Rock Stars On Dope: An Interview With R.U. Sirius

R.U. Sirius has long written about dope in his cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 and his many books, and he has long played punk and machine-rock music. His new book, Everybody Must Get Stoned, is about rock stars on drugs. Ken Layne interviewed R.U. Sirius through the magical medium of email — about Barack Obama getting high and whatever happened to the secret handshakes of the counterculture.

Q: We now have a president who grew up taking whatever drugs were around, never denied inhaling, and who has better than usual taste in music, at least for a politician. Is there any such thing as a counterculture when the president is a mixed-race former dope fiend who went to college hanging out with the punks and radicals at Occidental in east LA, and now has goddamned poetry slams and funk concerts in the White House?

A: Well, if Barack was really hip, One Nation Under A Groove would have been his theme song and P-Funk would have headlined the inaugural. But… you say he took whatever drugs were around?! When Olbermann sees this, his head will explode. (”Where is your proof sir!”) It seems nobody ever popped the psychedelic question to a presidential candidate. Did Barack trip? I’ll tell you a story. After Clinton was elected president, someone who claimed to be one of his former classmates from Oxford posted on The Well — a conferencing system that I was also on — that Clinton was known to be fond of psychedelics while he was in school there… particularly mescaline, and that it was true he didn’t inhale because of his throat problems, but he liked to eat hash. But I couldn’t get the guy to go public with the story. The Well certainly had the kind of participants who were baby boomers and who would have gone to Oxford, although I must admit I never checked the fellow’s creds. Back in my Mondo 2000 days, I thought that fact checks — like sound checks for a punk band — were for wankers.

Q: You didn’t tell this story in your book.

A: No. Bubba was a rock star only in his mind. But I did manage to squeeze the story about Hillary and the acid therapist into a discussion of a John Lennon song. There are a few scurrilous secondhand rumors in the book — clearly labeled as such, but people do like to believe. Actually, before Sean Hannity starts reporting about … “writer claims Obama, Clinton in LSD orgy”… I should point out that the discussion about the ex-pres is absolutely 100% bona fide unsubstantiatable. Anyway, more seriously, sure… when it comes to counterculture as a clearly meaningful path or identity, I think that ship — as a broad generalization — sailed a long time ago. Of course, these things are always ambiguous and dependent on what you mean by the word and who you ask and so forth. I don’t mean to discourage anyone with ambitions to be the next Abbie Hoffman. In 2004, when my previous book, Counterculture Through The Ages came out, I googled the word counterculture. The first link that came up was to a site called “Christian Counterculture.” And they considered themselves a counterculture because they were against pluralism and relativism and evolution and naughty behavior on television and in movies and openly gay people and all that. That seems like a pretty legitimate claim to me. People have been asking this question… is the counterculture still counter?… for years. And then Tom Frank, in The Conquest of Cool, asked whether it was ever really counter, or was it just consumer capitalism’s boho whorehouse? And I suppose the “Rock Stars On Drugs” answer would be: “Yeah. So what?” My own answer is a bit more nuanced but I think I’ve blathered about this question long enough.

Q: Maybe rock music is the whorehouse of the counterculture.

A: Well, I’ve got some quotes about drugs from Sirs Jagger and McCartney — from after they were knighted — that are unbecoming of Knights of the British empire. So let’s give the old whores some cred for staying true to the game. I’ve always had mixed feelings about people accusing other people of selling out. You can’t sell out somebody else’s convictions. Bob Dylan can’t sell out my ideals.

Q: One of the secret handshakes of rock that you cover in the book is William S. Burroughs. Knowing about Burroughs — his heroin addictions and psychedelic hunts, the way he accidentally shot his wife at a Mexico City beat party, his weird & cold hard-boiled writing — was a way for all kinds of druggy/poetic bands (Soft Machine, Nirvana, Steely Dan, Iggy Pop, the Stones & Beatles & the Dead, Soft Boys, etc. etc.) to give hipster signals to people in the know. And somebody would have to turn you on to Burroughs, because there was no Web or Pitchfork or Amazon for you to easily encounter the stuff, and your high school teacher wasn’t assigning Naked Lunch. Are there any secrets like this remaining in the world?

A: Is there someone or something today where… if you’re hip to it, it defines you as a hipster supremo? This is embarrassing. Maybe there is, and I don’t know it. I think the way it works now is rather than having a single signifier like Burroughs that you can flash around for ultra-hipster cred (and if you also mention Anita Pallenberg, you get a dream date with Kenneth Anger), it’s probably really tribalized and distributed. In the first issue of Mondo 2000 in 1989, I wrote that in the future, everybody will be famous to 15 people. I think we’re sort of there now. No one can keep track of every strange freak or avant artist who is doing something odd and interesting. But there will always be some in-group who will consider you clueless for not knowing about one particular person. I also think people would have a stronger inclination to go negative now on someone like Burroughs after awhile. The fickle finger of snark lands on everybody. I mean, one could have namedropped Damian Hirst for about fifteen minutes during the ’90s, but now that’s so 1995 and he sucks anyway.

Q: You write about all the rock people who did benefits for drug legalization, usually pot. Marijuana’s all but legal in California and a bunch of other states, and it’s been pretty much legal in much of Europe for a while. What is the chicken/egg thing there, as far as the outlaw part of the art/drug culture? The Dixieland/swing jazz musicians were potheads before it was illegal — they were part of the reason (along with the anti-Mexican movement) that “loco weed” became illegal in the first place — and then the bebop/cool jazz people seemed to turn pretty hard to heroin. I guess I’m asking, Does a drug’s illegality affect its prominence in an outlaw art form?

A: The first chapter of the book traces a bit of that history… which has been traced at much greater lengths by other books. This connection between musicians and drugs, just in terms of American culture, actually goes back to the medicine shows. Those elixirs — perfectly legal at the time — often contained cocaine or opium or both, so the rubes would go home high and happy. Sure cures what ails ya! The relationship between music and drugs — and particularly rock and drugs — is only partly about outlaw glamor. There also seems to be something of a neurologically and physical connection between enjoying and playing music and getting somewhat lit or altered, at least for some people some of the time. So I think some musicians will always find certain drugs to be performance enhancers… although that often backfires on them after awhile. But the outlaw aspect certainly has added a bit of a rebel edge to the whole thing and now they’ll have to find something else to be pissed off about… like file sharing.

Part II of this interview will post later this week is now posted on True/Slant.