Music and Drugs in Perspective"In order to put the drug culture of the 1960s into perspective, it is necessary to remember a number of things. The use and abuse of alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and other drugs has formed a part of the culture of musicians and their audiences in this country [USA] for a very long time. The pressures and doldrums of a performer's life have led many musicians to use stimulants, depressants, and intoxicants of various kinds, and unhealthy dependencies have naturally resulted all too frequently, prematurely snuffing out some of the brightest fights in America's musical history. (A partial list would include
Charlie Parker,
Hank Williams Senior,
Elvis Presley,
Janis Joplin, and
Jimi Hendrix, among many others.) Furthermore, the venues in which pop music is heard live are most commonly those in which the legal--and sometimes illegal--consumption of intoxicants forms an essential aspect of the audience's 'good time.' In this connection, it is important to recall that during the era of Prohibition, 1919-33, the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages were illegal in the United States. Thus many adults who were nonplussed by younger people's consumption of illegal marijuana and LSD in the 1960s had doubtless themselves enjoyed the new pop music and jazz of the 1920s and early 1930s to the accompaniment, in speakeasy clubs or at home, of illegal bootleg liquor."
Psychedelics and Spiritual Exploration"An appropriate perspective on the drug use of the 1960s would also take into account that many participants in the counterculture, including musicians and members of the rock audience, were not involved with drugs. Furthermore, along with the pleasure seekers who sought only to enjoy themselves and follow fashion while repeating the slogans of the time about 'mind expansion' and 'turning on,' there were those who were quite seriously seeking alternatives to the prevailing American bourgeois lifestyle, who may have employed hallucinogens such as peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, and LSD carefully and sparingly as an aspect of spiritual exploration (in a manner akin to that found in certain nonwestern cultures--there was, for example, a good deal of interest in Indian culture among members of the counterculture, some of it superficial and trendy but some of it assuredly serious). In the end, it appears that the value of psychoactive substances depends on the context and manner of their use, and that the drug culture of the 1960s was, at various times, both an enabler and a destroyer of musical creativity. Interviews with rock musicians of the late 1960s--now in their fifties and sixties--are notable for their lack of nostalgia in relation to drug use."
Stereoptypes and Creative Manifestations"It was, and is, easy to poke fun at stereotypical images of the counterculture.
Frank Zappa, assuredly a participant in the counterculture (and reportedly a nondrug user), wrote a savagely satirical song in 1967 called 'Who Needs the Peace Corps?' that targeted 'phony hippies' and their 'psychedelic dungeons.' Yet the greatest virtue of the 1960s counterculture, for all its naiveté and excesses, may be that it gave birth to and encouraged some innovative and remarkable creative manifestations ..."
- Starr and Waterman 'American Popular Music' 2006 pp 297-98
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