Music and Drugs are Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

Does music need drugs? While listening to Tool’s song “Third Eye” which opens up with a comedian joking about how drugs have done good things for the world and goes on to say if you don’t believe it than you should throw out all your records and CD’s because the artists who made those albums were really high on drugs, I wondered just how true this is. Unfortunately this fact is pretty hard to dispute, the greatest musicians of our time used drugs, a matter of fact probably 99.9% of the greatest musicians of all time experimented with drugs. When thinking about my favorite bands over the years I think of Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Doors, Bob Dylan, The Who, Led Zeppelin, and Nirvana, all of which dabbled heavily in drugs. How can it be that all of the greatest bands in music history used drugs? Seeing that I am one who abstains from both drugs and alcohol I cringe thinking that maybe drugs are indeed the key to creating great music. The great John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan delved in drugs like it was their job and what did we receive from them (Besides a short life)? GREAT MUSIC! It’s pretty difficult to actually think of bands that don’t or did not use drugs while creating music. Maybe I am thinking about this all wrong, maybe it is just the whole rock scene which drives the drugs to the artists and regardless of if they are drug users or not the music will still be great based on their talent. The problem with this is when looking at bands or artists that did not initially use drugs when creating music usually became better upon starting to use them, for example The Beatles. Now The Beatles were always a great band but to say that albums like “Meet the Beatles” and “Please Please Me” are better than albums like “Sgt. Pepper” and “Abbey Road” is a crime. Bands like Pink Floyd and The Doors experimented with drugs before their musical debut and for both Floyd and The Doors we had incredible debut albums, The Doors created what would be their best album and Floyd created what is arguably the best psychedelic album ever. This argument certainly seems to side with the fact that drugs create better music, I hope that this is not true because one, we just may be missing out on a lot of great music thanks to the lack of drug use compared to the 60’s and two, is the human mind just incapable of being that creative without the help of mind altering substances? Let’s just hope that grand and bombastic ideas can be assessed properly without the use of drugs, and if not then we just may never hear albums like “Tommy” and “Brain Salad Surgery” ever again.