CO-DEPENDENT: DRUGS, (OZ) MUSIC & ME, A POTTED HISTORY

Originally published in Meanjin, 2002

Painting by Howard Arkley

I can still remember my first joint. All the usual jibes notwithstanding (memory loss, not inhaling, whatever), I remember it vividly: It was at the University of Queensland, around 1972 or ’3, a Student Union gig at the Refec. with MacKenzie Theory playing. Now of course anyone else who remembers MacKenzie Theory might laugh, Well, you’d have needed a joint! - and that alone illustrates the almost inextricable link between drugs and music - but the seemingly free-form instrumental wailing of this Australia Council-sponsored, electric viola-led space-rock quartet (a sort of precursor to today’s Dirty 3) was in fact grounded in a serious sense of purpose, not to mention a deal of discipline too (as is the case, inevitably, with most ‘seemingly free-form’ music).

            I was still in high school at the time, at nearby Indooroopilly, but we found ourselves often out at the uni’s St.Lucia campus because for one thing, at a time when Queensland Premier, ‘hillbilly dictator’ Joh Bjelke-Petersen, seemed to have driven music out of Brisbane’s pubs, the uni was about the only place in town you could experience actual live local rock’n’roll. The campus itself was also off-limits to this police state’s finest, which only encouraged more brazen display. So we were sitting in a circle on the grass outside the hall, and soon enough a joint crawled into my hand, honest. I did not hesitate a whit, I inhaled, and thus began a lifelong love affair in which drugs and music formed, for me, a virtual menage-a-trois.

            The late, great English rocker Ian Dury apparently complained he never got credit for at least popularising the phrase ‘sex and drugs and rock’n’roll’, as he did with his 1979 hit single of the same name; he wasn’t aware - as is sadly the case with so much Australian rock history - it was prefigured in this country by Daddy Cool’s 1972 album Sex, Dope, Rock’n’Roll: Teenage Heaven.

            Sex and drugs, of course, are nothing new, separately and/or together, but the link to rock’n’roll made for a holy trinity, a mythology, that seduced millions in the second half of the last century and, in mutated variations, is still seducing ’em...

            Writers have long made comfortable bedfellows with the bottle, and especially since the likes of Jackson Pollock and Brett Whitely established the archetypes, artists too have had a bent for euphoric intoxication, and the film industry is still synonymous with cocaine. But it’s pop music that’s always seemed to have the strongest, most direct link with illicit drugs.

            It was early black American jazz musicians, after all, who were stereotypically associated with the spread of marijuana-smoking in the 20s and who were implicated in its initial demonisation, and it was 1950s cool school/be-boppers who first alerted the world to the idea of heroin as a drug of choice and of addiction. The deaths of Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker and Hank Williams, along with James Dean, helped create the whole concept of post-modern martyrdom.

            After that, it was rock stars who deified the use of acid, pot, speed, cocaine and heroin too, coming complete with a new roll-call of casualties. Now, it’s the club scene and house music to blame for the rise of ecstasy... Drugs are virtually integral to music sub-cultures whose larger meaning is a rebellion against accepted social norms.

            ‘Dancing with the Devil’ is a drug world analogy for using hard drugs; appropriately it is a musical metaphor. To some people, ‘trance’ is just a recent sub-genre of electronic house music. But it goes all the way back to pagan ritual.

            The co-dependence of drugs and music is such a long tradition, first of all, because it is such a great combination. Music alters mood and drugs alter mood, so put them together and it is a killer combination. If music takes you to a different place, drugs can be the short-cut to the zone, so to speak, a focus-enhancer that interlocks you with the music to redouble the all-round impact.

            When the Valentines - Bon Scott’s first successful band - became Australia’s first band to get busted en masse for posession of pot in 1969, their lawyer William Lennon claimed as part of their defence that “under the influence of marijuana they became more perceptive to musical sounds... They could distinguish more clearly various instruments and how they were being played.” Music is not something you can hold in your hand, it’s not an art form that exists in temporal space. Rather it expounds through time; it just sort of wafts through the air and then is gone, almost fleetingly. Drugs, then, can help capture it, clarify it, as if opening it out across time.

            As one of the few genuine avenues of expression and release available across all classes of society today, music is an exalted thing. It is prone to drugs not only to try and keep it up on that spiritual, or creative high plane, but also thanks to simple proximity. On a day to day level, music actually exists by night, in a world that is part of the underworld, all bars, showbusiness, bohemia, excess. Drugs, the criminal element, prostitution. The strongest analogy to a rock band, I’ve always believed, is a football team. Music is a young man’s game (sexism intended), and these are wild young men on the rampage, princely pigs at a smorgasbord trough...

            But drugs can also kill. They can hit anywhere ‘between heaven and hell’, to quote the Easybeats, who were quoting Huxley, in a 1968 single that was banned in the US for ‘drug references’ among other things.

            The Rock Star Drug Death is a regular tragi-comic feature of our lives. At best, drugs are a slow boat to oblivion; at worse, sudden death. As Paul Kelly has put it: “One shot is too many/ Two shots is not enough/Three don’t feel liked any/But it sure does cure my cough/Every time...”


The relationship between drugs and music is symbiotic. The music develops in such a way to satisfy the needs of its audience and/or creators who are using a particular drug. This much is patently obvious - the music sounds like its drug of choice: Psychedelia - acid rock - sounds like, well, acid. Australian pub rock sounds like beer, plus maybe a line of speed and/or a couple of cones. Reggae sounds like da ’erb. Disco was the sound of amyl nitrate, or ‘poppers’. Punk sounds like speed, as did the first wave of 50s’ rock’n’roll and early ‘beat’ music. Stadium rock - INXS in the 80s - was the sound of cocaine. The Velvet Underground and John Coltrane were the sound of smack.           

            Drugs have helped shape the music, and the music has effectively advertised the drugs, but the drugs have helped destroy the music too, and they have destroyed swathes of successive generations. The rock ethic as encapsulated in the Neil Young line - “It’s better to burn out than to fade away” - that Kurt Cobain (a heroin addict) quoted in his suicide note, has equally informed Australian music, and is still claiming lives.

            Everyone’s on drugs these days, it seems, it’s just a matter of whether those drugs are legal or not. Doctors push anti-depressants at a market whose need is merely part of the whole culture of complaint, an isolated, depressed, angry society that’s still hoping against hope there is an answer out there somewhere. That there are some double-standards at work in the War Against Drugs is obvious. The War Against Drugs is the march of folly of moralists and wowsers who, due to the ignorance of their own blinkered lives, cannot comprehend that they are their own worst enemy, that the very illegality of drugs remains a big part of their allure. “The most common self-image of the heroin addict,” as J. Kaplan says in The Hardest Drug, “is that of the outlaw. (The alcoholic’s, on the other hand, tends to be that of a failure.) And outlaws are regarded as living exciting, romantic lives.”

            Australian music is shot through with drugs, from bands with names like the Spliffs, the Purple Hearts and Co.Caine to the concept albums of early 70s ‘head’ bands, to the myriad songs that address the subject literally or have had the metaphor thrust upon them; from the tragi-classic 1980 death of AC/DC front man Bon Scott, who choked on his own vomit as a result of alcohol poisoning, to a longer list - including Michael Hutchence, Andy Gibb, Guy McDonough (late of Australian Crawl), David McComb (the Triffids), Tracy Pew (the Birthday Party) and Steve Connolly (late of Paul Kelly’s Coloured Girls) - who might not have died as a direct result of drugs but whose bad habits certainly hastened ill health; from today’s famous survivors like the Easybeats’ Little Stevie Wright, Debbie Byrne and Nick Cave, to the day-to-day reality of thousands of people who have used drugs but not to such a problematic level, to all the unknown soldiers who have died unnoticed and unlamented.

            The almost Darwinian theory of evolution of drug use says that soft drugs lead to hard drugs, that if you start out on pot, say, you will end up a junkie on heroin. It certainly unfolded that way for me personally, and rock too has progressed to the hardest levels.              

            For the first generation of Australian rock’n’rollers, pills - speed - was about as hard as the drugs got. The Australian jazz scene of the 50s was barely penetrated by heroin the way the American scene was. In Australia in the 50s, there was very little heroin at all. You had to go to Chinatown or the docks to score. It wasn’t till ’54 that both heroin and marijuana were made illegal. The small amount of grass around was smoked by would-be beatniks into jazz and radical politics. Johnny O’Keefe, Australia’s first King of Rock, was an exception to most rules, and he smoked, swallowed, snorted and - if the ultimate rumours are to be believed - shot up everything he could get his hands on. He was first busted, for pot, in 1970. His manager and confidante, American emigree Lee Gordon, was a notorious druggie and general degenerate whose final gesture to Australia was to tour the ‘obscene’ Lenny Bruce. The Wild One himself died a year almost to the day after his hero Elvis was found doped to death in his bathroom at Gracelands.

            In a way, Australia didn’t really get the 60s till the early 70s (a lag of the type isolated Australia used to suffer). We got a lot of the music, but the drugs didn’t fully arrive till the end of the decade. There was always pills, but grass and LSD - the drugs synonymous with the 60s - were hardly commonplace till the early 70s. By the same time, heroin was also arriving in force, via the Vietnam war.

            Australia’s beat boom of the 60s was relatively innocent. “It was just before the hippy drug era,” remembers soul shouter Dinah Lee, “maybe the jazzers were smoking a bit of pot but... We might have taken a slimming pill - they were uppers but we didn’t know it, things like purple hearts were the rage, methedrine and benzadrine... and lots of booze, bourbon and coke, very in, bourbon and coke.” Australia was still a repressive Anglo monoculture in the 60s. Visiting English bands like the Pretty Things and the Animals tested the naive authorities’ patience.

            “A lot of the guys in bands had girlfriends who worked in chemists,” says Chain frontman Matt Taylor, “so Friday night there’d always be this incredible selection... I can remember the first time anyone tried to sell me drugs. They had this handful of purple hearts, said they were 10c each, I said, Run away!”

            Digger Revell, who is currently serving a second stretch for cultivating cannabis, heralded a new era when in 1968 he released a single called “Mary Jane:” ‘Did anyone bring Mary Jane to the party?’ it begins. “There’s still a couple of wowsers out there that won’t book me,” Revell says now, “but that’s all right. I believe if you turn anyone upside down and shake them long enough, something’s going to fall out, you know.”

            Around the same time, Billy Thorpe went on ABC-TV’s This Day Tonight and told Bill Peach he was going to take LSD. Acid, Thorpe has testified, changed his life, and in turn, ‘Thorpie’ changed Australian music. In 1969, with Hair arriving here and Marianne Faithful OD’ing on the plane on the way out, and with the Vietnam war at its peak and equally the rise of anti-war liberalism, Australia was almost as if thrust into the modern world. “No Roses for Michael” was an anti-drug song that came from a telemovie and was a hit for Greg Anderson. Deporting Joe Cocker, as the Whitlam Labour government did in 1973 for posession of a few joints, was a laughable rearguard action in the face of an indigenous drug culture growing up from the grass roots. Australia’s first junkie memoir, The Cure by Kevin Mackey, was published by Angus & Robertson in 1970.

            Billy Thorpe may have dated his rebirth at his first trip, but just as the legendary Sunbury festival more closely resembled Mad Max than Woodstock, Thorpie’s catchcry became ‘Suck more piss!’, and he stomped all over the hippies sitting cross-legged on the floor as he led Australian rock’s charge into the pubs. In lifestyle terms, Australian pub rock became, as old roadies will say: If it’s wet, drink it; if it’s green, smoke it; if it’s dry, snort it; and if it moves, fuck it.

            But as much as Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs epitomise a transitional rather than golden era of Australian culture, a group like Tully illustrate the other side of the story. As John Clare wrote of the band in his book Bodgie Dada: “If drugs contributed to their exalted moments, they were undoubtedly a factor in their abrupt decline. Drummer Robert Taylor moved from psychedelics to heroin and may have died from an overdose, but saxophonist and flautist Richard Lockwood renounced drugs... Keyboard player Michael Carlos moved into film music.” Carlos and others, in a classic move, also joined the Meher Baba sect.

            In the space of a few short years, drugs went from a curiosity to a staple. Says Celibate Rifles frontman and recovering addict Damien Lovelock: “When I was in high school you could get stoned on morph for a dollar. To get stoned on marijuana was more expensive and a lot harder to get. All of a sudden then you had the emergence of Bowie, glam, decadence, all that. And then you have Uncle Lou (Reed), the Real McCoy. I will never forget going to see him for the first time. There were so many people hitting up in the toilets at the Hordern Pavillion you couldn’t get in. It was then I realised, This is Woolworths, man, this is everybody.”

            The Skyhooks were themselves an outgrowth of Melbourne’s Reefer Cabaret circuit who sang in 1974: “Whatever Happened to the Revolution? We all got stoned and it drifted away.” It was no coincidence that that Skyhooks track came out on the new independent label started by Micheal Gudinski, Mushroom Records - and it was no coincidence it was called Mushroom either. Just as it was no coincidence that the new youth radio station that began broadcasting with the Skyhooks’ “You Just Like Me ’Cos I’m Good in Bed” was called Double-Jay.

            The murder of Griffith anti-drugs campaigner Donald MacKay in 1977 suggested the drug trade in Australia was by then fairly firmly established. You could relatively easily buy almost anything: pot, acid, speed, smack. By the early 80s, cocaine too had fully arrived.

            Rock came full circle, in one sense, with the punk uprising of the late 70s. Appropriately, punk was even more extreme than its prophets like Lou Reed or Iggy Pop. Sid Vicious didn’t just die, he took his girlfriend out first. At Radio Birdman’s original haunt in Darlinghurst, the Oxford Funhouse, you could buy mandrax under the counter at the bar.

            One of Australian rock’s first heroin overdose deaths, in 1978, was that of Ian Krahe, guitarist in Sydney power-punk outfit X. It was a gig at industry watering hole the Bondi Lifesaver, as bassist Ian Rilen recalls: “First song (Krahe) breaks three strings. So he sits down on the edge of the stage to change them. Steve Lucas is lying on the floor with his mouth open. There was this woman who ran the place, she storms up and says, What the fuck are you doing? So I said, Well, he’s changing his strings, he’s tripping, and I’m telling you to get fucked. That was the night Ian died. They never had us back.”

            Even as rock could no longer naively claim to be unaware of the dangers of drugs, it continued to draw elevation out of them. And ‘dangerousness’ continued and continues to claim its casualties.

            Richard Lowenstein’s 1986 feature film Dogs in Space, starring Michael Hutchence, was an accurate if cartoonish portrait of Melbourne’s inner-city post-punk music scene, which was graudually and fatally infected with heroin. The grunge wave of the early 90s picked up on this same thread, thus its great martyr Kurt Cobain.

            Is Dave Graney the only one making any sense when he sings, “Drugs Are Wasted on the Young”?


The final kicker, it has to be admitted, is the large amount of great music that has emerged out of the drug haze. Even if Bon Scott did drink himself into an early grave, he left behind a transcendent body of work.

            MacKenzie Theory, at least on vinyl, might not have well stood the test of time. But there’s no doubt that, say, the smack-addled work of Nick Cave in the 1980s stands as one of the musical beacons of that bleak but shiny decade. Was it thanks to or in spite of the drugs?

            Even if Ian Krahe did die, Ian Rilen has lived to tell the tale (he is one of the great white wonders of Australian rock), and X remain an imposing presence on the edges of the Australian scene, one of the most brutally powerful rock bands the world has ever seen. So whaddya do? The question is, How high is too high a price to pay?            

            For a band known for its pop classicism sooner than rock action, Dragon were a high temple of hard living that left everyone from Sherbert to Cold Chisel gasping in their wake, and their career claimed not one but two overdose deaths. Paul Kelly came out of an early descent into serious drug use, but not before he recorded 1982’s Manila and 1985’s Post, the latter the album that re-started his career and which is often regarded as one of Australia’s finest bar none (when The Australian ran a straw poll among critics in 1998, Post came in as Number Eight Best Album). The link in the story is Dragon keyboardist, the late Paul Hewson, to whom Kelly dedicated Post.

            Having lost two members to overdoses is a distinction Dragon share with the New York Dolls and perhaps only the Stooges otherwise. The Dolls lost original drummer Billy Mercia in a London bath before their recording career even began; Dragon lost drummer Neil Storey not long after their arrival in Sydney from New Zealand in 1976. Fellow Kiwi hippies Mi-Sex make numerous cameo appearances in John Dale’s biography of the late Sally Ann Huckstepp, Kings Cross working girl and drug user/dealer, and this was the same world Dragon also inhabited. (Has anyone ever asked, Is Dragon’s name connected at all to the phrase ‘Chasing the Dragon’, as in smoking heroin?) 

            When Kelly moved to Sydney from Melbourne in 1984, two fellow musicians he knew and stayed with in Kings Cross were Don Walker, of Cold Chisel, and Paul Hewson. Kelly himself was doing a geographical, as they say in the ‘fellowship’ (Narcotics Anonymous). He had hit the bottom of a bad habit in Melbourne. But kicking drugs was just one reason for his move to Sydney. His second album for Mushroom Records, the long-awaited Manila, was, it’s fair to say, a debacle. Not because it was and still sounds like a classic smack album, with songs that contain all the right clues like “Some Guys,” as quoted above, and “Lenny,” “Forbidden Street,” “Clean This House,” “Alive and Well” and “To Live is to Burn;” the real problem was it didn’t sell. Mushroom was quite prepared to just let Kelly go. Kelly’s first child had just been born. He had a bad car accident. Then he suffered a vicious bashing. So then, as he sings in Post’s opening track, he got on a bus “From St.Kilda to Kings Cross.” He got off the bus and from Oxford St. he cut across to Don Walker’s place, and sitting at Walker’s beautiful white grand piano, he played him this song he’d just written, which Walker has described as a watershed in Kelly’s career.

            Paul Hewson died of an overdose in New Zealand not much later, in January, 1985. For me, listening to Post now, a record I’d felt extremely close to in many ways - you heard it constantly in Sydney in the mid-80s, plus I knew most everyone involved in it - it just sort of sounded tiny, like a voice coming from a long, long way away. This was the very vinyl copy that got played all those times back then, complete with ambient surface noise, which itself may have soaked up something of the times that were for me were very heady too: I was myself a junkie living in Kings Cross, in the same drug-rock demi-monde. Post has become even more poignant in the wake of the death of guitarist Steve Connolly in 1995.

            Kelly doesn’t like to talk about his Manila-period now. His book of collected lyrics, Don’t Start Me Talkin’, doesn’t start till 1984, with Post.

            Post may have been little more than a collection of sparse demos, but what gives it its power is its songs and its artful construction. Kelly now also likes to say his songs are very seldom autobiographical, but certainly for me it’s impossible not to listen to Post and find direct personal interpretations. Kelly uses standard folksong motifs like trains, and in Post, trains both black and white symbolise heroin as much as anything. “White Train” and “Incident on South Dowling Street” are both obvious overdose stories. “I Just Can’t Get On,” however, in which the protagonist can’t bring himself to board a train with his girlfriend - noting that to ‘get on’ in smack parlance is to score - is one of the album’s telling, more forward-looking moments.

            After the artistic triumph of Post, Kelly followed it up in 1986 with his commercial breakthrough, the elaborate double-album Gossip. Gossip contained reworkings of “White Train” and “Incident on South Dowling Street,” plus a new song called “Randwick Bells,” which may be the last overtly druggy song Kelly has produced. Gossip came in two places ahead of Post at Number Five in that same Australian straw-poll.

            One can only wonder what Jimmy Little made of “Randwick Bells” when he covered it on his 1997 comeback album Messenger. In the song, the lovers go back to bed not to make love but rather shoot up together. It concludes, “Come on baby let’s cook something up... let’s fix something up” (both being just another way of saying ‘shoot up’).

            Sex and death, Kelly still says - quoting Yeats - that’s all you want to write about. Kelly writes about what he sees around him, just like Slim Dusty. And just as drugs aren’t going to help anyone produce a masterpiece if they don’t already have it in them, the people who choose to go down on drugs are going to do it anyway too.


During the middle seven years of the 1980s I kept up a nice little heroin habit of my own. I know very few people who’ve tried heroin and not liked it. I was never convinced myself by the famous French description of orgasm as ‘the little death’. When I first tried heroin, I knew it was wrong. Nothing is more like a little taste of death than that sweet sickly rush of smack shot up. That’s why people get addicted - not so much because they have a disease, or a dysfunctional background, but because it is the ultimate stone. They say cocaine is god’s way of saying you’ve got too much money; what they say about heroin is that if there’s a better drug, god’s keeping it for himself. Heroin makes no special case for musicians though; it claims all in its path without distinction.

            Is it a mark of Australian maturity of some sort that when the late Howard Arkley went looking for a musical soul brother - unlike the late Brett Whiteley, who played groupie to Dylan and Mark Knopfler (?!) - he found one in an Australian, in Nick Cave? In the 80s music split into two distinct, opposing factions, Mainstream and Alternative, both with their attendant set of stereotypes: Mainstream equated with America equated with cocaine, while Alternative equated with England equated with heroin. Now when Nick Cave returns to Australia, after being virtually run out of the country twenty years ago, it is as one of the world’s foremost singer-songwriters for grown-ups, a man whose Past adds colour to his receding darkness; while Michael Hutchence is dead, a victim of fame’s fickleness as much as drug abuse or anything else.

            I myself was sometimes a participant in the out-of-control lifestyle led by Cave and his cohorts in the 1980s. The first priority of Cave’s minders, such as they were in those days, was to get him on stage just-so. He couldn’t be hanging out, obviously, just as he couldn’t be too out of it, because either way his performance would suffer. An extraordinary filmclip shot at Sydney’s Trade Union Club in 1983 shows Cave sporting a bloody tourniquet around his arm. It is an amazing performance, of “Deep in the Woods,” where, of course, “a funeral is swinging.”

            Of course, you can’t go on like this forever, no-one can. Tracy Pew retired from the road and then he died in 1986. Nick Cave had to be busted on three continents before he was dragged ‘kicking and screaming’ into rehab for the first time in 1988. He ultimately survived, along with numerous other members of the Birthday Party/Bad Seeds troupe who also had bad habits, but none emerged unscathed, least of all Cave, who seems to have found God in an attempt to fill the void. Even guitarist Mick Harvey, Cave’s right hand man who was always the calm at the eye of storm, and who never used drugs, has spoken of the scars of co-dependency.

            What is most extraordinary though, is the body of work Cave created through this madness, the string of albums that established him around the world and which still sound superb today; and which, for me as others, have a special magic, an all-consuming ambience, that is sadly, it seems, in part a result of the drugs in which they were pickled.

            At the same time, it must be said, Cave has confounded the stereotypes, since his early ‘clean’ albums like 1990’s The Good Son and ’94’s Let Love In are perhaps his pinnacle. Is the question rather then, How much might an artist like Cave have achieved had drugs not wasted so much of everything, most of the time?

           
I kicked the gear myself in 1988. I’d turned 30 and maybe I was finally just growing up a bit, I don’t know. I knew I was tired of the Life: the running around, up all night in bars... and when I withdrew from the Life, I withdrew from the drugs too... hard drugs, that is. I’ve never stopped the drinking and smoking that might yet kill me. What can you do? A big part of me will always love getting high and immersing myself in music. A lot of people are always going to love that, it’s human nature, and that’s why drugs and music will continue to cohabit.

            As Mainstream ate up Alternative in the 90s, rock became increasingly corporate, and it was left to dance music to take up the cudgels and return some danger to popular music, which paradoxically again, is when it’s at its best. Itch-e & Scratch-e won the inaugural ARIA Award for Best Dance Release in 1995 - for “Sweetness & Light” - and Paul Mac controversially thanked “all the ecstasy dealers.”

            And as long as War Against Drugs continues to rage - despite the fact that Prohibition is proven not to work - ‘the young and the lost’, to borrow David Remnick’s phrase, will find drugs more and more attractive precisely because they remain a taboo. And they will continue to use them in concert with music because this combination will always be explosive. And as surely as night follows day, after the rise will come a fall.

            I am lucky enough myself to have lived through the biggest little death. I have been to the other side and I’ve come back (overdosed and been revived). I have seen others cross over, and not come back. And all I can say is that it’s better to be back. Eternity can wait.

            And so for me now, music itself is the greatest drug of all. Like Roxy Music once sang, Love is the Drug. I miss the sense of community that undoubtedly elevates the experience of live music, but I can still listen to music at home and be transported. To get ‘lost in music’, as Chic once put it, is in fact a fleeting respite from uncertainty, a journey to another place that’s life-affirming. I might play John Coltrane’s “My Favourite Things,” or Charlie Rich’s “Feel Like Goin’ Home,” or Black Sabbath, or Chic, or Johnny Cash’s recent version of “The Mercy Seat,” and I can still touch on some magic. And it doesn’t even leave a hangover!