M.J. Moore
RETRO: BLOW-TOP BLUES “. . . dragging themselves through the negro streets at
dawn . . . angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection . . . who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness . . . contemplating jazz . . .” —Howl, Allen Ginsberg
Decades prior to Rock ‘n’ Roll’s official emergence in 1955 (when “Rock Around the Clock” topped the charts, conclusively ending the Big Band Era), marijuana enveloped American culture and its rebellious, mostly urban subcultures. Authoritarian laws and policies tried to do away with all that jazz. And it literally revolved, at first, around Jazz. For the longest time Jazz music, which became mainstream in the 1920s, was perceived by parents, preachers, politicians and the police as the red-hot soundtrack for a subterranean “underground,” youth culture where all the races mixed. These negators believed that marijuana inspired the music and then the inevitable interracial sex. In Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, & Drugs (2017, Da Capo), independent historian and cultural commentator Martin Torgoff writes a sweeping account of how much of America’s marijuana debate was scripted eons ago. America’s new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is hardly the first to make bold anti-marijuana pronouncements. A quick trip in Ye Olde Time Machine reminds us of the career and agendas of Harry Anslinger, who back in the Jazz Age loomed large while heading the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Dubbed “The Paranoid Spokesman,” Anslinger spearheaded a mass-media anti-cannabis campaign as the 1930s unfolded. That multifaceted campaign went beyond making outlaws of anyone who smoked weed. It aimed to forbid by law any and all freedoms regarding marijuana, premarital sex (interracial sex in particular), and the devil-may-care hedonism associated with the Roaring Twenties and its failed Prohibition laws. Torgoff explains: “Anslinger became convinced that the only way to ensure against any possibility of a recurrence of what had happened with Prohibition—the phenomenon of a significant percentage of the American population wantonly and brazenly breaking an unpopular law they found obnoxious, living as virtual criminals until the law had to be repealed—would be through a national campaign
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BOP APOCALYPSE by Martin Torgoff
against the weed.” Anslinger and his Federal Bureau of Narcotics used the mass media of the day (major magazines, movies, plus newspaper articles). Torgoff explains: “Before 1935, the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature lists not a single article about marijuana in any major national magazine. From July 1935 to June 1937, four appeared; between 1937 and 1939, there were seventeen.” Those stories spotlighted crimes and murder sprees committed by individuals who were allegedly high. Demonizing weed, at the precise cultural moment when alcohol was again legalized, sparked a crusade that’s still in effect. As the Swing Era uplifted millions of Americans’ hearts and had their dancing feet flyin’ high, the racially-biased links between dangerous weed and dangerous music would become clear. Swing would invite Jazz right into America’s living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms (or wherever else radios blared). No matter how white the Swing Era appeared, the music was still rooted in the Blues and black culture, integrating America long before baseball did.
