, Thelonious Monk, Marilyn Monroe, Robert Lowell and many others. Leary also purportedly gave LSD to Mary Meyer, then mistress of US president John F. Kennedy, and trained her to be an LSD "guide." She, in turn, took the drug back to the White House where she turned the president of the United States on to acid.

Ken Kesey, writer, Merry Prankster and perpetual thorn in the side of J. Edgar Hoover, was first introduced to LSD by the US Army, who, at the time, were considering the possible uses of the drug in mind control and psychological warfare. And it was eight peyote buttons that got Kesey started on his most famous novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Lewis Carrol, who sent his fictional heroine Alice "through the looking glass" and onto a psychedelic odyssey, was reportedly a user of both magic mushrooms and hashish. Alice In Wonderland has long been suspected of being less an innocent children's fantasy tale and more the detailed story of a hallucinogenic experience. Indeed, in the course of her adventure, Alice ingests pills of varying size and drinks from unmarked containers, and all of these dutifully change her perception of the phantasmagorical world around her.

In contrast to the bizarre and otherworldly fantasy of the late nineteenth century, the writers of the beat generation envisioned a world darker and much more foreboding, realistically, and sometimes hellishly, feeling out the edges of sanity in the literary underworld of the 1950s. Jack Kerouac was a frequent user of marijuana, the "tea" of the 1950s, as well as drugs like speed and Benzedrine, and his best-known work, On The Road, in which he and his friends criss-cross America ingesting a variety of substances, is a frenzied, unhinged document of the travels and travails of the scattered writers of the beat generation, whose drug use was as copious and continuous as the American highways they traversed. Another of the most famous beat writers was William S. Burroughs, whose books were often drenched in hallucinations, where the dream-like drug state is indiscernible from reality. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (from within which rock group Steely Dan took its name) is, in itself, entirely a drug-induced hallucination, and difficult to get through without keeping that always in mind. Likewise, Junky is a more realistic story about crime and addiction on the streets of New York City. Burroughs is also the author of a book called The Yage Letters, consisting of his correspondence to fellow beat writer Allen Ginsberg as he traveled through South America in search of the hallucinogenic yage plant, also known as ayahuasca.

Ayahuasca is a rare, hard to find plant, used by native tribes of South America, and certain Indian tribes, and its psychedelic properties are intense and mind-blowing, but it isn't a drug that has had a chance to affect a very wide range of the artists of the last several centuries. Conversely, two substances that were more prevalent with writers for decades and decades were opium and absinthe. Opium use was especially common and many nineteenth century writers, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, John Keats and William James, were known to use it. The use of absinthe was equally widespread for a time and among its constituents were Verlaine, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Another writer addict, Samuel Coleridge, would tell stories of smoking opium and falling into a drug-induced dream state, "a kind of a reverie," waking up to find pages and pages of verse written in iambic pentameter, with no recollection of the act of writing it. It is said that this is how he happened to write not only his most famous work, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," but also the symbolic "Kubla Khan" and the beginning of the narrative poem "Christabel."

From opium and absinthe to mushrooms and LSD, drug use has long been a prevalent part of the literary world. Mystical fantasy worlds, epic tales of adventure and the seedy underground where literature and addiction collide and sometimes fall apart, a fair amount of humanity's most inventive and transporting fiction owes much to the darker depths of the human mind untapped by sobriety.

 

"I don't take drugs. I am drugs."

Painting under the influence

"Everyone should eat hashish," Spanish painter Salvador Dali is quoted as saying, "but only once." Although he may have only used hashish once, Dali is part of the larger school of surrealism, which explored not just drugs, but also dreaming and other altered states of consciousness in their work. Along with the Dada movement, out of whose roots the surrealist movement grew, these artists explored the unusual, the absurd and the nonsensical, occasionally with the assistance of mind-altering drugs like absinthe, opium, hash and camphor. The painted world of Salvador Dali, with its famous melting clocks, dream-like visions and fragmented imagery, certainly reflects an altered state of mind that could be the work of various foreign substances, visions culled from dreams or simply sheer imagination.

One of the more mysterious artists of the last few centuries is Vincent Van Gogh, painter of "Starry Night," among other great works, who eventually succumbed to mental illness and suicide. While mental disturbance is a given, trying to find out exactly what the hell was up with Vincent Van Gogh is to delve into a bottomless reservoir of mostly unsubstantiated speculation. Theories abound as to why Van Gogh's paintings all feature lights ringed with his signature yellow halos, and everything from vertigo, schizophrenia, long-term exposure to gonorrhea or syphilis, cataracts, tinnitus, and bipolar disorder has been put forth, though the answer likely will never be known. One of the more interesting theories, however, and the one that relates to our current discussion, is that Van Gogh was taking a certain drug, a root that is similar to today's common drug Lanoxin, which produces a side effect of blurred vision with yellow halos around objects. Van Gogh was also known to abuse camphor (yes, that stuff you burn to keep mosquitoes away, also used as a pain-killer in the nineteenth century), and was another artist of many who found inspiration in absinthe.

Other painters imbibing in "the green fairy" included Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Pablo Picasso. In fact, all three men had at least one painting titled "The Absinthe Drinker" which share marked similarities beyond just subject matter. Each of the artists' subjects is seen through a muted haze, with dull colors and blurred edges, and is often accompanied by a feeling of sullen indifference and a dejected, disconnected sense of melancholy. These are the works of men with a clear empathy for the pain of their subjects. Picasso is also the painter of another interesting work, done after his return from a trip to Amsterdam, named "Boy With Pipe," in which a boy sits with legs crossed and a pipe in hand, looking drowsy and detached, and which is speculated to involve the opium that Picasso was known to use. Picasso is even quoted as saying that "the smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world."

The artistic world itself is rich and diverse, plumbing the depths of human emotion and imagination. When you add the possibilities of consciousness-expanding drugs to an already artistic mind, the results can be magical, mystical, thrilling, chilling, disturbing, destructive and nonsensical. For better or for worse, the effects are usually more than apparent when an artist's work bears the distinct mark of chemical mischief, and we, who see, hear and read the traces of their insular experiences, reap all of the benefits with none of the despair.

Credits:
1. Wilde, Jon.  “Tomorrow Never Knows.”  Uncut.  July 2004. 
2. Wenner, Jann S.  Lennon Remembers: The Rolling Stone Interviews.  1971. 
3. Crowe, Cameron.  Biograph liner notes.  1985.
4. The Blacklisted Journalist, Column 69.  March 1, 2002.

 

 

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