Daily Bruin File Photo Two students sit on a hill in Meyerhoff
Park as they smoke out on 4/20.
By Shana Dines
Daily Bruin Reporter
[email protected]
Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
This has been the combination in the U.S. since there was such a
thing as counterculture. Well, sex kind of goes with most
everything. When it comes to drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,
however, one is rarely seen without the other.
How many among us have spent a long night getting stoned in the
dorms listening to the grooves and subliminal bass lines of
Sublime, Dave Matthews or Jack Johnson? In the last four years how
many times have glow sticks turned before our eyes into psychedelic
expressions of rolling love as trance echoed around our heads?
The connection between college, drugs and music is
inescapable.
Musicians get hyped up on amphetamines to be able to play six
straight hours of music. Or they trip out on psychedelic drugs,
trying to burst through Huxley’s famous “Doors of
Perception” and discover the truth of some alternative
reality.
The relationship between illegal substances and music goes back
beyond the past century. During the ’20s and prohibition,
music lovers and alcoholics alike would gather at local speakeasies
to drink illegal bathtub gin and listen to jazz music. Earlier than
that, classical composer Berlioz, famous for his eccentricities,
wrote an orchestral arrangement, “Symphonie
fantastique,” the last movement of which he wrote as the
expression of an opium dream.
“At least in the realm of popular music, you really have
to ask which types have not been associated with illegal drug use,
and you’re left with country,” said musicology
professor Robert Fink. “It’s a countercultural thing,
and the scene is basically defined by two things, some kind of
illegal drug and a particular kind of music, which is supposed to
key in, to some extent, to that drug.”
Drug use among musicians has always been a well-known
occurrence. When Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia died,
everyone knew it was not due to natural causes. Today, thanks to
shows like VH1’s famed “Behind the Music” series,
the fact that bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Stone Temple
Pilots have come close to destruction because of members’
drug use is public knowledge.
It is not as well known, however, that Charlie Parker was a
heroin addict or that Louis Armstrong smoked a joint of marijuana a
day as a matter of habit. This fact does not take away from their
status as heroes in American music though.
Listener drug use is another story, though.
There are two main music-drug sub-cultures that are most
prominent in today’s society ““ pot smoking at jam band
and rock concerts and ecstasy use at raves. Fans take the drugs in
both instances to enhance the pleasure derived from listening to
music.
“The drugs either mimic or accentuate actions of
endogenous chemicals in the brain, and by those actions they
somehow modify behavior and likely overwhelm the normal homeostatic
mechanisms that underlie our normal functions,” said
associate professor of molecular and medical pharmacology William
Melega. “So when drugs have an effect, it’s because
they modify ongoing processes that underlie reward or
pleasure.”
When people smoke marijuana at rock concerts, they can be
attempting to achieve numerous different sensations. According to
Fink, a large part of marijuana’s continued popularity is the
perpetuation of the ’60s lifestyle with which it was
originally associated. There are also chemical reasons for getting
high at concerts. As a mild hallucinogen, marijuana can help users
crack open their “doors of perception,” rather than
blast them wide open, as with a much stronger drug such as
acid.
Fink described today’s world as a place of memory and
anticipation in which people are never totally in one place at one
time because their minds are constantly concerned with the past and
the future. Mild hallucinogens like marijuana work to erase those
worries from the mind of the consumer. Being high, therefore,
allows a listener to forget about all other worries and concentrate
fully on the music at the moment.
“I’ve smoked pot at like every concert I’ve
ever been to. I like getting really stoned at concerts because
it’s such an introverted event,” said a first-year
biology student. “You can just stand there and watch the band
and ignore everyone else. When you’re high, you can feel the
music. It becomes instinctual and you feel it become a part of you.
It’s so wonderful.”
The music that has become most popular with marijuana smokers is
the unstructured jam sessions started by bands like the Grateful
Dead and continued today by bands like Phish. This type of music
has no real beginning or end to songs, just extended middles that
feature numerous solos. While under the influence of marijuana,
listeners rarely notice the music’s lack of structure, but
rather enjoy each particular moment.
“If you’re not in the scene, a 20-minute guitar solo
sounds boring,” Fink said. “But if you’re on pot,
you’re not thinking about how long the solo has been, if
you’re getting tired, or where the drink stand is.”
Ecstasy, or “E,” the most popular of the rave drugs,
is, like marijuana, also a mild hallucinogen. It has other effects,
however, that mimic methamphetamines, or speed, and also
empathogens. The combination of these three effects makes users
hyper, hallucinatory, loving and empathetic. The dumping of the
brain’s serotonin causes these feelings, not the actual
drug.
“Serotonin neurons seemed to have, through evolution, been
used for modulating behavior and behavioral tone, from
aggressiveness to anxiety to most likely aspects of pleasure and
ultimately to consciousness,” Melega explained. “We
don’t know those exact pathways, but we know that when those
pathways, in general, are stimulated by certain drugs, they produce
markedly different changes in behavior, ranging from a mellow high
to a full-blown hallucination.”
Trance and electronica musicians, while they may not take drugs
while making their music, know how ecstasy makes people feel. There
are certain beats, repetition of sounds, and other musical aspects
that are particularly pleasing to people on ecstasy. As the music
scene has grown, it has evolved to appeal to ecstasy users.
“They create music which is almost a kind of
co-drug,” Fink said. “So you have, in a sense, a drug
interaction model of music where you have the chemical drug and you
have the physical trigger stimulus thing that is designed very
carefully to maximize the kind of sensations that are particularly
fantastic on E.”
There are other reasons for the prominence of drug use at
raves.
“The environment is very conducive to drugs. To continue
the mood the music gives you, to perpetuate those feelings, you
take drugs,” said a third-year art student. “It’s
also for the experience. A lot of it is peer pressure, too. The
drugs enhance your mood and that makes it sound better because
you’re in such a good mood, I guess, and you can have more
fun and be more relaxed. It makes you more of a party
animal.”
The impressive fact is that drug sub-cultures and music scenes
have developed together to augment listening pleasure. While drugs
equally have the potential to put consumers in a bad mood or make
it more difficult for people to get out of bed to pass their
midterms, they have become a staple of the college music
experience.