I Woke Up this Mornin' and I Got Myself a Beer

Well, I woke up this mornin’ and I got myself a beer-
I woke up this mornin’ and I got myself a beer-
The future’s uncertain and the end is always near…

-- J. Morrison, with The Doors


I’m sick of listening to people blame addiction for their lack of accomplishment. In my field (which is art, whether that be visual, performative, musical, or literary), addiction has only served to SERVE the most famous artists/writers of the 20th century.

Let’s take pop music, as an example, and from that let's take Jim Morrison -- the first to be quoted herein -- and examine exactly what I’m saying. Jim Morrison. One of the sexiest, shortest-lived pop musicians of the ‘60s. Heavily into drugs and equally into 19th-Century Romantic poetry (or vice-versa), Morrison has gone down in American Top 40 history as one of the saddest icons since Elvis. But despite the fact that he died before (and younger than) The King, he had more to say. We can chalk that up to his fascination with Rimbaud and Verlaine, who managed, in between their volatile attempts at defining homosexual male love, to etch out some pretty raunchy-yet-perfect odes to the nitty-gritty physical aspects of homo-sapiel [sic] existence. Am I saying Morrison was queer? Hell, no. But did he learn about love from homosexuals? Indeed, he did. You figure out what the difference is; I’m too tired of having to draw such distinctions. Funny thing about Morrison, though – despite his reputation for indulging in mescalin, acid and other hallucinogens – his real Jones was for booze, as described by the previously enscribed quote. I mean, of all things to reach for early in the a.m. during the mid-1960's... a BEER?!?



Tired of lying in the sunshine,
Staying home to watch the rain –
But you were young and life was long,
And there was time to kill today…

-- Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon


There’s only time to kill, regardless of how despondent one’s adolescent nature might be, when there are drugs around. Otherwise, the adolescent grows bored. Once s/he tires of contemplation and its sister – masturbation – the adolescent needs some chemical compound in order to retain his/her complacency. For early 20th Century generations that drug was alcohol. But as the industrial revolution evolved into the technological revolution, the urge to expand consciousness evolved, relatively. Relativity, even though having been around since way before Morrison's day, caught up with the majority sometime during Floyd's day. In so doing, it relegated the booze buzz to an almost insignificant status. Sure, getting drunk was always a safe option (after all, isn’t that what Mom and Dad did?), but it didn’t exactly provide one with "options." It had become merely a steam valve.

So in order to effectively contemplate post-cocktail generation existence, one needed – at the very least – marijuana. Marijuana led entire generations into the lifestyle of complacency. Pot made “nothing happen.” Heck, it still does… But the pot mindest not only put Pink Floyd on the map, it also put them in the same league as the literary and filmatic masterpiece as The Wizard of Oz. And that was no easy feat. Just try to compare “All you touch and all you see/Is all your life will ever be” with “There’s no place like home.” That’s a pretty deep equation. But to this day, stoners will commence the Oz video with the Dark Side album, in order to compare how precisely each introduces its introduction, conflicts its conflict, and then struggles to resolve its respective resolutions -- simultaneously, if one's audio/visual cueing is right. I don't know about you, but I can't envision any member of the cocktail generation going to such extremes to prove a point that's ultimately not a point at all, but just a buzz. (Nah, that's the kind of thing only a stoner would do...)



She don’t lie,
She don’t lie,
She don’t lie –
Cocaine.

-- Eric Clapton

How much more explicit could he have made our entry into the ‘80’s? As much as his rock fans wanted to proclaim that “Disco was for fags,” they couldn’t help but pick up on the fad Studio 54 made so popular. And it wasn't just popular with the pop artists. It was popular with everyone in search of a higher high. Didn’t coke provide it? (Doesn’t it still, wherever it’s still available?) ‘Nough said ‘bout that... 'Cept that, of course, She still don't lie...



Clean shirt, new shoes
And I don't know where I'm goin' to
Silk suit, black tie
I don't need a reason why
They come runnin' just as fast as they can
'Coz every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man.

-- ZZ Top

And so came the ‘80s. So what if this song, just like Clapton’s, came out in the late ‘70’s? There’s no difference. All that matters to our present argument is that, somewhere in the late ‘70s, substance left and superficiality entered the scene. How ironic, in an argument about substances. But it's true. Somewhere during the late '70s, between when Led Zeppelin was contemplating "Houses of the Holy" and when Liza was spreading Herpes at '54, the fashionable "substance" became an utter lack of substance. It became superficiality. And it has been ever since, no matter which drugs we've subsequently ingested. (Ecstacy? Speed? -- they only help us stay "in the moment," which, unfortunately, consistently turns out not to be much of a moment at all).

What does this have to do with addiction? Not much, if we’re referring to dependence on some chemical compound. But if we’re talking about the re-direction of more than two entire generations onto the feel-good Jones of Consumerism, then there’s our Hard Rock Genesis. Oh, what a coincidence. (And you thought it was all Calvin Kein’s fault…) It was around the time ZZ came out with their hits that the Hard Rock Café chain became infamous as a hot spot for tourists traveling from just about anywhere in the Western world to anywhere else within. That whole conglomerate happened for the sake of a "sharp-dressed man." Or, in lieu of that, for the sake of "a pair of cheap sunglasses…"

So what am I getting at? I’m getting at the heart of late 20th-Century/early 21st Century American existence, as foretold and described within the confines of its pop musical culture. I’m getting at how we’ve been obsessed – if "we" describes us as one of the many who’ve been living in the first of the “three worlds” circa 1965 – with one substance or another. And even though the substances of fashion have changed slightly as the decades have progressed, the truth is, pop culture has wanted nothing less than to get us hooked on something. Pop culture has led us, as far back as we can trace, to favor one mood-altering path or another. In the long run, that path has proven to be nothing less than pop culture itself.



Well, it’s bungle in the jungle
And that’s all right by me.

-- Jethro Tull



Which eventually leads us to:



This is not my beautiful house!

-- David Byrne and The Talking Heads



So just where have YOU been living? If your domicile is absolutely free of alcohol, pot, mescalin/acid, cocaine/speed, or consumerist label-lust, then by all means, I want to hear from you. If you honestly think your lifestyle doesn’t serve some addiction to something, then I really want to hear from you. ‘Cuz I think that, in the end, we’re all addicted to something. Lately, I’ve witnessed a bunch of folks addicted to addiction. They all sit around in circles made up of other people addicted to their same addictions and talk abaout how they’re no longer going to succumb to their addictions. All the while, they drink coffee and smoke cigarettes – not only like both chemicals are going out of style – but as if neither chemical was indeed addictive. So where do you stand? What are you hooked on?

If you consider yourself “not hooked,” then, like I said, I really want to hear from you. Because I’m willing to toss this entire hypothesis out the window. I really am. Show me a person who's not hooked on something and bam! -- out goes this entire mental trajectory. But in the meantime, as the personal ads say, "ISO addicted individuals. Please be into any sort of chemical dependency and/or be admittedly hooked on commerce. Or in lieu of those things, be hooked on getting unhooked."

Life; addiction. Addiction; life. Would Darwin have defined either without the other?

Personally, I don't blame my addiction(s) for my lack of accomplishment. I just blame fate. If I'd have had Morrison's photogenics, or Pink Floyd's orchestrations, or ZZ Top's long beards, or even David Byrne's RISD pedigree (all at the right time in the right place, you see), I imagine I'd still have been just as much an addict -- only more famous.

Like they are.



[Ed's Note: This was composed, in exact sequence, while listening to New York's "only classic rock station." The author had no idea which songs would be played or within what order; he was merely responding to the stimulus.]