If, as Larner asserts, rock and roll music naturally allowed the listener to “loosen his mind”, then the blending of sex, drugs and rock and roll in the 1960s can be seen as a natural transition in the evolution of this music genre. The theme of drugs (particularly alcohol and heroin) had always been an nuance in rock’s ancestor — rhythm and blues. In the 1960s with the initiation of the psychedelic era, the drug theme in rock and roll came out of the closet. Even the names of the groups in the mid-1960s evoked drug themes: The Doors, the Jefferson Airplane, the Loading Zone, the Weeds, the Seeds, the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat, Sly and the Family Stone, the Magic Mushrooms and the Zombies.
If the group names were evocative, the songs were more so. Sometimes the song title alone was enough to tell the story: The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”, the Fugs’ “Marijuana” and “I couldn’t Get High”, Jimi Hendricks’ “Purple Haze” and “stone free”. Most recently, Jean taught in our lecture about Jimi Hendrix that Hendrix controlled his music as Rock developed, as a means of presenting ownership and rank, in an era that unfortunately was unequal and unfair, from the early 1940s till the mid to late 1960’s. The radio charts back then were evidence of white supremacy. In Steve Waksman’s article “Black Sound, Black Body: Jimi Hendrix, The Electric Guitar, and the meanings of Blackness”, he notes that:
His song “Electric Lady was Hendrix’s effort to move his control over sound one step further, to actually own the means of muscical (re)production. It was also his attempt to create a “total environment” in which physical design and visual appearance fused into the overarching purpose of making music” (Waksman, 75).
He was known to be sexual with his performance, referencing all types of sensual behavior. Also, “purple haze” in the drug world, is actually a strain of marijuana.
Waksman continues to define Hendrix as unique:
“Through the medium of the electric guitar, Hendrix was able to transcend human potential in both musical and sexual terms; the dimension of exaggerated phallic display was complemented by the array of new sonic possibilities offered by the instrument, possibilities he deployed with aggressive creativity. Hendrix’s achievement therefore rested upon a combination of talent and technology in which the electric guitar allowed him to construct a superhuman persona founded upon the display of musical and sexual mastery” (Waksman, 93).
Sex and drugs in rock and roll music 