Rock, folk, blues, and jazz are genres in which some of the greatest musicians have also been drug addicts; Bix Beiderbecke, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Art Pepper, Tim Hardin, Townes Van Zandt, Tim Buckley, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, and the Pretenders' Pete Farndon and James Honeyman-Scott were all among the casualties. These musicians were all extraordinarily gifted. Some were visionaries. And not to be overly clinical or reductionist, some may have been inherently unstable as a result of some underlying psychological conditions.While some lost their battle with smack or booze, others managed to go clean, at least for a time. While drinking or drug taking was not necessarily the essence of a Charlie Parker or a Townes Van Zandt or an explanation of the unquestionable beauty of their music, being wasted - and thus loopy and uninhibited - at least some of the time may have had something to do with how they lived their lives and in how they created a music that endures to this very day.
A couple of bands, though, spring to mind as bands that were both drug addled and thus prone to self-destruction but nevertheless perhaps somewhat inspired by the junky existence; brilliant and influentially ragged, these bands, from the world of punk - a world that reveres raggedness and nonconformity - are: The Germs, the Heartbreakers and Flipper.
Here are the Germs doing No God The Germs have recently reformed with a new lead singer and have been out on the "Warped" Tour, playing for kids a few generations younger, and young enough to be their offspring. Many outside of their L.A. base in the early 1980s became aware of the Germs through their appearance in the film The Decline of Western Civilization, myself included.
The Germs were, in my opinion, one of the great and essential American punk bands. Their sound was a particularly primitive stripped down three chord punk; listening to them it sounds as if they could barely play when they started. No matter - neither could other punk legends like Sid Vicious or the Ramones, both of whom were obvious influences here. The other obviously key part of their unique sound is singer Darby Crash. Darby was no poser; for him, punk was a total way of life, one to which he committed his (short lived) life. On songs like What We Do is Secret, Richie Dagger's Crime or Lexicon Devil, you can hear the power of his vocalizing; and you can also hear a deeply buried but inherent tunefulness, deep within the musical muck.
Here are the Heartbreakers doing Going steady and Chinese Rocks. The Heartbreakers were a band formed by guitarist Johnny Thunders, after the breakup/fracturing of his earlier band, the legendary New York Dolls (Here is a really fine Johnny Thunders blog.) I recently finished reading Nina Antonia's book about the Dolls - Too Much Too Soon, and also read, a few years ago, her book on Thunders, In Cold Blood. Both are very good, interesting, informative reads, with both chronicling the rapid rise and hard, grief strewn falls of said musicians.
[Incidentally, the New York Dolls have recently reformed and have an official band website. I've seen this version of them twice live, and while they are a lot of fun and sound decent, it's not quite the same as the 70s version; it cannot possibly be. Everyone knows that. And Nina Antonia's book's has apparently been revised, for the 3rd edition, to cover this recent reunion, as well as the most recent Dolls death, of bass player Arthur "Killer"Kane.]
With the Heartbreakers, Johnny Thunders established himself as his own leader of the pack, but in the clip shown above, he shares the stage with bass player/songwriter/singer Richard Hell, who didn't last in this group for very long; (the clip being from 1975, and Johnny here still has his long NY Dolls haircut and not yet his punk hairdo). The classic Heartbreakers lineup was Johnny, ex-Doll Jerry Nolan on drums, Walter Lure on guitar, and Billy Rath on bass. While the Heartbreakers were well known as a band of heroin addicts and were thus inherently unstable (only managing to record one studio LP as a band, and, according to Antonia, sort of screwing that task up. Nevertheless, their recording are filled with hooks, chords, and a type of New York street humor. The Heartbreakers, as well as the Ramones, were also massively influential on the London punks of the 70s, and thus on punk, generally speaking. And yet in their live shows, they were essentially playing for chump change, and were sometimes so wasted that they could barely hold their instruments.
And not to overly romanticize their use of potentially deadly substances, but an argument can and should be made that the use of such substances as speed and heroin by such bands helped to fuel their creativity, by fueling their alienation from much of the world, essentially all of the straight (i.e., non partaking) world, and also by altering their perceptions in ways we may not fully understand. It made their performances ragged and messy, and this actually and authentically added a certain textural quality to their otherwise in many ways conventional music. None of this is to rationalize drugs; rather, it is to look at the use of drugs by certain artists with a sense of honesty.
Finally, here is Flipper doing Way of the world
These performances are truly sloppy and pretty great, with Flipper's showing a particular intensity. Bruce Lose is quite the charismatic front man/lead singer and looks healthy here (that would change in later years; Flipper would also suffer a band casualty - in their case, bass player Will Shatter. In the early, classic lineup, Flipper's two main songwriters were a kind of yin and yang, with Shatter known for writing the "optimistic" songs like "Life" and "Way of the World," and Lose writing the more "pessimistic" songs like "Life is Cheap" and "Living for the Depression."
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