Tag Archives: heroin

714. guilt

Posted on by
Reply

“Marianne Faithfull‘s Broken English being one of the best albums of 1979 (or any other year for that matter), Guilt being a track that made no sense to me at first. I thought she was saying she felt ‘good’. Why so exquisitely gloomy then? Was it some twisted junkie thing I needed heroin in my veins to figure out? Then I bought the album and read the title, and there it was: Guilt. Which reminds me of sage wisdom c/o old friend Jill. Guilt is easy to avoid. Just don’t do that thing that you know you’ll end up feeling guilty about. Words to live by.” (Philip Random)

(photo: Derek Jarman)

826. for the turnstiles

Posted on by
Reply

Neil Young, reluctant rock star, still smarting from the heroin deaths of two good friends, sits on a vague beach on a vague day and plucks his banjo, waxing skeptically (if not cynically) about the nature of the game he’s playing. Apparently they were imbibing a lot of strong hemp product during the recording of this album. You’d never know.

neilyoung-1974

843. Walkin’ with Jesus

Posted on by
Reply

“In which the Spacemen 3 sing the somnambulant praises of being so f***ing high, you may as well be hanging with God’s own son. Found on their first album and a bunch of other places, it’s rumoured to be completely concerned with heroin. But don’t be fooled, kids. Heroin’s a liar. Ain’t no heaven on earth.” (Philip Random)

spacemen3-1987

851. she’s like heroin to me

Posted on by
Reply

“The Gun Club were punk badasses out of L.A. who did much of the dirty work of rescuing the blues way back when, releasing them back into the swamp where they belong, or as I remember someone shouting in my ear in the late ’70s sometime, ‘Punk killed the blues, and a good thing too.’ But good things never die, do they?  They just mutate, reinvent, re-emerge, with 1981’s Fire Of Love all the evidence required: the full-on rush of punk and the muck of the bayou (that crossroad where the real stuff never dies), maybe put it at the service of some dangerous poetry about a girl so heavy, she’s like heroin – never misses the vein. Hell yeah.” (Philip Random)

gunclub-1981

997. the city drops into the night

Posted on by
Reply

In which Jim Carroll (former teenage heroin poet eventually made famous by Leonardo DiCaprio) forms a band and makes good on an album of raw urban angst best exemplified by this epic chunk of dark glory. Because we’ve all been there with the daylight fading, the shadows laying their claim.  Let the strange times roll.

JimCarroll

1039. the harder they come

Posted on by
Reply

“In which Keith Richard stumbles through a reggae classic that no white man has any business even touching and actually delivers something halfway worthy, maybe because of all the heroin related calamity he’d recently endured in Toronto. Found on the  b-side of Run Rudolph Run, a 1978 Christmas single that went nowhere, except it eventually found me.” (Philip Random)