"The Album You Would Play for a Martian Who Just Landed in Your Yard and Asked What Cocaine Is"

"The Brothers Gallagher became folk heroes in the Nineties because they reveled in all the tropes of rock & roll excess, from onstage fistfights to marrying movie stars. Other bands drank and drugged and decadenced to escape their grunge angst or the pressures of fame. The Gallaghers did it for dumb fun. They loved their mum, hated the Tories, couldn't even spell 'irony,' wanted to live forever and to beat each other's faces in. Always up for cutting a promo with their rivals in Blur. Never into misogyny, because the only time they sang about women was when they needed a Sally to wait or an Elsa to sniff Alka-Seltzer. These boyos approached guitar rock in a totally pop way, making it nonstop fun to be a fan—what a concept."

Rob Sheffield at Rolling Stone marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Oasis's Be Here Now.

Where the Pyramid Met the Eye

"In 1965, his group the Spades released a single containing two Erickson songs that became crucial to the Elevators–You're Gonna Miss Me and We Sell Soul. But the leap into innerspace came when he paired up with Tommy Hall to form the Elevators in Austin, Texas, later that year. Hall was the psychedelic visionary–the one who shaped the band’s debut into being The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, the principal lyricist, and the player of the electric jug, the sound that gave the band their unearthly wobbliness–while Erickson was the singer and main composer; and what extraordinary music he composed. On that debut album, Roller Coaster is disorienting and sinister, a combination of rock'n'roll and raga-like intensity; Reverberation (Doubt) a claustrophobic nightmare; Fire Engine is garage rock taken to its logical extreme. As Rob Chapman wrote in his book Psychedelia and Other Colours: 'The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators and its follow-up, Easter Everywhere, contain some of the most primal yelps of discomfort and joy heard anywhere in rock'n'roll.'"

Michael Hann at The Guardian writes an appreciation of Roky Erickson.

"Takes on the Elements of the Standard Story One by One"

"Meanwhile, all the rewards for the prosecutor, at any level, are for making more prisoners. Since most prosecutors are elected, they might seem responsive to democratic discipline. In truth, they are so easily reëlected that a common path for a successful prosecutor is toward higher office. And the one thing that can cripple a prosecutor's political ascent is a reputation, even if based on only a single case, for being too lenient. In short, our system has huge incentives for brutality, and no incentives at all for mercy."

Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker reviews John F. Pfaff's Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform.

As does German Lopez at Vox.

"A Story That Explains the Situation Better Than Any Abstract Case"

"Narcotics police began to shut down this loophole, state by state, actually rounding up 17,000 doctors nationally between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s. In California, the success of the legal drugs program was so clear that many people fought back; the mayor of Los Angeles was one of its strongest defenders. But the feds came for California's legal drug program too, and in the early 1930s Edward Smith Williams was arrested.
"The reasons for this crackdown only became public years later, when they were established in a trial.
"The head of the Narcotics Bureau in California in the 1930s, Chris Hanson, was approached one day by a local drug lord called Woo Sing. He pointed out that in states like Nevada, where the legal clinics had already been closed, addicts were forced to go to dealers; and he was furious that in California, the gangs couldn't find customers because users and addicts could buy their drugs legally. So Woo bribed Hanson to introduce the drug war into California. Hanson was convicted of taking bribes–but the war on drugs he brought to California continues."

Johann Hari in the Los Angeles Times explores the origin of the war on drugs in California.

"It Had a Certain Poetry to It"

"By this time, Schiller was a photojournalist of some renown, and with a batch of good-quality LSD finding its way into counterculture circles and talk of so-called Acid Tests–musical events fuelled by Kool-Aid laced with psychedelics–taking place along the west coast, he set out to document the new scene. Through acid guru Timothy Leary, Schiller made contact with Kesey, who told him the Pranksters were due to hold an Acid Test on Sunset Boulevard. Mid-trip, they skipped down the block to pose for portraits. 'Cassady was there,' Schiller recalls. 'At one point I went over, and he started dancing with his silhouette.'"

Louis Pattison in a 2011 Guardian article tells the backstory of the cover of the Flaming Lips album The Soft Bulletin.

"How Did the United States Entangle Itself in a Policy of Drug Prohibition That Has Yielded So Much Misery and So Few Good Results?"

"I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. 'You want to know what this was really all about?' he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. 'The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.'
"I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.
"Nixon's invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since—Democrat and Republican alike—has found it equally useful for one reason or another."

Dan Baum in Harper's investigates drug legalization.

Don't Criticize It

"A lot of different theories were advanced for the defeat of Proposition 19. Law-enforcement officials, both major political parties, and the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor all opposed it. Some popular impetus for legalization had been sapped by rapidly declining penalties for recreational use (it had basically become like a sporadically enforced traffic offense), and thwarted by the refusal of federal law-enforcement officials to defer to state or local laws in this area. There was also a notable lack of enthusiasm for Prop 19 in Northern California pot-growing areas, which feared a major takeover of the industry by medical-marijuana distributors or even big tobacco companies. And since no other jurisdiction had at that point legalized pot, there were a lot of fears about the legalization regime's feasibility.
"Finally, and perhaps most important, 2010 was a midterm election, which invariably brings out an older, more conservative electorate.
"That will not be a problem in November."

Ed Kilgore at New York discusses California's upcoming proposition to legalize marijuana.

Every Thing Would Appear to Man as It Is

Rob Young in New Statesman and Ian Thomson in The Spectator review Rob Chapman's Psychedelia and Other Colours.

Young Corporate Ecstasy Steelers Spot

The New York Times runs obits for feminist activist Karen DeCrow, chemist Alexander Shulgin, comedian Rik Mayall, Nixon appointee Myles J. Ambrose, historian Gabriel Kolko, baseball player Bob Welch, Renaissance fair co-founder Phyllis Patterson, actress Ruby Dee, illustrator Eric Hill, singer Jimmy Scott, and football coach Chuck Noll.

"The National Battle to Curb Smoking Still Smolders"

"In addition to listing all the dangers and diseases associated with smoking, Terry also took the extraordinary step of calling for government involvement in the issue.  Across the decades, the national effort to separate Americans from their cigarettes has manifested itself in the creation of warning labels on packs of cigarettes (1965), the launching of free anti-smoking PSAs on television (1967), the creation of smoking sections in restaurants, airplanes, and elsewhere in the 1970s, and the banning of cigarette advertisements.  Eventually, full smoking bans took root as well."


Adam Chandler at The Atlantic notes the fiftieth anniversary of the Surgeon General "report that linked smoking cigarettes with lung cancer."

"The Squares Have Joined In"

"That's right, America. We've entered the age of the iPhone bong—sleek, elegant, corporate. Oh sure, maybe that Grateful Dead-style blown-glass hippie shit was never cool. Indeed, those items are ugly. But they know what they are. Far worse is the middlebrow pipe that strives to be something more.
"The situation has left actual young people confused."

Elspeth Reeve at The Atlantic argues that legal marijuana is uncool.

"Pot and Slots"

"But both have been made possible by the same trend in American attitudes: the rise of a live-and-let-live social libertarianism, the weakening influence of both religious conservatism and liberal communitarianism, the growing suspicion of moralism in public policy.

"And both, in different ways, illustrate the potential problems facing a culture pervaded by what the late sociologist Robert Bellah called 'expressive individualism' and allergic to any restrictions on what individuals choose to do."

 

Ross Douthat in The New York Times links the rising popularity of legalized marijuana and casino gambling.

"A Literary One-Hit Wonder"

"After finishing the Yates and Cheever bios, Bailey tells the Weekly, he was a bit burned out and looking for a lighter subject. His first idea was to write a collection of mini-profiles of promising young writers who got off track and never made their literary mark—long-forgotten names like Nathan Asch, Calvin Canfield and Jackson. But when he read the editor's preface to The Lost Weekend and learned about Jackson's pathetic end at the Chelsea Hotel, he knew he'd found his next full-length subject: 'I had to get to the bottom of that,' he says. 'How did the author of The Lost Weekend end up like that?'"

Paul Teetor in the LA Weekly reviews Blake Bailey's Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson.

Higher than the Sun

"Whereas before, the band had mostly written with their guitars, the new material was based mainly on keyboard chords, while key to the creative process was an Akai S1000 sampler. 'That changed everything,' Innes recalls. 'Suddenly we could experiment. You're a rock'n'roll band, but you can take a James Brown drum loop and play along with that; you can add horns, you can add strings. The engineer would give you a floppy disk with some tablas on it and you'd stick that in the sampler and try that. It was like we'd been painting in black and white and suddenly we had a full palette of colours to play with.'"

In The Guardian, Caspar Llewellyn Smith revisits Primal Scream's Screamadelica album two decades later.

It's My Wife and It's My Life

"The drug urges them, as the story shows, to murky streets and ill-lit corners, through shabby rooms and in and out of hospitals and jails. It is their jealous lover, and their wrathful god."

Via Google Books, James Mills in a 1965 Life magazine series follows a Greenwich Village couple, who are both addicted to heroin. (The article is also a possible inspiration for a recent Mad Men episode.)

"Understanding the Secrets of Space and Time"

"You could be forgiven for thinking that it's a Xerox of the Byrds' Eight Miles High but not so, according to the Dovers' guitarist, Bruce Clawson. 'We'd already worked on the tune,' he told Mike Markesich, 'a few weeks later I'm in the car and Eight Miles High came on. I was crushed. I thought I had something unique.'"

In The Guardian's music blog, Jon Savage praises the Dovers's "The Third Eye" from 1966 as one of the first pop songs influenced by LSD.

"A Cynical Euphemism for 'Available'"

"Modern readers in the grip of F. Scott Fitzgerald's prose may not recognize the meaning of Tom Buchanan's insight, but Fitzgerald knew his contemporaries would understand. In 1925, when 'The Great Gatsby' was published, the meaning of 'drugstores' was as clear as gin: Those were the places you went to get medically prescribed alcohol, a legally acceptable source of liquor during all 13 years of Prohibition.
"Sound familiar? To any modern Californian, of course it does."

Daniel Okrent in the Los Angeles Times recalls a loophole during Prohibition.

Dark Stuff

"Kent first made his journalistic name with elegiac yet unsparing celebrations of rock's 'lost boys'-–Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, Nick Drake-–and now his willingness to confront the extent to which his own considerable talents were dissipated rather than sustained by the self-conscious pursuit of decadence allows him to bring a welcome new perspective to the all-too-familiar contours of the addiction memoir. When he describes the experience of re-reading the articles he wrote at the height of his drug-addled notoriety as 'like watching a man trying to swim his way through an ocean of mud', you can almost feel the barnacles of chemical dependency being stripped away from the steel hull of his intellect.'"

Ben Thompson in The Independent reviews Nick Kent's Apathy for the Devil.

Well, Well, Well, You're Feeling Fine

"To her surprise, patients often got greater relief from pot than from prescription drugs--and they reported no side effects. In 2007, she shut down her family practice on Sunset and went herbal all the way on Melrose. Her answer to the obvious question? Yes, the money is better."

Steve Lopez in the Los Angeles Times visits Dr. Sona Patel, the most glamorous marijuana doctor in L.A.

"Stay Thirsty, My Friends"

"But the most interesting man hasn't actually been conceived as a brand icon--a la Mr. Clean or Ronald McDonald. He's more like a celebrity endorser. One who happens to be fictional. He doesn't shill with brio for the simple reason that it would undercut his claim to awesomeness."

Seth Stevenson in Slate praises Dos Equis' new advertising spokesman.