“You cannot blame idols for doing certain things. Parents, at home, are the real idols, those who get your life on track,” Diego Maradona said at a press conference, after arriving at the Madrid-Barajas airport.
Let’s go back in time:
Watching television a father receives the news of Kurt Cobain´s suicide. It’s 1994. He remembers that the last record his fifteen-years-old son asked for was Nirvana’s Nevermind,. “The same band in which the guy, who has shot himself in the head with a Magnum, sang” – he thinks.
Immediately he goes to his son’s room and says: “I don’t want to see you with that guitar ever again.”
░ Has the drugs and rock and roll combination disappeared?
You can blame the guitar for heroin, you can blame Chill for LSD, and you can blame books about horsemen for paranoia. But, does anybody think that Don Quixote went crazy for reading tales of knights?
Music, literature, art feed of life. To create, just one thing is needed: feeling. We can learn from drugs, or perhaps a jail sentence (like Cervantes or Dostoyevsky), or maybe a broken heart. ¿Are the muses addicted to love, or are they serving sentence because of love?
Mick Jagger said that drugs had surpassed the preterit ‘sex’ in the legend: “sex, drugs and rock and roll”, therefore it became: “drugs, sex and rock and roll”. That is how Jagger illustrated its importance in the current music scene.
As a pair, drugs and rock and roll have been sharing stages and dressing rooms, assailing the microphone with fury and the backstage with sexual encounters, just as once upon a time there were giant-like windmills in the land of Castilla.
To such an extent that each decade can immediately be identified with a certain musical style; if you think for a second, only a second, you can also identify them with a specific drug, a sinister totem: the 70´s were rock, but also cocaine; the 80´s were pop, and also heroin; the 90´s were electronic music, and also acid..
░ Cocaine, heroin, alcohol, amphetamines. Drugs in the music world
Let us have a look at some famous names perversely matched by destiny. Barred from witch-hunting and fatal adventures, let us just tell the story:
ELVIS AND AMPHETAMINES
The poor kid from the American South, Elvis Aaron Presley, worked as a cinema usher, a truck driver, a park keeper… He also took voice lessons in a Baptist Choir, he grew sideburns and a toupee and became ‘the king of rock’.
The downfall of the great myth of the Twentieth Century was impressive. ‘The pelvis’ (as he was called because of his characteristic way of dancing) weighed 130 kilos when his body was found in a bathtub in his mansion of Graceland. It was not alcohol or heroin, but an overdose of amphetamines and barbiturates with which he was trying to reduce his weight, finally caused his death at 42.
JANIS AND HEROIN
The white blues and rock singer had round glasses, a girlish face and a very powerful voice with which she burst onto the musical scene of the 60´s. This was a steep climb for Janis Joplin, who among other things, found heroin. They say she had given up heroin when she was recording Pearl, her last and posthumous record. Janis shot up pure heroin which caused her death in 1970, even before the record was finished.
JIM AND ALCOHOL
JJim Morrison: singer, poet, alcohol addict. He founded The Doors in the mid 60´s and became an icon of revolt and genius. His image has been present in the worldwide press, but only the image of his first years. Morrison became blurred like the time he lived. It is said that aside from alcohol, he tried every drug, with two peculiarities: he detested heroin and got hooked on alcohol until it killed him..
In another bathtub, in Paris this time, ‘the lizard king’ died at 27. His body was swollen from the effects of alcohol, which he could never give up.
ANTONIO AND BARBITURATES
Our country particularly mourned Antonio Flores’ death in May of 1995. His mother, the immortal Lola Flores, had died two weeks before from cancer which she had battled for many years. Lola’s strength was almost Antonio’s strength. He had battled drugs since he was a teenager, and when Lola passed away, Antonio stopped fighting.
He was found in his garden with a combination of barbiturates and alcohol in his blood. He left behind a daughter, Alba.
░ The drug that killed James Dean
“Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse”, James Dean said ironically. This sentence turned sinister when he practiced what he preached. A red Porsche Spyder that usually went too fast was his grave.
How excessive is it to say that speed was the drug that killed James Dean? He had an accident on the way to a rally. Meaning, he had raced on his way to a racing circuit. And that is not all, he had just been fined for speeding a few minutes before. I know someone who would say that that is a true craving to consume.
Drugs or speed, as other thing, are signs of human behavior, deficiencies, weaknesses, or perhaps an undiscovered spirit. What were James, Kurt, Elvis, Antonio running to? Or even more disturbingly: what were they running from?
OTHERS
░ Sport and Drugs
░ Music and Drugs
░ Cinema and Drugs
░ Sexuality and Drugs
░ Domestic violence and drugs
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