Drums and Drugs...

Pollyanna said:
I know what you mean, Hipshot.

Having said that, as a human, I'm very happy for them (and wildly jealous) that they were/are playing music for a living rather than cramming in with other sardine commuters to be tied to an office from 9 to 5.

Swings and roundabouts ...
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The way I look at it, if Buddha was right about life being suffering, then it's better to suffer on the course you've set for yourself than while you're weighing anchor for someone else.

(Hey, I know it's terrible metaphor. But I live in a town that's the biggest wooden sailing ship port in the world. Gotta pay it a little honor when I can.)
 
Ian Williams said:
What do you do when the day is blue...sex and drums and rock n´ roll... ;-)
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I'm good with two out of three of those. For the purposes of honesty in this discussion, gotta cop to the fact that I very rarely do drugs...because my normal chemical imbalances give me the effect of being stoned much of the time.

Embarrassingly true story: Not that long ago a friend came to stay with us and brought, as a gift thanking us for our hospitality, some designer acid. After a couple of days, I finally gave in to his wheedling and tried some - a lot.

Flash forward to a time in the infinite future, when the friend is asking me how I liked it.

"It didn't do anything for me, dude. Sorry," I told him.

"You didn't see all the colors of my aura?" he said.

"Oh, yeah, absolutely I did," I said.

"You didn't witness the infinity of universes and wander from dimension to dimension?" he said.

"Oh, sure, I did. Of course," I said.

"Then how can you say it didn't do anything for you?" he demanded.

"Um...because I always see, witness, and wander anyway."

I also experience food as colors, and when I play the drums I taste every beat.

Bottom line: Drums are my drugs. Which seems like a good place for me to end this reply.
 
I'll never understand why such a big deal gets made over such a tiny little thing.
 
Because the world has turned into a fashion blow out everywhere...simple as that!
 
I have played under the influence of Week once or twice but to be honest it didn't leave a lasting impression on me as I found my feel too different to what I'm used to.

Have played gigs on Speed and Cocaine and to be honest it was a waste of time, didn't do anything for me. Found it frustrating as I kept on having to hold back wanting to add some super fast fills every other bar.

The most I have before a show these days is a pint or two to relax my nerves, then about an hour before stage time I switch to water to Hydrate myself. That's the formula I stick to these days being a little older and more mature.

Did a show a handful of years ago where I came to the venue in a bad mood after some personal stuff went down, proceeded to drink the rider and went on stage in a bad way. I have the DVD of that gig locked away as It's painful to watch. Glad it happened though as I have that as a reminder for the rest of my life. Let myself down that day, I was awful.

Keep your head and self respect.
 
HipshotPercussion said:
"Um...because I always see, witness, and wander anyway."

I also experience food as colors, and when I play the drums I taste every beat.

Bottom line: Drums are my drugs. Which seems like a good place for me to end this reply.
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You're a very odd person Hipshot. The acid did more for you than you realise.
 
Back in the nightclub show days, in the early to mid-seventies, the band members would go outside during breaks and pass one around. It was just something that was done. Being a kid still wet behind the ears I was happy to tag along. It made the gig more fun. I mean, some of the stuff we had to play was really corny. And the arrangements...forget it. Try a swingin' version of "Proud Mary."

Everybody did it back then. Bandleaders didn't seem to mind as long as the charts were played right and no one flubbed a cue or an ending.

Edited to add: Of course, the stuff musicians could get back then wasn't at all like the hammer-to-the-forehead stuff the young folks can get today.
 
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When rehearsing after drinking, I've found that I've injured my hands, blisters and the like, just much rougher and paying less attention to the hands when drinking. Anybody else have that experience?
 
....having a 'mare here aren't I?.

*leaves the thread in shame*
 
Louis Armstrong? Total doped up hack, am I right?

The 20th century stories of music and marijuana both begin in Storyville, the red light district of New Orleans. This is where Louis Armstrong was born in 1901, and where the first recorded American use of "marihuana" occurred in 1909.

According to cannabis historian Ernest Abel, "It was in these bordellos, where music provided the background and not the primary focus of attention, that marihuana became an integral part of the jazz era. Unlike booze, which dulled and incapacitated, marihuana enabled musicians whose job required them to play long into the night to forget their exhaustion. Moreover, the drug seemed to make their music sound more imaginative and unique, at least to those who played and listened while under its sensorial influence."1

Growing up in this milieu, as Armstrong told his biographers, much later, "We always looked at pot as a sort of medicine, a cheap drunk and with much better thoughts than one that's full of liquor."2

Jazz and swing music was declared to be an "outgrowth of marihuana use" by the white authorities. They expressed concern that itinerant black musicians were spreading a powerful new "voodoo" music and that they also sold the weed which made decent folks abandon their inhibitions.
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...So Anslinger hated marijuana for the same reason jazz musicians loved it! One of the reasons Anslinger was motivated to stop people smoking pot in the first place was because it inspired unconventional jazz music!

Even after he'd managed to get marijuana banned in 1937, Anslinger was so vexed by pot-smoking musicians that he instructed his agents across the country to keep an eye on all local jazz musicians and prepare for the day when they would all be rounded up in one fell swoop!

The planned Jazz Pogrom was abandoned in 1948, when Anslinger went before a Congressional Committee to plead for more funds to carry out his dastardly plan and shot himself in the foot: newspaper reports of his denunciation of jazz musicians prompted thousands of letters of objection from the jazz-loving American public.
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The Beatles? Those burnt out wanna be musicians couldn't sell their doped up music to a fellow doper!

The Swingin' Sixties officially kicked off on August 28, 1964, when Bob Dylan met the Beatles in their hotel suite during their first visit to New York and turned them on to pot. Paul McCartney told Barry Miles how Ringo took Dylan's proffered reefer and, not knowing that etiquette dictates that the skinny cigarette be passed around, smoked the whole thing. From that day forward, throughout what is universally accepted to be the most creatively fertile period of any pop group in history, the Beatles were stoned out of their ever-expanding minds on a daily basis.

Any and every mention of "high" or "grass" or "smoke" in a Beatles song, said Paul, was always intentional. By the time they made Help, at the height of Beatlemania in the Summer of '65, according to John Lennon: "The Beatles had gone beyond comprehension. We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just glazed eyes, giggling all the time."
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