{"id":729,"date":"2011-06-09T10:41:51","date_gmt":"2011-06-09T14:41:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=729"},"modified":"2012-07-15T19:57:21","modified_gmt":"2012-07-15T23:57:21","slug":"bob-dylan-stoned-galore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/bob-dylan-stoned-galore\/","title":{"rendered":"Bob Dylan: Stoned Galore?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In March 1966, music critic Robert Shelton became privy to one of Bob Dylan\u2019s allegedly best-kept secrets. “I kicked a heroin habit in New York City. I got very, very strung out for a while, I mean really, very strung out. And I kicked the habit. I had about a $25-a-day habit and I kicked it,\u201d he said. Lately, many Americans were stunned to learn that the voice of the 1960s generation was at one point or another jockeyed by the mind-numbing drug, while others laid to rest their long-held presumptions of his heroin use. Still others are critical of the recent flurry over Dylan\u2019s claim to a heroin addiction, for numerous reasons. Some point to the artist\u2019s nearly pathological tendency to lie in past interviews. For instance, according to Rolling Stone Magazine<\/em>\u2019s Andy Greene, Dylan claimed to have worked as a prostitute during his time in New York in another 1966 interview with Robert Shelton. Other critics raise questions of Shelton\u2019s moral integrity\u2014why did he fail to mention this integral part of Dylan\u2019s life in his biography, No Direction Home<\/em>? Surprisingly, the question no one seems to be asking is, should this new insight change how Americans today look at Dylan\u2019s life and work, and if so, how?<\/p>\n

One of the most addictive drugs readily available on the street, heroin is more potent than its relatives, opium and morphine, and other than track marks, lacks the telltale signs of abuse that similarly addicting drugs leave in their wake, making it the drug of choice for many people who live their lives in the spotlight, such as Bob Dylan. This is how it works. When used, it shoots straight to the brain, and within forty seconds kills the body\u2019s pain centers and releases a flood of dopamine which soaks the user in a transcendent euphoria that is warm, intense, and complete. It rapidly shuts down the brain\u2019s frontal lobe, which analyzes the potential consequences of actions, as well as the limbic system, which controls emotion, motivation, and drive. The drug forms a habit after just one use, and the brains of repeated users eventually come to believe that the altered sense of reality heroin creates is the normal one.<\/p>\n

It is not surprising that Dylan might have used heroin at some point in his career\u2014it would put him in league with countless others in his field, such as Janis Joplin, Sid Vicious, and Miles Davis, to name a few. Unlike his peers, however, Dylan claimed the ability to compartmentalize his lyric-writing and his drug use. When asked in a 1969 interview with Rolling Stone Magazine\u2019s Jann Wenner whether drugs influenced his songs, Dylan said, \u201cNo, not the writing of them; it just kept me up there to pump them out.\u201d While this tale makes for a nice story, it is an unlikely one. A $25-a-day habit in the early 1960s averages out to an approximately $186-a-day habit today. If Dylan told the truth, he would be considered a hardcore user, who today spends between $150 and $200 a day just to keep up with their habit. If he really did have and kick a heroin habit this fixed, the ability to pigeonhole his work and his drug habit that he professes is simply ridiculous. A hardcore heroin habit would have indisputably affected his work, and to a careful observer, this shift in Dylan\u2019s career may be readily apparent. So when precisely did he use heroin?<\/p>\n

His eponymous March 1962 debut album featured only two original songs, both laced with lament. One of these songs was \u201cSong to Woody,\u201d an elegy which conflates his grief for the loss of his idol, the late Woody Guthrie, to a larger scale by bemoaning a world that \u201clooks like it\u2019s dyin\u2019 and it\u2019s hardly been born.\u201d In just a few lines, Dylan\u2019s lyrics give form and release to his anxiety, though without resolving the problem. Debatably, heroin had not yet usurped music as an outlet for his unease.<\/p>\n

A year and two months later, he had undergone changes, but not so many so as to raise questions. He had legally changed his name to Bob Dylan, walked out of the Ed Sullivan Show, and released his sophomore album, The Freewheelin\u2019 Bob Dylan<\/em>. All originals, its thirteen tracks retained his previous album\u2019s hillbilly twang and folksy charm, but beefed up his handwringing over personal and social problems. He was jaded, and far from numb. \u201cYou see, in time, with those old singers, music was a tool\u2014a way to live more, a way to make themselves feel better at certain points. As for me, I can make myself feel better some times, but at other times, it’s still hard to go to sleep at night,” Dylan said of one song on the album. Perhaps it is this need to feel better that led him to experiment with heroin in the first place. Maybe music was not the escape from himself and others that he craved, agitating his disquiet rather than pacifying it. His third album, The Times They Are A-Changin\u2019<\/em>, further magnified his mushrooming concern with social issues such as racism, poverty, and the peace movement.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But it seems the times really changed in 1964 with the release of his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan<\/em>, whose strangely innocuous motif sticks out like a sore thumb among his earlier New York albums. Unlike his previous three albums, this album featured no accusatory songs\u2014an unusual break in a trend of kvetching he had spent three years establishing. It displays a distinct lyrical dullness to issues at large in society at the time which coincides with original poetry by Dylan on the back of the album that is dimly aware of drug use in society, and possibly by Dylan himself. The back-cover poetry, besides featuring little drug-riddled phrases here and there, such as \u201cjunkie nurse,\u201d \u201ccountless common housewives strung out on drugstore dope,\u201d and \u201cstoned galore,\u201d makes metaphorical reference to a kind of drug that glazes over angst\u2014arguably heroin. In one section, Dylan aligns himself with a \u201cmob\u201d which is hardly a mob at all, and which instead behaves like a group of foggy-headed, torpid heroin users.<\/p>\n

(a mob. each member knowin’
\nthat they all know an’ see the same thing
\nthey have the same thing in common.
\ncan stare at each other in total blankness
\nthey do not have t’ speak an’ not feel guilty
\nabout havin’ nothing t’ say. everyday boredom
\nsoaked by the temporary happiness
\nof that their search is finally over
\nfor findin’ a way t’ communicate a leech cookout
\ngiant cop out. all mobs i would think.
\nan’ i was in it an’ caught by the excitement of it),<\/p>\n

he writes. Read conscientiously, \u201ctotal blankness,\u201d \u201ctemporary happiness,\u201d and \u201cleech cookout\u201d instantly bring to mind images of a drug-induced daze, getting a fix, and pierced skin, all of the markers of heroin abuse. Like any user, Dylan was \u201ccaught by the excitement of it,\u201d and found himself fully wrapped up in this passionless throng.<\/p>\n

So is this the album that Dylan wrote while using heroin? If he did in fact abuse heroin for a spell in New York, Another Side of Bob Dylan <\/em>may very well pinpoint when. At the least, the album hits the checkpoints. It was written during his New York years. Its lyrics are woozily anodyne, and its back-cover poetry is rife with drug imagery. And for argument\u2019s sake, Another Side of Bob Dylan <\/em>was the last album before Dylan\u2019s electric period, the kind of style change that might accompany a lifestyle change, such as kicking a serious drug habit. However, just because Americans are reevaluating Dylan\u2019s life does not mean they should or can do the same to his musical legacy. \u00a0After all, it is still the same Bob Dylan. For many Bobheads, the discovery of a past heroin addiction will not disqualify him as \u201cThe Voice of the 1960s,\u201d a title he assumed without contest years ago. As he said himself in 1963, \u201cAll I’m doing is saying what’s on my mind the best way I know how. And whatever else you say about me, everything I do and sing and write comes out of me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In March 1966, music critic Robert Shelton became privy to one of Bob Dylan\u2019s allegedly best-kept secrets. “I kicked a heroin habit in New York City. I got very, very strung out for a while, I mean really, very strung out. And I kicked the habit. I had about a $25-a-day habit and I kicked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[119,118,123,120,121,8,122],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3041,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729\/revisions\/3041"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}