FIFTY YEARS OF SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK 'N' ROLL

FIFTY YEARS OF SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK 'N' ROLL

Zachary Lipez

“Sex, drugs, and rock and roll (SDRR) is a storied trilogy in popular culture.... Evidence does indirectly support connections between the components of this Triumvirate. People with increased sensation seeking (a personality trait marked by a preference for risky, intense experiences) prefer rock music (Little & Zuckerman, 1986), and sensation seeking is strongly connected to substance use (Wagner, 2001).” —Human Ethology Bulletin 32 (2017)3: 63-84 "SEX DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL: EVIDENCE SUPPORTING THE STORIED TRILOGY” by Marissa A. Harrison (Department of Psychology, Penn State) & Susan M. Hughes (Department of Psychology, Albright College)

When it comes to the question of “Whither SDRR?” it’s possible to overthink things. And while underthinking has its charm, and failing to interrogate may work for savants like Black Oak Arkansas or Nashville Pussy, it’s also how you end up with a Runaways biopic that'll turn your stomach. History unexamined repeats itself, first as “Lit Up,” then as “Crazy Bitch."

PARSING ANY ERA’S RATES OF SEXINESS, DRUGGINESS, AND ROCK ’N’ ROLLABILITY IS, OF COURSE, DEEPLY SILLY.

Parsing any era’s rates of sexiness, drugginess, and rock ’n’ rollability is, of course, deeply silly. We’re only doing it because we enjoy being silly, and because many in our age group(s) deny an incontrovertible truth: The human need to sex and drug has never changed, and only the signifiers vary. And yeah, we keep hearing about how that last component, rock ’n’ roll, is dead. But we’re familiar enough with the New Testament, Bob Weir’s touring schedule, and the lyrics to “Atlantic City” to know that, sometimes, the dead keep trucking.

For some, “SDRR” is a catchall boomer reverie encompassing any vaguely transgressive happening that occurred between Neil Young growing his first sideburns and the first application of a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. For some, it was the Summer of Love exclusively, with anything after ’67 being pure MK-Ultra psyop. In truth, SDRR started whenever a caveman licked their first horny toad and decided to graffiti a prehistoric French cave. But for our purposes, we ll start with the fucking hippies.

Are You Gonna Be There (at the Love-in)

In the late ’60s, the idea of “lifestyle” was a decade into going from the language of German intellectuals to being a way for Volkswagen to sell bubble-butted cars to counterculture types. Free love (and its accoutrements) was at a crossroads. Sex was no longer verboten in mass culture. For example, through the popularity of James Bond, MI6 agents were celebrated for slinging good dick against the forces of communism. Also, miniskirts. On the other hand, the previous year’s Rosemary’s Baby illustrated what might happen to women with short hair, and Billboard’s No. 1 song was “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies.

By 1969, the Summer of Love, the ’67 San Francisco freak scene’s attempt to reshape reality, had blown over with not too much to show for all that squalor except for America’s immediate love/hate relationship with all that it represented.

By then “heavy metal" meant biker-adjacent thunder, while actual (proto) metal was just called “playing the blues poorly.” Getting high, rocking out, and extramatrimonial tuggers were outré, activities best left to innercity denizens or the Kennedys.

That this relationship would prove interminable couldn’t have been guessed in October of ’69, when Edward Kern first used the phrase “sex, drugs, and rock” in a LIFE magazine article called “Can It Happen Here?” Kern’s answer was basically an anticlimactic “nah.”

The phrase “sex & drugs & rock & roll” entered the recorded realm a decade later via Ian Dury’s song of the same name. The song itself is not as primal as its title indicates. The lyrics (“Every bit of clothing ought to make you pretty/You can cut the clothing, gray is such a pity”) are mostly solid advice. They’re chanted by Dury—over a Chaz Jankel bassline subconsciously lifted off an Ornette Coleman jam—in a tone that matches the mod grooviness of the music, which is itself a representation of the lite-reggae, punk-esque R&B that the singer (along with Joe Jackson, Garland Jeffreys, and even the Clash) was perfecting at the time. You see why treating SDRR as something selfevident is a mistake? When people bemoan how SDRR has gone missing from our woke police state, they don’t mean “I miss Elvis Costello."

SDRR is more than the sum of its parts. When we talk about it, we’re talking about a metaphor, a movable oasis of teenage kicks. Like its kissing cousins, art and pornography, one can know SDRR when one sees it, but it’s just as often seen where it isn’t. And sometimes it’s not seen even when it’s licking you in the face.

DIVORCED FROM THE RESPONSIBILITY OF ELEVATING INTER-DIMENSIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS, SDRR ENJOYED A GOLDEN AGE.

There’s no confusing the tentpoles: Elvis thrusting on The Ed Sullivan Show, Bowie on The Dick Cavett Show, the cover of Sticky Fingers, Ozzy in The Decline of the Western Civilization II, tour stories about the Go-Go’s, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors, Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, Bon Scott singing about a woman named Rosie, Brian Johnson singing “She told me to come, but I was already there.” Not rhythmic enough to dance to on Soul Train, but swinging enough to make a teenager think it’d be a nifty soundtrack for making out. Smoke on the water, witchy women and warlocks sweating from their eyeballs, reaching across the age gap to groupies like an airbrushed Sistine Chapel.

On its face, not super complicated. But it’s easy to mistake something as of SDRR when it’s actually not. Examples would be the Beatles, the song “Cocaine” (J.J. Cale original and Clapton version), and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Subjective, also objectively true. The Beatles are out because Leonard Bernstein loving one’s art is very nice but disqualifies one from inclusion. CCR and J.J. Cale are out because anything critics describe as “choogle” or “motorik” is out (if you have a problem with that, blame Sting for making tantric sex sound like a drag), and Clapton is out because we’re still mad about him blaming his ’70s xenophobia on poor, innocent cocaine. Not to say that all those examples aren’t great art (even the Clapton song), but, for the discussion at hand, all are off vibe to anyone who ponders such things way too much.

Even as its individual components grew fraught, SDRR as a lifestyle got less irritating in the ’70s. The hypocrisy of the Summer of Love—revolutionary claims versus “the patriarchy, but topless” reality—was resolved by simply dropping the revolution part. SDRR became safe enough to scrawl on one’s jeans in class, to be treated as much as an American Pastime as baseball, apple pie, or ruefully contemplating the folly of man as “Fortunate Son” played in the background during your tour in Vietnam.

It’s easy to be cynical about “Dope, guns, and fucking in the streets” becoming SDRR, but when the Garden of Eden turns out to be the Altamont Speedway, it’s hard to blame the next generation of longhairs for lowering their expectations. While a few got political, and others invented punk, most chose to focus on what they had control over: their virginity and their pill intake. For this majority, the vacuum of a hollowed-out counterculture could only be filled by stadium rock. Those stadiums in turn were filled with all the counterculture’s little brothers and sisters. None of those kids wanted to hear about 'Nam. Not when Alice Cooper’s snake and/or Suzi Quatro’s bodysuit spoke to their specific concerns. Divorced from the responsibility of elevating interdimensional consciousness, SDRR enjoyed a golden age.

This is not to diminish the bummer reality of underage groupies, the mortality rate of Neil Young’s social circle, Jimmy Page’s more Gargamel-ic tendencies, or the sheer number of LP covers that approached the sexual revolution with a cruel joie de vivre reminiscent of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Despite very real awfulness, it’s wrong to separate SDRR from smiley-face T-shirts, Sea-Monkeys, or any other youth culture tchotchkes of the time. Regardless of how scummy the reality of stadium rock may have been, the story it told was pure cartoon; Jukebox Hero, Pinball Wizard.

To that: When Williams Electronic Games rolled out “Rock 'N Roll Pinball” in 1970, the technology was disreputable, with the game more likely to be found in bars than arcades. Williams’ rock pinball, however, was a baby bauble, painted in the most harmless of psychedelics to approximate “Yellow Submarine.” Fast-forward to the end of the ’70s, when KISS pinball came out. That featured the boys in full makeup, dressed for space combat and surrounded by nipple-extended strippers in thigh-high leather boots along the machine’s margins. This was near the end of the pinball craze, half a decade into the game being accessible to teenagers. It had been 10 years since SDRR had been first used in the context of incipient Maoism taking over San Francisco. It may as well have been a hundred.

ALL MUSIC, REGARDLESS OF AESTHETIC, WOULD BECOME ROCK 'N' ROLL, EVENTUALLY WITH A HALL OF FAME TO CODIFY THAT FACT.

In this quaintness the seeds were planted for whatever absence of SDRR is perceived today. While rock was still dominant, other forces were edging in. It turned out that drugs didn’t need massive riffs to get you high. This had always been the case (with jazz being an early adopter of powder-fueled lifestyles, and alcoholism being a core tenet of country music), but the mid-’70s saw jazz visionary Rahsaan Roland Kirk doling out bumps of coke between sax solos while, at the same time, country’s new outlaws were dressing like Byrds roadies and behaving like Steely Dan lyrics.

It’s impossible to know whether Led Zeppelin concertgoers were fornicating on the scale of Saturday Night Fever attendees, but in comparing the numbers of women and homosexuals populating boogie wonderland to the number of adolescent Tolkien readers on the opposing team, the point goes to disco. Luckily for rock ’n’ roll (and the lifestyle profiteers who’d invested in all those stadiums), the 1980s were just around the corner.

And with the ’80s came MTV. If the kids were going to try to find new soundtracks to old kicks, the solution was simple. Rock ’n’ roll would maintain cultural supremacy by becoming everything. In Madonna and MTV, sex would become rock ’n’ roll. In Huey Lewis and Wall Street, all drugs (with the notable exception of crack) would become rock ’n’ roll. All music, regardless of aesthetic, would become rock ’n’ roll, eventually with a Hall of Fame to codify that fact. America would become synonymous with rock ’n’ roll, as would God himself (even if it meant KISS taking off their makeup and making one of the worst songs ever recorded).

Hair metal was, of course, an SDRR torchbearer. But it was also a genre heavy with effort, with every Sunset Strippee out-partying the last, resulting in an arms race of partying that could only end in a hangover of pale Stones pastiche, the county-fair circuit, or Generation Swine.

Memorializations of SDRR during the '80s are split evenly between generations. Partially because the whole “generation” thing is an astrology-level scam of cherry-picking trends and self-flattery, designed to sell cars and keep social scientists off the street. And partially because it takes a generationally shared effort to sugarcoat the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll of the ’80s into anything close to innocence. Not to say that the alliance didn’t pull it off. Just pointing out that the so-called Greatest Generation storming Normandy was impressive, but the reformation of Axl Rose (from “Turn around, bitch, I got a use for you” to his current insurance-salesman-on-holiday haircut era) took some doing too.

Whereas boomers used the ’60s to slap us around with idealism, Generation X did something similar in the '90s. Their SDRR was something darker, but for all their vaunted cynicism, it is recalled with equal romanticism. They lived through this. “This” being Woodstock ’94 and ’99. Their SDRR is proudly depicted as a trial by fire. Every rock-star suicide of the decade served to increase an Alternative Nation’s fluency in sarcasm. Every indie overdose has been retconned as generational character building.

EVERY ROCK-STAR SUICIDE OF THE DECADE SERVED TO INCREASE AN ALTERNATIVE NATION’S FLUENCY IN SARCASM.

Despite the popular narrative, it wasn’t AIDS or grunge that killed the party. That’s just what your high school health teacher said to keep you off the Slipknot boards. The misreading comes from the ahistorical belief that young American men (of any sexual orientation) might be capable of systemically, for an extended period of time, prioritizing “not dying’’ over “blowjobs from strangers.” It’s also based on a facile reading of Grunge’s Great Works. In this tomfoolery, gmnge was less sexy than hard rock because, apparently, girls simply hate tragic crooners with sensitive eyes.

The trick here is to not fetishize the more cartoonish aspects of hard rock. The codpiece, the Camaro, the airbrushed van mural of a scantily clad Carrie Fisher straddling a Pegasus: all fine and beautiful things. But if the logical conclusion of Matthew McConaughey’s character arc in Dazed and Confused can be swept from the mind’s eye when the “Slow Ride” riff kicks in, so too can we encourage one to see the timelessness of some tropes, even as we all age out of cuteness.

That said, if one feels like sweet SDRR died when guitar solos went out of fashion, one wouldn’t be alone in the early ’90s, even amongst those who ostensibly celebrated this demise. Outside of Jane’s Addiction unironically quoting Ian Dury on an interlude in Ritual de lo Habitual, rock music of the time cloaked its conventionally horny and drugged-out tropes in punky hairdos, suicidal ideation, and, uh, Sabbath riffs. Maybe this veneer convinced some that grunge was an irrevocable break from good times past. Certainly, parents and critics of the time didn't know better. But little girls, boys, burnouts of any gender, and anyone who ever fantasized about being a thumb hole in one of Kurt Cobain’s cardigans? They, on a cellular/libidinous level, understood.

Whether grunge was denying its true nature, the jig was up by 1995, when the surest way to get on a rom-com soundtrack was to sound like Cheap Trick. By the end of the decade, grunge’s yarling backwash was supplanted by nü-metal, a genre as much in the tradition of Grand Funk Railroad as it was indebted to childhood trauma. The vast majority conveyed the same sexed-up and narcoticized spirit as ’70s arena rock. The themes and chords may have implied a degree of self-loathing absent in your average Mark Farner composition, but—and feel free to confirm this with anyone who’s ever had a boyfriend—sometimes when the lyrics are about how sad and damaged the singer is, the song otherwise remains the same.

OUR ADVICE IS: COOL, BUT DON’T MAKE YOUR MORTAL DREAD THE KIDS IN GRETA VAN FLEET T-SHIRTS’ PROBLEM. OR OURS.

At this juncture, dwelling on the aughts would be a waste of space. There’s only so many ways to say “such-and-such artist is neither a major break from what came before nor a sudden resurgence of some long-absent aspect of pop that people of a certain age and/or haircut revere.’’ If one doesn’t recall the 2000s as a time of low-rise jeans, “Sex on Fire,” and teenagers listening to adolescently absurd hard rock (called garage or pop punk or emo or metalcore, because words stopped having meaning around 2001) while doing copious amounts of drugs, that’s entirely on one, as angst, horniness, and the need to take the edge off are constant to human experience.

The “indie sleaze revival” was dumb. Not just because it is so badly misremembered, but because it—on a smaller scale—repeated hair metal’s error of trying too hard to party, even in the midst of debauchery. Or maybe, like hair metal, the indie sleaze revival got it right in continuing the '70s rock tradition of announcing how rockingly rocking it rocks. Andrew W.K., Turbonegro, Eagles of Death Metal, and the Darkness all did SDRR with varying degrees of winks and nudges. When it comes to sex & drugs & rock & roll, nothing is as simple as it so badly wants to be.

It is true that there were times, of our various youths, that retrospect grants a specific raciness that now feels extinct. Yes, once upon a time, album covers had more half-exposed tits than a gang of titmouse outlaws. Yes, you could pay your rent with Camel Cash. Everybody smoked, everywhere. Girls from Dayton could pass for French, and all the boys sounded like Marianne Faithfull. In those halcyon days, Joan Jett was straight; now nobody is.

There’s no point in denying that the youth of today have puritanical strains, and if our sources at the “Only ’80s Kids Will Remember This” Facebook page are to be believed, today’s weird kids are still not fucking. Some of that uptightness is well-earned (20 years of opioid/meth crisis, thirtysomething dudes from middle-font Warped Tour bands telling your older sisters that they’re “not like other girls”), and some is the usual numbers that skew teetotaler-esque. Despite what boomers might claim, Nixon got 52 percent of the under-30 vote in 1972, and the ’80s had Minor Threat, Uniform Choice...and Youth of Today.

Still, if you can’t fathom the continuity— from “classic” rock bacchanalia to grunge’s interpolating “More Than a Feeling” into a more minor key, from Alice in Chain’s updated CSNY harmonies (and drugginess) to rock’s post-9/11 retreat into either euphoric escapism or THC-fueled doomerism, from one decade’s shaggy-haired princeling to the next’s—you might be getting hung up on language. Or you might not miss sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. You might just miss a time when one could still fit in one’s Boston T-shirt, call people retarded, and smoke on airplanes. You might just miss having a witchy woman/ warlock on speed dial and being able to do lines at work. Which are definitely things to miss. (Not the “retarded” part. Grow up.)

Our advice is: Cool, but don’t make your mortal dread the kids in Greta Van Fleet T-shirts’ problem. Or ours. We’re gonna die too, fleshy and sad as anyone. But until then, we’d like to crush up these ADHD pills, snuggle our polycule (or, in this particular writer’s case, wife), and listen to the fucked up kids in peace. Do what you want. We’ll be here, listening to Lambrini Girls singing about cuntology, Turnstile conveniently including a chill-out room in every song, Cameron Winter using esoterics and a piano to get into the universal Godhead’s pants, Death Valley Girls covering “Sisters of the Moon,” and all the other doomed, existentially bombastic and overheated rock stars who maybe aren’t bigger than Jesus or the Stones but about whom, you can bet, someone will be irritatingly nostalgic when we’re all rolling and rocking in our graves, with our KISS records out.