PARADISE LOST'S HAZY SHADE OF SLUMBER: EXAMINING BLACK MUSIC AND DRUG CULTURE BY SHELDON TAYLOR

“What did Marvin say? The boy that made slaves out of men?”

A pivotal scene in Harlem crime thriller New Jack City (1991) finds reformed crack addict  Benny “Pookie” Robinson in surveillance mode alongside a cadre of cops bent on taking down drug-dealing villain Nino Brown. 

Pookie's acid dismissal is sharp as a knife's jagged edge. Sharp as his clear-eyed focus regained after a rehab stint. Still, his words hold no weight: to the cops, they're nothing but an addict's racial rock toss at a glass (crack) house. Pookie's words meant so much more. Minted in demonic duality, they were two sides of a chaotic coin: clear as day. Dark as night: 

The boy that made slaves out of men……

Cribbed by screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper from a track off Marvin Gaye's 1971 magnum opus "What's Going On," the song's title---"Flyin' High (On The Friendly Skies)" plays on a United Airlines commercial tagline.

"What's Going On" lives among my sprawling music collection in album, original, and expanded CD versions. Despite years of listening, I was slow to make the connection. To me, "boy" referred to young scramblers pushing poison that held grown men captive in a hazy shade of slumber. 

Until I realized "boy" was actually heroin....

While the rest of a “tired and weary” world lay their bodies down in deep slumber, Gaye morphs into the role of addict on a nocturnal search for a fix. 

"I go to the place where danger awaits me, and it's bound to forsake me….”

As he "flies high "without ever leaving the ground, Gaye's bone-chilling transparency is no match for heroin's tight grip: defeat is inevitable:

“Nobody really understands (help me somebody) and I go where good feeling awaits me, self-destruction’s in my hand (Oh Lord; stupid minded....can't help it), But I go crazy when I can’t find it (help me)  I know that I’m hooked my friend (got to have it)  to the boy who made slaves out of men”…….

Tackling salvation, ecology, war, spirituality, and addiction, "What's Going On" helped redirect Black music from two-track purgatory onto a new creative third rail. Love songs and dance anthems gave way to more serious, contemplative, and confrontational material.

From the mid-sixties on, R&B and soul began leaning forward: there was Sam Cooke ("A Change Is Gonna Come") and Otis Redding's ("Sitting On The Dock of The Bay") subtle lyrical code-switch; the Chambers Brothers' evergreen fiery commentary ("Time is Tight") and Curtis Mayfield's strident anthems ("A Choice of Colors", "People Get Ready"); James Brown's bold racial pride ("Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud") and the Temptations' psychedelic soul ("Cloud Nine"). Philly International's urban narratives were just around the corner.

Wielding the album medium like a sickle, Black music cut away the singles-driven format. Full-length exploration of social and political issues was now in full bloom. The subject of drugs became a constant topic of exploration.

                                       Music, Muggles and The Mob 

T.J. English's Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld explored the connection between drugs and the music business back when Prohibition-era crime underworld figures moved beyond liquor and beer sales to expand into the narcotic trade.

A scene from The Godfather (1972) showed a cadre of mob figures mapping out a plan to deposit heroin in Black neighborhoods:

"I want to control it as a business to keep it respectable. I don't want it near schools, and I don't want it sold to children. That's an infamia....in my city we would keep it within the dark people...the colored...they're animals; let them lose their souls...."

Already holding sway over speakeasies and nightclubs, a phalanx of "crime underbosses, errand runners and Good Time Charleys" would serve as what English called "a lifeline" or "death knell" between the mob and the nightlife crowd — specifically jazz musicians. 

Marijuana---known as "herb," "muggles" and "gage," was no longer the primary drug of choice: Jazz icons Dexter Gordon, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker and others became avid heroin users.

 Parker jazz biopic Bird (1988) featured a dark world of dope peddlers and detectives lurking in shadowy, dim-lit streets like vultures circling their addicted prey, relieving musicians of their pay, freedom, and cabaret cards.

Bird's mercurial talent dazzles audiences and fellow musicians like trumpet-playing comrade Red Rodney. Anxious to touch the hem of Bird's rumpled garments, Rodney tries to bond with him by inviting him to shoot up after a gig. Bird tries to cut Rodney off at the pass, but he's too late: Rodney's already tethered to the white horse:

Parker: "If you wanna play like Bird, you gotta shoot shit like Bird! It don't help; don't you know?"

Rodney: "I know now...."

In an interview years later, Rodney proclaimed, "heroin was our badge....the thing that made us different from the world." 

Proclaiming underworld introduction of hard drugs into the music world led to "the premature demise of some of the greatest jazz musicians who ever lived," A Dangerous Rhythms book chapter ("The Birth of The Hipster") revealed a lurid example of addiction's wicked lure:

Anonymous jazz man: "What the hell's going on in there?"

Mysterious voice: "Send him in here and let him find for himself."

 Mezz Mezzrow (a curious jazz clarinetist) rose from the card table and walked into the bedroom:

"The smell in that room was enough to knock you out. It was the sort of sweet, with a punch in it, heavy as an insomniac's eyelids, so thick and solid it was like a brick wall built all around you. It made my smeller tingle... got me scared and excited too, put me on an edge----it promised a rare jam-up jack, some once-in-a-lifetime thrill."

Gangster: "Come over here and lay your head down on my chest and I'll let you smoke something that will make you throw your muggles in the ashcan."

Mezz took a hit off the pipe and was hooked:

"Goddamn if I didn't live through it. Man, I even liked it. Before I finished one pill, a heatwave heaved up out my stomach and spread all through me, right down to my toes, the most intense and pleasant sensation I have ever felt in all my life.....I glowed all over, like the sun was planted in my breadbasket. Man, I was sent, and didn't want to come back...."

Barry Michael Cooper's scripted New Jack City follow-up Sugar Hill (1994), finds Harlem drug-dealing Scuggs brothers, Romello and Raynathan, chafing under the control of Gus: a mobbed-up drug supplier and ex- employer of their musician father, Arthur Romello ("A.R.") Scuggs. 

A gifted jazz pianist, A.R. pushes Gus's product to musician friends but develops a heroin habit, ultimately destroying his family, and his wife overdoses. Romello looks past his father's flaws; Raynathan despises him. 

A scene from "Sugar Hill" finds Gus reflecting on the era:

"Back in those days, it was slow uptown. The only drug addicts were musicians and tommy beatniks. There was a kid I liked. Played the piano beautifully; smoked a little dope now and then....he started working for me....it was raining money... that's when the junkie vets came back from Vietnam....everything was good."

Raynathan gives A.R. a package of pure heroin to put him out of his misery. While unknowingly preparing for his lethal injection, A.R. tells the story of his addiction. Moved by a Sunday sermon of "hell, damnation, judgment day, and salvation," he flees to 145th Street to spread the gospel to friends. In the end, he's the one who's been converted: 

"These were the baddest motherfuckers on the block; I mean, those guys were the first to skin pop. And they just laughed. And they gave a bag and some works...here is your God!

For a while, it quieted the voices around me. The I lost the only woman who ever loved me....I lost my sons. I lost my babies; I lost my money; I lost my self-respect..." 

 Throughout the 1930s, drug vernacular seeped into jazz, spawning a smoky subgenre devoted to the joys of marijuana known as "reefer songs." There was Fats Waller's "Reefer Man" and a string of recordings reveling in the joyful serpentine hiss from a reefer toke: Stuff and his Onyx Boys' "You'se a Viper" ("I'm the king of everything/I've got to be high before I swing"), Willie Bryant's "A Viper's Moan," and Louis Armstrong's "Song of the Vipers."

There was Armstrong's "Muggles": a composition featuring shared improvisational solo melodies; characterized by writer Martin Lee as "the passing of a joint between musicians....a synergetic enterprise" and mutual "sharing of the limelight and the drug."

Female jazz musicians faced an uphill battle for acceptance. A 1938 Down Beat article ("Why Women Musicians Are Inferior") proclaimed that "the woman musician was never born," stating their limited skills were incapable of sending listeners anywhere beyond "the nearest exit." 

Women were paid lower wages, forcing them to stretch their pay to maintain their appearance and hygienic needs on the road. They took amphetamines and marijuana to keep pace with their male counterparts.

 Often, the lone female traveling among men was expected to be "resilient and vulnerable" or "sensual yet chaste." The climate and "persistence of sexual abuse and accusation" dogged the careers of female trombonist Melba Liston ("rapes and everything; I've been going through that stuff for all my life") and Billie Holiday, whose relationship with a fellow musician and drug dealer saw her introduced to heroin.

Films like 1972's "Lady Sings The Blues and 2021's The United States vs Billie Holiday would dive deep into heroin's sinister manipulation and necessary release.

                                          

                                                                                                                 

                                 

Pivoting from marijuana's harmless depiction,  Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher" detailed the predatory nature of hard drugs:

 "She messed around with a bloke named Smokey, she loved him even though he was cokey, he took her down to Chinatown and showed her how to kick the gong (opium) around."

                                          Message In The Music

In 1970, James Brown's "King Heroin" used first-person narrative to reveal the drug's history, devastating reach, and seductive power: 

"I came to this country without a passport /and ever since then I've been hunted and sought...in cellophane bags/ I found my way to heads of state and children at play/I'm financed in China, ran in Japan/I'm respected in Turkey and legal in Siam...I can make the most virile of man/forsake his sex."

                           "One drag is all it took/now I'm hooked." 

                 The Temptations: "Take A Stroll Through Your Mind" (1970)

In '72 Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly soundtrack dived into the psyche of  Youngblood Priest, a drug dealer at odds with his partner Eddie. As Priest ponders his exit from selling cocaine, Eddie is content to live like "a Black prince" and bask in his sneering version of the American Dream: 

"A color TV in every room; eight-track tape player; and being able to "snort a half a piece of dope a day......that's the American Dream, nigga...you better come on in."

Money is Priest's mantra ("feed me money for style/and I’ll let you trip for a while"). Flashy ("ain’t I clean/bad machine/super cool/super mean") and hedonistic ("baddest bitches in the bed"), Priest's hold on the junkies is absolute (“I’m your momma/I’m your daddy/I’m that nigga in the alley/I’m your doctor/have some coke/have some weed”).

As the walls close in ("been told I can’t be nothin’ else/just a hustler in spite of myself" ) and the superficial fabric of his triumphs unravel, Priest plans his exit strategy ("got a woman I love desperately/wanna give her somethin’ better than me" ) away from a world defined by Mayfield's laconic imagery: 

"Another junkie plan, pushin’ dope for the man....."

Ironically, Gaye's and Mayfield's masterworks coincided with their own drug dalliances. 

Primarily a "grass smoker," Gaye's "spasmodic" cocaine use was limited to the studio and used to stimulate his creative juices. Despite treating coke with "respect and reverence," Gaye joined the hit parade of influential icons (Sly Stone, George Clinton) and Motown compatriots (David Ruffin, Rick James, and Smokey Robinson) descending into addiction's abyss.

Gaye shared with biographer David Ritz his love for cocaine:

"I like the feeling. No one can ever tell me it's not a good feeling. A clean, fresh high, especially in the morning, will set you free. At least for a moment. There are times when blow got to me and sometimes I knew it built up bad vibes in my brain. I saw coke as though it was an elitist item; a gourmet drug, and maybe that was one of its attractions. Was I corrupting myself? Slowly, very slowly."

Mayfield's substance abuse journey was a circuitous one. In Mayfield's biography, Traveling Soul: The Life of Curtis Mayfield, written by the late singer's son, the book reveals Mayfield's interest in marijuana's public acceptance during a San Francisco tour stop in the swinging sixties. 

Writer Michael Gonzales unearthed Mayfield's revelations in a 2009 Wax Poetics essay:

 "I wasn't dropping acid, but I guess it's safe to say I too smoked herb. It wasn't a big deal. I didn't do anything until I was twenty-seven years old, and smoking herb didn't seem like a high price to pay to cure." 

Record executive Larry Harris' memoir, And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records recalls killing time with the singer and his entourage backstage at a TV taping. In the absence of rolling papers, they use a grocery bag and a cardboard box to make a filtered three-foot joint. 

Harris tells of Mayfield summoning him to his hotel room, dispatching him on a cocaine run:

"When I arrive, I find him in bed with several women. He called me over, handed me two thousand dollars, and gave me an address to pick up a package for him. I went to this seedy part of town knowing full well I had two grand on me, and that package was not going to contain a pastrami sandwich.

 Carrying so much cocaine around made me paranoid. I returned to Curtis's suite, but this time I was not invited in. This time, he opened the door a crack, took the blow, and slammed the door. No, thank you---nothing. Probably should have expected a gratuity either....

I was struck by the irony. This guy had written the music to Super Fly and was hailed by everyone as a genius for writing Freddie's Dead and Pusher Man, and now he was doing an entire ounce of blow...."

Mayfield's drug use eased his burdens as solitary family breadwinner and singular driving force behind his music and business empire constructed to move him beyond limited opportunities for Black entertainers (see: "Money and the Power')

Domestic abuse and chronic infidelity dogged turbulent relationships with common-law wives and mothers of Mayfield's many children. Business life could be just as chaotic as he escaped the clutches of mob-owned booking companies and warded off extortion from militant street gangs. 

 Jumping from lead singer of a hit group to an in-demand solo act, Mayfield was pulled in many directions. He balanced a heavy tour schedule and was the sole writer and producer for his Curtom imprint, "creating an entire record label's worth of material" for his artists, ex-group, and himself. 

A model of contradiction, Mayfield refused to share the fruits of collective labor with his day-one inner circle yet trusted predatory "accountants, employees, and friends" who stole money from him. Ignoring revelations of financial misappropriation, he accrued large tax debts. 

To advance his career, Mayfield installed accountant Marv (Heimann) Stuart as manager and eventual business partner ("He can get better deals. During those years, my face during those days would not allow doors to open for me. As a Black man, you don't get an invitation"). Part accomplice/enabler of Mayfield's vices ("He knew girls who liked to party. They both smoked pot and snorted cocaine"), Stuart catapulted his client to "levels he could never imagine" and became Mayfield's close confidant, replacing trusted family and friends. 

Marijuana and coke eased Mayfield's perplexity with music's changing climate yet plunged him into personal and professional stagnancy. Todd Mayfield likened his father's situation to the fictional plight of Super Fly's Priest and Eddie: drug dealers forced into a rigged situation that "left him with few choices.":

"For all his business acumen and obsession with owning himself, my father often acted directly against his own interests. That was my father, though. His stubbornness got the best of him, and strong Gemini traits meant he could be two people at once: shrewd and blind."

Instead of Marvin and Mayfield's voyeuristic approach, songwriter Tony Hester looked no further than his tormented soul for inspiration, Flying high with a string of hits ("The Rain", "What' Cha See Is What You Get", "Fall In Love, Lady Love", "Get Up and Get Down") penned for Detroit supergroup The Dramatics, Hester was also grounded by a crippling heroin habit.

 As the hits rolled in, Hester attracted attention from West Coast record executives. Inability to score a California drug connection, Hester remained tethered to his Detroit dealers. Mysteriously found dead in an alley at 34, Hester's heroin addiction would spawn the cryptic "Hey You! (Get Off My Mountain)", "Beware of The Man (With The Candy In His Hand)" and "Jim, What's Wrong With Him."  

"The Devil is Dope" was his most memorable:

"Satan is his name, from hell he came/some call him Lucifer but he hides his horns in many forms/but still is Lucifer/He plays tricks, begins with kicks, next thing you know, gotta jones/Here comes the pusher!/While you're getting high, Lucifer is pulling you down lower/he'll make you a slave, then put you in a grave and close the door " 

Bypassing graphic shock value, Stevie Wonder employed abstract panoramic lyricism. 1974's "Birds of Beauty," framed sobriety as a beatific alternative: 

"Simon says that now your mind desires a vacation,/Free to join in fun and plenty of recreation;/there awaits you a ticket at Please Have A Good Time Station;/there's so much in life for you to feel unfound in white, red or yellow pills,/a mind excursion is so much a thrill, please satisfy, take a chance and ride the birds of beauty of the sky"

Wonder's "Too High" finds a young girl's drug-induced journey ("she sees a four-eyed monster on a TV screen") to a "superficial paradise" ending in overdose.

The careers of Black music's funk triumvirate, James Brown, Sly Stone, and George Clinton, crumbled under the weight of addiction. PCP heightened Brown's forceful personality, reducing him to an erratic shell that ultimately sent him to prison. Snorting cocaine stalled Sly at his commercial peak. As he descended into reclusiveness, freebasing eroded his gifts. 

Brown and Sly's heir apparent---Clinton's grip on his prolific P-Funk empire would weaken due to heavy drug use. The 2019 film Tear The Roof Off: The Untold Story of Parliament-Funkadelic reveals the chaotic climate that fueled both Clinton's genius and his downfall.

The cloud of R&B social commentary began to fade, but the residue of drug references lingered in Rick James' album titles (1979's "Fire It Up") and songs like herb-induced "Mary Jane" (1978) and "Below The Funk (Pass The J)" (1981). Keenly aware of his competitors two decades into his career, Marvin Gaye would record the druggy James-inspired "Midnight Lady":

"Super freaks hanging out wall to wall/they tell me something's going on in the men's room/soon as we come out we'll be high soon...did you save a line for the ladies? (We're not into that, are you crazy?)."

 Isaac Hayes' "Ike's Rap 8" (1986) provided a momentary digression. Reviving the baritone spoken-word monologue from his 1970s chain-laden Black Moses days, Hayes traded in husky seduction for somber intervention:

"You're a resident of crack city/and the price of occupancy is way too high..."

For a generation, music industry fatal drug overdoses would be defined by rock and pop's fraternal order: Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Gram Parsons (and later Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse) would all die on the eve of or on their 27th birthdays. The fates of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and Prince would balance the scales, giving new meaning to the day the music died. 

 Milton's Paradise Lost describes the fragile balance between grandeur and tragic ambition; Black music would follow suit, providing a similar personal and creative time stamp.