CATEGORY: Drugs and musicians

The following has fuck-all to do with any situation or the rest of this thread -- simply a sidebar notion I've had for a while but never seen a fit place to air before this & you probably ought to skip it.

Let's talk about drugs and musicians. Miles Davis grew the fuck up and beat it. Astute and accurate to an extent ... but when you start drifting off the comedy thing and into music, well, it's not just the habit that gets beat. Fact is, despite the warm fuzzy inspirational rush at the end every VH-1 12-step success story, I always find myself confronting a sad corollary truth: I can't name a single musical figure whose post-rehab output shows a fraction of the vision and fire of work rendered in the peak of addiction.

Examples:

Miles on smack = Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain
Miles off smack = Human Nature, Time After Time
Clapton on junk = Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs
Clapton off junk = Layla unplugged
Keith Richards on H = Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street
Keith Richards off H = Voodoo Lounge, A Bigger Bang
Ray Charles on skag = What'd I Say, Unchain My Heart
Ray Charles off skag = Baby Grand, You Got the Right One Baby
Aerosmith on cheeba = Dream On, Sweet Emotion, Walk This Way
Aerosmith off cheeba = Love in an Elevator, Dude Looks Like a Lady
James Taylor on horse = Fire and Rain, Carolina in My Mind
James Taylor off horse = Hourglass, October Road

Plug in your own favorite examples for china white, tha boy, et al. And PLEASE NOTE that I am not suggesting any of the above-named parties should have continued with their deadly addictions just for the sake of my delicate ears, because a) if the rush of addiction wears on long enough to eventually devolve down to singleminded obsessive humdrum habit, musical technique & inspiration likewise tend to deteriorate accordingly; and b) any asshole can easily make a list 10 times this length of artists whose post-addiction work doesn't exist for comparison because they fucking died. Not to mention all those who never developed habits in the first place.

And I certainly ain't saying the artists' latter work totally sucks balls in any of the above instances (except Clapton) -- some of their sober stuff is actually even pretty good. I'm just saying there's no way to deny the magic always takes an asswhipping somewhere between the befores and the afters.