More Drugs, More Rock: The R.U. Sirius Interview, Part II

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In the first part of this dopey Q&A, Wonkette’s Ken Layne asked Everybody Must Get Stoned author and cyberpunk prankster R.U. Sirius about the glorious excess of rock-art past, and where the William S. Burroughs of the 2010s might be hiding out today. In the final installment, they cover Kesey, R.A. Wilson, Lou Reed, French Bohemia and psychedelics in modern medical trials.

Q: Robert Anton Wilson and Ken Kesey are two of the crucial counterculture writers, and you got to work with both of them. They haven’t been gone very long, but it feels like forever. This is basically the same question again, but where are the philosophical/spiritual leaders a druggy counterculture needs to keep it from descending into, say, the scene around where I live in the Mojave Desert, where illiterate high-school-dropout OHV idiots are cooking meth in double-wides and spending the meager profits on neck tattoos promoting terrible white-rap bands and Aryan gangs? Is the intellectual/arty drug era over?

A:  You know, I don’t see how people can take meth and want to ride around on their “hogs” all day. Doesn’t it make you want to re-read Gravity’s Rainbow… backwards… and then diagram the relationship between it and the Kabbalah?

Seriously though, there’s certainly a very intellectual psychedelic culture, mostly in the S.F. Bay Area but also in Europe. The American scene is almost pre-sixties in the sense that it’s fairly quiet, scientific, and largely into driving forward legitimate research.  And there has been nothing but positive reports from the research. There have been quite a few mainstream news reports about all this, but not so much that it doesn’t get lost or forgotten in the flood.  Most amusing was the report on recent psilocybin experiments conducted at John Hopkins that got reasonably wide coverage.  The New York Times headline read: “Mushroom Drugs Produce Mystical Experiences.” Wow. Scientists Discover Ass is Not Elbow!

Anyway, I don’t know if there’s any hope for your Mojave Desert meth-cookers, but you know, most hippies were pretty fuckin’ stupid too…  although much nicer… at least superficially.

And Lou Reed has the top three positions in my Top Ten Songs To Tweek To list, and he’s pretty intellectual. He’s married to Laurie Anderson…  you don’t get much more intellectual than that in rock culture.  Anyway, intelligent morbidity makes for mighty fine tweek music.

Q:  There is a kind of bohemian line going back centuries or even millennia, of the druggy/wine-crazed lords of excess doing the important thinking and taking the necessary dives into weirdness to maybe come back and write it down or put it on canvas or make music from it. Whether it’s Dionysus or Freud or Oscar Wilde or Miles Davis or the rock poets in your new book. Where should an 18-year-old be looking today for the secret key to whatever?

A:  First of all, I really like the idea of seeking after the Secret Key to Whatever.  It’s a perfect mix of boomer and gen-x.

My sense is that, at the start of the 21st century, you got the first generation of college students in which just about everybody has lost the thread…  the history that runs from the beats through the merry pranksters through the hippie/new left convergence through punk and on into various subcultures like goths, ravers, funkateers….  whatever.  I think there are way fewer young people with a sense of that history.  But that’s fine. They need to start a new story…  their own new narrative.

When I’m in a certain mood, I think “these kids today” could never produce an Allen Ginsberg or a Hunter Thompson or an Iggy Pop or a Patti Smith.  Or they may produce a few like them… but they would never indulge them to the degree that we once did, and so we wouldn’t know about them.  And that’s OK.  It’s understandable. We’re being squeezed dry by a kleptocracy, the national security state wants to monitor us right down to our last neuron, and you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the ice flows.  So these are not expansive, generous times and there’s this populist hatred of extravagance.   And Dionysian bohemian visionary drug excess is a type of extravagance.  Personally, I think a culture needs some types of extravagance, some excess… a culture needs its sacred monsters or it becomes really pinched.

But like I said… it’s not up to me.  It’s up to the 18-year-olds to make up their own stories…  you know, about how groovy it is to recycle their urine into tasty energy drinks while surfing in Montana and taking orders from robots that are smarter than they are about cleaning up the wreckage.

Q: This new book you wrote, it’s comedic.

A: One radio interviewer called the book tragicomic, but if you’re pretty twisted, parts of it are just flat out funny.  There are definitely some disturbing tales of excess. It definitely shouldn’t be taken entirely seriously.

On the other hand, it may be worth thinking about the fact that all the rock stars that fuck up mightily in the book were basically taught abstinence when it comes to drugs.

But as our society slowly starts to get more sophisticated about mind-active drugs — and starts to turn away from the simplistic rhetoric of the drug war — eventually it needs to learn that abstinence education doesn’t work with drugs either.  People are going to take them, and the best way to limit the harm is to have really accurate and precise drug education.  Let it all hang out.  Let people learn what people get from drugs — even the most dangerous ones — and learn the pitfalls.  And if we do that, there will be less harm. Probably. And if not, I get to write another trashy tragicomic book full of vignettes showing people doing weird things on drugs.

Ken Layne is editor of Wonkette, and was a columnist for R.U. Sirius’ Getting It webzine at the Dawn of the Century. R.U. Sirius is currently the editor of h+ Magazine.