Tag Archives: cocaine

449. it’s no game [part 1]

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“David Bowie hits the 1980s in powerful form with Scary Monsters, blows minds and fuses across all known dimensions. But then that’s pretty much it. He’ll sell piles of records through the decade, make the cover of TIME magazine, and everything else for that matter… but he’ll never be truly monstrous or scary again. Which is either A. damned sad, or B. whatever.  I mean, it’s not as if he hadn’t already given us way more than enough through the 1970s, from collapsing the hippie dream to unleashing his own personal alien glam supernova, onward unto cocaine bullshit, decadence, everything. But he always kept his cool even as he lost his mind. Did any other single artist come even close? Definitely no game.” (Philip Random)

DavidBowie-1980-filmFRAME

505. across the universe

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“The Thin White Duke (aka David Bowie, aka David Jones) at the point of pitching into thinnest, whitest, most cocaine psychotic point in his career, takes a seemingly careless swipe at John Lennon‘s psychedelic hymn to transcendence, eternity, higher meaning. And at first, it really is a sloppy mess, a blasphemy even, but then something very cool starts happening. The memory is of being drunk, maybe twenty-one, singing my head off to it while very alone, and feeling somehow saved. I think I was driving at the time, but apparently I made it home, or wherever the hell I was going.” (Philip Random)

DavidBowie+JohnLennon-1975

558. walk a thin line

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Tusk was the big deal double Fleetwood Mac album that came after the mega-platinum hugeness of Rumours (you may have heard of it) and thus was bound to fail. Gloriously. We do love it when the Music Biz fails thus, throws huge piles of cash and cocaine and marketing buzz at something that dares to be art. Particularly when it contains genuine treasures like Walk A Thin Line, Lindsey Buckingham not just close to the edge, right on it, and walking it just fine.

FleetwoodMAC-1979-promo

853. clear as the driven snow

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“There ought to be a law that when a band changes its sound as thoroughly as the Doobie Brothers did in the mid-1970s, it should also be required to change its name, if only so future generations don’t get forever stuck confusing the cool, rocking stuff with the soft, latter day sponge ball stuff.  Anyway, for the record, the Doobies peaked in about 1973 with an album called The Captain and Me that didn’t just boast mega-hit rockers like China Grove and Long Train Runnin’, it also had a stretched out mini-epic called Clear As The Driven Snow. Apparently it’s about cocaine abuse, but it’s always been more of a marijuana fave of mine.” (Philip Random)

959. Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy

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Reginald Dwight (aka Elton John) was beyond huge through the first half of the 1970s  – ten studio albums (plus one soundtrack) between 1969 and 1975 and none of them awful. Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy was the last truly good one though, with the title track working a sort of country feel that shouldn’t have worked coming from an English suburban kid, but it did. The 70s were like that. Lots of fantasies realized … until the cocaine took over.

eltonjohn-live75

1105. Cortez the Killer

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Mr. Neil Young and his horse friends at the very peak of their shambolic grandeur.  We credit and/or blame the Bolivian marching power that was all the rage at the time if you were a certain class of rock star or movie director (or the kind of person that hung with them) way back when in that cultural depression between the death of the Elvis and the Sex Pistols and whatever the hell happened next. Some have argued nothing — the world ended and it’s all been a feedback loop every since.