Ooooh, heroin and rock, Helen Bach wrote about the big one and now it’s my turn.
Drugs and music go hand in hand like… I dunno, drugs and music. Opium for the opera, booze for the big bands, rock and roll speed and alcohol, the hippies marijuana, hip hop crack , the punks speed, disco coke, dance ectacy…
But junk, that would kill you.
I blame the jazz guys, everybody wanted to be John Coltrane and forgot that Coltrane wasn’t Coltrane because he was a junkie but he was Coltrane despite being a junkie.
The buzzing in the back of a Coltrane’s brain, the swelled craziness of his musical epilepticvision needed hard drugs to find its way back to normalcy. He would replace it with religion.
So let’s say that is one reason to embrace the deadliest of drugs because to become a junkie? You’ve got to want to be a junkie. I tried it a coupla times and I was sicker than a dog.
So jazz guys wanted it to:
A) rest their brain cells
And
B) kill the boredom
And
C) because it is a great high (taking junk is an end in itself)
As for the next line of junkies? Rock and roll superstars from Lennon to Richards and everybody in between.
All of the above but also
D) They hated themselves.
Everybody is filled with self-loathing. One reason is because we are in the business of denying we are humans. We pretend to be spirits and our basic intuitive animistic instincts we consider beneath our spiritual side. The result: we hate ourselves for being what we are. It proves our mortality and terrifies us: this is sent to an extreme in rock stars.
Treated as deities and driven insane by a world of instant gratification and the high/lows of touring, there self-hatred manifests itself in 1) the KOL syndrome: just being total assholes. And 2) The junkie syndrome, having a secret world of such terrible weakness that it overshadows normal human frailties. A Keith, a Lennon: they are saying you think it is this but it is that instead. When Lennon sings, “I need a fix cuz I’m going down” -the emphasize is on the need. As rock God Richards degenerates before your eyes in a slobbering mess of needles and spoon, he is the mirror image of the rock god we like to pretend it is.
From Hendrix to Vicious, it is a storm of social malfeasance, arrogance, upyouism and a hatred of the self that is terrifying and baffling. And it will and does and has destroy you.
Look, all drugs will destroy (fuck, everything will destroy you) BUT heroin will destroy you like religion will: in a tradition of icons and rituals and then… mistakes. One moment you are Johnny Thunders, next moment you are waste in a body bag. The finer the junk, the refiner the dose, the faster the exit.
And the God who can’t find religion can find religion: he treads in the footprints of musical genius and embraces his mortality, living his godness and enjoining his humanity in an embrace of nothingness.