7. Cannabis-and-Music
Music was the only art-form I genuinely appreciated before exposure to cannabis. I was a child of the sixties, and there were two weekly broadcasts that spoke to me; Top-of-the-Pops and radio Caroline. Firstly Top-of-the-Pops. For those who don’t know, Top-of-the-Pops was a TV show that attempted to package-up the recordings of the day into program that the whole family could safely watch. Its format and production were execrable; lip synching groups, sets made of string-and-paper, schoolgirls corralled into making approximate movements to the music, all compared by C-list DJ’s and a paedophile.
What the BBC commissioners did not appreciate though was that Top-of-the-Pops for many, many of us, became a window through which you could see the beginnings of the US counter-culture that still reverberates today. Everything about the show was poor or mediocre, except the music itself. It was new, heretical, raw, bold, adventurous and subversive, without any of the restraints of previous generations, and literally electric. I don’t know who was on the BBC’s gatekeeping morality panel, but whoever it was, they spectacularly failed.
Who could possibly have allowed “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” by the Beatles, “Eight Miles High by the Byrds”, “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane, “Lola” by the Kinks and “Free Electric Band” by Albert Hammond, into the mind of a ten-year-old? Thankyou, whoever it was, intentionally or unintentionally. Not only was the music sensational, it opened-up a whole world of possibilities that my parents seemed to be keeping from me; the West-Coast, Woodstock, anti-war protests, drugs, sex etc. Thankfully Mum and Dad never really did “get-it”, and thought these songs were about seeing faces in the clouds, jet aircraft, Lewis Carol, mistaken-identity and career-advice. And it got better and better as each week saw the arrival of a new bunch of weirdos to listen to, beamed directly and uncensored into your teenage head by black-and-white state TV. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Now radio Caroline, the pirate radio station anchored off the coast of my home county, Essex. It played all the best of the new music and was there, twenty-four hours a day (until it sunk). This introduced me to more substantial rock music and powered me through school and into college where I first encountered cannabis. The immediate mixture of weed and music didn’t make much of a difference appreciation-wise, until that is, my mate Cosmic-Ray after a few joints suggested we listened to the Dark-Side-of-the-Moon album by Led-Zeppelin that had just been released, while on LSD. Neither of us had heard it before as he had been saving it for exactly this occasion.
I won’t bore you talking about our trip too much (this is always frowned upon by us psychonauts as being very uncool), but alongside the dope it really did supercharge the experience. It was the first time that the music felt as real as reality itself. It was not just some melodic sound, but had a life-force behind it that literally altered the way I perceived music from then onwards. It’s not simply that LSD permanently rewires your brain directly, it’s more the case that the experience of music on a strong hallucinogen is so utterly overwhelming your brain rewires according to the memory of that experience. It’s more the “Doors-of-Perception” thingy by Aldous-Huxley; once opened you can see a whole new vista, or as the “Doors” themselves put it, “break-on-through to the other-side”. Cannabis was never the same again – it worked five times better.
Which brings us on to the central mysteries; what on earth is music, why do we appreciate it, how did it evolve, and does it bring any advantage? I really have very little idea on this – unlike the appreciation of food or sex, music seems to fit in the category of “who ordered that?”. Language has utility, but music? If I’m a tone-deaf philistine, am I missing-out on anything benefit-wise? Probably not if I can get my kicks elsewhere, and there are lots of other opportunities (trust me on this).
It’s all very strange. If I was a traditional scientific researcher, after securing appropriate funding, I’d start playing music to lab-rats to see if I could measure any effect. If that failed, I’d try other lab-animals (more funding), or on great-apes in their native environments (more funding) with different types of music (still more funding). Orangs look laidback, so I’d try some trance-music on them. Gorillas seem more classical-music inclined to me, and as for chimpanzees, it would have to be punk or metal. If all that failed, I’d announce even more funding was urgently needed to resolve the issue (why didn’t I become a scientist? – it seems so much more fun than working for a living). I do have a horrible suspicion this may have actually been attempted. Please tell me I’m wrong.
Cannabis enhances the positive experience of music you like. What effect does it have on music you don’t like? Yes, it enhances the dis-pleasure as well. Let me give you an example; bagpipes. Like most people I had never been that affected by bagpipes until moving to Edinburgh. They don’t warn you in the tourist guides the distress these can cause to the average human. Not only can your ears and soul be assaulted by the occasional bagpiper, they also sometimes come mob-handed. Picture a whole squad of them marching down the Royal-Mile in kilts, sporting sporrans and silly uniforms, their bagpipes moaning-and-groaning in unison. Awful, just awful.
What can be worse than this? I’ll tell you what can be worse, being forced to listen to someone learning the bagpipes. There’s a wild-life park opposite us (its really a repurposed abandoned graveyard). The visitors there are the usual mix of dog-walkers, dope-smokers and cruisers. Imagine you are going about your business, smoking a joint and exercising your pit-bull-terrier while on the look-out for a-bit-of-rough in-the-rough, when a faltering “Over-the-Sea-to-Sky” dirge is launched. It ruins your whole day, and I’ve never seen Gnasher so traumatized.
This is one of the reasons I’ve joined the SNP (Scottish National Party). Only with independence can we pass legislation to stem this uncontrolled scourge of bagpipes. In general, I don’t like banning things, but a full training and licencing scheme needs to be set up so those who are addicted to this sort of thing can be properly regulated and taxed. Training-and-testing would need to be done at one or possibly more remote locations, which Scotland has a-plenty of.
Taking a policy steer from the Tories and their levelling-up strategy, regions in the highlands-and-islands could compete with each-other for the new facility and employment it would bring. This could mark the end of hair-brained development schemes, and the dawn of a new, sustainable regional policy. An added benefit is that other countries that received the Scottish diaspora of the eighteenth-and-nineteenth centuries could send their aspiring pipers to this facility in Scotland for official training-and-testing. This would provide much needed foreign investment; dollars from Australia and New-Zealand, loonies from Canada etc. Having reached the required standard these aspirant pipers would return to their motherlands to bring moderated-mayhem to their communities.
If the solution to the Fermi-paradox is slowly expanding “grabby-alien” civilizations, that they are social animals that have also evolved according to natural-selection, and natural-selection does preferentially select for musical-abilities in particular, and cultural-abilities in general, then it makes sense that any “grabby-alien” civilization we might encounter should share these abilities with us. To communicate with them it would be sensible to send musicians-and-artists as envoys to make first-contact. Perhaps professor Brian-Cox from D-Ream could do a jam-session with them before discussing quantum-entanglement. You’d have to be careful to send the correct Brian Cox, though dammit, a little-bit of Shakespeare may smooth the conversations, so send both of them.
To be on the cultural safe-side we could also send all the national-treasures from around the world. There’d be throat-singers from Mongolia, yodellers from Switzerland, Noh performers from Japan, ring-cyclists from Germany, whole Gamelans from Indonesia, Stephen-Fry, J.K.-Rowling, Jeremy-Clarkson and others from the UK, etc. Every nation would contribute under the auspices of the United-Nations.
It’s possible of course, the alien civilization instead of evolving music in its culture, evolution preferentially selected for communication via sexual interactions. In this case our brave envoys would have to interact sexually with them. I’m sure the transition would come naturally to many of them. And for those who don’t fancy unnatural-sex with an alien or two, well, just close your eyes and think of Earth.
In the unlikely event they fail to understand us at-all and decide to eat the envoys instead, we could detonate the anti-matter-bomb hidden in the spaceship to remove the alien threat altogether. If we used Elon Musk’s starship, we might not even have to develop such a bomb as it could naturally self-detonate. Afterwards each nation’s national-treasury could slowly be repopulated until another of Robin-Hanson’s grabby-alien civilizations is encountered, and the process repeated.
For those who say this is derivative and reminiscent of insights from the Hitch-Hiker’s-Guide-to-the-Galaxy, Strange-Encounters-of-the-Third-Kind, Mars-Attack and the Odyssey, I’d respond with “then why not also send along the perpetrators, Douglas-Adams, Stephen-Spielberg, Tim-Burton and Homer? The more class-acts the better”. It should not be a problem if any of these are technically dead, because any civilization at type IV and above on the Kardashev scale could easily resurrect the individual concerned before consumption. A last thought-and-correction. Unfortunately, the spaceship would have to leave Jeremy-Clarkson behind on Earth as he, like me, has near-zero artistic abilities. I’m sure he would agree with me on this. And another thing…
Sorry, I’ve been rambling, but I’ve just had some of doctor Sidewinder’s magic-powder and am back on-line. Which brings us to techno. This was the background music to much of Marvella’s and my Amsterdam experience, whether it be in coffee-shops, gay-bars, clubs or SM-studios, fetish-events etc. Since we both tended to go stoned to all of these, the local techno became part of our musical taste. It was so different to rock-music, and fitted the zeitgeist much better. In that environment there was a natural momentum towards experimenting with Ecstasy. If techno-on-hash was good, techno-on-Ecstasy was indescribably-good. You can’t keep two old-hippies down!
I once heard on the radio a medical piece on helping patients with sexual disorder, and how Ecstasy had been used as a disinhibitory-treatment. The doctor who was being interviewed said he was really surprised when he found-out about it a second, illegal use for it, in “raves” as he called them. What the good doctor missed was the obvious combination of the two, having sex in a rave (us participants call them SM/fetish-parties). Never underestimate the genius of the common man and woman.
Simultaneously with our new exposure to techno, the old rock-music still took equal precedence. We decided to retrace our original hippy days, but this time from a solid, bourgeois base. For all those squaring-up to middle-age, glamping is the way to do it. Identify five-star hotels near the festival sites, and use taxis to ferry you between those muddy fields and your base. To be truthful, I had never been that much involved in the festival-scene first-time-round, but Marvella is an authentic sixties hippy. Was she there at the Isle-of-White when Jimmy-Hendrix gave his last performance? (yes), does she remember any of it? (no – fast asleep and far too out-of-it). Most of the sixties has been chemically erased from her memory, though she admitted fragments of being at the Roundhouse when the early Pink-Floyd played there had come back to her, and scoring speed off the West-Indians on the queue.
So, we visited many of the old festivals and venues again. We went to reading where we say the last performance of the Stone-Roses. They were really awful, and this time it wasn’t our drugs, apparently it was theirs (too stoned to play coherently). I also remember seeing Underworld there in one of the inside stages, and being amazed that whole set must have been on hydraulic-jacks as it rose with them into the air. It was only after a few seconds it was no such thing; it was my ecstasy kicking-in. Oh, happy days!
Where else? The V-festival in Chelmsford (Essex again), Pink-Pop in the Netherlands, and many more that mysteriously seem to escape my memory at the moment. Regarding inside venues, we frequented the Ministry-of-Sound in London, and the Melkweg and Paradiso in Amsterdam. Acts included the Dandy-Warhols, the Chemical-Brothers, and may others, who also mysteriously seem to be escaping my memory. Strangely my autocorrect function suggested “War Holes” instead of Warhols – what the hell is a “War Hole”? I’m not altogether sure I should Google it to find out! Happy days indeed, and cannabis/ecstasy fuelled; totally unforgettable (that is except for chemical erasure).
Which pretty much brings this to a close. Cannabis-and-listening-to-music is an amazing combination, one that everyone should encourage and experience. Cannabis-and-creating-music is probably also an amazing combination, though I haven’t the skills to do this. Cannabis-and-performing-music carries the usual risks (fire, forgetfulness, etc.), but again I’m saved from this risk by being unable-and-unwilling to learn a musical instrument. One hint though on this last point; as my maternal-grandmother aways used to say, “wedging a joint in your guitar strings is cool, but if it falls burning onto the carpet because you forgot about it, is not”.